By Dan Kennedy • Tracking the future of local news and other passions since 2005
Cosmo Macero Jr., the only journalist I’m aware of who managed to compete with Steve Bailey and not look completely foolish, blogs a tribute to the now-former Globe columnist for Boston Magazine.
Macero, who left the Herald a few years ago and is now a vice president at O’Neill and Associates, also happens to be one of a handful of plausible replacements for Bailey. So what about it?
How big a story is the downsizing at WBZ-TV (Channels 4 and 38)? Bigger than the Globe plays it — a small story inside City & Region. [Correction: I’ve been told that it made the front of City & Region in some editions.] But not as big as the Herald seems to think, with a huge front-page package.
With three well-known names — sports anchor Bob Lobel, entertainment reporter Joyce Kulhawik and on-air news guy Scott Wahle — departing the station, the local-newscast glory days of the 1970s and ’80s are starting to look more and more like the distant past.
Oddly, though, it may be the most retro of the three, Lobel, who still has a future in local television. As Herald columnist Steve Buckley points out, the newscasts have shrunk their sports segments in recent years because the obsessives have left for NESN, ESPN and the like.
If Lobel wants to keep working and doesn’t mind taking a substantial pay cut, he could presumably slide into a prime slot on cable tomorrow. Except when the Red Sox are playing, NESN still resembles a local-access outfit more than it does a professional operation. I like Bob Ryan’s show, but Lobel would really help.
By the way — think Dan Rea has had any second thoughts about moving from television to radio? No, I don’t think so, either.
Finally, the Outraged Liberal has some worthwhile observations on the WBZ cuts and related media matters.
If any broadcast news operation could avoid cuts, you’d like to think it would be WBZ. With two television stations (Channels 4 and 38), a powerhouse news-and-talk (AM 1030) radio station and an unusually good, video-laden Web site, the CBS-owned operation should have been in a strong position.
Unfortunately, 30 people are being let go, according to this Jessica Heslam piece in the Boston Herald. According to a story by Bill Carter in the New York Times, CBS is cutting back nationally, and Boston is being hit harder than just about anywhere.
This has become the story that won’t die, and I’m sick of it. So take it away, Jessica Van Sack:
The Commission on Judicial Conduct has recommended Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy be publicly censured, suspended without pay for 30 days and fined $25,000 for sending two “bizarre” and “threatening” letters to the publisher of the Boston Herald.
Globe story here.
The Boston Globe today editorializes that Gov. Deval Patrick’s book may prove to be a distraction that takes away from his responsibilities to the state. Not to worry — it’s already finished!
The plunge in Metro Boston’s circulation remains a mystery, with the biggest mystery being whether there really was a plunge or just a change in accounting. (Like, the auditors discovered 50,000 copies in a Dumpster somewhere?)
Boston Herald editor Kevin Convey suggests a new slogan to Boston Magazine’s Amy Derjue: “Metro: We Can’t Even Give It Away.” More substantively, Convey says, “If economics were ever to permit us to go free we would give away one hell of a lot more papers than the Metro has managed to do during its lifetime.” (Via Adam Reilly.)
Maybe, maybe not. It all comes down to those economics. If I could choose between a free Herald as it is today and a free Metro, there’d be no contest — I’d grab a Herald every time. Trouble is, it’s highly unlikely that you could turn the Herald into a free paper without laying off most of the staff, cutting way back on pages and — yes — turning it into something very much like Metro. Or BostonNOW.
Unless — and here’s the big unless — the Herald could find a way to make the Web pay, and then publish a small, free paper as a supplement to the online edition. But we’re probably a long way from that becoming realistic.
Leander Kahney offers an interesting case study in how one visionary has proved all the tech catch phrases about transparency and openness to be wrong.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Kahney writes in Wired, has transformed his company by designing closed systems, screaming at his employees, suing bloggers and even parking his Mercedes in a handicapped zone. The Macintosh, the iPod and the iPhone, Kahney notes, all live in entirely separate universes from the rest of technology. Yet people clamor for them because they’re willing to give up some interoperability for products that work better.
All of this, he observes, goes against the “don’t be evil” slogan coined by Google, which encapsulates the ethos of Silicon Valley. Evil combined with genius works, in other words.
That’s fine, but I’m still holding out for a Google phone.
Click on photo for a Flickr slideshowI took a camera this afternoon to one of my favorite stomping grounds, the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary in Topsfield. There was a little bit of snow and lots of mud on the ground, as well as many people who’d had enough of winter and couldn’t take it anymore.
No leaves and not an awful lot of wildlife. But it was in the mid-40s, sunny, with no wind, and so it was a perfect day to take a walk. Hope you enjoy the results.
The Phoenix‘s “Best ’08” survey continues, and I want to mention again that if you’re inclined to give Media Nation the nod, I hope you’ll do so today. Just click here or on the box in the upper-right corner of this blog. Once you do that, you may find it’s a little confusing — I’m listed as “Dan Kennedy” rather than “Media Nation,” and you’ll need to hit “submit” after you’ve selected my name.
The Phoenix’s Adam Reilly finds that Metro Boston‘s reported circulation has plunged from 187,000 to 136,000 since last fall. That’s some plunge. But what does it mean?
The owners of Metro (including the New York Times Co., with a 49 percent share) can control the circulation to a large extent, given that it’s a free paper. Did the owners decide to cut back? Or did the auditors discover that 50,000 copies were ending up in the trash every day? Adam promises to get to the bottom of it.
Here’s another possibility — the BostonNOW [link now fixed] effect. Don’t laugh. My students tell me it’s got a much better crossword puzzle.