Media Nation

The White House, the Herald and “The Mahatma”

Perhaps the dumbest aspect of the White House’s decision to snub the Boston Herald is that no one had to say a word. The Herald was not technically barred from covering a fundraiser by President Obama in Boston today. Rather, its request that a Herald staffer be a pool reporter was turned down. Not everyone gets to go.

But no. According to the Herald’s Hillary Chabot, a White House spokesman named Matt Lehrich felt compelled to put in writing his complaint about the Herald’s recent (boneheaded) decision to blast a Mitt Romney op-ed on page one. Lehrich demonstrated that he’s got a real problem with logorrhea, writing (and writing and writing):

I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters.

My point about the op-ed was not that you ran it but that it was the full front page, which excluded any coverage of the visit of a sitting US President to Boston. I think that raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the President’s visits.

Clearly Lehrich has never heard of the great Martin Lomasney (“The Mahatma,” as he was called) and his first rule of politics: “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”

Lehrich also tells Chabot that the Herald will be considered for pool duty in the future, but the damage was done. The White House could send the right message of Lehrich is standing on an unemployment line by the end of today.

Laura Crimaldi moves on to the AP

Laura Crimaldi

Congratulations and best wishes to Laura Crimaldi, who left the Boston Herald this week and will soon start a one-year temporary job at the Associated Press’ bureau in Providence, where she’ll focus on law enforcement and the legal system.

I’ve gotten to know Laura through her work with the New England First Amendment Center at Northeastern University, for whom I occasionally contribute blog items. Laura is a director of the center, and has done a great job of re-energizing the blog.

Laura’s married to longtime Herald photographer Mark Garfinkel, who worked with Mrs. Media Nation at the Beverly Times back in the day. (The Times was later subsumed into the Salem News.) I don’t know if it’s a small world, but Greater Boston is definitely a small town.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide (II)

The New Haven Board of Education met last night to consider turning over the management of one of its public schools to a for-profit company — and had to postpone its meeting after the New Haven Independent’s Melissa Bailey pointed out that the board had not given 24 hours’ notice, as required under Connecticut’s open-meeting law.

This time, Bailey video-records Mayor John DeStefano to get his take on the various forms of transparency. And Abbe Smith, covering the story for the city’s daily paper, the New Haven Register, credits Bailey and the Independent for shutting down the illegal meeting.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUyeoWTKVKA?rel=0&w=480&h=390]
A reporter shows up to a meeting of parents and officials from a for-profit company that may be contracted to take over their kids’ K-8 school. The school department has promised “transparency,” but the department’s spokesman bars the reporter from attending. What would you do?

Here’s what Melissa Bailey of the New Haven Independent did: She pulled out her pocket video camera and trained it on the spokesman, Chris Hoffman, for more than three minutes as he tried to explain the meaning of “transparency.” To Hoffman’s credit, he didn’t turn and run. The result, above, is highly entertaining. Here is Bailey’s story.

Bailey, in an email exchange with Media Nation, confirms that the meeting did not fall under the purview of the state’s open-meeting law, and so she did not have a legal right to be there. By barring Bailey, though, school officials managed to keep the public in the dark about an initiative that promises to be both consequential and controversial.

Oh, and be sure to check out the comments. Will Clark, who accuses Bailey of writing a “sensationalized story,” is the school department’s chief operating officer.

Taking a look at Connecticut budget coverage

Compared to Greater Boston, the decline of traditional news organizations in Connecticut is considerably more advanced. The Hartford Courant, a venerable statewide daily that traces its founding to 1764, is owned by Tribune Co., which is in bankruptcy. As a result, the Courant has had to cut back on its Statehouse coverage in recent years. Other largish dailies, such as the New Haven Register, no longer even have a full-time Statehouse reporter.

Yet Connecticut has also proved to be a place where digital-media experiments have arisen to fill in some of the gap. Two that are focused on state government are the Connecticut Mirror, a well-funded non-profit, and CT News Junkie, a scrappy for-profit that also functions as the Statehouse bureau for the non-profit New Haven Independent.

With Gov. Dannel Malloy having reached a tentative agreement with the state’s labor leaders on Friday, a deal that could prevent the layoff of nearly 5,000 employees, I thought this was a good time to check in on how the old and new players covered it.

Hartford Courant

Lede: “Capping months of secretive talks, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and state-employee union leaders reached a deal Friday to save $1.6 billion over the next two years in exchange for a promise not to lay off unionized workers for the next four years.”
When: Time-stamped at 10:11 p.m. on Friday; published in Saturday’s print edition
Length: About 1,600 words
What: A densely reported story that is full of details but is a little bewildering if you’re not an insider. Perhaps the one-must read if you’re a stakeholder, but loses points for quoting the chairman of the Republican State Committee as calling the budget “unconstitutional” without offering (or demanding) an explanation.
Reported by no one else: “At the end of his prepared remarks in announcing the deal, Malloy’s speech said, ‘Finally … so much for Friday the 13th being an unlucky day!’ But Malloy never delivered that line.”

The Connecticut Mirror

Lede: “Negotiators for state employee unions and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy tentatively agreed Friday on a two-year $1.6 billion package of concessions and other labor savings that will help Malloy balance the $40.1 billion biennial budget without 4,700 announced layoffs.”
When: Posted on Friday with no time-stamp, but first comment posted at 2:29 p.m.
Length: About 1,400 words, plus a 1,100-word sidebar analyzing the implications of the deal for future budget planning, posted later on Friday
What: As with the Courant, the Mirror’s main story is densely reported and filled with details of interest mainly to insiders. The sidebar, though, provides needed perspective by demonstrating how difficult it will be for Malloy to hold on to savings in the face of demands that he undo program cuts.
Reported by no one else: “With over $19 billion in bonded debt, Connecticut ranks among the top three states in the nation in terms of debt per capita, and debt as a percentage of the taxpayers’ personal income.”

CT News Junkie

Lede: “Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said that after months of negotiating he has reached a deal with labor that saves the state $1.6 billion over the next two years and $21.5 billion over the next 20. However, at a 3 p.m. press conference there was little Malloy could say about the agreement until negotiators have had time to brief union members.”
When: Friday at 6:12 p.m. (final update); initial post at 2:20 p.m.
Length: About 900 words
What: As the site’s name suggests, CT News Junkie is mainly geared toward political junkies and insiders. It doesn’t get any more insidery than this: “Also the retirement age will be raised from 60 to 63 for Tier II employees and 62 to 65 for Tier IIa employees, however, those changes won’t kick in until 2022.” But the shorter length makes for a somewhat zippier read without sacrificing much in the way of needed details.
Reported by no one else: “In 2009 the last time a the [sic] SEBAC contract was reopened it took the state employee unions three weeks to complete the ratification of the contracts.”

The New York Times

Lede: “Threatened with nearly 5,000 layoffs, representatives for 45,000 unionized state employees agreed Friday to $1.6 billion in concessions over two years to help balance a budget that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy says includes pain for everyone: record tax increases, substantial program cuts and worker givebacks in health care, pension benefits and wages.”
When: The Web version of the article says it was “published” on Friday; it appeared in print on Saturday
Length: About 900 words
What: The Times covers major Connecticut stories as part of its New York local report. The story, which cites the Courant for some details, offers a more sweeping view than the others, going with fewer details and seeking to place Malloy’s conciliatory approach with the unions in a broader political context.
Reported by no one else: “And while the confrontational approach has made Governor Christie of New Jersey a hot property, there is no early indication that what Mr. Malloy calls ‘shared sacrifice’ is working as well for him. A Quinnipiac University poll in March put his approval rating at 35 percent.”

Times public editor: Refer to torture as torture

New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane takes on the paper’s queasiness about referring to waterboarding as torture in its news pages — and comes down firmly on the side of clarity. He writes:

The Times should use the term “torture” more directly, using it on first reference when the discussion is about — and there’s no other word for it — torture. The debate was never whether Bin Laden was found because of brutal interrogations: it was whether he was found because of torture. More narrowly, the word is appropriate when describing techniques traditionally considered torture, waterboarding being the obvious example. Reasonable fairness can be achieved by adding caveats that acknowledge the Bush camp’s view of its narrow legal definition.

Since Brisbane reports that the Times’ institutional reluctance to be forthright stems from not wanting to take sides, I wish he had stated more clearly that refusing to use the “T”-word is also an exercise in taking sides — perhaps more so, since it also involves implicitly accepting the Bush administration’s claim that waterboarding isn’t torture, a claim directly contradicted by history and international law.

Still, Brisbane takes a strong stand in favor of truth, and that’s no small thing when it comes to this highly charged topic.

Indies fight back against Patch

Thirty independent community news sites have banded together to tell the world, in effect, “We are not Patch.” The project, called Authentically Local, includes such well-known sites as Baristanet, based in Montclair, N.J., The Batavian, of Batavia, N.Y., and the New Haven Independent.

In a statement posted online, Baristanet founder and editor Debbie Galant says:

The Authentically Local campaign seeks to illuminate the difference between authentic local businesses and those that are just cashing in — before every town in America becomes one giant strip mall. This is not just about us, the owned-and-operated sites that write about place. It’s about place.

The alliance includes both for-profit and non-profit sites. Its motto, “local doesn’t scale,” appears to be aimed squarely at AOL’s Patch.com sites, a network of hyperlocal sites that are a key part of AOL’s efforts to reinvent itself.

Recently Galant compared Patch to Wal-Mart, saying, “The profits are going to a corporation. And so it’s difficult. It makes us understand what the local merchants are dealing with on a regular basis, for different local hardware stores to be competing against Home Depot. It’s basically the same thing.”

Patch has emerged as a real hiring engine for journalists at a time when the news business continues to shrink. So I’d like to see both Patch and the independents thrive. To the extent that Patch poses a threat to the indies, I hope Authentically Local helps them compete on a level field.

Norfolk DA seeks to close a window at OpenCourt

OpenCourt, an ambitious project affiliated with WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) that’s designed to shine some sunlight on court proceedings, has been dealt a setback at the hands of Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey.

Last week OpenCourt began webcasting a livestream from Quincy District Court. But several days into the experiment, Morrissey asked that archives of the video stream be closed to the public. A motion (pdf) filed by his office claims that “the privacy and safety of victims and witnesses could be seriously compromised,” especially in cases involving gang violence. The motion cites the possibility that the jury pool could be tainted as well.

The OpenCourt blog responds:

The letter and the motions came as a great surprise to us, since we have for the past four months met with all stakeholders of the court, including the District Attorney, to ensure we implement this groundbreaking pilot project responsibly and respectfully.

While we will continue to record sessions, we have voluntarily decided to suspend posting the archives until sometime after May 18, 2011, as we try to work out a practical solution to the concerns raised by the District Attorney.

Headed by WBUR’s executive editor for new media, John Davidow, OpenCourt received a $250,000 Knight News Challenge grant to livestream court proceedings and to make it easier for journalists, both professional and citizen, to provide coverage via Twitter and live-blogging.

“It’s a pilot,” Davidow recently told Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab. “It’s now a reality and off the white board. More and more issues will come forward.”

What makes this sticky is that OpenCourt has no First Amendment right to archive its video, or even to livestream. The project is entirely dependent on the goodwill of court officials. Yet the traditional closed-door mentality of our justice system helps foster suspicion and cynicism — exactly the negative attitudes that Davidow and company are trying to break down by making it easy for us to see exactly what takes place.

Let’s hope Morrissey thinks better of his knee-jerk reaction to openness and gives OpenCourt the room it needs to keep moving forward.

Note: OpenCourt’s struggle with Morrissey is also being tracked by the New England First Amendment Center at Northeastern University, to whose blog I occasionally contribute.

Dan Shaughnessy by the numbers

Why does Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy keep saying (here and here) that the Celtics were 41-14 before the Kendrick Perkins trade? After all, they were 33-10 without him. No, I didn’t like the Perkins trade, either. But how the Celtics played while Perkins was rehabbing from knee surgery isn’t exactly relevant if the point you’re trying to make is that everything went to hell once he was traded. (Note: Italic section added for clarity.)

Globe reportedly on verge of deal to print Herald

It looks like folks at the Boston Globe and the New York Times Co. have decided to get smart and take some of Boston Herald owner Pat Purcell’s money rather than try to put him out of business.

According to reports, the Globe is on the verge of a deal to print and distribute the Herald in the Boston area. It’s not the first time such an arrangement has been proposed, but it’s the first time the Globe has come this close to saying yes. A trusted Media Nation source credits Globe publisher Christopher Mayer for recognizing that the Herald isn’t going away and reversing the anti-Herald stance taken by previous publishers.

The unfortunate part of this is that the Herald would have to lay off its truck drivers. But on the trauma scale, that doesn’t approach Purcell’s decision a few years ago to shut down his presses and outsource much of the printing to a Wall Street Journal plant in Chicopee.

The Globe covers the story here, and the Herald here. The Associated Press quotes yours truly.