Author: Dan Kennedy

Ron Borges and that disclaimer

After the Boston Globe emerged in the late 1990s from its travails over ethically challenged columnists Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith, the editors began taking a number of steps to restore the paper’s credibility. One was the disclaimer placed at the bottom of the Sunday sports “notes” columns: “[M]aterial from personal interviews, wire services, other beat writers, and league and team sources was used in this report.”

Now it looks like that disclaimer is going to be put to the test. A Web site called Cold, Hard Football Facts charges that Globe football writer Ron Borges “apparently stole great stretches of his column from a previously published report” in the Tacoma News Tribune. Well, it depends on the meaning of “stole,” doesn’t it? The site acknowledges the disclaimer, but then adds that “even a 90-pound weakling of a newspaper copy boy has enough sense to change some of the words.”

The Phoenix’s Adam Reilly has all the details and promises to post responses from Borges and Globe editor Marty Baron as soon as he gets them.

Chris Lydon and talk radio

When UMass Lowell announced last fall that it would stop funding Christopher Lydon’s radio show, “Open Source,” you had to wonder if its days were numbered. Fortunately, it stayed on the air — and now appears to have some guaranteed longevity.

Last week, the program announced that it’s received a $250,000 MacArthur grant “in support of the innovative use of internet-based tools in the production of a daily public radio program.”

Lydon and company have made a big deal out of using the Web to generate program ideas and discussion. Frankly, I’m somewhat skeptical of how crucial that’s been. The main thing is that “Open Source” is a good program, bringing back to the air one of Boston’s most distinctive voices.

I’ve been complaining a lot about the state of talk radio in Boston recently. Today I want to point out that you can fill up a pretty good part of your weekday with high-quality, locally based talk shows. Consider:

I’m not deliberately leaving out conservatives. Sullivan is pretty conservative, and I’d be the first to admit that many of the great talk-show hosts of the past were conservative — David Brudnoy, Jerry Williams and Gene Burns foremost among them. (I’d round out that trio with Peter Meade, who’s a liberal.)

The problem now is that the morning and afternoon drives are a talk-radio wasteland. On WRKO (AM 680), Tom Finneran shows some promise, so maybe the 6 to 10 a.m. slot won’t be a total vacuum.

In the afternoon, though, when NPR starts to drag, you’re stuck with Howie Carr on WRKO and Jay Severin on WTKK. Both can be entertaining at times. But you won’t respect yourself in the morning.

Banned in Boston

Clea Simon reports in today’s Globe that local radio executives are excited about four Boston talk-show hosts’ being named to the Talkers magazine “2007 Heavy Hundred.”

Well, now. Boston is the ninth-largest radio market in the country. Yet the local “Heavy Hundred” winners are essentially also-rans, with Howie Carr (WRKO, AM 680) coming in at #50, Jay Severin (WTKK, 96.9 FM) at #66 and John Dennis and Gerry Callahan (WEEI, AM 850) at #93. Granted, most of the top 50 hosts are nationally syndicated, but this doesn’t strike me as much to get excited about.

And here’s something to ponder. Though the majority of the top-ranked hosts are conservatives, with Rush Limbaugh coming in at #1, there are some liberal and left-wing hosts near the top, too. Ed Schultz is ranked fifth. Randi Rhodes is #13. Alan Colmes is #16. Stephanie Miller is #36.

What do they have in common? With the exception of Colmes, they could all be heard in Boston on Clear Channel’s weak-signaled “Progressive Talk” stations until December, when the stations were converted to Spanish-language programming.

You think they might do well in liberal Massachusetts if they were put on a station where you could actually hear them? Yeah, I think so, too. Here are the folks who are trying to make that happen.

The Boston Daily Blogger

Media Nation trivia: In the early 1980s John Wilpers and I were competitors. Back then he edited three weekly newspapers, including the Winchester Star, now part of the giant Fairport, N.Y.-based GateHouse Media chain. I edited the Winchester edition of Woburn’s Daily Times Chronicle, still owned by the Haggerty family, among the nicest people in the news business. So there you go.

Anyway, these days the much-traveled Wilpers is the editor of a nascent free daily to be called BostonNOW, which will compete directly with Metro Boston and indirectly with the Globe and the Herald. (The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, also owns 49 percent of Metro.) Wilpers is working for Russel Pergament, a hyperactive visionary who founded the suburban Tab weeklies (long since subsumed into the chain that became GateHouse), was the first publisher of Metro Boston — owned by a European media conglomerate — and then started amNewYork, a freebie that (yes) competes with Metro New York.

It looks as though Wilpers and Pergament are looking to fill BostonNOW with gobs of blogger-provided free or nearly free content. Here’s what Wilpers says on the BostonNOW blog:

This is your opportunity, as a local blogger, photographer, artist, or pundit, to get in on the ground floor and contribute. You will get to share your perspective on living, surviving, and thriving in this amazing city. Participation in the BostonNOW experience will give you massive exposure to a huge reading audience — your words in a daily newspaper going to tens of thousands of commuters and residents; your words on a website generating thousands of page views; your words syndicated worldwide with a share of any profits going to you.

The best part? You’re already doing it on your blogs and websites. We want to give you the opportunity to share your insight with the entire city.

It’s an interesting idea, and a way to distinguish BostonNOW from the generic, wire-heavy Metro. I’m skeptical of corporate-driven citizen journalism, of course, as schemes like this strike me as little more than an opportunity to exploit volunteer labor for profit. Handled right, though, BostonNOW could wind up being a better read than Metro. Then, too, I’ve seen cereal boxes that are a better read than Metro.

Pergament and Wilpers have invited bloggers to meet them on March 10. The details are in Wilpers’ post. Wish I could be there. (Via Universal Hub.)

Phoenix names new editor

The Boston Phoenix has named a new editor. Here’s the press release, hot off the wire:

Lance Gould, a journalist with 20 years’ experience at leading New York-based newspapers and magazines, will become the next Editor of the Boston Phoenix.

Gould will report to Peter Kadzis, who as Executive Editor of the Phoenix Media/Communications Group oversees the editorial operations of the Boston Phoenix, the Providence Phoenix, and the Portland Phoenix as well as Stuff@Night magazine.

Gould will assume his duties in late April.

As Deputy Managing Editor at New York’s Daily News, Gould was responsible for all entertainment and lifestyle coverage in the nation’s fifth-largest daily newspaper. While at the News, he also did a fair amount of writing, reporting on a range of topics from the TV cult-mega-hit show Survivor in Kenya to the tragic events of 9/11.

Most recently, he was a contributing editor on the relaunch of Radar. He helped launch the New York edition of the London-based Time Out and served as Executive Editor of both Spy and Men’s Fitness.

The many publications Gould has written for include Details, Spin, Maxim, Stuff, the New York Times Book Review, USA Today, Outside, New York magazine, the Boston Globe, Marie Claire, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, the Guardian (UK), Arena (UK), FHM (UK).

Educated at the Pingry School in Bernardsville, New Jersey, Gould received his BA in English and American Literature with honors from Brandeis in 1987. He took his MS in Journalism at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1993.

“I couldn’t be more excited about editing the Boston Phoenix,” he says. “The challenge of working in a new city and leading a paper as venerable as the Phoenix is a genuine thrill, and I can’t wait to get started.”

Gould, 41, will be moving to Boston from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he currently resides with his wife, Michele Orecklin, a former staff writer for Time magazine, and their daughter, Samantha, age 1.

“Lance has a varied and diverse background that will serve Phoenix readers well,” says Kadzis. “His recent work at Radar, where a premium was placed on the interdependence of print and online, will serve him particularly well at the Phoenix as we continue to work toward maximizing the convergence of our print, online, and radio content.”

Kadzis adds: “Lance’s former colleagues speak highly of his ability to bring out the very best in his co-workers, and make special mention of his ability to help young talents realize their full potential. Those are qualities that will be appreciated at the Phoenix.”

Founded in 1966 as a four-page arts-and-entertainment weekly, the Boston Phoenix is the flagship property of the Phoenix Media/Communications Group, which in addition to the Phoenix weekly newspapers in Rhode Island and Maine and Stuff@Night comprises the FNX Radio Network; Phoenix Interactive (thephoenix.com, fnxradio.com, stuffatnight.com); Phoenix Ventures (the sports and magazine group that publishes the official year books for the Boston Bruins, the Boston Celtics, and the Boston Marathon, in addition to program guides for the Tweeter Center and the Bank of America Pavilion summer music series); people2people group (voice and Internet personals for the publishing industry); g8wave (marketing and content using SMS and other mobile technologies); and Mass Web Printing (four-color offset printing).

“Frontline” on the future of news

I thought last night’s installment of “Frontline”‘s excellent “News War” series was the strongest yet. The first two parts focused on the so-called reporter’s privilege — the rapidly eroding right of journalists not to disclose their confidential sources or turn over their notes, photos, video footage and the like if called before a grand jury or a judge. Important stuff, but a little esoteric. Last night’s 90-minute installment, by contrast, was about the future.

My only complaint is that it rambled. Framing the story as some sort of dual narrative encompassing both the rise of new media and the fate of the Los Angeles Times was awkward, though both tales are worth telling. Especially good was Dean Baquet, who left as editor of the LA Times last November rather than follow orders from his budget-slashing overlords at the Tribune Co. Baquet, recently hired as Washington bureau chief at the New York Times, came across as a real human being — unlike the LA Times’ bloodless new publisher, David Hiller. (Check out Hiller’s attempt at pre-broadcast spin, reported by Kevin Roderick in LA Observed.)

Baquet’s predecessor in Los Angeles, John Carroll, pointed out a crucial fact: Most of the serious reporting in this country is done by newspaper journalists. If the newspaper business is in trouble, who will do the kind of public-service journalism that we need to govern ourselves?

Though it rambled, it rambled at a sprightly pace. Reporter/producer Lowell Bergman isn’t afraid to use silence to his advantage, forcing his interview subjects to fill the empty space. At times, it seems, Bergman is able to squeeze out good stuff simply by raising a reproachful eyebrow.

I do wish the new-media story hadn’t been subsumed by the drama over the LA Times. Bloggerman Jeff Jarvis was his usual pugnacious self in countering Nicholas Lemann‘s dismissal of blogs as “church newsletters,” telling Lemann (through Bergman) that the future will be marked by professional and amateur journalists working together. It’s a crucial point, but Bergman didn’t follow up. I doubt anyone who isn’t already following the rise of “open-source journalism” would have even known what Jarvis was talking about.

The bottom line, according to Bergman and the folks he interviewed, is the bottom line. Though newspapers remain profitable, they are being gutted because of Wall Street’s ever-rising demands for even greater profits. Combined with a belief among financial analysts that the Web will kill off the print side in the not-too-distant future, the newspaper business has become engulfed by a sense of crisis even as it continues to crank out annual profits in the range of 20 percent.

Bergman was unable to suggest much of a solution other than to highlight a few well-known alternatives, such as the St. Petersburg Times (owned by a nonprofit foundation, the Poynter Institute), and National Public Radio (a nonprofit funded mainly through listener contributions, corporate underwriting and the late Joan Kroc).

But he was certainly asking the right questions.

Update: Jeff Jarvis reacts in his usual laid-back manner, writing that Bergman and company “played the themes we have heard again and again, as if on a Top 40 radio station: tsk-tsking the tackiness, fretting about the news that the big guys are sure we need, evil Wall Street, looney citizens. I could sit down and fisk, as we say, all its cheap shots and lazy analysis and incomplete reporting but, frankly, I don’t find it worth the effort.”

Online speech, offline punishment

Over the past year or so, students have become increasingly savvy about the downside of Facebook and MySpace. In talking with my students and in reading their stories for journalism classes, it’s clear that they know if they post photos of themselves drunk and/or in compromising positions, potential employers will somehow find out about it.

What they may not know is that college and university officials themselves may be cruising around Facebook — and going after students who’ve posted content they don’t like. In the current Phoenix, Greg Lukianoff and Will Creeley report that students have been singled out and punished for posting content that is obnoxious and racially insensitive, but that nevertheless is protected by the First Amendment. They write:

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the speech codes, censorship, and double standards of the culture-wars heyday of the ’80s and ’90s are alive and kicking, and they are now colliding with the latest explosion of communication technology. Sites like Facebook and MySpace are becoming the largest battleground yet for student free speech. Whatever campus administrators’ intentions (and they are often mixed), students need to know that online jokes, photos, and comments can get them in hot water, no matter how effusively their schools claim to respect free speech. The long arm of campus officialdom is reaching far beyond the bounds of its buildings and grounds and into the shadowy realm of cyberspace.

Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and Creeley is a top official with FIRE.

Raj makes the Herald

Dan Gillmor coined the oft-quoted citizen-journalism aphorism “My readers know more than I do.”

Casey Ross of the Boston Herald certainly thinks it’s true when it comes to Media Nation. In today’s “Monday Morning briefing,” Ross dips into this blog for some wisdom on Gov. Deval Patrick’s proposal to let cities and towns raise certain local taxes, such as the meals tax:

The blogosphere was busy this weekend assessing the governor’s budget and tax proposals. While legislative leaders have resisted his proposal for local-option meals taxes, others don’t see what the fuss is about. One blogger on Dan Kennedy’s Media Nation wrote: “The stranglehold by the state on local mechanisms for raising revenue is ridiculous. I’m from the midwest, and local-option taxes are the primary means by which they raise revenue, not the property tax.”

Nice going, Raj.

Readership exodus

Not that we didn’t all know this, but check out the latest from the General Social Survey, reported in today’s New York Times.

In the accompanying slide show, you’ll see that only two measurements have changed drastically since the early 1970s: attitudes toward women in politics (for the better) and daily newspaper readership (for the worse).

The percentage of Americans who say they read a newspaper every day has dropped from nearly 70 percent to just over 30 percent.