A free Herald?

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.

Sometimes evil works

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.

Springtime on the North Shore

Click on photo for a Flickr slideshow

I 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.

Cast your vote for Media Nation

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.

Jumping off the Metro

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.

Rosebud redux

Citizen Charles Foster Kane has returned to the blog wars after a long absence, and he’s immediately going after Gregg Jackson for an approving reference to “evangelical Christian field hands who bring in the harvest.”

Anyway, I scanned through Jackson’s column and was equally amused at Jackson’s reference to Mitt Romney as “by far the most left wing GOP presidential candidate in American history.”

Obviously Jackson is referring to the moderate, pre- presidential- campaign version of Romney. Even so, it’s not difficult for a sentient being to think of any number of Republican presidential candidates over the years who have been well to Romney’s left — even the Romney of 1994 or 2002. How about — well, gee, Rudy Giuliani? Remember him? Pro-choice, pro-gay rights, nice and soft on illegal immigration; you get the picture. And if I remember correctly, his presidential campaign wasn’t all that long ago.

In 1980, an obscure Republican congressman named John Anderson challenged Ronald Reagan for the nomination. He became such a liberal darling that, when he ran as an independent that fall, he helped Reagan by pulling votes away from the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter.

Are you paying attention, Gregg? Get this: Mitt Romney wasn’t even the most left-wing GOP presidential candidate in American history named Romney. That would have been his father, George, who ran in 1968 and who was a true progressive. Mitt even said his father marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He didn’t, but he could have.

The early front-runner in 1964 was Nelson Rockefeller, so liberal at that stage of his career that many observers thought he should become a Democrat.

Or how about Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and ’56? Alas, the divisive cultural issues of today were not on the table in the 1950s. But Ike stifled the Republican Party’s nascent right wing, consolidated the New Deal, enforced federally ordered school desegregation and warned against the power of the “military-industrial complex.”

Anyway, I come not to bury Gregg Jackson, which is ridiculously easy to do, but to praise Citizen Chuck on his return.

More troubles for newspapers

The ongoing good news/bad news paradigm in which the newspaper business finds itself continues. According to the trade publication Editor & Publisher, advertising revenue dropped by the largest proportion in 50 years from 2006 to 2007 — and online revenue gains, though still impressive, are beginning to slow.

So where’s the good news? Readership isn’t really declining when you add print and online together. I must admit, though, that the utter lack of ideas on how to pay for the journalism that the public continues to seek is starting to put me in a pessimistic frame of mind.

And it’s not that newspapers as we know them — either in print or online — have to thrive in order for journalism to survive. But though I see plenty of projects that do some of the things that newspapers do, none comes close to being a replacement.

I know that better days are ahead, but right now it’s discouraging. I just hope the latest news is more recession-driven than it is a sign that we’re heading over the cliff.

More on Patrick’s book

The Globe’s Matt Viser and Frank Phillips report that Deval Patrick will receive a $1.35 million advance for his autobiography, which is scheduled to be published in 2010. Doubleday will be the publisher.

A few observations.

First, Patrick obviously has an interesting story to tell. I’m not sure if it’s $1.35 million worth of interesting, given that he’s an essentially local figure. (Even if he is from Chicago originally.) But the size of the advance doesn’t strike me as entirely crazy — just half-crazy.

Second, 2010 is the year he’s up for re-election as governor. It strikes me that Patrick wouldn’t have agreed to a 2010 release date if he didn’t already have a pretty good idea of what he hopes to be doing then. Serving in a Democratic White House? Laying the groundwork for a 2012 presidential run of his own? Or something as mundane as seeking re-election?

Finally, Peter Porcupine makes an excellent point about Patrick’s decision to show his book proposal to New York publishers last week rather than see the casino bill through. Yes, it was headed for certain, overwhelming defeat. But shouldn’t the captain go down with his ship? Patrick’s view of the world, P.P. suggests, is that “the captain is the only one in the lifeboat.”