Media Nation

Jon Keller gives props to Barack Obama for admitting that he inhaled. “Finally,” Keller writes, “a baby-boomer political candidate who tells the truth!”

But alas — Obama is just 45 years old, which makes him more GenX than Baby Boom. And, as Jon knows, the Xers have always hated us Boomers for our arrogance and dissembling.

Kerry Healey’s got Deval Patrick right where she wants him. According to a new poll by Suffolk University and WHDH-TV (Channel 7), Healey now trails Patrick by 27 points. Healey’s unfavorable rating is up to 53 percent.

Obviously Healey’s strategy of buying boneheadedly offensive attack ads is working: Patrick’s folks are now likely to become overconfident, thus increasing the chance that he’ll blow it down the stretch.

Via Blue Mass. Group, which also has poll results showing Patrick ahead by 25 points and 24 points.

Patrick should ask his Internet supporters to send money to Healey so that she can buy some more ads.

I should be grading papers, so just two quick observations.

— Is Kerry Healey’s gubernatorial campaign now the dirtiest in state history? Oh, I suppose those orange-jumpsuit-clad demonstrators have nothing to do with her campaign. (Globe coverage here; Herald coverage here.) I’m especially impressed with a new wrinkle: terrorizing the 12-year-old son of Deval Patrick’s campaign manager.

— Former Globe reporter Mitchell Zuckoff, now a Boston University professor, is right on the mark in his letter to Romenesko, in which he says that the Boston Newspaper Guild’s request that politicians write to the New York Times Co. on its behalf is “a textbook case of seeking favors from sources and subjects.”

The Globe reports on Zuckoff’s letter here, and quotes Guild president Dan Totten as saying that Zuckoff’s scenario is “an extreme stretch.” The article also quotes my colleague Steve Burgard, director of Northeastern’s School of Journalism.

Question: Is it relevant that Totten has an advertising background rather than one in news? Perhaps the potential conflict of interest never occurred to him. Granted, he doesn’t govern alone. But still.

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.