Author: Dan Kennedy

Bring lots of quarters

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State officials have ruled that it’s all right for the Cambridge Police Department to charge the Cambridge Chronicle $1,215 for nearly a month’s worth of public records. The Chronicle had sought descriptions of criminal suspects, the addresses of those who had been arrested and the addresses to which police responded between July 1 and 27.

“Given that a large number of documents, which may contain sensitive information about the identities of the victims and witnesses, are required to be properly viewed, I consider this to be a reasonable fee estimate provided by the department,” the Chronicle quotes Alan Cote, the records supervisor for the secretary of state’s office, as saying.

Trouble is, the Chronicle contends that, before June, the police had routinely been making most of that information available. Even though the state has now found that the police are not doing anything illegal by withholding certain types of information from its daily public reports, the police department is nevertheless moving in a direction of less openness — not a good thing for any law-enforcement agency, let alone one that is in the midst of an investigation stemming from the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates.

As I wrote when this first came up in August, the fees being imposed by the police department are an outrageous breach of the public’s right to know. And it’s not being done in isolation. Last month the Boston Globe reported on public officials who are using high fees to discourage bloggers and financially struggling news organizations from obtaining public records.

It’s time for elected officials who believe in governmental openness to rethink the practice of charging high fees for information that, by right, ought to be freely available to the public.

Times Co., Globe renew their vows

I ducked into a Starbucks in downtown New Haven so I could write this. So, for now, just a few preliminary thoughts about the New York Times Co.’s announcement that it has decided against selling the Boston Globe.

Like most observers, I thought the happy talk last month from Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and president Janet Robinson was aimed mainly at driving up the price. So even though I had been hearing since last week that things were not going well with the two interested buyers (Platinum Equity and a group led by former Globe executive Stephen Taylor), it still struck me as plausible that the Times Co. would sell — at any price. In hindsight, it’s now clear there was a price below which Sulzberger and company were not willing to go.

I do think the Times Co. damaged its credibility in Boston this year by being so uncommunicative about its battle with the Globe’s unions (especially the Boston Newspaper Guild) and about the would-be sale. The company’s got some work to do on the community-relations front.

But there were certainly worse possible outcomes than this. Platinum Equity, by all accounts, would have relentlessly focused on the bottom line. I was rooting for a Taylor comeback, but if that group was as under-capitalized as I was hearing, then you can be sure that more cuts would have been the first order of business.

Besides, people who buy newspapers tend to want to bring in their own editor. I think Marty Baron has done a terrific job under incredibly difficult circumstances this year, and if this means he stays, then that’s a good thing.

Overall, today’s announcement is not bad news. Which is not quite the same as good news, but close enough.

More from the Times, the Globe, the Herald and Beat the Press.

And then there was one?

Venture capitalist John Ellis, a former Boston Globe columnist who’s been nosing around the Globe situation for months, posted an intriguing tidbit [update: but apparently wrong; see below] on Twitter a little while ago:

there’s a rumor about that Platinum Equity declined to make a “final” bid on the Boston Globe. I wonder if its true.

If Platinum is out of the picture, that would presumably leave the group put together by former Globe executive Stephen Taylor as the only remaining interested buyer. But do Taylor and company have enough capital to get the New York Times Co. to say “yes”?

I also wonder if this might pave the way for a comeback by Boston businessman Jack Connors, whose proposal to take the Globe non-profit was left by the side of the road a few months ago.

Wednesday morning update: Well, so much for that rumor. The Globe’s Beth Healey reports that both groups submitted bids for the Globe, and that a third group submitted a bid for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

The Blutarsky theory of Red Sox futility

Blutto_20091013If you’re like me, you probably hadn’t thought about “Animal House” for many years, even though it is the greatest movie of all time.

So what were the odds of finding two Blutto Blutarsky references following the collapse of the 2009 Red Sox?

First, on Monday, the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy informed us, “In that moment, Papelbon was working on a string of 27 consecutive scoreless postseason innings. His career playoff ERA was John Blutarsky’s grade-point average: 0.00.”

Then, today, Gerry Callahan writes in the Boston Herald: “Guerrero flared a single to center, and just like that, the previous six months of Red Sox baseball was like Blutarsky’s seven years at Faber College: down the drain.”

Must be just a coincidence. (Thanks to Media Nation reader J.M.)

Libel battle won, but war remains lost

A battle has been won over a bizarre and dangerous decision by a federal appeals court earlier this year that truth may not be a defense in libel cases brought by private parties. Unfortunately, the war remains lost.

According to lawyer Robert Ambrogi, executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, a jury found recently that the office-supply chain Staples did not act with malice when a manager sent an e-mail to some 1,500 employees informing them he had fired a sales manager named Alan Noonan for violating the company’s travel and expense policies. (Ambrogi points to an article in the National Law Journal, but it’s subscription-only.)

As I reported earlier this year in the Guardian, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, ruled that Noonan’s libel suit against Staples could proceed even though the contents of the e-mail were true. The court relied on an old provision of Massachusetts libel law pertaining to “actual malice,” which Judge Juan Torruella wrote should be defined as “ill will” or “malevolent intent.” Torruella earned a Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award for his anti-First Amendment decision.

Although Staples may not spring immediately to mind when one thinks about freedom of the press, the implications for the news media are obvious.

In the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court case of Times v. Sullivan, actual malice is defined as pertaining to a defamatory statement made with knowing falsity, or with “reckless disregard” for the truth. And though Times v. Sullivan applies solely to public officials, a series of subsequent decisions by the Court made it clear that a defamatory statement can never be found libelous if it is true — a principle asserted by free-speech advocates since the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger.

First Amendment lawyers such as Ambrogi and Robert Bertsche wrote that Torruella should have thrown out the Massachusetts law, on the books since 1902, as unconstitutional in light of Times v. Sullivan.

So far, though, Torruella’s toxic handiwork remains in effect — at least in Massachusetts.

Hopelessness and hope in urban America

Regular readers know I’m closely following the New Haven Independent, among the most journalistically substantial of the non-profit community news sites.

This morning I want to share with you an astonishing story from the Independent on the state of urban America — a feature by Melissa Bailey on community volunteers who cleaned up the dried blood left behind in a three-family home after a recent murder.

Not to indulge in clichés, but it’s a story that quite literally combines hopelessness and hope. And the comments actually cohere into a worthwhile conversation.

Closer to home, if you missed Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham’s Sunday piece on Maria Dickerson, a Springfield woman raising the four children left behind by her murdered friend, it’s not too late.

Good call running it on page one and giving Abraham the space she needed to tell the story properly.

Gay-activist numbers match tea-party protesters

Last month, a crowd that the Washington fire department estimated at somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 turned out to protest against President Obama. (You may recall that Michelle Malkin passed along the fiction that 2 million people had showed up, and was forced to backtrack.)

By Washington standards, it was a decent turnout, but nothing remarkable. To judge by much of the coverage, though, you would have thought we were witnessing the final collapse of the Obama administration. Fox News covered it like a sporting event, with the tea-party protesters cast as the home team, and the self-loathing mainstream media struggled to follow suit.

Yesterday, a crowd at least that big marched in Washington on behalf of gay and lesbian rights. There has been no reported official estimate, but the New York Times reports that “tens of thousands” marched. So does the Washington Post. The organizers, Equality Across America, have reportedly placed the crowd at 150,000.

Yes, the gay activists got coverage. But even now, the march barely rates a mention on the home pages of CNN.com, MSNBC.com and FoxNews.com. How much do you think we’re going to hear about it in the days and weeks ahead?