Year: 2009

A low whine from the Naked City

Is this what the Boston Herald calls a correction?

The Herald’s Inside Track chides the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly and Media Nation today for questioning a blog post by financial analyst Douglas McIntyre placing the Boston Globe on a list of 10 newspapers that may go out of business or go online-only by the end of the year.

What’s really amusing, though, is the way the Track quietly corrects an error made earlier this week on Jessica Heslam’s Messenger Blog. The error — which had Time magazine predicting the Globe’s demise — remains uncorrected.

As Media Nation was the first to report, Time, like several other media outlets, was merely running the feed from McIntyre’s 24/7 Wall St. blog on its Web site. Naturally, the Track takes Reilly and me to task for not doing any “reporting,” which it conveniently defines as not calling the Globe in order to get a “no comment.”

Finally, the Track manages the neat trick of lampooning Reilly’s and my skepticism over McIntyre’s claim that the Globe is worth only $20 million while simultaneously acknowledging that the paper’s real estate and other assets are probably worth more than $100 million.

The plain fact is that the most recent analysis anyone has seen is one put out by Barclays Capital analyst Craig Huber, who estimates the paper’s value at $192.8 million.

The newspaper business is in unimaginably bad shape, and the Globe is as vulnerable as any paper. If being cautiously optimistic about the future of the Globe makes me hopelessly naive, then I offer my deepest apologies.

Then again, I’m also one of the few media-watchers I know who predicts that the Herald will also survive. I suppose I could be wrong about that, too.

More: WBZ Radio (AM 1030) still has a Tuesday report up on its Web site wrongly attributing McIntyre’s item to Time magazine. Come on, folks. This isn’t that hard.

Nice guys finish first

Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is one of the Boston area’s great managers and leaders of the past generation. So I’m not surprised — as Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen reports — that he earned a standing ovation when he suggested that high-paid people at the hospital sacrifice in order to save low-paid jobs.

On and on the NewsTrust J-hunt goes

But it all ends tomorrow! Today’s five six picks:

Here, once again, is NewsTrust’s journalism topic page. Please consider taking part.

The M-word makes an ugly appearance

It’s hard to believe, after all these years, that the word “midget” would pop up in a front-page story in today’s New York Times. David Segal writes:

After the Depression, Congress formed what became known as the Pecora Commission, which grilled top financiers. But the point was mostly to embarrass them, and the upshot was to set the stage for stricter regulations. The most indelible image of the commission’s hearings was a photo of J. P. Morgan Jr. with a midget who had been plopped in his lap by an opportunistic publicist.

The American Heritage Dictionary makes it clear that the M-word is “offensive.” In my book, “Little People,” I trace the history of this unfortunate word, possibly coined in the 1860s by Harriet Beecher Stowe and inextricably tied up in the idea of putting someone on public display.

NewsTrust: The J-hunt continues

Five more stories on journalism for your perusal:

If you’d like to join in the fun, sign up for NewsTrust and visit the journalism topic page.

Five more for NewsTrust’s journalism hunt

Here are five more pieces about journalism that I’ve posted to NewsTrust.

Again, I invite you to register with NewsTrust, review stories and submit some that you find as well.

Time is not predicting the Globe’s demise

First of all, let’s dispense with the fiction that Time magazine is predicting the Boston Globe may go out of business or cease publishing its print edition sometime this year. Universal Hub and Jessica Heslam wrongly attribute the prediction to Time. Bostonist almost gets it right, but is unclear enough that readers might still think this is coming from Time.

In fact, the source of this rather startling prediction is Douglas McIntyre, a blogger for 24/7 Wall Street — not exactly the ghost of Henry Luce. Time just happens to run the feed on its Web site. (Here’s a look at the site’s syndication service.) I’ve interviewed McIntyre. He’s a smart, knowledgeable guy, but it’s fair to say that he likes to be a provocateur.

You will notice, too, that McIntyre repeats that bit about the Globe’s being worth only $20 million. In fact, as the Boston Business Journal reported recently, a more logical number is a shade under $200 million — far short of the $1.1 billion that the New York Times Co. paid for it (in 1993 dollars, no less), but a lot more than $20 million. I know of no one who ever thought the $20 million figure was credible.

The Globe is struggling mightily, but its Web site, Boston.com, attracts more than 5 million unique visitors a month, and its paid print circulation — about 325,000 on weekdays and 500,000 on Sundays — is, though far short of the glory days, plenty enough to attract a decent amount of advertising if we weren’t in the midst of a brutal recession.

So can we please get real?