Rupert Murdoch’s decision to put Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell in charge of his Ottaway community-newspaper division is paying some dividends for the Herald.
Today the Herald collaborates with Ottaway’s Cape Cod Times on a story about six Falmouth students who face child-pornography charges for allegedly text-messaging a nude photograph of a 13-year-old girl.
Interestingly, the Cape Cod Times version appears to have no Herald involvement. But the Times is running some Herald content, including the “Inside Track.”
For the Herald, this isn’t nearly as good as it was back when Purcell owned Community Newspaper Co., which is now part of GateHouse Media. For a few years, the Herald could draw on more than 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts covering nearly all of Boston’s suburbs.
The only Massachusetts papers Ottaway owns, by contrast, are well south of Boston: the Cape Cod Times, the New Bedford Standard-Times and a handful of weeklies that cover the same territory.
Still, the Ottaway connection gives the understaffed Herald a bit more reach than it had before.
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I had noticed that the Herald started running a lot of stuff from the Cape Cod Times in the last week, and now I know why. It looks like the content is going both ways, which must be a boon for both papers.