Media Nation

I’m facing a deadline and 2,000 words to write. But before I sign off for the day, I just wanted to mention a few things about the explosion in Danvers this morning, which took place barely two miles from Media Nation Central.

First, the blast was unlike anything I’d heard before — loud and deep, as though a bomb had gone off, which I guess is not far from what actually happened. Mrs. Media Nation assumed it was the “snow thunder” that had been predicted, but it sure didn’t sound like thunder to me. Still, we couldn’t imagine that part of a neighborhood had just been wiped out.

Second, it is incredibly good news that no one was killed or seriously hurt. Now there’s something to be grateful for on Thanksgiving.

Third, though television and radio have obviously been all over it, I’m interested to see how the Globe and the Herald perform online today. This is the worst possible scenario for print — it’s the biggest story of the day, and the papers don’t publish until tomorrow. But they’re already posting coverage on their Web sites. Take a look, and you’ll see that they’re both off and running. The Globe’s already got sidebars, a slide show and a discussion board.

Finally, WRKO Radio (AM 680) dodged a bullet this morning. Faced with the first big local story since firing its entire news staff, the station had Joe Sciacca, a top editor at the Herald, filling in for the vacationing Scott Allen Miller. Sciacca, in turn, hooked up with Herald reporter O’Ryan Johnson, who delivered live updates from the scene.

The Boston Globe’s redoubtable Steve Bailey today reports on both of the city’s struggling dailies.

On page one, Bailey reveals that the New York Times Co. has rejected the notion of selling the Globe to a group headed by retired GE chairman Jack Welch. Bailey writes that a source who’d seen the Times Co.’s letter, signed by president Janet Robinson, described it as “unequivocal” in expressing the company’s desire to keep the Globe. So explain this Bailey tidbit:

Welch could not be reached for comment. But executives close to the Welch group, which includes longtime Boston advertising executive Jack Connors and Boston concessionaire Joe O’Donnell, said the three had no plans to abandon their effort.

Did the Times Co. leave the door open a crack? Do Welch and company think the Sulzbergers are going to change their minds? Or are these simply three guys who are used to getting their own way?

Media Nation’s prediction: The Times Co. will sell the Globe in one to three years, when, presumably, the advertising market will have recovered enough so that the paper will bring a better price. And Welch won’t be the buyer.

Bailey also has news about the Boston Herald in his “Downtown” column. It seems that Herald publisher Pat Purcell is keeping the revenue from some new billboards on Herald property for himself, and some union folks are ticked off about it.

I can’t say I blame them. The Weekly Dig posted an item yesterday reporting something I had heard independently — that three more Herald veterans have been laid off. They are lifestyle columnist Beth Teitell and arts reporters Dana Bisbee and Terry Byrne.

The Dig, as is its wont, kicks Teitell when she’s down, which draws a much-deserved rebuke from Herald stalwart Tom Mashberg.

Every writer, before he dies, should have a chance to whack an editor or a publisher who’s tormented him the way Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara gets to do today with would-be O.J. Simpson enabler Judith Regan.

Regan, it turns out, rejected a book proposal McNamara brought to her some years ago because it had too much substance and not enough sex. The book, “Breakdown: Sex, Suicide and the Harvard Psychiatrist,” was eventually bought by another publishing house, where it suffered the fate of 99 percent of books.

McNamara gets her revenge today, from the headline, “A vulture gets plucked,” to the ending:

As Regan predicted, my book made a quick trip to the remainder table, but Regan developed an interest in psychiatry after all. “I listened carefully, and what went through my mind surprised me,” she said of her now-shelved interview with Simpson. “Mental illness. Thought-process disorder. No empathy. Malignant narcissism.” Kind of what went through my mind when I heard that Judith Regan was behind this debacle.

Wow. Vicious stuff. And I definitely mean that in a good way.

I finally got around to watching the DVD that comes with the “limited edition” version of Bob Dylan’s “Modern Times.” And the notorious “Soy Bomb” moment that occurred as Dylan performed “Love Sick” at the 1997 Grammy Awards, in February 1998, has somehow been edited out.

What happened? Is it simply a different camera angle? Were more-drastic measures taken? A concert clip isn’t journalism, but is this kind of rewrite ethical or not?

Here is the original, unedited clip, complete with Soy Bomb writhing away as Dylan tries to ignore him:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boGrq8VdDEE]
The editing makes for a smoother viewing experience, I suppose. But it’s not what happened.

Globalvision‘s Danny Schechter and Rory O’Connor have posted a three-minute video commentary on the debut of the English-language Al-Jazeera International channel. It’s worth checking out. Schechter and O’Connor want American cable operators to carry the channel, which they have so far declined to do. But I’m not sure whether that’s all that important.

After all, you can watch a live stream of Al-Jazeera International right here. And if you don’t mind a low-quality stream that has to be refreshed every 15 minutes, you don’t even have to pay. It’s a great example of the increasing irrelevance of big media companies, and it will become more of an option over the next few years, as television and the Internet become one.

Two dissenting voices.

First, the extremely predictable Jeff Jarvis responds with his standard critique: They’re clueless! To wit: “It’s foolish that they try to charge a monthly fee for watching the stream and even more foolish that they based the business on getting cable carriage. If they’d just put the channel up online, they’d be getting a huge audience today.” Hmmm … well, maybe. Somehow, though, I don’t think HBO would be doing as well if it were streaming for free on the Web. (And, as Jarvis acknowledges, Al-Jazeera International is streaming for free — just not the way he’d like.)

Second, a woman with the unlikely name of Cinnamon Stillwell has written a commentary for a Web site called Family Security Matters that begins with this introduction:

It is unthinkable that America would allow avowed enemies to move here, set down roots, flourish and grow, and then manipulate our citizens into thinking that our own government is the enemy rather than they. Yet as FSM Contributing Editor Cinnamon Stillwell points out, this abomination is exactly what has happened with Al Jazeera International as it sets up shop right under our noses in Washington, D.C. Imagine that!

I’m going to confess that I have not slogged all the way through Stillwell’s screed. I just wanted to point out that the notion that Ignorance Is Good is alive and well. I mean, why on earth would we want to know what Al-Jazeera is reporting? Is Stillwell afraid we might learn something?

Personally, I would rather see the regular, Arabic-language Al-Jazeera channel with subtitles than Al-Jazeera International. Though I don’t think Al-Jazeera is quite the spawn of Satan that its critics would have it, I am curious to know whether the message it tells its viewers in the Arab and Muslim world is different from what it streams to the West.

Speaking of Herald blogs, Adam Reilly confirms, via State House News Service, that the paper has lost its best blogger, political reporter Kimberly Atkins, who’s moving to Washington.

Atkins is skilled at negotiating the line between working as a straight-news reporter for print and projecting her own voice online. She mainly did it by making her blog, the Daily Briefing, interactive, with readers contributing ideas not just for the blog but for print as well.

There’s talk that the Herald may find a way to keep her blogging from her new home. That would be good news.

The Boston Herald recently started a media blog, the Messenger, helmed by media reporters Jessica Heslam and Jesse Noyes, pop-culture guy Sean McCarthy and TV critic Mark Perigard. The Messenger is the city’s third blog devoted to all things media, joining Adam Reilly of the Phoenix and yours truly.

The Herald’s media coverage is pretty good, but the Messenger is off to a slow start, mainly in terms of linking: When other content is referenced at all, it tends to be Herald stories. The exception is McCarthy, who’s been blogging on his own for a while and who gets it.

Across town at Boston.com, there are plenty of blogs by Globe reporters, but none on the media per se. The Globe hasn’t had anyone covering the media full-time since Mark Jurkowitz left in mid-2005.

While you’re on the Globe bloggers page, scroll down to “Other Blogs in the Boston area,” and check out “Politics & the media.” You won’t find a single media blog listed there — including the Messenger, Reilly’s Media Log (which has been around in one form or another since 2002) or Media Nation (2005). Curious, no?

By the way: Jesse Noyes reports that Ed Piette, who runs WBZ-TV (Channel 4), has decided to go back to calling the station WBZ rather than CBS4. For the record, Media Nation never stopped referring to the station as WBZ. After all, those are the call letters.

The Boston Globe did something pretty smart yesterday: It blew out about two-thirds of the City & Region front for a feature whose sole purpose was to drive you to the Web. The online presentation, “Ten from 20 to 30,” is a multimedia package on 10 young Bostonians with lots of photos and audio but not much text.

You might wonder why you should pay for the paper when the Globe is saving some of its more provocative content for the Web. But that’s where the audience is going anyway. Far smarter to give people a reason to go to the Globe’s site, Boston.com, than to chase them away altogether.

The trick, as always, is how to make money from this.

In a column about people whose hobby is writing letters to newspapers, the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam takes a poke at one John Zack of Hopkinton, whose blog, ZACKly Right, is devoted to making fun of the Globe. But it only takes a moment for Beam, in the course of criticizing Zack’s grasp of grammar, to run off the grammatical rails himself. Beam writes:

The site touts itself as “a spout-off space for a taxpayer that endures the nutty liberalism of the Boston Globe and the nutty liberalism of all those that need the Globe to know how they think.” Shouldn’t that read “a taxpayer who endures” and “those who need the Globe”? Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

In fact, both examples Beam cites are restrictive phrases, and though it has become customary to precede them with who, it is perfectly acceptable to use that. Here is what the American Heritage Book of English Usage has to say:

Some people say that you can only use who and not that to introduce a restrictive relative clause that identifies a person. But that has been used in this way for centuries. It is a quintessential English usage, going back to the Old English period, and has been used by our best writers. So it is entirely acceptable to write either the man that wanted to talk to you or the man who wanted to talk to you.

In other words, Beam should have resisted.

Drake Bennett, who writes for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, says this today in his article on the pros and cons of private newspaper ownership:

What also worries many journalists is the issue of what happens when a newspaper owner exercises the prerogatives of ownership. William Randolph Hearst famously used his newspaper empire to drum up support for the Spanish-American War. The Sulzbergers were accused, most recently in a 1999 book by the journalists Alex Jones and Susan Tifft, of playing down the Holocaust in the pages of The New York Times out of concern that the paper would seem too Jewish.

Most recently? In fact, Bennett’s research should have quickly revealed that the definitive work on the Sulzbergers and the Holocaust was written by Northeastern journalism professor Laurel Leff and published in 2005. Her book, “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,” recently received the American Journalism Historians Association’s 2006 Award for Best Book in Media History. So it’s not exactly obscure.

Here’s what Seth Lipsky wrote about “Buried by the Times” in the Columbia Journalism Review last year:

The importance of Leff’s book is in helping us to understand what happened so that we can be faster on our feet and avoid the same mistakes now that a new war against the Jews is under way and a new generation of newspaper men and women are on the story.

Then again, the Globe never bothered to review Leff’s book.

By the way, the book by Tifft and Jones to which Bennett refers is “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times,” expertly analyzed in this 2003 post by former Globe columnist David Warsh.