The art of the obit

Something for which the Boston Globe deserves a lot of credit is that it treats local obituaries with the seriousness they deserve. I especially like the way its obits shine a spotlight on the lives of ordinary people, who often turn out to be not ordinary in the least.

Today the Globe’s Bryan Marquard tells us about the life of Stella May Brown Weaco, a lovely soul of dubious sanity who died on Dec. 31 after many years of homelessness, which ended only after she became ill. Marquard writes:

Obituaries usually confer honorifics, but what title could capture Stella? Given occasionally to delusions, she offered no clear explanation of how she acquired the name Weaco, which is not on her birth certificate. Was she married or a mother? Workers at Women’s Lunch Place hope a relative will read this and inquire about Stella.

Born in Coffeeville, a small Mississippi town some 90 miles south of Tennessee, she spoke of having lived in Memphis. She also said she was born in Jerusalem, was a member of the Rockefeller family, “and was part of a very select group,” [Boston Health Care for the Homeless president Jim] O’Connell said. “And I think that last part was true.

“Among the homeless, he said, “she was an aristocrat.”

I tell my students that obituaries are the most important part of a newspaper, at least for friends and family members. But telling isn’t the same as showing, which Marquard does on a regular basis.

More: Mike Stucka rightly notes that Steve Landwehr of the Salem News has been performing similar journalistic artistry with obits.

A more optimistic take on the Times Co.

No one doubts that the New York Times Co. is in financial trouble, or that the Times as we know it will someday cease to exist.

But Rick Edmonds, who analyzes the news business for the Poynter Institute, has done a great job of demonstrating that there’s no there there in an attention-grabbing piece in the Atlantic arguing that the Times Co. is rapidly running out of money — and, in a worst-case scenario, could shut down as early as this May.

The Atlantic article, by Michael Hirschorn, is pegged to the writings of financial analyst Henry Blodget, who has been sounding the alarm about the Times Co.’s cash woes for some time now. Hirschorn says even the drastic measures that the Sulzbergers might consider could fall short of being enough: selling their share of the Red Sox (already under way, supposedly), selling About.com (even though it’s one of the few bright spots in their portfolio), even shutting down the Boston Globe.

But Edmonds carefully walks us through the numbers, demonstrating that the payment-due deadline the Times Co. faces in May is not at all what Hirschorn seems to think it is. Edmonds writes:

Long story short, the company will be able to meet the May deadline. And corporate finance is not like an auto loan, in which the repo man comes if you miss a few payments…. [C]reditors typically renegotiate the terms — as they have done to much sicklier newspaper companies than the New York Times Co.

Edmonds also shows that Hirschorn’s comparison of print and online readers isn’t just “not apples-to-apples,” as Hirschorn himself acknowledges, but more in the nature of apples to cinder blocks. In other words, Hirschorn doesn’t even come close.

There are three problems with the newspaper business right now: (1) the Internet is destroying its business model; (2) too many newspaper companies took on way too much debt in building their empires; and (3) the worst recession since the early 1980s, if not the ’30s, is wiping out the advertising that Craigslist didn’t already grab.

Right now, it’s the recession and the debt that are taking the biggest toll on the business; without those, newspapers might have some hope of making a downsized but successful transition to online.

The Times Co. took a couple of small but important steps this week, unrolling lucrative front-page ads in the Times and announcing that it will soon do the same in the Globe. The future of legacy media is going to look very different from what we’re all accustomed to, as Edmonds himself acknowledges. But the Times Co. should be able to make it through the recession. After that, we’ll see.

Photo (cc) by Steve Rhodes and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Nat Hentoff signs off, vows not to retire

Nat Hentoff has written his farewell column for the Village Voice after his unconscionable layoff. Hentoff quotes Tom Wicker’s tribute to I.F. Stone: “He never lost his sense of rage.”

I’ve called Hentoff and Molly Ivins the two best columnists never to win a Pulitzer. It’s still not too late for Hentoff, who, at 83, vows not to retire.

Those WBZ Radio cuts

I’ve been looking for a point of entry to comment on the recent cutbacks at WBZ Radio (AM 1030), which have claimed talk-show hosts Lovell Dyett, Steve LeVeille and Pat Desmarais, as well as sports reporter Tom Cuddy. It looks like Scott Fybush’s blistering commentary ought to do the trick.

Unfortunately, I never got to hear those shows, as they were on during a time when I simply never listen to talk radio. Sorry to give fuel to CBS’s fire — no doubt the company’s research showed that I was pretty typical.

But live and local ought to be part of any radio station’s mandate. As Garrett says, if CBS doesn’t want to live up to its responsibilities, let it find a buyer who will. (Via Universal Hub.)

A sad day for the Fenway

One of the great things about working at the Boston Phoenix was its proximity to cheap, good, independent restaurants on Peterborough Street. Those restaurants were only slightly less accessible from Northeastern, as they were just a quick walk across the Fens.

Sadly, six of those restaurants were wiped out in a fire early today. Three of them — the Thornton Grille, Rod-Dee and El Pelón — were longtime Media Nation favorites. Along with the recent closure of the slightly more upscale Brown Sugar, around the corner on Jersey Street, the Fenway is now pretty much bereft of good lunch places.

More than 100 people, many of them elderly, are at least temporarily homeless, too. Fortunately, early reports are that no one was injured.

Because he might defend himself

Today we offer a postscript to Chuck Turner’s absurd call for legal sanctions against media outlets that fail to presume his innocence in an ongoing federal corruption probe. Now the government wants to take away Turner’s First Amendment rights. According to Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy:

Federal prosecutors urged a judge yesterday to prohibit Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner from revealing, or even talking about, evidence and witnesses the government is relying on to convince a jury that he pocketed a $1,000 bribe.

The best part is a letter written to the judge by Assistant U.S. Attorney John McNeil, in which he says in part: “Mr. Turner has held a series of press conferences and rallies since he was charged in this matter, aimed in part at bolstering his character and attacking the government’s motives for seeking an indictment against him from the grand jury.” And this is wrong?

McNeil goes on to say that Turner might “selectively” quote from the evidence against him, which could have the effect of “indirectly” intimidating witnesses and otherwise harming the case against him.

According to Laurel Sweet and Ed Mason, writing in the Boston Herald, the gag order sought by prosecutors could also derail an internal investigation by the Boston City Council.

The idea that Turner should be denied a look at the evidence against him unless he agrees to give up his First Amendment right to defend himself in public is offensive and outrageous. If prosecutors fear they can’t win without Turner’s silence, then they must be worried that they don’t have much of a case.

Why the Times’ front-page ads don’t matter

Three reasons why the New York Times’ decision to sell display ads on its front page is nothing to get excited about:

1. The Times’ most important front page is the home page of NYTimes.com, which, like nearly all news Web sites, has included advertising from the beginning. In a world in which the Web is your primary delivery vehicle, it’s silly to pretend there’s anything sacrosanct about print.

2. Back in newspapers’ heyday, the Times was one of the few quality papers to run front-page ads at all. The reason we’re all saying that the Times is now selling display ads on page one is that it’s always run classifieds. Remember those ads reminding Jewish women to light candles for Shabbat?

3. The Times actually held out longer than many. As Richard Pérez-Peña notes, a number of excellent national papers have been publishing front-page ads for a while, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times. Each of those papers has its own pathologies, but none is any more troubled than the New York Times is these days.

If front-page ads can help to offset newspapers’ mounting losses, then I’m fine with it. No doubt we can expect ads on the front of the Times Co.-owned Boston Globe in the near future.

Peering through the blue murk

The Boston Herald today tries to knock down yesterday’s Boston Globe story reporting that as many as 200 Boston police officers could be laid off because of the recession-driven budget meltdown. But it’s difficult to know exactly what is going on.

For instance, the Herald’s Jessica Van Sack writes that an aide to “enraged” (isn’t it ever thus?) Boston Mayor Tom Menino said, “It won’t be 200 police officers.” Well, what about 150? Not exactly reassuring.

For that matter, the online headline over Van Sack’s story goes quite a bit farther than her own carefully worded story: “Riled mayor Thomas M. Menino: Reports of cop layoffs untrue.” The cover line, “Menino vows to spare cops from budget ax,” strikes me as unsupported by Van Sack’s reporting as well.

Given the murk, it’s worth looking at what named sources have said. The Globe’s Donovan Slack and Maria Cramer yesterday cited “two officials” in their report that “as many as 200” officers could lose their jobs. It’s hard to know what to make of that, given that we don’t know who the “two officials” are.

But they also quote Menino spokeswoman Dot Joyce as saying, “There is nothing official at this point, and it is way too premature to determine the impact on any department, including the Boston Police Department.” And Police Commissioner Ed Davis weighs in with this: “Everyone knows that if your budget is 90 percent personnel and you sustain deep cuts, then personnel would be on the table. At this point in time, it’s not something that I can comment on, because I don’t know what those numbers are going to be.”

I take Joyce’s and Davis’ comments as essentially confirming the idea that the two officials with whom the Globe spoke are knowledgeable, and that they are indeed throwing around the 200 number as a worst-case scenario, if nothing else.

Now let’s take a look at what’s on the record in Van Sack’s Herald story today. Thomas Nee, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, tells her, “The mayor has assured me that while there are problems, there are no planned layoffs.” OK. But I don’t think anyone said there were at this point.

Joyce and Davis also pop up in the Herald story, and what they have to say is telling as well. Davis: “Somebody put this out to try to raise fear.” No doubt about it — it smacks of a political tactic. But does that mean it’s not true?

Joyce’s quote to the Herald is even more equivocal: “Any numbers are irresponsible to put out at this time, seeing as we have no idea what’s gonna happen with the state. There’s lots of employees at the Police Department. The mayor has made it clear that protecting the service to residents as much as possible is his first priority.”

Finally, the Globe’s Cramer today quotes an e-mail Davis sent out within his department following yesterday’s story: “At this time I want to be clear that no decision has been made to proceed with layoffs. Any suggestion to the contrary is premature.” That doesn’t contradict the Globe’s report that as many as 200 officers could lose their jobs, either.

So what is going on? It’s hard to say, but here’s one likely possibility. Two officials knowledgeable about discussions taking place at City Hall leaked to the Globe the possibility that as many as 200 police officers might face layoffs. More than anything, the leak was aimed at scaring Gov. Deval Patrick into ensuring sufficient local aid so that such cuts don’t have to be made.

Menino is angry — that’s a given. What we don’t know is if 1) he is genuinely angry because he didn’t want the layoff numbers to be leaked, at least not yet; 2) he is genuinely angry because the Globe’s emphasis on layoffs, rather than on Patrick’s options, puts more pressure on City Hall than he had intended; or 3) he is pretending to be angry but is actually pleased that he succeeded in floating this frightening trial balloon.

Because officials appear to be dialing back, that gives the Herald the opportunity to claim that the Globe got it wrong. The problem is that what officials are actually saying, on the record, does not contradict the notion that as many as 200 officers could be laid off if more money can’t be found.