Media Nation

Former Boston Herald (and Phoenix) sports columnist Michael Gee today absolutely unloads on the Globe. Gee’s a good enough writer that it doesn’t seem completely out of context or gratuitous when the F-bombs start flying. But whoa!

In particular, Gee sees Brian McGrory’s suggestion that Green Rainbow Party candidate Grace Ross get out of the governor’s race as evidence of the Globe’s institutional arrogance — an arrogance that’s now as laughable as it is irritating, given the paper’s declining readership and advertising revenue. Only that’s not, ahem, how Gee puts it.

Via Universal Hub.

And speaking of the governor’s race, I finally got to hear last night’s debate. Let me try to make amends for being so late to the scene by giving you my Official Generic David Gergen Question, good for any debate and all occasions: I’d like to ask you an incredibly complex question about a troubling social problem that experts have been struggling with for decades. You each have 20 seconds.

Update: Kevin has a similar observation about Gergen, except that he cuts him more slack than I’m willing to.

What would a locally owned Boston Globe look like? How would it differ from the New York Times Co.-owned version?

It may be too soon to answer those questions, but it’s certainly not too soon to ask them. The Globe continues to be a drain on Times Co. revenues. Company executives respond by cutting the Globe still further. It’s an endless cycle, and one that is getting increasingly nasty.

Today’s Boston Herald reports that some 20 politicians and union officials, including Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. Stephen Lynch, have signed letters urging the Times Co. to ease up on the slice-o-matic. And check out this toxic quote from Dan Totten, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild, in today’s New York Post: “It seems to us they’ve ruined the paper and are guilty of gutting it.” This goes far beyond the rhetoric of previous Globe union heads, such as Robert Jordan and Steve Richards.

Let’s be honest: Local ownership would not save the Globe from advertising and circulation pressures. You hear a lot of talk in newspaper circles about local owners’ being willing to accept lower profit margins, such as 5 or 10 percent, as opposed to the 20 percent or more demanded by corporate owners such as Gannett, the former Knight Ridder and the Times Co. But as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, the Globe right now isn’t making any money at all.

Whether locally owned or not, large regional dailies such as the Globe are going to keep getting smaller and more focused on covering their region rather than the entire world. When the Times, the Washington Post, the BBC et al. are just a click away, the mission statement of a paper such as the Globe has to change.

Nevertheless, the corporate-ownership model may be reaching the end of its useful life in the newspaper business. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News have been sold to a local group. The Chicago-based Tribune Co. is under pressure to sell the Los Angeles Times to L.A. investors. Why not here?

What’s missing is an identifiable group of Boston-based investors who’d be interested in buying the Globe. I would love to see such a group step forward so we could all have a look. A locally owned Globe might be a better Globe — but it all depends on who those owners might be.

Update: Romenesko’s got PDFs of the letters. And the Times reports that its parent company isn’t selling the Globe. Not yet!

Here’s a pretty amazing detail that Kimberly Atkins includes in her account of last night’s debate: “Healey … stationed supporters outside the debate posing in orange jumpsuits with signs reading ‘Inmates for Deval Patrick’ …”

A disadvantage to recording the gubernatorial debates for later listening in the Media Nationmobile is that I still don’t know what happened, except second-hand. Seth Gitell’s take strikes me as characteristically sharp. Check out what he says about Kerry Healey:

My only interpretation of this unprecedented campaign: that is, a candidacy where the candidate never introduces herself, never runs an ad telling the public about her background, gives voters no “story” or “narrative” to latch on about who she is. That is always my first question in writing political profiles. All candidates need to lay this positive foundation so they can weather the difficulties of a political campaign — and give voters a reason to vote for them. Either Healey’s advisers are unaware of this basic fact or something is blocking the Healey campaign — or the candidate herself — from telling this story. I have a couple theories about this. One is that her campaign team has no confidence in any story Healey would tell pro-actively. Another is that Healey has difficulty talking about herself.

OK, that’s more about Healey’s stunningly negative ads than about the debate, but there you go.

What Healey’s doing isn’t working. Adam Reilly was among those who pointed to a new Wall Street Journal poll showing that Deval Patrick’s actually gaining again following a rocky couple of weeks. His lead is now more than 22 points. Another round of attack ads isn’t going to do it for Healey.

Earlier today I was talking with a fellow political junkie. Her take was that Healey should have differentiated herself from Mitt Romney early on — come out foursquare for same-sex marriage and made it clear that she’s a moderate Republican in the Bill Weld mold. That’s who we all suspect she really is. Yet she spends 99 percent of her energy pandering to the tiny number of people who call radio talk shows.

If I’d been advising Healey, I’d have told her that she was probably going to lose, but that she should do everything she could to establish herself as a likable, moderate, competent alternative should Patrick self-destruct. And if he cruised to victory — well, there are worse things than losing.

Like destroying your own reputation, as Healey is doing right now.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Boston Globe is en route to its first unprofitable year in a long time. It’s the same old story — circulation is plummeting; Web readership is skyrocketing; but online advertising revenues aren’t nearly enough to offset the decline in print ads.

The Journal story adds perspective to last week’s news that Globe management doesn’t want the union to share in the growth of online revenues. The Boston Herald today carries a story that the Newspaper Guild has rejected the proposed contract.

It looks like Shaw’s may have violated its own policy in banishing copies of the Portland Phoenix, which carries an inside-the-paper nude photo of the late Allen Ginsberg and his lover, Peter Orlovsky, to accompany this article. In a statement reported by the Portland Press Herald, Shaw’s spokeswoman Judy Chong says:

“It’s not our policy to censor material produced by an independent publisher if the material falls within the guidelines of the law and is not considered patently obscene or offensive. Shaw’s reviewed the content of this publication and decided to remove the paper based on the nude images.”

If you want to parse this legally, you’ve got to put a lot of weight on the word “offensive.” Because something that is obscene under the Supreme Court’s Miller v. California standard is, by definition, illegal — not that there’s always any sure way of knowing in advance whether it’s obscene. But there is no way that this particular image could be considered obscene. It doesn’t depict sexual acts, and it obviously has artistic merit.

Shaw’s clearly has the right to ban anything it wishes. I’m just pointing out how far off Shaw’s is in invoking obscenity as a reason for removing the paper.

After all, the photo is freely available on photographer Elsa Dorfman’s Web site (that’s her at the top of this item) and, as Phoenix editor Peter Kadzis tells the Press Herald, is on permanent display at the Museum of Fine Arts. So far, the anti-obscenity cops at the FBI have not descended on either Dorfman’s studio or the MFA.

Christopher Lydon’s year-and-a-half-old radio program, “Open Source,” has been dealt a blow, but apparently not a fatal one. Since its inception, “Open Source” has been ostensibly based at WUML Radio (91.5 FM), the UMass Lowell radio station. Now, according to this post by Lydon, interim chancellor David MacKenzie has decided to end the relationship.

The Lowell Sun editorializes that “Open Source” was just too expensive, noting that Lydon is paid $12,500 a month.

The UMass Lowell connection has been an odd one from the beginning. As I reported in March 2005, the move was highly unpopular with the students and community activists who were involved in WUML.

Still, it sounded like it could be a good deal for UMass. At the time, there was talk of building a new state-of-the-art studio at the university, and of Lydon hosting a Lowell-only show on Fridays with the help of students. That never came to pass, and Lydon is still only on the air four evenings a week — from Boston.

Lydon’s partnership with PRI is intact, and he continues to broadcast from 7 to 8 p.m. at WGBH Radio (89.7 FM).

Lydon writes:

It’s not easy to get a radio show off the ground, and UMass Lowell supported us through a year and a half of a then untested concept that debuted on three stations. Support from UMass Lowell gave us time to build an audience of more than 150,000 listeners a night on thirty-one stations. Around 80,000 different people come to our website each month, from more than 150 different countries. 8,000 people download our podcasts.

“Open Source” is excellent, and Lydon was off the air for too long before his return. Let’s hope this is no more than a temporary setback.

It looks like we might never know who tipped off the media about Deval Patrick’s brother-in-law Bernard Sigh. In today’s Boston Globe, Andrea Estes reports:

The Globe received an anonymous two-page document last week describing the criminal case. The Globe immediately verified the rape conviction and Sigh’s residence in Massachusetts and then checked with the sex offender registry to determine if Sigh had fulfilled a requirement to register.

The Globe inquiry prompted state officials to notify Sigh that he had failed to register, but the editors decided against publishing a story after finding no relevance to Patrick’s record or qualifications. Responding to inquiries from the Globe, the campaign said Patrick had never intervened on Sigh’s behalf and the Globe found nothing to contradict that assertion.

This expands slightly on the statement that the Globe reportedly posted on its Web site yesterday and then removed. And it looks like the perfect political crime: Dump the documents anonymously, and then sit back and watch what happens. From this, I would have to assume that the Herald doesn’t know where the documents came from either.

The culprit is almost certainly a Kerry Healey supporter who works in a state agency that has access to such documents. But Patrick may have gone too far yesterday when he blamed it on the Healey campaign. She immediately denied having anything to do with it, and demanded an apology from Patrick.

Finally, a word to Patrick-bashers who’ve been posting here and here: You seem to assume that those of us who are appalled by what’s happened believe Sigh should have been left alone. No. He is a convicted rapist. If someone learned that he’s unregistered, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with notifying the Sex Offender Registry Board.

What’s slimy about this is the fact that the press was tipped off. Sigh is not a public figure, and this would not have been news if it weren’t for his family ties.

As for who leaked the documents, it looks like this is going to be a tough one to crack. But I hope that our political press at least makes the attempt.

Update: I endorse Anonymous 8:59’s theory of a California connection. As for the national Republican involvement that he suspects, we’ll have to wait and see.

Update II: Sorry, but if Patrick is parsing his language as finely as David of Blue Mass. Group thinks he is, then he deserves to be criticized, not praised.

As David notes, Patrick said yesterday of his brother-in-law and sister: “By no rules of common decency should their private struggles become a public issue. But this is the politics of Kerry Healey.”

If that doesn’t mean Patrick’s blaming the Healey campaign, then he worked for Bill Clinton way too long.

Odd goings-on over the fallout from the story about Deval Patrick’s brother-in-law Bernard Sigh, who was outed in the Herald today as an unregistered sex offender.

Dave Wedge, who wrote the first story, has done a follow-up in which the Sex Offender Registry Board (SORB) claims that the initial inquiry about Sigh came from the Globe. Wedge writes:

The SORB originally investigated Sigh’s criminal record after an inquiry from a Boston Globe reporter, said Kelly Nantel, spokeswoman for the state Executive Office of Public Safety. The letter was sent after the SORB confirmed his record and determined he is required to register, she said.

So who tipped off the Globe? Obviously someone has been shopping this around. Presumably this slime artist turned to the Herald after having been jilted on Morrissey Boulevard.

More intrigue: Blue Mass. Group claims that the Globe posted this statement on its Web site earlier today, and then later removed it:

The Globe learned about Patrick’s brother-in-law last Friday. After assurances from his campaign that Patrick did not intervene on Sigh’s behalf, the paper decided not to write about the issue because it had no bearing on Patrick’s candidacy for governor.

A responsible decision, I’d say. As I wrote earlier today, I’m not going to claim this isn’t a story; but if I were playing editor, I’d rather not run it than run it. Sigh is a convicted rapist, and it’s his responsibility to register as a sex offender. But he’s not seeking office, and Patrick is not responsible for his brother-in-law’s actions. Moreover, the circumstances of Sigh’s crime are such that this story would be entirely unnewsworthy were it not for the Patrick connection.

Here’s what Globe editors are dealing with this evening. The political community is in an uproar over this incredibly sleazy maneuver against Patrick. Everyone wants to know who’s behind it. The Herald, no doubt having gotten the tip on a promise of anonymity, can’t say. Maybe the Globe can — although its editors may be laboring under the same promise.

Is there someone who can get to the bottom of this ugly smear?

The Lowell Sun reports that he’s recovering from brain surgery and should be back to work soon.