Author: Dan Kennedy

A tale of intrigue and resentment

It’s hard to imagine that members of the Boston Newspaper Guild won’t approve the deal offered by New York Times Co. management to keep the Boston Globe alive. But in today’s Boston Herald, Jessica Heslam tells a tale of intrigue and resentment so byzantine that it makes you wonder. Let’s just say this is unlikely to be a slam dunk.

Here’s the best part: among other things, some Guild members are upset that their leaders have been more forthcoming with their public-relations firm, O’Neill and Associates, than with the rank-and-file. And who speaks up on behalf of O’Neill? Cosmo Macero, former business editor of the Herald. Talk about what goes around.

The major parameters of the deal, according to Heslam’s piece and to Rob Gavin and Keith O’Brien’s story in the Globe, amount to an approximately 10 percent wage cut (8.3 percent plus five days of unpaid furlough) and an end to lifetime job guarantees for about 190 Guild members. As O’Brien and Steve Syre observe, the package could make the Globe more attractive to potential buyers.

As for the pain that lies ahead, the Herald’s Jay Fitzgerald takes a look at the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper similar to the Globe in circulation. Fitzgerald writes that the Chronicle is “now cutting about 150 jobs within its largest union alone, less than two months after it agreed to major contract revisions.”

Some background on Rhode Island’s A.G.

Hey, Joe Dwinell: You should see what people talk about on the phone. Sex, drugs — all manner of illegal activity. Maybe it’s time we brought Verizon to heel, eh?

My friend and former employer Stephen Mindich, publisher of the Phoenix newspapers, is doing a perfectly fine job of defending himself. I just thought I’d point out that Rhode Island attorney general Patrick Lynch, who wants to crack down on adult advertising on Craigslist and in the Phoenix following a recent murder linked to a Craigslist ad, was the proud recipient of a 2004 Phoenix Muzzle Award.

In brief, here’s what happened: a man died in the custody of the North Kingstown police. Local officials refused to release public records pertaining to the case. And Lynch, whose duties include enforcing the state’s open-records law, not only refused to order the release of those records, but coached local authorities on how to keep them private.

Here’s what Providence Journal columnist Edward Achorn wrote at the time about Lynch’s behavior:

He would have served the public much better had he acted immediately to get the facts out, and let the investigation proceed. It is hard to see and no one has explained how sharing basic information with citizens would have impeded such an investigation. And it presents a clear conflict for the attorney general to join police in keeping records secret, when he is the government official charged with enforcing the Open Records Law.

With regard to Craigslist and the Phoenix, Lynch should concentrate on punishing illegal behavior, not speech. Prostitution and the dangers accompanying it, after all, have been with us forever.

A half-century of bad blood

Earlier today the Boston Globe posted a 1982 article about the day that Rupert Murdoch saved the Boston Herald. Interestingly, the story, by David Wessel, now economics editor for Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, gets into precisely why some old-timers at the Herald, like Joe Fitzgerald, remain angry at the Globe more than 26 years later.

As you will see, in the midst of Murdoch’s efforts to buy what was then the Herald American from Hearst, Globe publisher William Taylor sent a telegram to unions at the Herald informing them that any concessions they granted to Murdoch would have to be granted to the Globe as well. The move was seen at the time as an attempt by the Globe to nix the deal and hasten the Herald American to its grave, though Taylor denied that was his intent.

Murdoch threatened to file a lawsuit against the Globe charging the paper with violating antitrust laws, but was also quoted as saying: “I might have done the same thing in their circumstance.”

For those interested in tracing the feud back even farther, let’s not forget that the Herald American was formed as a result of the Globe’s journalistic and extra-journalistic efforts to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to strip the Boston Herald Traveler of its television and radio licenses, which the Herald held despite the FCC’s ban on cross-ownership.

The FCC ruled against the Herald Traveler in 1972, and the paper was acquired by Hearst’s Record American.

And while we’re at it, let’s go back to the 1950s, following the death of the once-dominant Boston Post. As recounted in the late J. Anthony Lukas’ masterpiece, “Common Ground,” then-Herald publisher Robert “Beanie” Choate suggested a merger with the Globe. When Globe publisher Davis Taylor turned him down, Choate reportedly told him: “You fellows are stubborn. Worse than that, you’re arrogant. You better listen to us or we’ll teach you a lesson. I’m going to get Channel 5, and with my television revenues I’ll put you out of business.”

Choate got his license — apparently with the help of Joseph Kennedy, whose son Ted, ironically, tried to put the Herald out of business in 1988 by forcing Murdoch to give up either the Herald or Channel 25. Murdoch chose to keep the Herald and sell Channel 25, although several years later he sold the Herald to longtime protégé Pat Purcell and repurchased Channel 25.

So there you have it: a half-century of bad blood between the Globe and the Herald.

Paulson versus Warsh

Boston Globe religion reporter Michael Paulson responds to the David Warsh piece I linked to yesterday, and takes umbrage with Warsh’s suggestion that the Globe hurt itself with readers by pursuing the pedophile-priest story so vigorously.

Let’s assume for a moment that Warsh is right, although I don’t think he is. Isn’t a good newspaper supposed to ignore public opinion in pursuing an important story? Warsh’s piece is smart and well-informed, but I do disagree with him about that.

It’s alive

In what can only be described as great news for the city and the region, the New York Times Co. and the Boston Newspaper Guild have reached an agreement, ending an increasingly tense and ugly standoff over the future of Boston’s largest and most important news organization.

The Globe’s Rob Gavin and Keith O’Brien report on the deal here; the Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam and Christine McConville’s story is here. Not many details yet, but it sounds like the Guild agreed to take significant pay cuts (though not the 23 percent cuts that were being bandied about yesterday), and to yield at least to some extent on those lifetime job guarantees.

If you want to know what’s happening at the Globe, just read my predictions and go with the opposite. After the Times Co. made it clear earlier this week that closure of the paper was at least 60 days away, I was certain that the two sides would break off talks for a while. Instead, they got it done.

There seems little doubt, though, that the $20 million in union givebacks is just the beginning. Guild president Dan Totten has warned his members that management is hinting at a massive round of layoffs. And the easing of lifetime job guarantees, the Globe notes, could clear the way for a sale of the paper, as no prospective owner wanted to take on the task of revitalizing the Globe without maximum flexibility.

In the long run, I suspect that the major metropolitan daily is a doomed relic of the Industrial Age. Still, I’d like to think papers like the Globe can survive another five to 10 years as we transition to whatever’s next. The Globe produces the lion’s share of public-interest journalism and investigative reporting in Greater Boston. The challenge will be to preserve that function with a much smaller staff — keeping in mind that the newsroom has already shrunk from 550 to 330 full-timers in recent years.

In today’s Globe, columnist Jeff Jacoby challenges those who believe the Globe and papers like it are being punished for their liberal bias. Jacoby’s premise is based on the common-sense observation that the Globe isn’t actually losing readers. There’s an apples-and-oranges quality to to readership numbers. But there’s a strong case to be made that when you factor in online readers, the Globe is reaching as many people as it ever has, regardless of its plummeting print circulation.

George Snell offers some worthwhile thoughts on what’s next for the Globe. He has correctly identified the biggest challenge: How can the Globe reinvent itself while simultaneously slashing its news coverage? It’s already cut much of its international and national reporting and closed its foreign bureaus. In order to thrive as a great local paper, it’s got to offer compelling local coverage. Will it be able to continue doing that?

Finally, Herald columnist Joe Fitzgerald sanctimoniously tells us why he’s got no problem with the Herald’s snarky comments on the Globe’s meltdown. He says the Globe was mean to the Herald 27 years ago, when Rupert Murdoch saved the tabloid from what had seemed like certain death.

Good grief. Talk about a long, long, long memory. Howie Carr wasn’t around in 1982. Neither was current Herald owner Pat Purcell. The Herald American, as it was then called, was being mismanaged into extinction by Hearst. For that matter, the Globe was under different ownership, too.

I guess this is why they say the two favorite sports in Boston are politics and revenge.

An incredible, non-credible proposal

The New York Times Co. is trying to force a 23 percent pay cut on the Newspaper Guild, which prompts the Outraged Liberal to ask: “What, no sacrifice of first borns?”

That really is one hell of a proposed pay cut. It’s hard to know what to make of such a move except to assume that management wants some sort of dramatic end game — a walkout by the Guild, bankruptcy, whatever.

Earlier today the Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam — back from hardship duty — reported that Guild officers have gotten some mighty nice raises the past few years. But though Heslam’s enterprise might have sowed some dissension within the ranks at 135 Morrissey Boulevard, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and company seem intent on keeping Globe staffers united and pissed off.

You may have seen this already, but the Washington Post’s newly minted Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Eugene Robinson, has a smart take on the Globe’s woes today. And on and on it goes.

One final thought: Management’s latest offer could be thought of more as an opening gambit than a “last, best offer.” The 30-day deadline has passed, and the company has now said it will not close the paper until after a federally mandated 60-day warning period has passed — and it hasn’t even filed the necessary paperwork for that to happen.

What will management do when the Guild says no? Announce that it will close the Globe in two months? Sorry — now that we know the company wasn’t serious about closing the paper on Friday, and then on Sunday, that’s no longer credible. Unless you’re North Korea, you only get to make threats once.

Pension scandals are forever with us

The Boston Globe’s Sean Murphy has been doing some terrific work recently on the scandal that is the Massachusetts public pension system. As Michael Jonas notes at CommonWealth Unbound, similar stories were published in CommonWealth Magazine five and seven years ago.

Unfortunately, the only thing we seem to have learned is that, eventually, the public forgets.