By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
WBZ-TV (Channel 4) political analyst Jon Keller will be interviewing Doug Bailey and me about Bailey’s column in today’s Boston Globe, in which he argues that newspaper comments are worthless. (They are if you’re going to do them the way the Globe and the Boston Herald do them. But we’ll talk.)
The segment should pop up on the 11 p.m. news.
And by the way, has anyone yet figured out the identity of the anonymous blogger whom Bailey attacked?
Thursday update: Here’s the link to Keller’s story.
Danny Schechter, the “News Dissector” whose progressive approach to the news was such a key part of WBCN’s early years, has weighed in on CBS’s decision to pull the plug. He writes:
The station’s legacy and importance — the reason it built a national reputation and worldwide respect — was deliberately buried in the need to meet quarterly revenue projections and serve its corporate masters. Their goal was to compete with commercial drek by becoming commercial drek. And they did.
And where did it take them? To the radio graveyard. Shame.
Interestingly enough, Schechter says he had recently been approached about doing commentaries for WBCN’s Web site — something that may yet come to pass, given that CBS is reportedly thinking about keeping the station semi-alive online.
As you may have heard, the Eagle Times of Claremont, N.H., folded last week. Martin Langeveld of the Nieman Journalism Lab goes deep, finding that the paper’s poor penetration rate made it a marginal operation even in the best of times. Meanwhile, long live Your Claremont Press.
Doug Bailey want you to know there’s a local blog out there that’s not as reliable as maybe it should be. (Imagine that.) But he doesn’t want you to know what the blog is. Bailey, a former Boston Globe staffer-turned-media consultant, writes on the Globe’s op-ed page:
I recently contacted a blog that has apparently gained a reputation as an “authoritative source” on local news to point out an outrageously inaccurate — and easily verifiable — item posted on the site, attributed to one of its many “insiders.” The editor of the site conceded to me his “inside” information had actually come from an anonymous posting he saw on a newspaper website. If this wasn’t outrageous enough, this site has developed a following among traditional media reporters who apparently believe this blogger is wired and who regularly republish his missives unaware that his “exclusive” sources come from anonymous comments on their own websites. The identities of the “insiders” are unknown even to the original blogger.
Without the name of the blog and its author, and a chance for him to respond, the value of Bailey’s anecdote is approximately zero. Let’s have it, Doug. And let’s see the Globe give his target an opportunity to defend himself.
One side benefit related to the demise of WBCN Radio (104.1 FM) is that CBS will move Bruins games from WBZ (AM 1030) to the new WBZ-FM (98.5 FM).
The late, legendary WBZ talk-show host David Brudnoy spent years lamenting the frequent Bruins interruptions. Ironically, the beneficiary of the move will be Dan Rea, who, unlike Brudnoy, is a hockey fan.
Fans of former Boston Herald political reporter/blogger Kimberly Atkins will be interested to know that she’s liveblogging the Sonia Sotomayor hearings for her current employer, Lawyers USA. Atkins, a lawyer, is a staff reporter for the publication.
Learning that WBCN Radio (104.1 FM) is leaving the airwaves leaves me feeling a bit wistful, but not much more. There was a time when I would have been outraged. But ‘BCN had become so irrelevant to my life that I had not listened to it in years.
It looks like I wasn’t alone, as the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly reports that CBS is doing a station switch, the main result of which will be a new sports-talk station, WBZ-FM, at 98.5 FM. Anything that makes the boyos at WEEI (AM 850) break into a sweat is all right by me.
Charles Laquidara greets the news of WBCN’s demise with an obscure one-liner, while Danny “The News Dissector” Schechter hasn’t mentioned it yet.
WBCN, an independently owned “underground” station that launched in 1968, was an ear-opener for an exurban adolescent growing up in the early 1970s. I listened to Laquidara and Schechter and Old Saxophone Joe and Maxanne Sartori and all the rest of that great crew.
Along with alternative papers like the Phoenix, Boston After Dark and the Real Paper, WBCN was my main source of information on leftist politics and the counterculture.
But the station had long since disappeared into the cog of corporate radio. It’s not that it won’t be missed. It’s that the time to miss it expired about 20 years ago.
The student-run Huntington News is taking the social-media route to covering the collapse of a cornice on a Northeastern University-owned residence hall on Huntington Avenue.
Editor Maggie Cassidy used her Twitter account to get out the word that the News had posted a story online. And the photos were posted to the paper’s Flickr account.
Breaking news, from a paper that only comes out every other week during the summer. Good job, although the Flickr link from Twitter doesn’t work [note: now fixed]; pick it up from the story (or from here) instead.
Boston.com editor Dave Beard says that his site’s readership numbers are down over the previous May and June in large part because of the Boston Celtics’ early flameout. Since the Kevin Garnett-less Celts were eliminated on May 17, that explanation definitely makes some sense. Beard writes:
Two words: Boston Celtics.
No rolling rally. No euphoria. No heart-stopping NBA finals, sadly, with photo-friendly celebs packing the Garden. No May-to-June buildup for such a record season.
That said, despite a 40 percent dropoff from Sports in June pageviews, we made up most of it with News and Arts and Entertainment. By internal measurement, we came very close to our record June number for pageviews and for unique users, and we showed 11 percent more visits that the preceding June.
And, not to be a salesman on you, but July is looking very strong.
In short: We don’t read too much into a month or two of the widely variable and smallish samplings of Nielsen, as you mentioned in your lede. But we’re not relaxing one bit.
Web readership numbers tend to fluctuate so wildly that only a fool would try to read any deeper meaning into month-to-month changes.
Still, it’s hard not to notice that the number of unique monthly visitors to Boston.com, the Boston Globe’s Web site, has dropped considerably over the past two months, according to Nielsen Online figures provided by a reliable source who asked not to be identified.
After hitting an all-time peak of 8.5 million visitors in January of this year, perhaps tied to President Obama’s inauguration, the figure plunged all the way to 4 million in June, a drop of more than 23 percent over the previous June and the lowest number in two years.
Last June, then-senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were engaged in the final stages of their hard-fought battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, and I’ve been told that Boston.com’s political coverage does well in search engines and aggregators. So that could be an explanation.
Or maybe it’s Red Sox fatigue — it’s possible that the Sox have been so good for so long that casual fans are checking in less frequently than they used to. Could it be the Globe’s labor unrest? (Unlikely, though it’s interesting that readership figures for the Globe’s corporate cousin NYTimes.com were also down by 21 percent in May.) Or maybe it’s just one of those things.
Based on Nielsen’s May figures, Boston.com is now the ninth-ranked newspaper Web site overall — down from sixth for all of 2008, though it’s still the most widely read regional newspaper site in the United States*.
Among all news sites, including perennial ratings leaders MSNBC.com, CNN.com and Yahoo News, Boston.com now ranks 32nd, down from 17th in January.
What follows are Boston.com’s unique monthly visitors over the past two years. Percentages are increases and decreases over the previous year.
*I’ve been asked how Boston.com can be considered the most-read regional newspaper site when the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Post and New York’s Daily News are all ahead of it.
My answer is that the LA Times has long been considered a national paper. Indeed, Slate includes it as one of the five papers it summarizes in its “Today’s Papers” feature. (The others are the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.)
It’s only recently that Boston.com’s readership dropped below those of the other three papers, so perhaps I’ll have to rethink my “most-read regional newspaper site” formulation. Both New York and Chicago are huge metropolitan areas that dwarf Greater Boston. Yet the Tribune, the Post and the Daily News are all more regional than they are national.
I’ll have to ponder that for a bit.