Media Nation

The Herald business editor and the Phoenix media critic go at it. Read it here.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd absolutely takes off on the duplicitous Judith Miller today. And even if you’re not a TimesSelect subscriber, you can read Dowd’s entire column: I’ve found a blogger who was either brave or foolish enough to copy and paste the entire thing, right down to the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. Read it here before it disappears.

Mo’s lead: “I’ve always liked Judy Miller.” You just know what’s coming, don’t you?

On another front, Times executive editor Bill Keller’s rehabilitation seems just about complete. Earlier this week, the New York Observer reported that Keller was far tougher on Miller in private than he had appeared to be in public.

Yesterday, as you may have heard, Keller e-mailed a memo to the Times staff conceding not just that mistakes were made, but that he himself made some of them. Respect for Keller will only increase.

Next up (as I continue my Saturday morning Romenesko feeding frenzy): a forthcoming New York magazine article by Kurt Andersen that will apparently lay most of the blame for the Miller fiasco at the feet of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. – where, I suspect, it belongs.

At this point, it’s not inconceivable that Sulzberger could be pressured into giving up one of his jobs – say, leaving as publisher of the Times while remaining as chairman of the New York Times Co.

Given that the single most significant mistake of Sulzberger’s tenure remains his hiring of the dictatorial bully Howell Raines over Keller as executive editor several years ago – only to have to reverse himself when Raines imploded amid the Jayson Blair scandal – such an event would only enhance Keller’s stature.

I’ve written a piece for the Public Eye section of CBSNews.com on how to fix the network evening newscasts at CBS, NBC and ABC. An excerpt:

The dilemma facing the Big Three became apparent only during the commercial breaks. Each time [anchor Bob] Schieffer disappeared from my screen, he was replaced with a parade of advertisements promising relief from one malady after another: dry eyes, blood clots, arthritis, calcium deficiency, diabetes, insomnia, toenail fungus, bad feet and high cholesterol. There was a message on where to find government information about Medicare. There was an image-building ad from a drug company. As someone who is in the very middle of middle age, I was appalled to think that I had this to look forward to in my declining years. And, of course, I realized that here was the evidence of what is really wrong with the nightly newscasts: they’re on at 6:30 p.m., a time when only the elderly can watch them. Everyone else is either commuting, eating dinner or helping the kids with their homework. That, more than anything, explains why the combined network-newscast audience has declined from about 50 million to fewer than 30 million over the past couple of decades. People work longer hours and lead more hectic lives than they did 20 years ago. The networks haven’t kept pace.

You may read the whole thing by clicking here.

Chuck Tanowitz brings up the part that I left out of yesterday’s post on circulation numbers and the Web: the fact that the insanely lucrative classified ads off which daily newspapers fed for years are gone for good.

Yes, newspapers can move their classified sections to the Web. The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald have both done quite a lot on that front. But how do they compete with Craig’s List, which is free? Or Monster.com, which has ravaged newspapers’ help-wanted sections? They don’t.

Romenesko today has a whole section of stories on the Boston Globe’s circulation and advertising woes, including this Jay Fitzgerald piece in the Boston Herald, headlined “Bored Readers Cutting Off Globe’s Circulation.” Fitzgerald focuses on the Globe’s plummeting circulation – down nearly 8 percent, to about 416,000 on weekdays and 667,000 on Sundays.

But though these are certainly dark days at 135 Morrissey Blvd., especially with the national operation being dismantled, there’s a larger point that everyone is missing.

Take a look at the media kit for the Globe’s Web site, Boston.com. As you’ll see, Boston.com claims to have 600,000 registered users. Moreover, it cites a third-party study showing that Boston.com is visited by more than 4.1 million unique users every month.

Now, those 4.1 million people aren’t all Globe readers. Boston.com includes features not just from the Globe but also from New England Cable News and New England Sports Network, as well as some of its own content. But, for the sake of simplicity, let’s say that Boston.com and the Globe are one and the same. Divide those 4.1 million monthly users by 30 days in a month (another oversimplification), and you’ve got an average of about 136,000 people reading the Globe online every day.

Add those readers to the Globe’s current circulation, and you get 552,000 on weekdays and 803,000 on Sundays. Significantly, those numbers are similar to the Globe’s best years pre-Web. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), the Globe’s weekday circulation in 1991 was 519,000. Its Sunday circulation in 1994 was 815,000.

Of course, the Herald has had its own circulation woes in recent years. Fitzgerald reports that the Herald’s circulation has dropped by about 4 percent during the past six months. That would put the Herald’s current circulation at about 240,000 on weekdays and 145,000 on Sundays.

Now, let’s do the same exercise. Herald Interactive claims that its Web sites receive about 3 million unique visitors every month. As I did with Boston.com and the Globe, I’m going to award every one of those visitors to the Herald, even though Herald Interactive includes Town Online, the electronic wing of its Community Newspaper subsidiary, as well as three classified-ad sites.

Divide 3 million by 30, and you get 100,000. Add those to the current circulation numbers, and you get 340,000 readers on weekdays and 245,000 on Sundays. That compares favorably to ABC figures for 1989, which show that the Herald’s circulation was 360,000 on weekdays and 252,000 on Sundays.

No one doubts that the newspaper business is in serious trouble. The Herald eliminated a quarter of its 145 newsroom employees earlier this year, and the Globe is in the midst of cutting about 35 newsroom positions. The Globe’s decision to get rid of its national desk is stunning, because it represents a serious lowering of the paper’s reach and ambition, and because it will make it harder to attract talented young reporters.

But there is a case to be made that the Globe’s readership – and, for that matter, the Herald’s – is pretty much unchanged over the past 12 to 15 years. Changes in advertising patterns and an inability to come up with a viable online business model are taking a huge toll. Readers, though, aren’t leaving. That’s a reason for optimism.

Correction: In the original version of this post, I transposed the Herald’s weekday and Sunday circulation figures. The numbers are now correct. D’oh!

Richard Prince reports that the Boston Globe is folding its entire national operation, although the Washington bureau will be spared. (Via Mark Jurkowitz, who’s also learned that the weekly Life at Home section is toast.)

This may be the most significant cut at the Globe that I can remember, since it goes right to the heart of its identity as a regional paper with national ambitions. The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, is not inspiring a lot of trust this week.

Perhaps nothing was more dispiriting in Sunday’s massive New York Times takeout on the Judith Miller scandal than this section on executive editor Bill Keller, in which he came across as an ineffective wimp:

TIMES: On July 30, 2003, Mr. Keller became executive editor after his predecessor, Howell Raines, was dismissed after a fabrication scandal involving a young reporter named Jayson Blair.

Within a few weeks, in one of his first personnel moves, Mr. Keller told Ms. Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues. Even so, Mr. Keller said, “she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm.”

But an article in today’s New York Observer by Tom Scocca and Gabriel Sherman is more encouraging. They write:

SCOCCA AND SHERMAN: “A lot of people are galled by the quotation from Keller that after she was taken off the Iraq W.M.D. beat, she somehow found her way back in,” one Times staffer said.

In fact, Mr. Keller and Ms. Abramson had sharply rebuked Ms. Miller for that drifting. Though the Times account didn’t mention it, the two called Ms. Miller into Mr. Keller’s office this past winter and told her that she could no longer cover national security in any form for the paper.

“The implication was that she would resign,” said a person with knowledge of the meeting. Though Ms. Miller “blew up,” as the source put it, she took a two-week vacation, with Mr. Keller saying he expected to hear on her return whether she accepted the reassignment. When she came back, she agreed to the arrangement.

I’ve been nibbling around the edges of the Judith Miller saga – make that the Judith Miller scandal – because I keep thinking another shoe is going to drop. And it may. Perhaps special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s report, which could come sometime after the Oct. 28 expiration of the grand-jury investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, will shed more light on precisely what Miller was up to in her conversations with Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

But it’s clear that the New York Times, our most important daily newspaper, is broken in some profound way. American Journalism Review editor Rem Rieder traces it back to the Times-assisted railroading of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee in the late 1990s. I’d go back even farther, to the Times’ endless credulous reports on the so-called Clinton scandals, none of which ever panned out (except for the legally irrelevant Monica Lewinsky matter), but which weakened Bill Clinton’s presidency considerably.

On “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” last night, former Timesman Alex Jones, director of the Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center and the co-author of a massive biography of the Sulzbergers, who founded the modern Times and continue to own it, had this to say:

JONES: Judy Miller’s credibility and the New York Times’ credibility are the same thing right now in my opinion, and until Judy Miller’s credibility is vetted and until the questions that have been raised and sort of – that have come tumbling out of this exploration of Judy Miller’s relationship not just with Scooter Libby but with the White House, with the administration, her role in the work-up to the Iraq war, all of these things are now part of the story, part of the story because the New York Times did the reporting it did on Sunday but also because Judy Miller has refused within the New York Times to be completely accountable because, for instance, in the case of Sunday’s articles, she declined to provide the reporters at the New York Times with an opportunity to examine those notebooks which were a critical part of her testimony.

Yes, Jones changed directions several times in mid-thought, but you get the idea. And he’s right: Miller’s credibility and the Times’ credibility are the same thing right now. And that’s not good for the Times.

I want to focus on one aspect of Miller’s first-person account that was published on Sunday – the revelation, if you can call it that, that she had security clearance while she was reporting from Iraq in the weeks after the fall of Baghdad:

MILLER: In my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment “embedded” with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby. I said I believed so, but could not be sure. He asked how Mr. Libby treated classified information. I said, Very carefully.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to examine a series of documents. Though I could not identify them with certainty, I said that some seemed familiar, and that they might be excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq’s weapons. Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Libby had shown any of the documents to me. I said no, I didn’t think so. I thought I remembered him at one point reading from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.

I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance, given my special embedded status in Iraq. At the same time, I told the grand jury I thought that at our July 8 meeting I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me if I knew whether I was cleared to discuss classified information at the time of my meetings with Mr. Libby. I said I did not know.

Now, this is being treated as news by many media observers. In a widely quoted e-mail to Romenesko, retired CBS News correspondent Bill Lynch calls it an “enormous journalism scandal hidden” in Miller’s piece. But though Lynch is surely right that it’s a scandal, we have in fact known about it since June 2004, as I pointed out in a follow-up e-mail.

The revelation came in Franklin Foer’s extraordinarily tough profile of Miller in New York magazine. Miller at that time was in trouble over a previous, related scandal: her credulous reporting on Iraq’s alleged weapons capabilities and ties to Al Qaeda in the months leading up to the war. Foer describes Miller in Iraq in the spring of 2003:

FOER: … Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the Pentagon – an agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times editor, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Although she never fully acknowledged the specific terms of that arrangement in her articles, they were as stringent as any conditions imposed on any reporter in Iraq….

As Miller covered MET Alpha, it became increasingly clear that she had ceased to respect the boundaries between being an observer and a participant. And as an embedded reporter she went even further, several sources say. While traveling with MET Alpha, according to [Eugene] Pomeroy [a military source Foer relied on] and one other witness, she wore a military uniform.

When Colonel Richard McPhee ordered MET Alpha to pull back from a search mission and regroup in the town of Talil, Miller disagreed vehemently with the decision – and let her opinions be loudly known. The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz reprinted a note in which she told public-affairs officers that she would write negatively about his decision if McPhee didn’t back down. What’s more, Kurtz reported that Miller complained to her friend Major General David Petraeus. Even though McPhe’’s unit fell outside the general’s line of command, Petraeus’s rank gave his recommendation serious heft. According to Kurtz, in an account that was later denied, “McPhee rescinded his withdrawal order after Petraeus advised him to do so.”

Miller guarded her exclusive access with ferocity. When the Washington Post‘s Barton Gellman overlapped in the unit for a day, Miller instructed its members that they couldn’t talk with him. According to Pomeroy, “She told people that she had clearance to be there and Bart didn’t.” (One other witness confirms this account.)

Now, go back and read Miller’s account of what she told the grand jury about her conversations with Libby. Libby may have thought she still had security clearance. Did she? She didn’t know.

I’m not the first person to make this observation – unfortunately, I’ve lost track of where I picked it up – but it is possible that Miller went to jail not only because she was protecting a source, but because she was also afraid of the legal consequences if she disclosed classified information she had received as a result of having security clearance. And it’s possible that Libby wasn’t breaking the law in disclosing that Bush-administration critic Joseph Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative because he was giving the information to someone with clearance to be told such things.

And it’s possible that all this was playing out with publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and executive editor Bill Keller being unaware of this bizarre twist. Yes, according to the unnamed Times editor with whom Foer spoke, people at the Times were aware that Miller had negotiated an unusually sensitive agreement with the Pentagon. But were they aware that she may have had security clearance? And given that they should have been alerted to that possibility when they read Foer’s story, did they think about the implications later that summer, when Fitzgerald first started threatening Miller with jail if she refused to testify? Did they think about it some more during all those months when they gave her their support?

So many questions. And as Alex Jones says, the Times doesn’t have any hope of regaining its credibility until we have answers to all of them.

Once again, the “For Sale” sign has gone up outside the Boston Herald. Pat Purcell, the owner of Herald Media Inc., tells the Herald’s Greg Gatlin that he must recapitalize his company now that some of his investors are looking to cash in. And he declines to rule out a sale of either the Herald or his 100-plus community newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts.

But how likely is it that Purcell would sell? Over the years, the unknown factor in a long string of Herald-for-sale rumors has always been the extent of the financial pressure under which Purcell labors. Herald Media is a privately held company, and Purcell holds his cards pretty close to the vest, so it’s nearly impossible to know for sure.

Certainly it wasn’t a good sign when he slashed the Herald’s newsroom contingent by 25 percent earlier this year. But given the cutbacks that are now spreading across the entire newspaper business, including at the Boston Globe, those reductions don’t look quite as horrifying as they did at the time. In any case, the new, downsized Herald has proved to be a better paper than I would have thought possible.

Whenever Purcell has rallied the troops, my sources have told me that he never rules out the possibility of a sale, but that he always plays down its likelihood as well. His comments in today’s Herald appear to be along the same lines. Gatlin writes:

GATLIN: Purcell said if someone came forward looking to take a majority interest in the company he would have to consider it.

“Even if that were the case, I don’t think there’s a better operator … than us and the team we’ve assembled here,” he said. “I don’t think there’s going to be any problem with continuing to operate this business.”

The closest Purcell came to selling in recent years appears to have been last winter, when he engaged in what were described to me as serious talks with the Hollinger chain (scroll down) about selling all of his papers for about $250 million. But it didn’t happen, and Purcell may well have been more interested in showing his investors that Herald Media was worth a quarter of a billion dollars than he was in actually collecting the money.

The Boston Globe’s Christopher Rowland reports on Purcell’s latest moves today, too, but doesn’t mention the sale possibility.

Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, with whom I’ve occasionally collaborated, has written a chilling column for the National Law Journal on Hosty v. Carter, which could seriously curtail the student press.

The decision, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Silverglate warns, “gives administrators unfettered discretion to become in effect the new editors of our nation’s college newspapers.”

Here’s a roundup of coverage compiled by the Student Press Law Center.