Author: Dan Kennedy

Best New England books

Boston.com has posted an interactive list of the 100 best New England books evah. My nominee — Nicholas Howe’s “Not Without Peril,” a compilation of a century’s worth of fatalities in New Hampshire’s White Mountains — checks in at number 85.

Clarification: I didn’t mean to suggest that I think “Not Without Peril” is the best New England book. Rather, I proposed it to Boston.com a few months ago as one of the top 100. Boston.com’s choice of “Moby Dick” at number one is all right by me.

I also see that Boston.com has ranked “Not Without Peril” at number 90, not 85. I think I was looking at the “most read” category earlier.

Finally, I just finished Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Mayflower” (number 36) last week. A worthy choice, though slightly overrated, in my view. Too many impenetrable accounts of battles, not enough narrative sweep. But well worth reading.

Media Nation comments policy

Thank you to everyone who weighed in with thoughts regarding a comments policy for Media Nation. I received some excellent advice. For now, I’ve decided to tighten up on comments just a little bit. It’s easier to start slowly and then ratchet things up if needed.

The only real difference is that I plan to become more pro-active in deleting comments that I think are inappropriate. In the past, the subjectivity inherent in deciding which comments would live and which would die had led me to approve almost everything.

I’m not going to worry about that anymore, even though I’m fully aware that my tolerance level tends to vary from day to day.

I am going to try to keep this as short and easy to follow as possible.

1. The use of real names is strongly encouraged. If you use your real name, first and last, then you will be taken more seriously by everyone here. Real names are not required. But if you choose anonymity, you should ask yourself whether it’s truly necessary (i.e., for work-related reasons) or if, instead, you are using anonymity so that you can express opinions you wouldn’t want to see attached to your name.

2. The purpose of comments is to encourage civil discourse. Personal attacks will not be tolerated. Posts accompanied by hostile or offensive user names or avatars will be deleted. If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, then don’t say it here.

3. Comments on this site are unmoderated. Offensive comments are not subject to a pre-approval process, but may be removed after they have been posted. If you believe you have been attacked, rather than responding to the attacker, send a private e-mail to da {dot} kennedy {at} neu {dot} edu. If I agree, I’ll remove the offending comment.

3. Comments on this site are moderated. Comments are posted to a queue, and will not appear on Media Nation until I have approved them. This is the policy I had in place until a couple of years ago, and, on reflection, I think it worked well. If you believe I should not have allowed a comment to be posted, send a private e-mail to da {dot} kennedy {at} neu {dot} edu. I’ve been known to change my mind. (Policy updated on Aug. 13, 2009.)

4. Media Nation shall be held harmless. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Internet-based interactive services — including Media Nation — are not responsible for material posted by third-party contributors.

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

Another potential big day for the Globe

Depending on how things go, this could be a very big day for the future of the Boston Globe and its employees. The Newspaper Guild is sending in its national president, Bernie Lunzer, to try to work out an alternative deal with New York Times Co. management. (Boston Herald coverage here; Globe coverage here.)

It’s easy to say the Times Co. is going to stick with the 23 percent pay cut it imposed last week, but there are reasons to think that management would be amenable to negotiations. Management’s chief aim is to extract $10 million in concessions from the Guild, and to do it in a manner that paves the way for selling the paper.

The 23 percent pay cut accomplishes the first goal but not the second, since the Times Co. is now dealing with building full of seething employees. And about 190 Guild members still have lifetime employment guarantees, which will make it more difficult for a new owner to do the sort of drastic restructuring that’s needed.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the two sides reach an agreement that looks quite a bit like the one that was narrowly rejected last week: a pay cut of around 10 percent; cuts to retirement and other benefits; and an end to the lifetime job guarantees. If Times Co. executives have any sense at all — a debatable proposition at this point — then they will sweeten the pot a little bit so that Guild members can feel that they actually got something out of last week’s “no” vote. As long as it adds up to $10 million, then it really doesn’t matter.

New York Times columnist David Carr today, meanwhile, checks in with a group of outside analysts to try to put a price tag on the Globe. It proves to be a futile exercise, as the prices range anywhere from $250 million to the Times Co.’s actually having to pay a new owner as much as $25 million to make the Globe go away. Nor does the longer online version add much.

The takeaway quote comes from the venerable analyst John Morton, who writes to Carr:

Should a private buyer be found I suspect that any Globe employees still employed after the deal goes through will recall the contract they have just rejected as paradise compared with what a new owner will impose in cost-cutting.

Times Co. executives have behaved badly enough through this crisis that it’s easy to forget the larger truth: the newspaper business is coming apart at the seams, and what’s happening at the Globe is no different from what’s happening to major metropolitan dailies across the country. Morton’s assessment is a reminder of that reality.

Analyzing fraud claims in Iran

Did Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad steal his re-election victory? Hard to know without verifiable evidence. After all, it’s not difficult to believe that supporters of the opposition reform candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who are said to be educated, middle-class and urban, were outnumbered.

Two pieces I came across yesterday, though, offer some pretty compelling evidence that Ahmadinejad really did steal the election. The first, a Q&A from the Guardian, pulls together a number of different strands. Though not well-sourced, if they prove to be true, they add up to a powerful indictment:

  • Normally, it takes three days to finish counting the ballots in Iran. This time, Ahmadinejad’s victory was announced in two hours.
  • Mousavi supporters say the Iranian interior ministry told Mousavi not long after the polls had closed that it appeared he’d won by a substantial margin.
  • According to the official results, Mousavi even lost to Ahmadinejad among members of his own ethnic group, with Ahmadinejad capturing 57 percent of the vote in Mousavi’s home base.

The second piece, a blog post by Middle East expert Juan Cole, argues that an Ahmadinejad victory makes no logical sense given voting trends over the past decade. Though Ahmadinejad won election in 2005, Cole observes that reformist forces boycotted that election. This time, they turned out in droves.

Meanwhile, the Guardian is now reporting that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has ordered an investigation into claims of voter fraud. If you assume that Ahmadinejad’s re-election was exactly what Khamenei wanted — and Khamenei’s statements yesterday certainly indicated that — then this looks like a crack in the facade.

Maybe Khamenei and the people around him fear that Ahmadinejad overreached, and that if they don’t do something, they’ll all be in danger. We can only hope.

Elsewhere, the Boston-based international news service GlobalPost is putting up regular dispatches in a special section called “The Ground Truth in Tehran.”

Global Voices Online, which rounds up blogger commentary, has a section on the Iranian elections, though nothing new since Saturday.

The future of anonymous comments

From time to time I’ve considered instituting a real-names policy for Media Nation commenters. Take a look at this exchange and you’ll see why.

I know I would end up with many fewer commenters than I have now. Some folks who use regular pseudonyms add value, and I know there’s a good chance I would lose them.

But, too often, Media Nation — like most other Internet forums — has become a place where people come to say things behind a mask of anonymity that they would never say if they had to attach their names.

Thoughts?

Pin the tail on the potential owner

Who will buy the Boston Globe? Silly season may have already arrived. The Globe today attempts to knock down the Boston Herald’s claim yesterday that an investment group with ties to Thomas O’Neill III is interested, while at the same time identifying three other potential buyers.

The Herald, meanwhile, reports that Red Sox principal owner John Henry has told his Twitter followers he’s not interested; his name has been floating around for a while. (Sorry, but I don’t know Henry’s Twitter address.) Nothing new from Jack Welch, who has restricted his tweeting to sports the last couple of days.

Let me return to the Globe’s claim that the Herald got it wrong with respect to Intercontinental Real Estate Corp., whose board of advisers includes Tom O’Neill and former Bank of Boston head Ira Stepanian. The Globe’s Keith O’Brien and Beth Healy, with help from Casey Ross, write:

[A] person connected to the Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. refuted a report that the real estate investment and management firm is interested in buying the Globe. This person, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, said the report in the Boston Herald was not accurate.

Now, let’s go back to the Herald story, written by Christine McConville with assists from Jay Fitzgerald and Jessica Heslam. Here’s the key graf:

“Intercontinental is interested in any good investment that offers superior returns for our investors, as well as opportunities for job preservation, and even job growth, for our union investors,” said a top executive for Boston-based Intercontinental, which manages real estate and some $2.5 billion in investment funds, including union pensions. “The Globe fits our profile.”

Neither the Herald nor the Globe offers us an on-the-record source from Intercontinental, so it’s hard to know what to make of all this. But the specificity of the Herald quote suggests that there’s at least something to it. Most likely the Herald and the Globe stories are both accurate, but only one of them is true.

The possible buyers identified by the Globe — former Globe executive Stephen Taylor, a member of the paper’s former ruling family, as well as Boston advertising executive Jack Connors and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca — are all familiar names. It’s hard to know how serious any of them are. My guess is that when a buyer is announced, we’ll all be shocked. This is good coffee-machine conversation, but probably no one outside of New York Times Co. management really knows what’s going on.

In other Globe-related news, editorial-page editor Renée Loth is retiring to write a freelance column for the paper. She’ll be replaced by Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos, who’ll also oversee the Sunday Ideas section. The current Ideas editor, Gareth Cook, will remain in that post.

Bringing Canellos home in any capacity is a smart move. His specific job title is less important than getting him back inside the building, where he will no doubt be a key player in any and all reinvention initiatives. He also has a good relationship with Cook, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter.

Both Canellos and Cook are Boston Phoenix alumni, though Canellos had moved on before my arrival there. Cook and I worked together in the mid-’90s.

Finally, former Globe media consultant Lou Phelps has posted a commentary at Cape Cod Today in which she takes the Boston Newspaper Guild to task for being “unwilling to publicly acknowledge the core issues of the business model of The Boston Globe, and the changing newspaper industry that The New York Times company must face.”

Phelps’ main argument is that technology should allow a newsroom to operate with many fewer journalists than was the case before cell phones and the Internet.

Her take is interesting, but she should have acknowledged that the Globe has already done a lot of cutting — from 550 full-time newsroom positions in 2000 to about 330 today. I hope she’ll check in and let us know how much lower she thinks the Globe can go.

And wow — Phelps is easy on the Guild compared to Cape Cod Today editor Walter Brooks. Duck!

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

How Tip’s kid might save the Globe

Some years ago I wrote a review/essay for the Boston Phoenix about Jack Farrell’s massive Tip O’Neill biography. The headline: “How Tip saved the Globe.” (Pay no attention to the today’s date stamp; it’s an old piece.)

Farrell wrote about services rendered by the future House speaker in the Globe’s years-long quest to persuade the FCC to strip the Boston Herald Traveler of its broadcasting licenses. That finally happened in the early 1970s, ensuring the Globe’s dominance and dooming the Herald to second-banana status.

Today the Herald reports that Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. is interested in buying the Globe from the New York Times Co. And look who’s on the Intercontinental advisory board: Thomas P. O’Neill III. (Thanks to Northeastern School of Journalism director Steve Burgard for passing along that not-so-little tidbit.)

According to the Herald’s Christine McConville, talks have been going on for weeks. So here’s something to ponder: O’Neill’s public-relations firm, O’Neill and Associates, has been handling communications for the Boston Newspaper Guild. Another fun fact: most of those communications have come from former Boston Herald business editor Cosmo Macero Jr., now with O’Neill.

Make of that what you will. And yes, Boston is a very small town.