The Boston Globe has lost its second Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter this week, according to the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly. And while the departure of Sacha Pfeiffer for WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) means only that we’ll have to turn on the radio rather than pick up the paper, the latest loss — that of Charlie Savage, scourge of the Bush White House — is a rather different matter.
Savage is going to the New York Times. Given that he is only in his early 30s, this is like losing Jonathan Papelbon to the Yankees. Savage’s reporting on the Bush administration’s use and abuse of presidential signing statements showed that the Globe could still play on the national stage.
Globe editor Marty Baron and Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos tell Reilly all the right things. The good news is that Savage will be replaced. And, yes, people do move on, and, yes, the Globe would have had a hard time hanging on to a young, ambitious, talented reporter like Savage even before the newspaper apocalypse that’s now under way.
But this is a tough loss to take, and it plays to warnings that, in the future, only a tiny handful of newspapers — principally the Times, the Washington Post and perhaps the Murdoch-ized Wall Street Journal — will have the resources to do serious reporting outside their own back yards.
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another face at zanzibar
Dan,I disagree. This is more like Papelbon going from Pawtucket to Boston.
io saturnalia!
Dan,I think Media Nation is generally great, but I’m going to bitch a little. I apologize in advance.Shouldn’t you really call it Boston Media Nation? It seems the only papers you talk about with any frequency are the Globe and Herald. Surely, though, there are internecine squabbles, staff departures and occasional solid (or shoddy) journalism being practiced on the North and South Shores, Central and Western Mass. and, perhaps, even outside the Bay State?I’m still a fan, but I’m just saying …
Stella
It is a promotion, bubbe. Be happy for CS.