Author: Dan Kennedy

Why journalism matters

Tom Stites, whose speech at last July’s Media Giraffe conference I linked to here, is back with an essay called “Needed: More Excellence in Journalism.” It’s an extension of his speech — a meditation on the fate of public-service journalism, especially for audiences not served by elite news organizations such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Well worth reading.

More cutbacks at the Globe

The Herald’s Messenger Blog reports that the Globe is eliminating 19 editorial jobs, 17 on the news side and two on the opinion pages. The cuts are part of an overall plan by the New York Times Co. to get rid of 125 positions at the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

Globe editor Marty Baron, who’s out of town, says he’ll explain the impact in person next week. He writes in a memo to the troops:

Here is how Editorial will be affected: We are aiming for a reduction of 19 staff positions in Editorial, including 17 on the news side and two on the opinion pages. Some current openings also will be frozen. In addition, we anticipate achieving cost savings through newshole and other expense reductions, which I will detail as soon as possible in coming weeks.

This is bad news, obviously, but it’s not surprising. As I’ve said a number of times before, the Globe in a few years will be mostly local, mostly online and a lot smaller than it is today. This is just another painful step toward that uncertain future.

Finneran begins again

So it’s official. Former Massachusetts House Speaker Tom Finneran, barely a week after pleading guilty to federal obstruction-of-justice charges, is the new morning drive-time host at WRKO Radio (AM 680). But why?

Finneran used to do a lot of fill-in work at WBZ (AM 1030), especially when the legendary David Brudnoy was alive. He struck me as OK as a substitute, but not someone I’d want to listen to every day. He talked too much, throwing out a blizzard of verbiage when a few words would do, and wasn’t particularly funny, either. (Unlike legislators, Mr. Speaker, listeners don’t have to laugh at your jokes.) In fact, he was pretty much like the way he came off at today’s news conference, which you can watch here.

Nor do I think Finneran is much of a marquee name, although Entercom honchos Julie Kahn and Jason Wolfe obviously believe otherwise.

In his press conference, Finneran did sound as though he wants to try something a little more newsy and elevated than WRKO is used to. (Of course, he’ll be doing it without a news department.) Presumably we won’t have to snore through Finneran’s complaining about how mad he gets when the ATM makes him choose between English and Spanish — an actual Todd Feinburg topic yesterday. So I wish Finneran well.

Scott Allen Miller, the man he’ll be replacing, will stay at the helm until the Finneran show makes its debut on Feb. 12. This is unheard-of in radio, but Wolfe said at the news conference that Miller is being considered for another Entercom job outside of Boston. So Miller will be a good boy.

Miller’s not a bad guy (disclosure: I yakked with him on his show a few times, and once did a morning as his substitute co-host), but I don’t think he ever figured out the Boston market. He really could have used a piece of advice I once heard from Brudnoy: In talk radio, the callers are far dumber than the listeners. The trick is to find a way to deal with the callers without alienating the listeners. Unfortunately, Miller’s show all too often sounds like he thinks the callers are his listeners. By this point, maybe they are.

Save WRKO is apoplectic.

Bush in a Flash

I was out during President Bush’s speech last night, so the first thing I did when I got home was to start looking for the video on the Internet. So kudos to New England Cable News, which had posted it in easy-to-load Flash video. Even CSPAN.org couldn’t beat that.

As for the substance, I have to confess that Bush’s words came across as recycled boilerplate to such an extent that it was hard to pay attention. Besides, most of the details had been leaked out in the preceding days. But I found the lead of this Sheryl Gay Stolberg analysis in the New York Times to be suitably horrifying:

By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, as well as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

Unless you believe that Bush knows more than all of the aforementioned people (including the voters who rejected his policies last November), then you should be as horrified as I am.

“Local Hero” for homeland security

Gov. Deval Patrick has appointed Juliette Kayyem as the state’s homeland security adviser. Here’s a short profile I wrote about Kayyem for a “Local Heroes” roundup that appeared in the Boston Phoenix on Nov. 21, 2001.

How smart is Kayyem? Check out this excerpt from the Phoenix profile:

If Kayyem could give the administration one piece of advice, it would be to drop the “war” metaphor. With September 11 behind us, the pursuit of Al Qaeda well under way, and the anthrax attacks now believed to be the work of a domestic Unabomber type, the worst of it may already be over — yet the use of the word “war” justifies anti-liberty policies that serve no purpose in rooting out terrorism.

“It skews the debate too far to the right in a way that I think will have very bad long-term consequences for America,” she says. “We’ve put this entire structure in place for a war that is essentially over. A lot of what [then-attorney general John] Ashcroft has gotten through is stuff they’ve been trying to get through for a long time. Fifty or 100 years from now, what’s been done during the past two months may still be around.”

Too bad she’s not President Bush’s homeland security adviser instead of Patrick’s.

A threat to local access

Robert Weisman reports in today’s Globe that two legislators are filing a bill to transfer authority over cable-television franchises from local officials to the state. The bill was filed by state Sen. Steven Panagiotakos, D-Lowell, and state Rep. James Vallee, D-Franklin.

Weisman casts his story as one of more competition for the monolithic cable companies (make that company), but that’s only part of what’s going on. What’s in the crosshairs here is local-access cable programming — city council meetings, school plays, foreign-language programs, local talk shows and the like. The media-reform group Free Press has a wealth of background material on its Web site.

From the time that cable as we know it popped into existence in the 1970s, it has, with few exceptions, been a monopoly, with licenses granted by local regulators. The monopoly was a technological necessity: practically speaking, only one company could be allowed to string wires all over town.

In return for this monopoly, local officials would extract concessions such as special rates for senior citizens, upgraded communications for public safety and funding for local programming. It was a system that worked for everyone, and if local access doesn’t draw huge audiences, it nevertheless fills a real need.

But technology is changing by the day. Satellite TV is already an alternative, and satellite providers obviously don’t have to pay franchise fees. (You can’t get local-access programming, either — or even New England Cable News.)

Now comes Verizon, which wants to offer television programming over its phone lines to compete with cable, dominated by Comcast. Verizon wants to speed the process up by having the state, rather than local officials, sign off on its plans; Comcast, not surprisingly, likes things the way they are, since it wants to keep its local monopolies as long as possible.

If the bill to transfer regulatory authority from local communities to the state were to become law, there’s no reason to think that funding for local access would be eliminated — it would simply be administered at the state level. But we can see where this is going. With Verizon and Comcast competing, it’s easy to foresee the companies telling state regulators that they could charge less if only they didn’t have to pay those archaic local-access fees.

And, inevitably, television programming is moving to the Internet. Instead of 50 or 500 channels from which to choose, the number will theoretically be infinite — at least if we can preserve net neutrality. Local-access-type programming will move to the Internet, too, to be downloaded and viewed whenever you like.

In such a media environment, though, it’s not clear who, if anyone, should pay for local programming. Yes, you could sell advertising, and I imagine some entrepreneurial types will try. Or you could line up underwriting and pledges, following the public broadcasting model. But to carry the important but less-than-scintillating stuff that is the lifeblood of local access, you need some sort of guaranteed revenue stream to replace the local franchising fees.

You could accomplish this with a tax on Internet service or on Internet-capable TV sets, perhaps. But we have to start thinking about this now. If such ideas fall in the face of a no-new-taxes mentality, then public-interest media localism will suffer a heavy blow.

To follow this issue, keep an eye on MassAccess, the Massachusetts Chapter of the Alliance for Community Media, a national organization of local-access producers.

Comment reconsideration

After reading your public comments and private e-mails, I’ve decided not to do anything about comments to Media Nation in the immediate future. I’ve seen several good reasons not to require people to register with Blogger, including:

  • At least one correspondent whose judgment I respect thinks Blogger’s terms of service are a legal nightmare. I’ve decided not to worry about it, but I know others may differ.
  • Another tells me that requiring registration won’t even eliminate blog spam — a big incentive for making the change.
  • At least one third-party solution that I briefly investigated, Haloscan, doesn’t seem to do much.

Now that the semester has begun, I’ll probably let things continue unchanged until spring. After that, I plan to investigate a real third-party solution or possibly a switch to WordPress, which apparently has better comment tools.