Category: Media

For the Herald, a long-term lease and lots of space

We already knew that the Boston Herald, having shut down its printing presses, was getting ready to leave its hulking South End plant. Now the other shoe has dropped, as Herald owner Pat Purcell announced yesterday that the paper will move to the Seaport District in early 2012.

Two pieces of information seem significant. First, the Herald signed a 10-year lease, which, if nothing else, ought to give pause to those who perpetually predict the tabloid’s demise. Second, the paper will commandeer 51,000 square feet of space.

I’m not good at visualizing what that means, but it sounds like a lot for what has become a small operation. Is Purcell planning to expand? Or does he have additional ventures in mind? Don’t forget that he moonlights as head of Rupert Murdoch’s South Coast papers.

Memo to Tom Menino: Boston is not “a two-newspaper town” — it’s a multiple-newspaper town, with excellent papers ranging from neighborhood outlets such as the Dorchester Reporter and the South End News to specialty publications like the Boston Phoenix and Bay Windows.

Boston is a two-daily town, and it looks like Purcell intends to keep it that way for as long as he can.

The Boston Globe covers the Herald’s move as well.

Danvers remembers 9/11

If you’re on the North Shore this weekend, I hope you’ll consider attending a program at the Peabody Institute Library in Danvers called “9/11 Ten Years Later: A Decade of Change for American Culture.”

The program, to be held Sunday at 2 p.m., will be moderated by Town Manager Wayne Marquis and will feature Danvers Police Chief Neil Oullette and Endicott College professors Amy Damico and Sara Quay, the editors of “September 11 in Popular Culture: A Guide.” I’ll be talking about how the media have changed over the past decade, for better and for worse.

You can find out more information about the event here. And here is an essay I wrote for the Boston Phoenix’s issue of Sept. 13, 2001. I haven’t re-read it yet, so I have no idea how well it’s held up.

About that “zero” job-growth number

The economy gained 45,000 jobs in August — 62,000 in the private sector. Yet the media have been telling us since Friday that the United States added “zero” jobs, as the economy essentially ground to a halt.

I’m not here to defend anyone. In fact, 62,000 is a terrible number, and is really all the proof we need that the fragile recovery has flickered out. But for news organizations to adopt the methodology used by the government amounts to a form of innumeracy.

The key to this is that the government counts the 45,000 Verizon workers who were on strike as having lost their jobs. There may be reasons for the government to do that, but it’s ludicrous for the media to repeat it. They didn’t lose their jobs, they’re back at work and thus those 45,000 jobs shouldn’t enter into anyone’s calculations.

So who did lose their jobs? Government workers — 17,000 of them. And, as I already noted, the economy added 62,000 private-sector jobs. Thus there is no basis for asserting that there was zero job growth.

Oh, wait — there is one thing: the “optics of a giant zero in the jobs column,” as the New York Times puts it. It’s a stark bit of political symbolism. It’s just that it also happens not to be true.

Did the media overhype Irene? (II)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceQiNQuZ6gg&w=500&h=345]
In retrospect, the biggest problem with Howard Kurtz’s rant about the media’s overhyping Irene was that he was way too early. When I linked to him on Sunday afternoon, the storm clearly seemed to have fizzled — and the main question at the time was whether the media should have been more restrained, or if we were dealing with a genuinely threatening situation that just happened not to pan out. Then came the floods.

Yesterday, New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter and I appeared on “The Emily Rooney Show” on WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) to discuss whether the media were guilty of overkill. Essentially we were in agreement: the non-stop coverage was too much and often silly; the fact that Irene veered away from Washington and New York City initially made it seem like the storm had been oversold; but given the devastation in Vermont, Upstate New York, Western Massachusetts and parts of New Hampshire, it turned out that the storm hadn’t be overhyped at all. (It was a great kick to share the stage for a moment with Stelter, whom I hugely admire. Here is his Monday story on the Weather Channel.)

The last word goes to Charles Apple (via Martin Langeveld), who mocks the hype theory with images of the reality on the ground. Irene was a major storm that will affect the region for months to come. It was, in some respects, every bit as bad as the predictions — just different.

Video above is from Brattleboro Community Television.

Did the media overhype Irene?

Here was my prediction for Tropical Inconvenience Irene: a half-inch of rain and 20 mph winds. As it turned out, I wasn’t that far off, at least for those of us who live on the North Shore.

But does it necessarily follow that the media overhyped what turned out to be the Storm of the Week? At the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz excoriates cable news, writing that “the tsunami of hype on this story was relentless, a Category 5 performance that was driven in large measure by ratings.”

Kurtz’s point is that the storm got the coverage that it did mainly because it was heading toward New York City, and it’s hard to disagree. But Irene has caused tremendous damage in the South, and flooding could be heavy in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont later today.

What I’d like to know is whether there is reason to believe Irene was overhyped from the beginning — or if this was a legitimate potential disaster that just happened to fizzle out.

Slate inexplicably lays off Jack Shafer

Jack Shafer

Earlier this summer, Mark Lisheron called and asked if I’d like to talk with him for a profile of Slate media critic Jack Shafer that he was writing for the American Journalism Review. Well, of course. Shafer is among the very best when it comes to journalism about journalism. He’s also been kind to me over the years, so I was happy to return the favor. You can read Lisheron’s piece here.

Then, yesterday, the inexplicable happened: Slate got rid of Shafer, according to AdWeek, with editor David Plotz citing ongoing financial woes at the pioneering webzine. Erik Wemple of the Washington Post also ties the move to problems at the Washington Post Co., which owns Slate.

Shafer is a dogged reporter in a field where too many media critics would prefer to sit back and pontificate. (Yes, irony alert. I get it.) But he wore his reporting lightly in the sense that you could tell how much research he’d put into his pieces, yet he didn’t feel compelled to show his work all the time. As a small-“l” libertarian, he also brought a calm, iconoclastic perspective to a field dominated by liberals and conservatives thundering at each other about allegations of bias.

It was Shafer who popularized my two favorite descriptions of Rupert Murdoch: “rotten old bastard” and “genocidal tyrant.” Though Shafer is no admirer of Murdoch, he uses the former description more affectionately than not, and “genocidal tyrant” is actually something Murdoch himself coined. Nevertheless, I always enjoy borrowing those descriptions and crediting them to Shafer.

As for Slate, well, times are tough, and I suppose Plotz has access to website traffic numbers to justify his decision. But as far as I’m concerned, Shafer is pretty much the only reason to look at Slate, and it’s hard to imagine I’ll even bother with it anymore other than for exceptional articles someone flags on Twitter.

Shafer, I suspect, will soon surface in a better job than he’s got now. Still, this is a bitter day.

Photo via the Missouri School of Journalism.

Three for Thursday

There’s so much going on this morning that I can barely keep up. And I really need to return to (shhh!) the Book. So here’s a quick roundup, to be followed by a more important matter, and then (I tell myself sternly) that’s it for today.

  • Don’t miss Michael Levenson’s splendid Boston Globe article on the millions of dollars being spent on Beacon Hill by developers looking to build casinos in Massachusetts. Levinson wins extra bonus points for referring to “gambling interests” rather than the PR-ish “gaming interests” so beloved by those trying to improve the image of their miserable industry. As Dick Hirsch says of “gaming”: “They are trying to wrap a noxious substance in an elegant package in order to conceal its toxicity, deodorize it and tell us what a benefit it will be.”
  • Very sad news about Steve Jobs’ decision to step down as Apple’s chief executive. Forgive me if I’ve said this before: he may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard, always keeping his focus on what users want – and even on what they don’t know they want. He is a visionary and quite possibly a genius. The must-read is this essay by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. Don’t skip the video. Though it is universally believed that Jobs is gravely ill, I hope he can contribute to Apple in a reduced capacity for a long time to come.
  • Best wishes to Jim Romenesko, the indefatigable media blogger who announced his semi-retirement yesterday. Starting in the 1990s, Romenekso – first at his own site, later for the Poynter Institute – has been linking to (and offering short, intelligent commentary on) every bit of media news and gossip he can find. Especially in the early days of the Internet, he gave alt-weekly types like me a small national readership. Here’s a piece I wrote about him for the Boston Phoenix in 1999, when he announced the move to Poynter. And here’s a Phoenix article written by Mark Jurkowitz in 2005 on the dread “Romenesko effect.” Good luck to Jim, the best friend obscure media columnists like me ever had.

Graham points finger and apologizes

Well, now. A little after 3 p.m., Michael Graham addressed the matter of the dwarfism segment on last Friday’s show on WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) and apologized — not for anything he said, but for Karl Zahn’s so-called joke. The full transcript of Graham’s remarks:

If you listen to the show, you know that when I screw up, if I get a fact here wrong or whatever, I like to correct myself personally, and I like to do it right up front in the show. During Friday’s we had a conversation about Starbucks and a decision to settle a disability discrimination lawsuit. We were discussing the legitimate topic of a dwarf who had a job at Starbucks for which I feel she was clearly unqualified.

Well, during a roundtable some comments went too far. They weren’t funny. They were hurtful. Doesn’t matter who said them. It doesn’t matter that it was a wide-open conversation. This is my show, and I’m responsible. So I’d like to apologize for those comments. I’m sorry it happened. I wish that I could say nothing stupid will ever be said on this show again, but that is obviously impossible. People make mistakes. What I can promise is that I will take responsibility for mine.

I’m beginning to feel sorry for Karl.

Meanwhile, Heidi Raphael, a spokeswoman for Greater Media, which owns WTKK, told me in an emailed statement that the station will not be posting the audio. She added:

Please know we have spoken with Michael about his remarks, and made it clear this is not the type of commentary we expect on our airwaves. Michael’s comments do not, in any way, represent the views, opinions or company culture of Greater Media.

Please note the phrase his remarks in Raphael’s statement, which clearly refers to Graham, not Zahn.

Pending any new developments, I’ll be wrapping this up tomorrow. If you’ve been hanging in there to this point, please stay tuned.