Want to be outraged at Obama? Here you go.

Enough about Obamacare, which will be fixed. If you would like to be outraged at our president, there’s enough in this New York Times story to keep you screaming for the rest of the week. Here’s how it begins:

Standing on the marble floor just outside the House chamber, Faisal bin Ali Jaber looked lost in the human river of hard-charging lobbyists, members of Congress and staffers. It is not every day that a victim of American drone strikes travels 7,000 miles to Washington to look for answers.

Now he stood face to face with Representative Adam B. Schiff — a California Democrat who had carved out 20 minutes between two votes on natural gas policy — to tell his story: how he watched in horror last year as drone-fired missiles incinerated his nephew and brother-in-law in a remote Yemeni village.

Neither of the victims was a member of Al Qaeda. In fact, the opposite was true. They were meeting with three Qaeda members in hopes of changing the militants’ views.

Horrible and sickening. Twelve years of war, and what has it gotten us?

The New York Times and the Holocaust

Filmmaker Emily Harrold visited Northeastern on Thursday for a screening of “Reporting on The Times,” which explores how The New York Times covered (and didn’t cover) the Holocaust. Her film is based on Northeastern journalism professor Laurel Leff’s book “Buried by The Times.”

Click here for my Storify on the screening and the panel discussion that followed.

The return of Christopher Lydon

Christopher Lydon
Christopher Lydon

There’s big news in the Boston public radio world, as Christopher Lydon returns to the airwaves tonight at 9 with “Radio Open Source,” the radio/podcast interview program he’s been doing for some years now. He’ll be on for an hour every Thursday, with weekend rebroadcasts.

And in a sign that times change, he’ll be doing it on WBUR (90.9 FM), from which he and producer Mary McGrath — who still works with Lydon — memorably departed in 2001. Lydon and McGrath got into a dispute with then-general manager Jane Christo over the ownership of “The Connection,” the show they helmed at the time.

Lydon officially announced his return on Monday. The Boston Globe’s Joe Kahn reports on it today, the morning of Lydon’s debut.

Technically this is more of a ramp-up than a return: Lydon had been appearing regularly on Jim Braude and Margery Eagan’s show, “Boston Public Radio,” on WGBH (89.7 FM). I’m a paid contributor at WGBH, but I think it’s self-evident that the rivalry between the two public radio powerhouses has led to better local programming at both stations.

Here is what I reported for The Boston Phoenix in 2005 as “Open Source” was about to launch at UMass Lowell. (Lydon and company eventually affiliated with the Watson Institute at Brown University.)

Lydon is an on-air legend and McGrath knows how to do terrific radio. Best of luck to both of them.

Photo (cc) 2012 by Mark Fonseca Rendeiro and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Paid digital content comes to New Haven

I find it interesting that the Digital First paywall announced Monday will include the New Haven Register, even though the Register competes with the free New Haven Independent, a nonprofit online-only news organization.

Maybe it won’t matter much — the Independent covers nothing outside of New Haven, whereas the Register offers a lot of suburban coverage. Still, this is something to keep an eye on.

Digital First chief executive John Paton has long been a critic of paywalls, as he  acknowledges in this blog post. “Let’s be clear, paid digital subscriptions are not a long-term strategy. They don’t transform anything; they tweak. At best, they are a short-term tactic,” he writes, adding: “But it’s a tactic that will help us now.”

GateHouse restructures Mass. weeklies

Big news out of GateHouse Media today, but what happened isn’t entirely clear. From what I’ve been able to figure out, the struggling company has decided to close or combine some of its weaker weekly papers in Massachusetts and pump additional resources into about 10 stronger ones.

South of Boston, for instance, I’m told that the Norton Mirror will be folded.

And for an example of a combination: the Stoneham Sun, the Reading Advocate and the Wakefield Observer will be grouped. There will still be three separate papers, but most of their pages will be common to all three.

I also hear there will be no layoffs accompanying this particular restructuring, though some job descriptions may change.

GateHouse, based in suburban Rochester, N.Y., publishes about 100 weekly papers in Eastern Massachusetts as well as several dailies.

Journalism in the age of “facts optional” politics

Image (1) B_Kirtz.jpg for post 10773By Bill Kirtz

Three prominent journalists Wednesday criticized traditional “he said/she said” reporting that gives equal weight to truth and falsehood.

Their comments came at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

New York Times White House correspondent Jackie Calmes noted her frustration when interviewing politicians who misstate facts. “It’s not my place to tell them they’re wrong,” she said.

Lee Aitken, who helped direct Thomson Reuters’ coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign, expanded on that remark. She criticized the “false equivalence ” of giving equal space to correct and incorrect assertions and taking refuge by saying, “We reported both sides.”

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts said that nowadays, it’s OK to be “facts optional.” As a example, he mentioned Arizona Republican Sen. John Kyl’s  false claim in 2011 that well over 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activity was devoted to performing abortions. Soon after being challenged about that assertion, one of his staffers said it was “not intended to be a factual statement.”

Former senator Alan K. Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, joined the journalists in deploring the presentation of wild misstatements as truth. He cited the frequent assertion that the United States spends 30 to 40 percent of the federal budget on foreign aid, when the real figure is two-thirds of one percent.

He said the media are interested in only three things — conflict, confusion and controversy — and has forgotten the vital need for clarity.

Bill Kirtz is an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University.

The challenge of counting digital subscribers

UnknownHow many digital subscriptions has The Boston Globe sold? According to Globe spokeswoman Ellen Clegg, there were 45,971 “digital-only subscribers” in September — an increase of nearly 80 percent over the 25,557 who had signed up a year earlier.

That sounds impressive. But it’s a pittance compared to the numbers compiled by the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM), which recently released a report claiming the Globe had an average of 86,566 digital readers for its Monday-through-Friday editions for the six-month period ending Sept. 30.

The difference is in how you count digital subscriptions. I’ve written about this before, but the AAM’s methodology is becoming increasingly controversial, as some readers are being double- or even triple-counted.

Here’s how it works. As Clegg says, the number reported by the Globe represents only customers who have signed up for paid online access through the BostonGlobe.com website, the iPhone app, the ePaper replica edition or an edition for e-readers like the Kindle.

If anything, that methodology undercounts digital readership. For instance, we pay for home delivery of the Sunday paper, which entitles us to digital access at no extra charge — and that’s how we read the Globe Monday through Saturday. Yet according to Clegg, because we have not specifically purchased a digital edition we are counted as Sunday-only print subscribers.

By contrast, under the AAM methodology you could sign up for seven-day home delivery of the print edition — and if you also regularly log on to BostonGlobe.com at work, you’d count as a digital subscriber as well. If you download and use the Globe iPhone app to check the headlines while waiting for the subway, well, there’s a good chance you’ll be counted again. Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab recently broke it down:

AAM wrote a blog post in May explaining that a paying print subscriber at a paywalled newspaper can actually count as two “subscriptions” if publishers provide proof that the subscriber activated their username and password for digital. And there’s no reason to stop at two: “each digital platform,” like an iPhone app, can count as its own sub too.

And in a considerable understatement, Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon — noting that the AAM methodology allowed USA Today to claim a 67 percent increase in paid circulation — wrote that “the new figures make many comparisons challenging.”

The good news for the Globe is that paid circulation more or less held its own during past year even if you use the paper’s own understated figures. From September 2012 to September 2013, print circulation of the Monday-through-Friday edition fell from 180,919 to 166,807, according to the AAM. On Sundays it fell from 323,345 to 297,493.

But when you factor in  digital-only subscriptions, the Globe had a paid Monday-through-Friday circulation of 212,778 this September, up from 206,476 a year ago — an increase of 3 percent. On Sundays, total paid circulation declined from 348,902 to 343,464, or about 1.5 percent.

The picture looks considerably brighter if you use the AAM’s figures. By those measures, Monday-through-Friday paid circulation at the Globe rose from 230,351 to 253,373, an increase of about 10 percent. Sunday circulation rose from 372,541 to 384,931, or 3.3 percent.

What is the most accurate measure? The AAM figures may be exaggerated, but it’s also clear that the Globe’s measurements undercount paid subscribers — especially Sunday-only print customers who read the paper online during the rest of the week.

My best estimate is that paid circulation at the Globe is stable or growing slightly. And though digital advertising is not nearly as lucrative as its print counterpart, the far lower costs of digital publishing should help John Henry and company offset the loss in ad revenue.

Certainly Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell must be looking closely at the Globe’s strategy. According to the AAM, paid circulation of the Monday-through-Friday Herald dropped by 9 percent, to 88,052, over the past year. The Sunday edition fell by 7.5 percent, to 71,918.

Henry’s silence on Worcester may speak volumes

640px-Telegram_and_Gazette_Building_-_Worcester,_MA_-_DSC05767
Note: Since this blog post was published, I have learned that this is the old T&G building. For a look at the current one, please click here.

In his decade-plus as principal owner of the Red Sox, John Henry has demonstrated more than a passing interest in the public-relations aspects of the job.

So Henry’s ongoing silence about the other newspaper he bought last month along with The Boston Globe — the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester — strikes me as deliberate and potentially significant. It wouldn’t surprise me if he announced something soon — possibly a sale to local owners.

Henry’s lack of public interest in the T&G has caused some anxiety in Central Massachusetts, where it did not go unnoticed that his recent 2,900-word message to Globe readers made no mention of his other paper. Earlier this week the T&G reported that 25 legislators from the area had signed a letter imploring Henry to pay a visit — prompting George Donnelly, executive editor of the Boston Business Journal, to ask why the Globe hadn’t published anything about the letter.

Globe editor Brian McGrory told Donnelly that the legislators’ letter “is hardly news to the Globe’s readership.” Donnelly’s riposte: “Perhaps there’s some convoluted logic that has kept Henry from saying hello in Worcester. It’s tougher to divine a reason why the Globe isn’t covering this story.”

Here is the full text of the letter, which was posted by The Republican of Springfield.

Photo (cc) by Daderot and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Richard Cohen, piled high and deep

If you read only one commentary on Richard Cohen’s wretched Washington Post column of Tuesday, in which he appears to endorse the view that people with “conventional” views are nauseated at the sight of interracial couples, read this, by Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic.

As Coates reminds us, Cohen has stepped in it over race again and again over the years, and invariably tells us that his feelings are hurt at the idea that anyone might think he holds racist views. Time for the gold watch, Mr. Cohen. Actually, no — just leave, OK?