2009 – Page 72 – Media Nation

Heavy metal for the Phoenix’s Bernstein

I am going to start demanding more respect now that I can truthfully claim to have once worked with the New England Press Association‘s “Journalist of the Year.”

Congratulations to Boston Phoenix reporter David Bernstein, who also picked up first-place awards in investigative reporting and for his political column, the Phoenix’s venerable “Talking Politics” feature. In particular, Bernstein was singled out for his in-depth investigation into the wrongful conviction of Stephan Cowans, published almost exactly one year ago.

Plenty of other friends from the Phoenix were honored at NEPA last weekend as well. Here is the announcement.

Gitell moves on, suspends Gitell.com

Gitell.com (left) and Media Nation at

Seth’s 40th birthday party, November 2008

I’ve been holding off until it became official, but now it can be told. House Speaker Robert DeLeo has named friend of Media Nation Seth Gitell as his director of communications. DeLeo’s gain is our loss — Seth explains why he’s giving up his widely read blog, in which he expertly covered everything from politics to food.

Seth may be best known as Mayor Tom Menino’s former spokesman, but before that we were colleagues at the Boston Phoenix. Here’s my account of our last road trip — a Rudy Giuliani event in Durham, N.H., in December 2007, which Seth covered for the now-defunct New York Sun and I covered for the Guardian.

Good luck, Seth. And here’s an excellent Web site you can bookmark for your new boss.

The Herald-Ottaway connection

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.

The trouble with micropayments for news

I said pretty much all that I have to say about paying for online news last month, when I criticized David Carr’s suggestion of “an iTunes for news.” But the notion of micropayments — click and, say, a penny or a nickel or a dime is automatically deducted from your bank account — has suddenly gotten a boost. Unfortunately, the idea is a non-starter.

Walter Isaacson, the former editor of Time magazine, and Alan Mutter, a respected news-industry blogger, have both come out in favor of micropayments. Isaacson even made it on to “The Daily Show” last night, trading quips with Jon Stewart. All this comes amid an ongoing meltdown in the newspaper business. It’s gotten so serious that a number of publishers have started a rah-rah PR campaign called the Newspaper Project, the purpose of which is to — well, it’s hard to say.

So rather than repeat what I said a month ago, I’ll simply call your attention to a splendid op-ed in today’s New York Times by Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate, who points out that the news in newspapers has always been free:

Newspaper readers have never paid for the content (words and photos). What they have paid for is the paper that content is printed on. A week of The Washington Post weighs about eight pounds and costs $1.81 for new subscribers, home-delivered. With newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink) costing around $750 a metric ton, or 34 cents a pound, Post subscribers are getting almost a dollar’s worth of paper free every week — not to mention the ink, the delivery, etc.

And by the way, I once owned one of the Slate umbrellas to which Kinsley refers. If it hadn’t fallen apart at the first gust of wind, I might have it still.

I’m as concerned about how to pay for the news as anyone, but I think it’s pretty clear what doesn’t work.

Photo (cc) by Bill Ballantyne and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

The hypocritical Shepard Fairey

As one of my students, Marc Larocque, puts it, “Shepard Fairey is a hypocritical scumbag.” That’s really the only proper reaction you can have upon learning that Fairey, who’s fighting a copyright complaint lodged by the Associated Press, has himself charged an Austin artist with copyright violation for doing exactly the same thing.

The artist, Baxter Orr, took Fairey’s iconic image of Andre the Giant and put a respiratory mask on it — precisely the sort of “transformative” use that Fairey is relying on in his own repurposing of the AP’s Barack Obama photo to make his Obama “Hope” poster. Boston Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman has all the details.

Fairey is up to his neck in it at the moment, filing a pre-emptive lawsuit against the AP and defending himself against vandalism charges brought by the Boston police. I still think his Obama poster is protected under the fair-use exception, as I wrote last week. But so is Orr’s Andre the Giant image. These are nearly identical cases, and it’s amazing that Fairey doesn’t see it that way.

Update: Gee, Fairey’s problem with Orr couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Orr seems less enamored of Obama than Fairey does. Could it?

Obama’s surprisingly chilly news conference

In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at President Obama’s first prime-time presidential news conference — and find that despite his impressive command of facts and policies, his performance was surprisingly defensive, even chilly.

The last time the Huskies won the Beanpot

I’ve been meaning to give a plug to Outta the Pahk, a new sports blog by Jeff Goldberg, the former Hartford Courant sportswriter who wrote the terrific Jim Rice story I mentioned on Jan. 13, the day Rice made the Hall of Fame.

Today Goldberg offers a bit of Northeastern trivia: he was the last reporter for the Northeastern News to cover a Beanpot championship. Goldberg writes:

Led by Kevin Heffernan and goalie Bruce Racine, who later had a cup of coffee with the St. Louis Blues, the Huskies not only won the Beanpot by beating BU, they also took the Hockey East title at the Boston Garden, knocking off New England powerhouse Maine. Those three games proved the only three I ever got to cover at the old Garden, a thrill for a sportswriter of any age, let alone an 18-year-old.

The Huskies can do it again tonight. And, just as it was 21 years ago, it’s Boston University that’s standing in their way. Huntington News sports editor Nate Owen will be live-blogging the game here.

Heck of a job, Arthur

No offense to New York Times media reporter Richard Pérez-Peña, but his story today on the New York Times Co. should be seen as the Times Co.’s best case for itself rather than as a tough-minded forensic overview. So in that respect it offers some interesting insights into how Arthur Sulzberger Jr. assesses his reign as chairman of the company and publisher of its flagship newspaper.

And yes, for the most part, Sulzberger thinks he’s doing a hell of a job. Pérez-Peña writes:

Newspaper industry analysts say that despite some published alarms to the contrary, the company has positioned itself well to ride out another year of recession, maybe two. The company still operates at a profit, and analysts say it might have gotten by without the [Carlos] Slim loan, but could not afford to take the risk because borrowing could be even harder in six months or a year.

“But,” said Edward Atorino, an analyst at Benchmark, a research firm, “I think they’ve put The New York Times out of danger.”

And did you know that Times Topics is now a competitor to Wikipedia? No, me either. And Jimmy Wales makes three.

There is no mention of whether the Times Co. would like to peddle the Boston Globe, the subject of near-constant speculation around here.

Pérez-Peña does point to some shortcomings. And the most eye-opening is this: between 1997 and 2004, the company bought back $2.7 billion in stock, a number that is now nearly four times the company’s entire market capitalization of about $726 million.

“[I]t outweighs the prices of all the other second-guessed moves combined,” Pérez-Peña writes, “and it would be more than enough to ensure the company’s security for years to come.”

All that aside, I suspect that Pérez-Peña’s fundamentally sunny take on his newspaper’s future is more accurate than the doomsday scenarios put forth in recent months by Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley and Michael Hirschorn of the Atlantic.

At least I hope so.

Change we can believe in

Dexter Kennedy