There’s an interesting profile of former Boston Herald editor Kevin Convey, now editor of the New York Daily News, in the current issue of the Colby College alumni magazine. Written by old Northeastern friend David McKay Wilson, the profile begins with a good anecdote about the Daily News’ collector’s-item front page following the killing of Osama bin Laden: “Rot in Hell!”
Convey’s suggestions — “Dead,” a play on the famous Daily News front page on the execution of convicted killer Ruth Snyder, and “We Got Him” — were deemed not quite right before a copy editor came up with the winner.
“Tabloid headlines are a very demanding form,” Convey told Wilson. “You are putting big words on a page that 530,000 people will buy and 2 million will read. It’s like journalistic haiku.”
I’ll be part of a panel discussion this evening at Bentley University on information literacy, along with Elizabeth LeDoux, senior lecturer and director of the Media and Culture Program at Bentley, and Cynthia Robinson, research director at Bain Capital.
Titled “Who Wrote This and Why Should I Care? Evaluating and Understanding Information in a Business Context,” the discussion will begin at 6:30 p.m. at Bentley’s LaCava Campus Center, room 305AB.
The moderator will be Chris Beneke, associate professor of history and director of Bentley’s Valente Center for Arts and Sciences. We’ll also hear from Kathy Aronoff, special projects librarian at Bentley, and Elizabeth Galoozis, reference librarian and coordinator of user education.
Just out of curiosity, I tried out the Providence Journal on Mrs. Media Nation’s iPad last night. And though I haven’t changed my mind about PDF-based e-editions being generally miserable to navigate and read, the iPad app does make the experience decidedly less miserable.
Being able to use my hands to tap on stories and flip through the paper made using the e-edition sort of all right. I would have been hugely impressed if this were 2001 instead of 2011. Of course, if I wanted to look at the paper exactly as it was published, I’d go buy a copy — which, as I have argued, appears to be exactly what Journal officials have in mind.
But if the e-edition turns out to be reasonably priced, it may prove to be a viable option for people who’ve moved away and still need their daily fix of the Journal. I wonder if we’ll ever find out how many e-subscriptions the Journal ends up selling? I can’t imagine it will be more than a handful.
If you are a local — or maybe non-local — business that would like to boost your visibility by advertising on Media Nation, please drop me a line at dkennedy56 {at} gmail {dot} com. I’d love to have someone share the overhead space with Prince Lobel.
A Superior Court judge recently refused to throw out a libel suit brought against the Boston Herald by a woman who claims the paper defamed her by falsely reporting she’d had sex with an inmate during a visit to the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater. The suit was filed in 2010, and I posted some background on the case at that time.
The plaintiff, Joanna Marinova, accompanied state Rep. Gloria Fox, D-Boston, on a visit to the prison in May 2009. The Herald published a front-page story on May 28 of that year by reporter Jessica Van Sack saying that Fox had snuck Marinova in to see her boyfriend, a convicted murderer named Darrell Jones, and that Marinova had been “previously bagged for engaging in ‘sexual acts’ with the killer con.”
Marinova says the story is false. According to prison records introduced as part of the lawsuit, Jones had been disciplined for kissing Marinova and rubbing her leg, but there was no suggestion the two had had sex.
According to a story in the current Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly (sub. req.), the Herald’s lawyer, Elizabeth Ritvo, argued that the case should be dismissed because Marinova’s contention that the Herald had claimed she and Jones had sex was “a strange and tortured interpretation” of what the paper actually published.
But Judge Raymond Brassard disagreed, saying “it seems to me that not only a reasonable reader, but virtually any reader, even a First Amendment lawyer would read that and think this person was involved in some sort of sexual intercourse with this man at the prison. I don’t know how a reasonable person could think otherwise.”
Marinova’s lawyer is David Rich, who was part of the legal team that successfully sued the Herald on behalf of former judge Ernest Murphy several years ago. In an unrelated action, Tom Scholz, leader of the band Boston, is suing the Herald for libel over accusations that were made following the suicide of lead singer Brad Delp.
Marinova had also sued WHDH-TV (Channel 7), which broadcast a story similar to the Herald’s. Lawyers Weekly reports that the two sides have apparently reached a settlement.
The hearing that led Judge Brassard not to grant the Herald’s motion for summary judgment was held on Sept. 22. I have posted the document here.
The new ProvidenceJournal.com — goodbye, Projo.com — includes just the first few paragraphs of most stories. If you want to read the whole paper online, you have to subscribe to one of those miserable e-editions, a PDF-like format that is difficult to navigate and even more difficult to read. (The Journal’s implementation does seem to be slightly less miserable than others I’ve seen.) There’s an iPad version, too.
Ted Nesi, who’s been writing about the Journal for WPRI.com, says it’s not yet clear what access will cost after the current free trial period expires. But this is not a digital strategy — it’s a print strategy, built on the idea of downgrading the Journal’s electronic presence. Nesi and I talked last December, when the Journal announced the new direction, and what I said then seems to apply now:
The Journal is sacrificing its website in order to bolster its print edition, which is where it makes most of its money. I understand why Journal managers are doing this, but it’s a short-term solution that could prove harmful in the long term. I also wonder whether it will even accomplish anything. Newspaper readers are skimmers, and a headline and brief synopsis of a story may be all that they want.
The Times is proving that people will pay for a well-thought-out, reasonably priced online edition. The Globe is about to learn whether readers in Greater Boston will do the same. The Journal, by contrast, is looking backwards. It might even work — but for no more than a few years.
Angela Van Etten, an old friend from Little People of America, has written an excellent commentary for the Huffington Post on what’s wrong with dwarf-tossing. (And good grief, Arianna. “Weird News”? Really?) As you may have heard, a state legislator in Florida wants to repeal that state’s law against dwarf-tossing on the grounds that letting drunks hurl little people across barrooms would somehow help the economy.
Van Etten does a good job of explaining the difference between people with dwarfism who exploit their short stature for profit, like Verne “Mini-Me” Troyer, and people who allow themselves to be exploited — that is, the tossees. Among other things, dwarf-tossing is dangerous, because people with dwarfism have unstable spines.
In 2002, Van Etten and her husband, Robert, were interviewed by John Stossel, then of ABC News’ “20/20,” who mocked their opposition to a campaign led by a dwarf to overturn the Florida law. Fortunately, the law held.
I had the privilege of interviewing the Van Ettens during the 2002 LPA national conference in Salt Lake City, and they pop up several times in my book “Little People.”
BostonGlobe.com is supposed to shut down any minute now. When it returns, at 5 a.m. on Wednesday, it will become a paid site, eventually costing $3.99 a week. The best deal: taking home delivery of the Sunday paper for $3.50 a week, which gives you access to all of the Globe’s digital content for no extra charge.
Since the debut of the website in September, I’ve heard people complain that it’s too cumbersome to use. My own experience is that it’s gotten better, and that folks at the Globe are responsive to suggestions. In particular, the “Today’s Paper” section has improved. But it works better as a breaking-news site.
Thus I still find myself making some use of GlobeReader, the Adobe Air-based platform that serves as a pretty good representation of that day’s Globe. It’s not perfect — content is sometimes missing, and photos seem like an afterthought. But for those of us who still like to flip through the paper, I find you can do so much more efficiently than you can with the website. (You can use GlobeReader with a laptop or desktop computer, but not with an iPad or a smartphone, since those don’t support Air.)
Globe publisher Chris Mayer told me in August that GlobeReader would continue to be offered for some time to come, but would not be improved and would eventually be phased out. So it’s not a permanent solution.
So let me suggest that the Globe work on something similar to New York Times Skimmer, a website that presents all of the Times’ major RSS feeds in a Reader-like format. I think offering that in addition to the standard website would give readers a couple of good options depending on how much time they had and what device they were using. And Skimmer works on the iPad.
There’s an interesting profile of former Boston Herald editor Kevin Convey, now editor of the New York Daily News, in the current issue of the Colby College alumni magazine. Written by old Northeastern friend David McKay Wilson, the profile begins with a good anecdote about the Daily News’ collector’s-item front page following the killing of Osama bin Laden: “Rot in Hell!”
