Author: Dan Kennedy

Mark Jurkowitz, whom I replaced as the Boston Phoenix’s media columnist in 1994 — and who, in turn, replaced me when I left the Phoenix earlier this year — explains why he thought the Phoenix was a better outlet for his work than the Boston Globe. An excerpt:

JURKOWITZ: Everybody’s got a theory about how to fix the slumping newspaper business, which has the feel of a dying Rust Belt industry these days. First and foremost, print journalism has to remain reliable. But I believe it also needs to evolve to provide readers with more attititude and personality, a little more spit and vinegar and a little less perfunctory “he said, she said.” In the end, I figured that much of good media writing, like good sports writing, is about argument — starting arguments, making arguments, and occasionally even ending arguments. The alternative press is simply more conducive to arguing.

Among other things, Jurkowitz’s take on the importance of the alternative press is why you should be worried about this week’s news that the Phoenix-based New Times chain plans to merge with the Village Voice and its assorted weeklies. Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Chronicle has a good analysis explaining why this merger should not pass antitrust muster.

The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies is tracking coverage of this disturbing, long-predicted development.

After I posted a link I’d found to Maureen Dowd’s tough column on Judith Miller yesterday, I was told that the progressive Web site TruthOut.org continues to post the full text of New York Times columns – the left-leaning ones, anyway.

Sure enough: Check out the right-hand column, headlined “Op-Editorials.” So much for TimesSelect. At the bottom of each piece is this: “In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.”

But that’s only part of the fair-use provision of copyright law. Generally speaking, you just can’t post entire articles, as the Free Republic discovered a few years ago. It seems significant that CommonDreams.org, whose mission is similar to TruthOut’s, has stopped carrying Times columns.

Still, until someone at the Times complains, it looks like TruthOut is a good place for bloggers seeking links to liberal Times columnists.

So what about Brooks and Tierney?

Discerning Media Nation readers know that I am not an admirer of Joseph Wilson, the Bush administration critic married to former undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. I think the incomparable Bob Somerby has been dispositive on the man he calls “the Honest Ambassador.” Here is a good starting point.

Nevertheless, Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard pushed matters too far yesterday in talking about Wilson’s mission to Niger, to which Wilson had been dispatched to learn whether Saddam Hussein had sought uranium. In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Hayes said:

HAYES: We have to remember, Joe Wilson came back, and when he went public, first anonymously then later with his name attached, claims that he had debunked forgeries that suggested an Iraq-Niger uranium deal, the chronology doesn’t work. Wilson was in Niger in February of 2002. The U.S. government came into possession of those forgeries in October of 2002. He could not have done what he said he had done. So if you’re in the White House at the time, why would you not say, “Gosh, who is this guy? Why is he saying these things that we know aren’t true? And how do we fix this?”

Gosh, is that what Wilson said? That he “had debunked forgeries that suggested an Iraq-Niger uranium deal”? In fact, Hayes didn’t even come close. Here is the full text of the famous Wilson op-ed piece that appeared in the New York Times on July 6, 2003. Wilson deals with the forgery claim in three parenthetical sentences. Don’t blink, or you might miss it.

WILSON: As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors – they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government – and were probably forged. And then there’s the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.

Wilson wasn’t claiming to have debunked anything with respect to forged documents – he was merely citing news accounts that he saw long after he’d come home from his mission.

Sadly, host Tim Russert failed to correct Hayes.

The view from the summit of Mt. Washington this afternoon:

The Herald business editor and the Phoenix media critic go at it. Read it here.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd absolutely takes off on the duplicitous Judith Miller today. And even if you’re not a TimesSelect subscriber, you can read Dowd’s entire column: I’ve found a blogger who was either brave or foolish enough to copy and paste the entire thing, right down to the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. Read it here before it disappears.

Mo’s lead: “I’ve always liked Judy Miller.” You just know what’s coming, don’t you?

On another front, Times executive editor Bill Keller’s rehabilitation seems just about complete. Earlier this week, the New York Observer reported that Keller was far tougher on Miller in private than he had appeared to be in public.

Yesterday, as you may have heard, Keller e-mailed a memo to the Times staff conceding not just that mistakes were made, but that he himself made some of them. Respect for Keller will only increase.

Next up (as I continue my Saturday morning Romenesko feeding frenzy): a forthcoming New York magazine article by Kurt Andersen that will apparently lay most of the blame for the Miller fiasco at the feet of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. – where, I suspect, it belongs.

At this point, it’s not inconceivable that Sulzberger could be pressured into giving up one of his jobs – say, leaving as publisher of the Times while remaining as chairman of the New York Times Co.

Given that the single most significant mistake of Sulzberger’s tenure remains his hiring of the dictatorial bully Howell Raines over Keller as executive editor several years ago – only to have to reverse himself when Raines imploded amid the Jayson Blair scandal – such an event would only enhance Keller’s stature.

I’ve written a piece for the Public Eye section of CBSNews.com on how to fix the network evening newscasts at CBS, NBC and ABC. An excerpt:

The dilemma facing the Big Three became apparent only during the commercial breaks. Each time [anchor Bob] Schieffer disappeared from my screen, he was replaced with a parade of advertisements promising relief from one malady after another: dry eyes, blood clots, arthritis, calcium deficiency, diabetes, insomnia, toenail fungus, bad feet and high cholesterol. There was a message on where to find government information about Medicare. There was an image-building ad from a drug company. As someone who is in the very middle of middle age, I was appalled to think that I had this to look forward to in my declining years. And, of course, I realized that here was the evidence of what is really wrong with the nightly newscasts: they’re on at 6:30 p.m., a time when only the elderly can watch them. Everyone else is either commuting, eating dinner or helping the kids with their homework. That, more than anything, explains why the combined network-newscast audience has declined from about 50 million to fewer than 30 million over the past couple of decades. People work longer hours and lead more hectic lives than they did 20 years ago. The networks haven’t kept pace.

You may read the whole thing by clicking here.

Chuck Tanowitz brings up the part that I left out of yesterday’s post on circulation numbers and the Web: the fact that the insanely lucrative classified ads off which daily newspapers fed for years are gone for good.

Yes, newspapers can move their classified sections to the Web. The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald have both done quite a lot on that front. But how do they compete with Craig’s List, which is free? Or Monster.com, which has ravaged newspapers’ help-wanted sections? They don’t.

Romenesko today has a whole section of stories on the Boston Globe’s circulation and advertising woes, including this Jay Fitzgerald piece in the Boston Herald, headlined “Bored Readers Cutting Off Globe’s Circulation.” Fitzgerald focuses on the Globe’s plummeting circulation – down nearly 8 percent, to about 416,000 on weekdays and 667,000 on Sundays.

But though these are certainly dark days at 135 Morrissey Blvd., especially with the national operation being dismantled, there’s a larger point that everyone is missing.

Take a look at the media kit for the Globe’s Web site, Boston.com. As you’ll see, Boston.com claims to have 600,000 registered users. Moreover, it cites a third-party study showing that Boston.com is visited by more than 4.1 million unique users every month.

Now, those 4.1 million people aren’t all Globe readers. Boston.com includes features not just from the Globe but also from New England Cable News and New England Sports Network, as well as some of its own content. But, for the sake of simplicity, let’s say that Boston.com and the Globe are one and the same. Divide those 4.1 million monthly users by 30 days in a month (another oversimplification), and you’ve got an average of about 136,000 people reading the Globe online every day.

Add those readers to the Globe’s current circulation, and you get 552,000 on weekdays and 803,000 on Sundays. Significantly, those numbers are similar to the Globe’s best years pre-Web. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), the Globe’s weekday circulation in 1991 was 519,000. Its Sunday circulation in 1994 was 815,000.

Of course, the Herald has had its own circulation woes in recent years. Fitzgerald reports that the Herald’s circulation has dropped by about 4 percent during the past six months. That would put the Herald’s current circulation at about 240,000 on weekdays and 145,000 on Sundays.

Now, let’s do the same exercise. Herald Interactive claims that its Web sites receive about 3 million unique visitors every month. As I did with Boston.com and the Globe, I’m going to award every one of those visitors to the Herald, even though Herald Interactive includes Town Online, the electronic wing of its Community Newspaper subsidiary, as well as three classified-ad sites.

Divide 3 million by 30, and you get 100,000. Add those to the current circulation numbers, and you get 340,000 readers on weekdays and 245,000 on Sundays. That compares favorably to ABC figures for 1989, which show that the Herald’s circulation was 360,000 on weekdays and 252,000 on Sundays.

No one doubts that the newspaper business is in serious trouble. The Herald eliminated a quarter of its 145 newsroom employees earlier this year, and the Globe is in the midst of cutting about 35 newsroom positions. The Globe’s decision to get rid of its national desk is stunning, because it represents a serious lowering of the paper’s reach and ambition, and because it will make it harder to attract talented young reporters.

But there is a case to be made that the Globe’s readership – and, for that matter, the Herald’s – is pretty much unchanged over the past 12 to 15 years. Changes in advertising patterns and an inability to come up with a viable online business model are taking a huge toll. Readers, though, aren’t leaving. That’s a reason for optimism.

Correction: In the original version of this post, I transposed the Herald’s weekday and Sunday circulation figures. The numbers are now correct. D’oh!

Richard Prince reports that the Boston Globe is folding its entire national operation, although the Washington bureau will be spared. (Via Mark Jurkowitz, who’s also learned that the weekly Life at Home section is toast.)

This may be the most significant cut at the Globe that I can remember, since it goes right to the heart of its identity as a regional paper with national ambitions. The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, is not inspiring a lot of trust this week.