Media Nation

Recently I cited a Wall Street Journal piece by former Boston Globe columnist John Ellis as evidence that the New York Times Co. would not sell the Globe — at least not until it had managed to goose up its value.

Well, last night I checked out Ellis’ infrequently updated blog and discovered that he’s taken it back. He’s posted his entire Journal column, so you can finally read it without a subscription. But he adds this, in reference to Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.:

I now think he should sell all of the “New England assets” (The Globe, the Worcester paper, the Red Sox stake and the NESN stake), and gather up $1 billion-plus. This would enable the Times company to enter the next (2009-2010?) recession loaded with cash.

The fact is that the Globe is doomed. Without union concessions, the cost structure doesn’t work. And the unions will never concede anything, ever. So the NYT might as well get $600 million for it now, rather than $300 million for it in 2010.

Of course, $600 million is the price that retired GE chairman Jack Welch‘s group has floated for buying just the Globe.

Interesting, speculative though it is. Ellis does not specify what kind of “union concessions” the Times Co. needs. It’s certainly my impression that Globe management is already squeezing the union pretty hard.

I did a Technorati search to see whether I was the first blogger to stumble across Ellis’ revisionist theorizing, and discovered that a financial site called Controlled Greed posted on this yesterday.

It was an experiment preordained to fail.

Two years ago, Clear Channel rebranded two of its weak-signaled Boston-area stations, AM 1200 and 1430, as “Boston’s Progressive Talk,” featuring liberal hosts from Air America (such as Al Franken and Randi Rhodes) and the Jones Radio Networks (Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller).

With little promotion and a small coverage area, liberal radio has not exactly been a ratings success here. Now, Jesse Noyes reports in the Boston Herald, Clear Channel is ready to pull the plug, and is likely to turn over the two frequencies to Spanish-language programming. The move comes as Clear Channel is in the process of being acquired by new owners, including Gov. Mitt Romney’s former company, Bain Capital.

And get this: Noyes says that Clear Channel is boosting the power of AM 1200 from 10,000 watts to 50,000. Gee, do you think that might have made “progressive talk” more popular?

It’s obvious that Clear Channel executives never wanted liberal radio to succeed in Boston. It was just a way of killing time until they figured out what they wanted to do with the two frequencies. Nor is it a terrible thing that Greater Boston’s growing Spanish-language audience will be better served. Still, this is a loss. Someone else ought to give it a try.

Update: Brian Maloney has more, and he also offers this:

These particular stations have really brought out a number of lefty conspiracy theorists who believe the lack of ratings were the result of not enough signal power and a promotional shortfall by the company. But these same arguments could be made regarding a number of other talk outlets that have in fact succeeded.

Uh, Brian. If you can’t hear the station, you can’t hear the station. If I leave for work early or come home late, I can’t listen, because AM 1430, which is the signal closest to me, is a sunup-to-sundown station. I’m pretty sure AM 1200 is, too. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a reality-based observation.

Both the Globe and the Herald report today that it looks like Manny Ramírez will be back in a Red Sox uniform next year. Well, break out the Champagne. Having Julio Lugo, Coco Crisp, David Ortiz, Manny and J.D. Drew batting one through five sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

But what, really, is the deal with Manny? He did, after all, stop playing for the last six weeks of the season in 2006. I’m prepared to believe that he’s a semi-mature adult, which means that I have to assume he was, indeed, too hurt to play. OK, then. Has he healed? Is he rehabbing? Does he need surgery? Will he be gone by Memorial Day when his knee problems come back?

Fans who defend Ramírez forget that last year was not like any other year. He didn’t just take a few days off under mysterious circumstances. He stopped playing. That was different — and scary for Red Sox fans.

Here’s an actual headline on WorldNetDaily right now: “Dick Morris: Hillary wants to be ‘President Rodham.'” Apparently this is something Morris said on Fox News.

Morris’ comments — and WorldNetDaily’s fascination with them — raise two questions: How does he know? And who cares? (Via Drudge, who also thinks this is hot stuff. Be prepared for a lot of this.)

I’ve been editing 29 final projects by my students over the past few days, so I’ve been a little out of it. But one of my students passes along this Washington Post story by Frank Ahrens on life at the Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press, a Gannett paper that’s on the leading edge of the company’s experiment in pro-am journalism.

Intrigued as I am by the idea, I nevertheless find Ahrens’ story a little dispiriting. The photo of mobile journalist (or “mojo”) Chuck Myron says it all — hunched over in his car, simultaneously writing a story and editing photos and audio, all to be uploaded to the News-Press Web site before he moves on to his next assignment. He doesn’t even have an office. And no one edits his work.

The Gannett experiment is certainly worthy. But let’s not kid ourselves: For a profit-hungry corporation like Gannett, this must look at least as much like an opportunity to load up on cheap and free content as it is a chance to help define the future.

Boston Herald business editor Greg Gatlin leaps onto the Herald’s Messenger Blog in order to whack the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly. Gatlin’s upset that Reilly allowed an anonymous “astute Boston observer” to call the Herald “basically irrelevant” in his article this week about the Herald and its new/old editor, Kevin Convey.

Reilly responds that Gatlin may be right — that “the source’s anonymity should have made me think twice about using such a damning line.”

Media Nation’s take: Reilly’s in a tough position. A journalist should not, except under very unusual circumstances, use anonymous sources to attack people or organizations. It’s a basic rule of the craft, and it’s one I reminded my students of last week.

And yet. Writing from experience as the Phoenix’s media critic from 1994 through 2005, I can tell you that if you follow that rule too strictly when covering the notoriously insular, paranoid press, you’ll rarely get a quote that’s either candid or memorable. This is not like covering politics — people can lose their jobs if they tell you what they really mean and attach their names to it. Or, in the case of the “astute Boston observer,” he or she may fear retribution in the pages of the Herald.

I still remember one occasion when I allowed an anonymous source to deliver a rather stinging rebuke to his news organization. Within days, this same source said exactly the opposite — on the record — to another newspaper. I can assure you that he was being candid with me and dissembling to the other paper.

If Reilly erred here, it was perhaps in not characterizing his anonymous source sufficiently enough for readers to get a feel for where the “irrelevant” quote was coming from.

If you tune in “Greater Boston” on Channel 2 this evening, you’ll hear me say that James Gordon Bennett, whose New York Herald, founded in 1835, was the first recognizably modern newspaper, should have been named to the Atlantic Monthly’s list of the top 100 influential Americans. In fact, he was, at No. 69. I don’t know how I missed that.

I’m sticking by my argument that Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan should have been on the list, too.

Adam Reilly of the Phoenix has a good wrap-up of the latest changes at the Boston Herald — and an even better blog item.

It seems that GateHouse Media, the Fairport, N.Y.-based corporation to which Herald owner Pat Purcell sold his Community Newspaper Co. (CNC) chain earlier this year, is seeking an online divorce.

At the moment, CNC’s Web presence is through Town Online, part of Purcell’s Herald Interactive. But GateHouse wants to switch to Wicked Local, a promising blend of traditional newspaper content and reader contributions rolled out in Plymouth by the parent company of the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, which GateHouse acquired at the same time that it bought CNC. (The Ledger and its progeny, the Enterprise of Brockton and a string of weeklies, were folded into CNC at the time of the sale.)

It’s been pretty obvious for some time that CNC major domo Kirk Davis, brought in from the Ledger papers, has regarded Wicked Local as the future. Plug in the name of any Eastern Massachusetts town, like hamilton.wickedlocal.com, sharon.wickedlocal.com or framingham.wickedlocal.com, and you’ll be taken straight to the Plymouth site. The names have been reserved, and it’s just a matter of setting them up with their own content.

CNC and the Herald still share stories. But that will continue only for as long as Davis thinks it’s in CNC’s best interest.

Updates: (1) MTS is no fun, but he’s right; (2) the Globe’s Robert Gavin quotes me in a “what it means” piece; (3) a bit of clarification: the expiration of GateHouse’s agreement with Town Online was agreed to at the time of the sale earlier this year. This may be a blow to Purcell, but it’s a blow he knew was coming for months.

Now that state and local officials have agreed to let the feds investigate what happened in Danvers, I anticipate that this will be my last post on the subject. But be sure to read Beth Daley’s story in today’s Boston Globe, which makes it clear that chemicals being stored at the blast site hadn’t been inspected for years because no one was doing his job, at the federal, state or local level. Good grief.

Tom Dalton of the Salem News has more.

Only a fool would suggest that Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell is obligated to go broke trying to save his struggling newspaper. But you’d think that at a time like this — when people are leaving and those who remain are having their wages frozen — that Purcell the landlord would ease up on Purcell the publisher. Apparently not.

In the new Weekly Dig, Paul McMorrow claims that, in fact, the Herald must pay hefty rent to Purcell for the right to use its own building. McMorrow writes:

[T]he possible rent figures floated by insiders — we heard numbers as high as $250,000 a month — make one wonder whether Purcell is gorging himself while bleeding his own paper dry. One insider noted that while Purcell asks his employees to take $12-a-week pay cuts, he maintains a manse in Weston and large vacation homes in Vermont and Martha’s Vineyard.

Purcell’s spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny any rent scenario we raised.

Apart from the haziness of “possible rent figures floated by insiders,” this does raise a serious question. As McMorrow notes, Purcell’s mantra is that the Herald has to stand on its own. But you’d think that Purcell could at least consider the Herald’s building part of, you know, the Herald.