Author: Dan Kennedy

Rory O’Connor to read from his new book

Backscratching Day festivities continue with my interview at thephoenix.com with old friend Rory O’Connor. The occasion is O’Connor’s excellent new book, “Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media,” published by City Lights.

O’Connor will appear on Tuesday, May 22, at 7 p.m. at the Brookline Booksmith to talk about his book and sign. His book grew out of a semester he spent a few years ago at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center after stepping down as editorial director of NewsTrust. The idea behind NewsTrust was that an online community could identify and evaluate journalism with respect to sourcing, fairness and the like. Unfortunately, O’Connor discovered that too many of the people who joined NewsTrust were pushing a political agenda.

Among the more provocative ideas that O’Connor discusses in “Friends, Followers and the Future” is that Facebook is actually a fairly effective platform for sharing diverse sources of information, since members tend to cultivate a lot of “weak ties” with acquaintances whose political views and life experiences may be quite different from their own.

The larger issue, in O’Connor’s view, is trust. We no longer fully trust legacy media, whether it’s the New York Times or Fox News. Facebook, Google and other online services present their own trust issues. “But I’m optimistic,” he concludes, “that ultimately the ongoing digital information revolution will help us not only to trust, but also to verify.”

Marjorie Arons-Barron moves to WordPress

It’s Backscratching Day at Media Nation, so let’s get right down to it. First up: My friend Marjorie Arons-Barron has moved her blog from Blogspot to WordPress, and can now be found at marjoriearonsbarron.com. I gave her a hand in making the transition, and her new site is much more attractive.

Arons-Barron is a longtime journalist and former editorial director of WCVB-TV (Channel 5). Please pay her site a visit.

Killing radio, one station at a time: A requiem for WFNX

By Donna L. Halper

I was getting my car repaired, and I got into a conversation with the 20-something guy who was waiting on me. I told him I had written a book about Boston radio, and I asked him what his favorite station was.

“I never listen to radio,” he said, “but my mother still does.”

I’d like to say I was shocked, but it’s a comment I’ve heard from other young adults, including many of my students at Lesley University. Today, they can easily download their favorite songs without having to sit through endless commercial interruptions. Few of these kids have any emotional connection to radio.

Whenever I discuss this with colleagues, I am often told that radio has simply become yesterday’s technology. But I disagree. I believe many of radio’s problems are an outgrowth of the policies that deregulated broadcasting and allowed a handful of giant conglomerates to dominate what’s on the air.

This has been bad news for independent stations with unique formats, as well as for stations with personality disc jockeys and a finger on the pulse of the city. Many have been replaced by cheaper options — predictable and safe music, syndicated or voice-tracked hosts, minimal local presence.

It’s been great news for the corporate owners: they save lots of money by syndicating, voice-tracking and using cookie-cutter formats. But there is also a serious consequence: they are driving away the next generation of listeners. After all, if most stations sound the same, why bother to listen?

My students don’t dream of becoming disc jockeys (as I did), nor do they hope to have a show of their own. Increasingly, radio has become irrelevant to their lives. As someone who has spent more than four decades in broadcasting, I am deeply saddened by what has happened to the profession I love.

So, naturally, I was disappointed to learn that WFNX was just sold to Clear Channel, which remains one of the biggest media conglomerates. (Disclosure: Some years ago I worked as a consultant for WFNX.) I have nothing personally against Clear Channel, and several friends of mine work at one of their stations. But as I see it, Clear Channel’s bottom-line mentality is part of the larger problem. In our current media environment, corporate owners seem to have less tolerance for the station that is unusual, the station with the niche audience. Part of what makes radio unique as a mass medium is its ability to befriend the listener. So losing a favorite station is much like losing a friend.

Of course, stations get sold and formats change. It happened to WJDA in Quincy, WBCN in Boston and now WFNX. While these stations may not have had the biggest ratings, they had devoted fans who wish things had turned out better. Fortunately, there are still some wonderful stations in Greater Boston. But there should also be an environment where independent owners can thrive, and where the needs of the media conglomerates do not supersede the needs of the listeners.

In my ideal universe, there would be room for well-run corporate stations (with local announcers, please), but also room for stations that want to take chances and do something different, the way WFNX did for such a long time.

Donna L. Halper is associate professor of communication at Lesley University. She is the author of five books about media history, and has two essays in a new SABR book about Boston baseball, “Opening Fenway Park in Style: The 1912 Boston Red Sox.”

A blow to independent radio

This is very sad news indeed: Boston Phoenix publisher Stephen Mindich has announced that WFNX Radio (101.7 FM), one of the few big-market independent rock stations in the country, is being sold to Clear Channel.

The Phoenix has posted Mindich’s email to the staff here.

I remain part of the Phoenix family, and my best wishes go out to everyone affected. Mindich has fought hard to keep his media holdings out of the clutches of corporate chain ownership. But economic conditions remain miserable.

The FCC must approve the sale.

Clear Channel owns 850 radio stations in 150 cities. Its Boston stations are WJMN (94.5 FM), WXKS-FM (107.9 FM), WXKS-AM (AM 1200) and the Spanish-language station WKOX (AM 1430).

Update: Lisa van der Pool of the Boston Business Journal has more details.

Still more: Donna Goodison has a very good, thorough story in the Boston Herald. D.C. Denison has a briefer account at Boston.com.

Over the top with Beckett and the Red Sox

Josh Beckett

I’ve been listening to a lot of sports radio since it emerged that Josh Beckett golfed despite missing a start with an injury or near-injury or whatever it was, and I just thought I’d throw this out there:

The sports pundits in Boston have gone insane. Some more so than others, of course. Tony Massarotti and Mike Felger of the Sports Hub (98.5 FM) have been completely unhinged, while Michael Holley and Glenn Ordway of WEEI (93.7 FM) have been relatively restrained and coherent.

Overall, though, it’s gotten so ridiculous that hosts were asking callers last night if they would rather have seen Beckett get lit up than pitch the seven innings of shutout baseball that he turned in. And some said yes, damn right, they wish he’d been blown out in an inning or two.

Beckett strikes me — and most of us, I’m sure — as a pretty unlikeable guy. I don’t appreciate the way he answers questions. He was apparently the ringleader of the chicken-and-beer brigade, whose importance has been exaggerated, but which nevertheless was symbolic of a team that wasn’t much of a team. Still, the real story behind the Red Sox’ collapse last September and this spring is staring you in the face: the starting pitching totally melted down. When the starters do well, the Sox win, as we’ve seen this week.

Beckett pitches to the best of his ability (which is still pretty good, if not 2007 good), he doesn’t make excuses and, as he showed on Tuesday, he certainly doesn’t let himself get distracted.

There’s a pattern here. In 2010, Jacoby Ellsbury was injured and misdiagnosed, and the jock punditocracy questioned his heart and toughness. Last year Clay Buchholz fractured vertebrae in his back — think about that for a moment — and got the Ellsbury treatment. For good measure, John Lackey, who, yes, is loathsome in many respects, gave it his all despite needing Tommy John surgery.

Perspective, folks.

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

Sasha Baron Cohen’s smugly unfunny humor

I detested “Borat,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s best-known movie, for making vicious fun of good people who’d done nothing more than try to be polite. So I can only imagine how bad “The Dictator” must be if, as A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times, it doesn’t even reach that low standard.

I absolutely love this line from Scott:

Unlike his precursors Brüno, Borat and Ali G, Admiral General Aladeen is not meant to fool anyone into thinking that he is real, so viewers are denied the full measure of smugness that is Mr. Baron Cohen’s special gift to bestow.

When I was in Almaty, Kazakhstan, three years ago, our cab driver couldn’t wait to tell us how much he liked “Borat.” “But it’s not really Kazakhstan!” he quickly added.

On gay marriage, real names and a real discussion

Howard Owens

I’ve long been an admirer of Howard Owens’ real-names policy for online commenters. It’s one of the reasons I adopted it for Media Nation a couple of years ago. So I was intrigued when he tweeted this morning, “When you manage your comment community correctly, you can run a poll on gay marriage and have the convo remain civil.”

I clicked through to his community-news site, The Batavian, in rural western New York. As I write this, 1,501 people had responded to his survey question: “Do you support gay marriage?” About 45 percent said “yes” and 55 percent said “no.” And Owens was right: I couldn’t find a non-civil comment among them.

What I found was an engaged and engaging discussion (with a bit too much esoterica on states’ rights for my taste), with Owens himself making occasional contributions — an important part of keeping the online conversation on track. Given the volatile nature of the topic, I asked him if he pre-screened the comments or had deleted any after they were posted. His answer: no, and no. Impressive.

I’m not entirely opposed to allowing anonymous comments. At the New Haven Independent, for instance, editor and founder Paul Bass argues that teachers, police officers and other stakeholders wouldn’t dare express their thoughts if they had to reveal their identities. The Independent is often held up as a model of community engagement.

Yet the Independent runs off the rails from time to time, and earlier this year Bass had to tighten up his guidelines — including requiring real-name registration, though anonymous commenting is still allowed.

I can’t say it enough: News organizations have to find effective ways to engage with their users. Just because it isn’t easy doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. (You may thank me later for the triple negative.)

A great day for America, but with political implications

Was it partly political? Of course. As Jay Rosen tweeted, “I’m old enough to understand that a president who is with you only when the polling supports it is the best you are ever going to get.”

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/jayrosen_nyu/status/200314172389601280″]

So perhaps the most remarkable aspect of President Obama’s decision to endorse same-sex marriage was that he clearly saw it as good politics.

There are many ways of looking at this. For instance, Michael Rezendes reports in today’s Boston Globe that it may help the president with fundraising. But I think the overarching reason is that Obama’s been dragged into the most vicious culture war in a generation, and he was fighting with one hand tied behind his back. Now he’s free to play both offense and defense. His base will be as energized as the Republicans’.

(Non-political, real-world aside: This is huge! Tuesday was a great day for our country, and Obama deserves our thanks and congratulations no matter what political calculations went into this.)

Which brings me to an article I wrote for the Boston Phoenix in November 2003, shortly after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that marriage discrimination was unconstitutional. I urged Democrats in general, and the presidential candidates in particular, to embrace the ruling. My argument was that if they didn’t, they’d be cast by the anti-marriage right as gay-marriage supporters without receiving any of the benefits of actually coming out and saying it.

I was proved correct the following year, when then-president George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in part on the strength of anti-gay-marriage measures on the ballots in a number of battleground states — all while Kerry kept professing his opposition to same-sex marriage.

We are free to speculate that Obama’s opposition to gay marriage was just as political as — or perhaps more political than — his about-face. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, who’s against same-sex marriage, tweeted yesterday, “Pro-gay marriage in 1996. Anti-gay marriage in 2004. Pro-gay marriage in 2012. When Obama evolves, he evolves!” Jacoby was referring to a questionnaire Obama once filled out when he was running for office in Illinois.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/Jeff_Jacoby/status/200300582387458048″]

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, is doubling down on his opposition to same-sex marriage and even civil unions. And in characteristic Romney fashion, he is saying the matter ought to be left to the states, which contradicts his own position. As Rick Klein of ABC News tweets, “important to add that he [Romney] wants to ban it at federal level, via Constitution.”

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/rickklein/status/200577602212216833″]

In any event, the president is now on the right side of history, of morality and of human dignity. That it might also help him win re-election is beside the point.

For newspapers, a digital break from the bad news

It’s hard to know what to make of the latest numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations given that the New York Times gets credit for a paid-circulation boost of 73 percent. Yes, it makes sense to add print and digital subscriptions together. But some of the numbers reported on Tuesday are anomalies that won’t be repeated once digital subscriptions grow into maturity.

Still, good news is good news. Thanks to digital subscriptions, the Boston Globe registered a 2.5 percent circulation boost on Sundays (now 365,512) and a 2.9 percent increase on weekdays (225,482) — the paper’s first increases since 2004. Those numbers, though, do rely to some extent on favorable ABC rules when it comes to counting digital readership.

The Globe reports 18,000 digital subscriptions. ABC gives the Globe credit for about 33,000 digital readers. The difference is that the 18,000 figure counts Globe readers whose only subscription is digital. The higher ABC figure encompasses those whose subscriptions include some combination of print and digital — “engaged home delivery print subscribers who access BostonGlobe.com at least once per week,” according to an email from Peter Doucette, the Globe’s executive director of circulation sales and marketing.

Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell has talked about a paid-subscription model for his paper, and I’d imagine that talk is likely to increase after Tuesday. The Herald’s daily paid circulation fell by 12.3 percent, to 108,548; on Sundays it declined by 6.2 percent, to 81,925. In its own story today, the Herald emphasizes the popularity of its free website, traffic to which it claims is up 25 percent over the past year.

One point the Herald does make in its rather snippy account of the Globe’s numbers is that paid digital circulation simply isn’t as valuable to advertisers as paid print circulation. That’s true, and, if anything, the situation may be deteriorating. According to newspaper analyst Alan Mutter, the share of online advertising going to newspaper websites dropped to an all-time low in 2011.

What that means is the question of who will pay for journalism remains as vital as ever. The newspaper business is proving that at least some of its users are willing to pay for online news. Will there be enough of them to make a real difference — and will they be willing to pay enough to offset the continuing loss of advertising revenues?

Those are questions that will have to be answered. For now, we should all be glad that the issue is whether the new circulation numbers are as good as they seem. That’s a nice break from wondering if the bottom is about to fall out.