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The most earth-shattering change in the Boston Phoenix’s 40-year history was announced yesterday: Barry Morris, president of the company from its earliest days, said he’ll retire soon. He’ll be succeeded by Brad Mindich, currently the executive vice president and the son of founder, publisher and chairman Stephen Mindich. Mark Jurkowitz has all the details, including comments from Morris and the text of a company-wide e-mail sent out by Brad Mindich.

Barry is absolutely driven, and is widely credited with transforming the Phoenix into the revenue machine it’s been for most of its existence. That, in turn, has allowed the Phoenix to engage in the sort of high-level journalism that has made it one of the three most important print outlets in the city, along with the Globe and the Herald. It’s nice to see that he’s retiring at an age — 61 — at which he’s still got many good years ahead of him. According to Brad’s e-mail, the phrase “Gone Fishin’ ” is literally true in Barry’s case.

Meanwhile, the Phoenix (disclosure: I’m still a contributing writer) is, like all newspapers, undergoing a significant transformation, as editorial and business-side folks try to figure out how to get ready for the looming post-print era. Earlier this year the paper went through a change in design and format. The same is true of the Web site, which is expanding with blogs and interactive features.

But it’s not going to be the same without Barry.

A lot of people were talking about this yesterday, and the Boston Globe’s Steve Bailey nailed it down sufficiently to put it into print (scroll down) today: Pat Purcell will sell his 100 or so suburban papers in Eastern Massachusetts and hang on to the Boston Herald. The deal would presumably get Purcell out of the heavy debt he took on to buy the local papers from Fidelity Capital a few years ago.

Still, Purcell — who tried to hire Bailey a couple of years ago — cautions that there’s nothing to announce. So who knows?

This suggests that the good news online for the New York Times Co. has mostly to do with its About.com subsidiary.

From a Web site called MediaBuyerPlanner.com:

New York Times Co. newspapers’ online ad revenues, including those for the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Sarasota Herald-Tribune, surged in February — up 23 percent from a year ago …

You can’t tell from this how well the Globe’s Boston.com site is doing. But this is additional confirmation that the online incarnation of the Globe is doing fine — or would be, if overall revenues were enough to offset the decline of the print edition.

And, of course, the Globe is not alone. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that, at the San Jose Mercury News, revenue from help-wanted ads has plummeted over the past five years from $118 million annually to $18 million. Why buy an ad when there’s Craigslist?

The Craigslist effect probably isn’t quite as devastating at the Globe as it has been at the Mercury News. But no doubt it’s bad enough.

I have class in six minutes, so I’ll keep this brief. But it looks like things might be coming to a head at both of Boston’s troubled dailies.

Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Phoenix reports on a “palpable buzz” that Pat Purcell’s efforts to sell the Boston Herald and his Community Newspaper subsidiary may lead to a major announcement at any moment. Yes, I know this is cryptic, and it’s unclear whether Purcell will actually bug out or simply line up new investors. But it does appear that the uncertainty that hovers over One Herald Square may finally lift.

Meanwhile, the news at the Boston Globe just keeps getting worse. The Boston Business Journal yesterday reported that a 12 percent plunge in advertising revenues at the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette is doing serious damage to the New York Times Co.’s bottom line.

The Herald weighs in with a two-fer on the Globe’s woes today, with Jay Fitzgerald handling the news side and Brett Arends offering analysis.

The Globe appears to be silent on these developments.

Jay Fitzgerald reports in today’s Boston Herald that New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is paying a visit to his company’s troubled Boston Globe subsidiary next week. Globe spokesman Al Larkin describes the visit as routine, but Fitzgerald’s sources tell him that the Globe may be preparing for another round of job reductions, including those of some high-ranking managers.

And please check out the comments to my Monday post on the Globe’s ongoing revenue woes. I’ve been expanding on my argument that you can’t talk about declining circulation unless you also take into account the fact that Web readership of the Globe (and other papers) is soaring. That doesn’t mean the Globe couldn’t be better — it just means that the readership situation isn’t as dire as the plummeting print circulation figures would indicate.

That said, one Media Nation reader yesterday reminded me of something I haven’t given enough (or any) attention to: the fact that some proportion of people who read the Globe online are also subscribers to the print edition. In my mind, I’ve been counting those people twice. No question that that fuzzy math undercuts my argument to some degree.

Mark Jurkowitz reports that the Boston Globe might actually have lost money during January and February of this year. Granted, the Globe and its sister paper, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, created some unusual one-time grief for themselves thanks to that credit-card mess-up. But this is a long way from the Knight Ridder-style laments that newspapers, though profitable, just aren’t profitable enough for Wall Street.

It’s important to remember that the Globe and other daily newspapers are not, for the most part, losing readers — at least not in any great numbers. Rather, readers are migrating to those papers’ Web sites. I freely confess that this item, which I wrote last October, oversimplifies matters. The point, though, is that newspapers are losing advertising to bank and department-store consolidation and to free-classified sites like Craigslist and Monster.com, even as readership is holding up pretty well.

But can papers keep those readers when they continue to hack away at the journalism? Not forever. That’s the dilemma.

Last week I received an e-mail from someone who thought it was curious, to say the least, that “60 Minutes” failed to mention former Massachusetts Senate president Bill Bulger in its piece on ex-Whitey Bulger goon Kevin Weeks.

I didn’t do anything on it at the time, but Romenesko today links to a worthwhile piece by J. Max Robins, who doesn’t think “60 Minutes” has played it straight when it comes to the Bulgers — or to Howie Carr, on whose radio show Robins is a regular.

Good, asterisk-laden quotes from “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager.

Here is the Web version of the “60 Minutes” piece.

I’m afraid I know the answer to this already, having spent the last half-hour poking around the Web. But does anyone know if it’s possible to rent, borrow or buy “The Selling of the Pentagon” in either DVD or VHS? I would like to show it to my History of Journalism students, but it seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Update: Problem solved. And thank you for the suggestions I received.

Ramesh Ponnuru, writing for National Review Online, repeats a lie about Charles Pierce today. I’m calling it a lie because the essential untruth of this has long since been established, and because — something I didn’t know until today — Ponnuru had a hand, however slight, in creating this lie. [But wait! It wasn’t Ponnuru — it was Jonah Goldberg. See “Update and correction,” below.]

Anyway, the purported subject of Ponnuru’s item (at least I think it was Ponnuru; Jonah Goldberg’s name is slapped on this, too) is something Pierce wrote that established him as such a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal that he actually believed Ted Kennedy’s support for social problems more than negated his reprehensible behavior in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Imagine that. Only in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts! Here is Ponnuru’s item:

Ramesh: That reminds me of the winner of MRC’s wackiest comment award from 2004 (the year I was a presenter):

“Charles Pierce, Boston Globe Magazine:

” ‘If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.’ “

But hold on. The truth is that Pierce was employing irony in the service of a breathtakingly vicious putdown of Kennedy, in the midst of a profile that was far, far tougher than the Kennedys are accustomed to receiving in the Globe. Here is what I wrote at the time. As you will see, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, an honest conservative, accurately described what Pierce had written as a “paragraph of pure poison.” And a letter-writer to the Globe Magazine divined that Pierce had written “a savage attack” on Kennedy. (Fun fact: Mark Steyn didn’t get it. But of course.)

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center from completely misconstruing Pierce’s intent. Here is the MRC’s account of the award, complete with video I watched a little of before my computer choked (I’m not sure whether to attribute that to a bandwidth problem or good taste), in which Jonah Goldberg called Pierce’s line “one of the most metaphorically moronic observations ever penned by a journalist,” and joked about Pierce hanging out with Jim Morrison and Osama bin Laden.

From there it was a simple leap. Bernard Goldberg picked up the MRC’s award in his idiotic book “Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite.” (No, I haven’t read it, but I most definitely have read its predecessor, “Bias: A Media Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News.” I am confident that “Arrogance” is more of the same.) And a lie was born — a lie that smears both Pierce and the Globe.

It lives on.

Update and correction: Anon. 5:04 has figured out what’s going on here, and my hat’s off to him (or her; and while I’m at it, I’m not wearing a hat). In the original National Review Online item, posted yesterday at 4:24 p.m., Jonah Goldberg was addressing Ramesh Ponnuru. So it was written by Goldberg, not Ponnuru. Then, at 5:27 p.m., Ponnuru wrote:

One of Lindgren’s commenters mentioned the Pierce quote, and another one responded that it had been taken out of context — and linked to this article by Pierce about the controversy. Not having read the original article, I’m inclined to take Pierce’s word on his intent.

So Ponnuru is blameless in this affair, and I’m sorry I doubted him, given that he’s struck me in the past as being pretty reasonable. For that matter, so has Goldberg (Jonah, that is; certainly not Bernie!). But Jonah’s way, way off on this, just as he was when he presented the “award” two years ago.