Author: Dan Kennedy

Explaining the Journal Register’s fall

Media Nation reader MTS passes along this interesting Newsosaur analysis of what went wrong at the Journal Register Co., the bottom-feeding newspaper company now drowning in a sea of debt. (JRC’s best-known property at the moment is probably the New Haven Register.)

What’s fascinating about this is the gulf that separates Newsosaur’s Alan Mutter from his commenters. Mutter praises JRC’s 19.3 percent profit margin, and concludes that the company came to woe not because of the way it has run its newspapers but because of foolish investments.

Many of the commenters, though, say those profit margins were the result of such drastic cutbacks in newsroom budgets that the papers were decimated, leading to their “loosing circulation in heaps” (I hope that wasn’t written by a copy editor).

Of course, everyone is losing circulation in heaps these days. It would be telling to see how JRC’s numbers stack up with those of the industry as a whole.

Tom Palmer to leave the Globe

One of the unsung good guys is leaving the Boston Globe. Veteran reporter Tom Palmer, who’s been covering real estate and development for the past several years, is among those taking the early-retirement buyout.

Palmer tells Media Nation by e-mail why he decided now is the time after passing up previous offers:

I’m leaving a job — 13 different ones, really, over 32 years at the Globe — that I still love. But this was a generous offer that probably won’t be repeated. It’s time to go do something new. I won’t decide on anything until after I’ve left the Globe late in May.

Palmer is one of a handful of newsroom conservatives, as well as a Van Morrison fan of the first order. He will be missed.

The ugliest turn yet for Clemens

The New York Daily News shimmies nearly all the way out to the end of the limb today. Let’s not kid ourselves: Weasel words aside, you are instructed to believe that Roger Clemens started having sex with country star Mindy McCready when she was 15 years old. It depends on what the meaning of “romance” is, I guess.

What do you suppose Clemens’ lawyers are doing today? Researching libel law, or the statute of limitations? This is so ugly that the steroid allegations pale by comparison.

The Herald unbound

I’m of a mixed mind about Howard Kurtz’s story in the Washington Post today on the Boston Herald’s struggle to survive and thrive.

On the one hand, it’s well-reported and hits most of the right notes. On the other, the central theme — that of the “scrappy,” “feisty” tabloid trying to carve out a niche in the shadow of the dominant Boston Globe — is one that could have, and often has, been written about at any point during the past quarter-century. I’ve cranked out more than a few of those myself.

The article’s principal shortcoming, I think, is that Kurtz does not attempt to assess where the Herald’s Web site fits into the overall picture. BostonHerald.com is unusual in that it is almost entirely divorced from the print edition — it’s continuously updated, and there’s no good way of knowing whether a particular story ever made it into print or how it was played. Given its status as almost a free-standing entity, it’s an interesting experiment in online journalism.

As of last June, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, BostonHerald.com was drawing some 1.2 million unique visitors a month. That’s not nearly as many as the Globe’s site, Boston.com (4.2 million). But it’s still a lot of people. And you would think, at least anecdotally, that online readers do not fit the aging, blue-collar profile of the typical tabloid reader.

If Kurtz wanted to write another story about the struggle of a gritty urban tabloid, that’s fine. Personally I’d be more interested to read about how a gritty urban tabloid is struggling to reinvent itself as a news source whose online presence is at least as important as its print edition.

That’s especially true on a day when we learned that newspaper circulation took another dive (check out those wretched Globe numbers), and when the venerable Capital Times of Madison, Wis., made the switch to its much-discussed mostly online distribution model.

More on the Capital Times. Jay Rosen weighs in.

The Tao of Deval

When is the former dynamo known as Deval Patrick going to step up? Or was his campaign an anomaly, and what we’re seeing now is the real Patrick? Boston Herald reporter Jay Fitzgerald has the latest. It’s a bit convoluted, and I suspect it speaks to Patrick’s lack of leadership rather than to anything more nefarious.

In a nutshell, the Legislature recently passed a law allowing employees to collect triple damages if they win a wage dispute with their employer. Patrick opposed the bill but, unlike his predecessor, Mitt Romney, declined to veto it. Instead, he allowed it to become law without signing it.

Naturally, this will be a boon for lawyers — including Patrick’s wife, Diane Patrick, who was one of six lawyers at Ropes & Gray to sign a letter to clients alerting them about this new legal hazard. (Question: Did R&G really need her signature to drive the point home? This would be less of a story without that angle.)

Nearly two months ago, then-Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey reported that Patrick’s doomed proposal to build three casinos in Massachusetts would benefit Ropes & Gray, which has an extensive practice helping casino owners fight off gambling addicts and campaign-finance laws. Nice.

It’s all pretty remarkable and disheartening. In this week’s Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly attempts the meta-take, looking at Patrick’s communications strategy. Reilly writes:

The problem is simple: while Candidate Patrick seemed to say or do whatever the situation required, Governor Patrick frequently does exactly the opposite — whether it’s picking fights with the media, neglecting his staunchest grassroots supporters, or making ill-advised decisions that complicate his job instead of making it easier.

Over at WBZ-TV, Jon Keller reports that Patrick’s approval rating continues to nosedive. According to a Survey USA poll commissioned by WBZ, just 41 percent of registered voters now approve of the job Patrick’s doing, as opposed to 56 percent who don’t.

By now it should be obvious to Patrick that the governor’s job is hard — hard to learn and hard to do well. So why does he keep stepping in it, over and over again

Gitlin responds

I don’t like it when other people try to summarize my position, so I’ll try to be careful in summarizing his: It’s OK for an opinion journalist to comment on matters involving a politician he supports even when readers are not informed of that fact. He calls my position “incoherent.” And he throws in a “metadiscussion” for good measure.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d call this incoherent:

Anyway, I’m not writing a column on Obama, I’m writing a column on Tim Russert. I’ve been writing about Russert for a decade or so. I was writing about him — critically, in the main — when I’d never heard of Barack Obama.

Yes. Me too. Since then, though, you and I have heard of Obama, and you’ve publicly endorsed him. Thus you’ve forfeited the right to evaluate Russert’s coverage of the presidential campaign without disclosing that fact. And if you do disclose it, fewer people will take you seriously. This is basic journalism ethics. Do you not get it?

Now read the whole thing.

In Middleborough, a curious candidate

All has been fairly quiet on the Middleborough casino front lately, but things may be about to heat up. It seems that former Brockton mayor Jack Yunits is a finalist for the $130,000-a-year town manager’s job. And it just so happens that he works as a consultant for the Liberty Square Group, the Boston-based public-relations and lobbying firm that has led the fight to build the world’s largest casino in Middleborough.

Oh, but not to worry, says search committee member Wayne Perkins, a former selectman and casino backer. Yunits may be taking money from a firm funded in part by the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe and the South African casino moguls who are behind all this, but his work with Liberty Square is “strictly” limited to lobbying for a power plant in Brockton.

But according to a Liberty Square senior vice president Amy Lambiaso, Yunits has also lobbied for a Verizon-backed group that seeks to weaken the control local officials have over cable companies in communities like, you know, Middleborough. So much for Perkins’ “research.”

And let’s not forget that town officials are legally obligated to say nothing but nice things about the casino proposal. I suppose that task becomes easier if they simply hire a town manager who’s already getting paid by the casino’s backers.

The Brockton Enterprise covers the story here; the Cape Cod Times here.

As always: You can’t make this stuff up.