Media Nation

These are not the best of times for either of Boston’s daily newspapers. Three stories in today’s Boston Herald tell the tale:

– Following Monday’s announcement that the New York Times Co. will reduce its workforce – a move that will cost the Boston Globe 35 newsroom positions – the Herald’s Jay Fitzgerald reports that Globe union members are mad as hell. Not surprisingly, union president Dan Totten reserves some venom for James “King” Kilts, the mogul who sold locally owned Gillette down the river to Procter & Gamble. Kilts was named to the Times Co. board several months ago.

– The Herald’s Greg Gatlin indulges (link now fixed, thanks to Media Nation reader SMM) in some speculation about the future of Globe publisher Richard Gilman. Gatlin also dredges up a hardy perennial: the notion that the paper will cut costs by running material from the New York Times.

There are really two issues here. The first is that the Globe might use Times stories instead of material it currently buys from the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. That might enable the Globe to save money, but it wouldn’t necessarily represent a downsizing of the paper’s ambitions.

The second, more serious issue is whether the Globe might substitute Times coverage for some of its own reporting on national and world affairs. This would be the big one, and would cement even further the idea that the Globe is just a satellite of the Times.

My guess: the first might happen on at least a selective basis (the Globe has occasionally published Times photos for the past few years), but the second won’t, at least not yet. What the pessimists overlook is that the Globe is one of the Times Co.’s most valuable properties. Speculation to the contrary, Times Co. executives do not want to persuade readers to drop the Globe and take the Times instead, because they want the Globe to be financially successful.

On the other hand, speculation that the Times Co. will seek to squeeze the Globe as much as possible without actually driving readers away strikes me as being right on target. Unfortunately.

– Lest we forget, the Herald itself went through an incredibly painful round cost-cutting earlier this year, slashing its newsroom by about 40 employees, or 25 percent. And publisher Pat Purcell is still pushing to bolster his revenues by any means necessary. Today, in a non-bylined piece, the paper tries to put the best face on the fact that tabloid is starting to run page-one ads. The forced-cutesy lead:

HERALD: Future trivia question: Which advertiser was the first to land an ad on the Boston Herald’s front page? Answer: Sovereign Bank.

The story notes that such papers as the Times and USA Today have run page-one ads.

The Herald ad – a red strip across the bottom teasing a bigger ad on page three – is fairly unobtrusive. Nor do I think it takes away from the paper’s image or credibility. I’d go so far as to say it’s acceptable for paper as economically challenged as the Herald. But publishing ads on the front still falls into the category of Things You Don’t Really Want to Do.

To read the Boston Globe’s account of cutbacks announced by the New York Times Co. yesterday – including 35 positions to be eliminated in the Globe newsroom – you’d think that newspaper analyst John Morton believes they are the inevitable consequence of rising costs and a softening economy. The Globe’s Christopher Rowland writes:

ROWLAND: US newspapers have been taking a beating on the price of newsprint, which has been rising 10 to 15 percent a year with another price increase due to take effect Oct. 1, said industry analyst John Morton, president of Morton Research Inc., of Silver Spring, Md.

“That, combined with advertising revenue not keeping pace with inflation, puts a profit squeeze on companies, and one of the ways you can alleviate that is laying off people,” he said.

But wait. In an article published by the Globe’s corporate big brother, the New York Times, Morton sounds like a fire-breathing populist, ready to lead the oppressed workers in a round of “Solidarity Forever.” Here’s how Katharine Seelye ends her story:

SEELYE: John Morton, a newspaper industry analyst, said that one of the many business and social trends working against newspapers was public ownership of newspaper companies.

“Wall Street appreciates cost-cutting and improving margins and increased profitability,” he said. “Those are the things that make them dance a jig at night. They put that kind of pressure on publicly owned companies, and newspapers are no more immune to that than anybody else. These cuts and layoffs are known as dancing to Wall Street’s tune.”

Whoa! I like that John Morton. Hold on, though. Because Frank Ahrens, in the Washington Post, captures yet another side of Morton. To wit:

AHERNS: Newspaper analyst John Morton, however, said that all media are suffering from an ad slump and that yesterday’s cuts do not yet sound the death knell for newspapers.

“In terms of what it’s doing to editorial staff, these are not horrible cuts,” Morton said. “All three of these papers have fairly fat staffs compared with most other papers, if you take the rule of thumb of one editorial employee for every 1,000 [in] circulation.” [The three papers Morton’s referring to are the Globe, the Times and Knight Ridder’s Philadelphia Inquirer, which also announced major cuts yesterday.]

Gee, that certainly doesn’t sound like the guy who mocked owners for “dancing to Wall Street’s tune.”

So which John Morton should we believe? I’ve interviewed Morton a number of times over the years, and have always found him to be consistently hard-headed in his business assessments, yet also consistently concerned about the effects that corporate ownership is having on newspaper quality. What we’re seeing here are both Mortons, albeit with each paper choosing which Morton it likes better.

I understand the need to pick a quote and run with it, and I understand that Morton isn’t the story. But it’s too bad that the neither Globe, the Times nor the Post offered enough Morton so that readers could fully understand his views.

(A brief pause for credit: Although I’d come up with the Globe-Times comparison on my own, I hadn’t known about Morton’s remarks to the Post before my morning read of Romenesko.)

Locally, Jay Fitzgerald of the Boston Herald has a rock-’em, sock-’em take on downsizing at the tabloid’s Expressway rival, writing:

FITZGERALD: The planned bloodletting cast a pall over the Globe’s newsroom. Some staffers were grumbling about Morrissey Boulevard’s news operation taking a far bigger hit, from a percentage standpoint, than the Times’ newsroom. The Times Co. will slash about 250 jobs from its flagship New York Times broadsheet, 45 of them within the Times’ newsroom.

This past spring, the Globe covered in endless detail a huge downsizing at the Herald, which cost that paper a quarter of its newsroom jobs. (So did I, mainly on Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.) Now it’s payback time at One Herald Square.

A final observation: The Globe’s recently unveiled Sidekick section must cost something, no? Given that the daily entertainment guide still has virtually no advertising in it, wouldn’t it be a good idea to think about dumping it in order to save the jobs of a few people who cover actual news?

The Herald’s Inside Track goes after the Globe sports section today, claiming that the “Boring Broadsheet” favors the Red Sox over the three-time-champion Patriots because the Globe’s corporate owner, the New York Times Co., owns a share of the Sox.

“National Football League sources” are said to be upset. What prompted their dime-drop appears to be a complaint that Globe sports editor Joe Sullivan made about access to the Patriots during practice.

Sullivan denies stinting on Pats coverage, telling the Tracksters, “I don’t see how fans of either team could feel shortchanged.”

But Bruce Allen of Boston Sports Media Watch thinks there’s more than a little something to the Track’s complaint.

ALLEN: Even the Inside Track is jumping on the Globe for their lack of Patriots coverage, and they report about Globe sports editor Joe Sullivan calling up the NFL to whine about access to the team during practice. As I mentioned in part II of my Globe Review last month, I thought that Sullivan had done some good things during his watch there, but lately he’s been taking a lot of hits over the paper’s Patriots coverage, and isn’t looking good for it. His adamant stand that the paper has the most Patriots coverage in the region rings false to anyone who reads through the papers on a daily basis. His failure to promise or even admit that they’ll try to do better continues to be a slap in the face to Patriots fans.

Here’s the direct link to Allen’s post today, although it wasn’t working as of this morning.

On July 29, the Phoenix’s Ian Donnis took a close look at the relationship between the Sox and the Globe.

Media Nation offers three not-very-original observations:

1. Baseball is more interesting than football.

2. Boston is and always will be a baseball town.

3. I’m a lot more concerned about how the Globe – and especially its editorial page – covers the Red Sox’ development plans in the Fenway neighborhood than I am about measuring column-inches devoted to the Sox and the Pats. That’s where the real conflict-of-interest potential is.

From Alex Beam’s Boston Globe piece on the new luxury magazine Boston Common and its owner, Jason Binn:

BINN: When Madeleine Albright talks about luxury lifestyle, that’s the kind of story an editor wants.

Madeleine Albright?

Please join New York University journalism professor and blogger extraordinaire Jay Rosen and me this Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. for a Ford Hall Forum program on “Who’s Talking?”, a 90-minute discussion about blogging and journalism. The moderator will be Stephen Burgard, director of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

The program will be held in the Raytheon Amphitheater, which is on the first floor of the Egan Center on the Northeastern campus. Here is a campus map. The program is free and open to the public.

Day One, and I’m already peeved about TimesSelect, the disaster-in-the-making by which the New York Times will charge if you want to keep reading its columnists and a few other “premium” features.

I’m a paid-up, bona fide subscriber to the print edition, which right now is sitting on our kitchen table 25 miles away. So I tried entering the username and password I’ve had for NYTimes.com since those dark, long-ago days when I was running Lynx on a Unix account. No go: “Your ID must be either the e-mail address you used to register at NYTimes.com or your Home Delivery user ID, not your NYTimes.com member ID.”

So I tried to figure out how to get my “Home Delivery user ID,” only to be told it was either (1) the credit-card number we use to pay for our subscription (we pay by check); or (2) a number that’s on the delivery label. Our paper doesn’t come with a delivery label, so I’m not sure what that’s about. My last remaining option is to dig out an old bill. Which, of course, is 25 miles away.

Fie! Fie!

Thanks to Media Nation reader SCO, I was able to find a video of Gov. Mitt Romney’s remarks on wiretapping mosques, a statement that got him into trouble last week when his words were reported by the Boston Globe. I captured the audio to my Mac using WireTap (weirdly appropriate, no?), copied it to iTunes, converted it to an AAC file and moved it to my iPod. (Whew!) I listened on my way to work this morning, and identified a five-minute segment that goes to the heart of the matter.

The Globe article, by Scott Helman, placed Romney’s words in their proper context. Hearing the whole thing doesn’t make the governor look any better (or worse). Still, a fuller explication does reveal more about Romney’s thinking, and is thus worth a look.

Romney began by attempting to draw an analogy between the smaller/ faster/ more-nimble ethos embraced by the business world in recent years and how the struggle against terrorism ought to be pursued. He managed to work in word of praise for the war in Iraq, calling it part of a necessary “offensive” strategy against terror. And he addressed the futility of local efforts such as trying to defend, say, every bridge in the state, noting that even if it were possible to station a police cruiser at each one, there would be no way of knowing whether any particular vehicle represented a threat.

He then said this:

ROMNEY: In my opinion, based upon the work that I’ve done, it’s virtually impossible to have a homeland-security system based upon the principle only of protecting key assets and response. The key to a multilayered strategy begins with effective prevention. And for me, prevention begins with intelligence and counter-terrorist activity. And if you look back, … of all those billions that went out to the states, how much got spent in that activity, it would be a very, very small portion, if any, in many, many states. And as a nation, I think our number in that regard. How much more are we spending in domestic intelligence and domestic counter-terrorism relative to what we’re spending on protection and response? And I think the number would be very, very small indeed.

What do I mean? … Domestic intelligence – you know, I’m talking about monitoring people who come here from foreign countries that are terrorist-sponsored countries, individuals that may have been taught at places where terrorist training is going on. Tracking students, visitors. We have 120 colleges and universities in Massachusetts, roughly. How many individuals are coming to our state and going to those institutions who have come from terrorist-sponsored states? Do we know where they are? Are we tracking them? How about people who are in settings – mosques, for instance – who may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror? Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping? Are we following what’s going on? Are we seeing who’s coming in, who’s coming out? Are we eavesdropping, carrying out surveillance on those individuals that are coming from places that have sponsored domestic terror?

And by the way, whose job is it do that? Should I do that as a governor? I’ve got those colleges and universities. Should my state police have an intelligence unit that’s monitoring people that are coming in? We’re an international port. Boston gets a lot of flights in. Should we be checking people coming from places of concern and following them, finding out where they go? Checking their hotels, seeing who they meet at their hotels? Should I be doing that at the state level? Should the federal government be doing it instead?

New York City … said, hey, the federal government’s not doing the job, we’d better do it as a city. New York City has substantially more people doing intelligence work, counter-terror work, than my whole state does. [An editorial aside: The population of New York City is about 8 million; of Massachusetts, less than 6.5 million.] As a matter of fact, I wondered whether as governor I was failing by not having this kind of a unit. So I got together with our colleagues on the Homeland Security Advisory Committee and said, we need to understand what the state’s role is and the local role is. Should we do what New York City is doing? Should I establish several hundred or several thousand people in an intelligence capability at the state level? Or should the city of Boston do it, or all 351 cities and towns?… And after working with a lot of different states, I came to some interesting conclusions. First, it is not the state’s role to organize a counter-terror and intelligence capability. That states are free to do that if they’d like to, but by and large that’s the role of the federal government, that’s the FBI. It’s their job to be doing that kind of work.

But it is, however, the state’s role to do something else, and that is to take advantage of the one intelligence source where we have a substantial advantage relative to the terrorists. And that is the advantage of lots of eyes and ears. And that is, it’s the state’s role to find out how to gather the data from its citizens, from the private sector, from the local police departments, from the water and meter readers and so forth, to get the eyes and ears that we have. It’s the state’s responsibility to figure out how to gather that information and fuse it together, interpret it, analyze it, fuse it together, and send it to Washington where it can be connected with eyes and ears from other states, and foreign intelligence, to determine where real threats exist.

Before moving on to another topic, he spent a few moments praising Massachusetts’s own so-called fusion center, which itself has been a matter of some controversy among civil libertarians. And, yes, his reference to meter-readers sounded positively Poindexteresque.

Romney’s comments strike me as troubling but not outrageous. The real problem, I think, is that Romney – while trying to pump up his presidential hopes – said things that could be interpreted as offensive to Muslims without having made the effort to reach out to them first.

As Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, told Helman in a follow-up story, “If the governor is not going to apologize, the least he could do is reach out to the Muslim and immigrant community and say, ‘This is where I was coming from.’ Nobody is going to disagree that there are extremists who are looking to hurt us. We’re just asking for some time around the table to have a conversation.”

I know exactly when I attended my first Bruce Springsteen concert: Oct. 30, 1974, the night of the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Springsteen was playing in the old Music Hall in Boston, later renovated and renamed the Wang Center, and I was up somewhere in the balcony. Dr. John opened. And at 9 p.m., Springsteen and an early version of the E Street Band took the stage.

Bruce began with “Incident on 57th Street,” accompanied only by a young woman playing an electric violin – a spine-tingling performance that presaged the piano-and-glock version of “Thunder Road.” I was already hooked on the strength of his 1973 album, “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle,” which still might be his best. (Certainly it’s the greatest summer album ever.) The band did three and a half hours without much material, stretching “Kitty’s Back,” for instance, to a half-hour workout. At 12:30 a.m., after a series of encores, he finally left the stage for good. The last thing I remember was the promoter walking out to announce that Ali, against all odds, had defeated the mighty Foreman. Pandemonium.

What calls this to mind is a snide piece in today’s Boston Globe by James Parker on the matter of Springsteen-worshippers in academe. Parker has fun lampooning these earnest Bruce fans; and though he acknowledges Springsteen’s undeniable talent, he also disdains him as the most mainstream and conventional of musicians.

To which I say: neither Parker nor the academics get it. The problem stems from the misunderstood arc of Springsteen’s career. His image is that of a rock-and-roller who never really lost whatever it was he had, and who has managed to age gracefully with ever-more-mature songs and performances. The reality is that he was King of the Universe from 1973 to ’82, but has been pretty much sucking wind ever since.

Before there was punk rock, Springsteen was sometimes called a punk. It was a label he deserved: his music was a raucous, street-wise antidote to the bloated, pretentious synth-garbage being put out in the ’70s by the likes of Yes and Emerson Lake & Palmer. “Born to Run” (1975) and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (1978) established him as the coolest guy in rock, “The River” (1980) as its most literate and ambitious, the acoustic howl of “Nebraska” (1982) as its most daring and original.

Now here he is, 23 years later, still recording, still rocking. But the truth is that those early albums were just … about … it. “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984) instantly became the huge hit he had earned, but it was also an artistic comedown. Since then, he’s produced one good album (“Tunnel of Love,” 1987), one very good album (“The Ghost of Tom Joad,” 1995) and some real dreck. His 9/11 album, “The Rising” (2002), is such an embarrassment that it makes my skin crawl when I listen to it. (The one decent song, “My City of Ruins,” was written before 9/11.) His new album, “Devils & Dust,” is notable mainly for the title song, which is about the Iraq war, and the sweet “Jesus Was an Only Son.” (But what happened to James? Jesus’ brother, that is, not Parker.)

It’s hardly surprising that a man who was a celebrated rock star in his 20s and 30s would see the quality of his output diminish considerably in his 40s and 50s. Certainly “Devils & Dust” is a damn sight better than anything a whole raft of ’60s and ’70s stars have managed to produce since their golden days. Thus it’s not so much Springsteen I’m objecting to as it is the notion advanced by his most ardent fans that he hasn’t lost a thing, and that he’s as vital as he ever was. Well, yes he has, and no he isn’t.

As for Parker, he correctly observes that Springsteen doesn’t matter nearly as much as these folks believe, but he makes the mistake of extrapolating backwards to assert that he never did. Sorry, James. Bruce Springsteen saved rock and roll. For a decade, he mattered like few pop stars have ever mattered, just a few steps behind Bob Dylan, John Lennon and a tiny handful of others.

That Dylan himself has turned out to be more interesting in his 60s than Springsteen is in his 50s is just one of those unfortunate facts of life. But don’t try to take away from what Bruce did when he was damn close to being the only musician who mattered.

In his column on Jay Severin in yesterday’s Globe, Scot Lehigh reported that Severin’s claim of having won a Pulitzer Prize was false – that, in fact, Severin had merely been writing for MSNBC.com back in 2000, when the site won an Online Journalism Award. Severin, in trying to explain his hyperbole, told Lehigh that the award was “the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Web journalism.”

Which begs the question: Were Severin’s contributions specifically acknowledged in the award that MSNBC.com won? Unfortunately, the Online Journalism Awards have changed sponsors several times, and a Google search led me down a trail of broken links. However, I did find the judges’ comments for the 2000 award in a press release on LexisNexis. Here are those comments:

THE JUDGES: MSNBC.com creates a highly successful blend of online and interactive elements, making innovative use of most every interactive application, such as charts, maps, surveys, and streaming video. The site offers a commendable marriage of original journalism with video resources, and, more broadly, a successful integration of journalism from its partners and alliance members. In this case, bigger surely is better.

Given those criteria, Severin’s reported claim that “I received a Pulitzer Prize for my columns for excellence in online journalism” looks even more ridiculous.

By the way, Severin was not at his post yesterday on the airwaves of WTKK Radio (96.9 FM). His usual custom when attacked is to spend most of his show whipping “The Best and the Brightest” into a frenzy. It would be unfair of me to speculate why he took yesterday off (his absence could easily be explained by contract complications raised by his new syndication deal), but it certainly would have been interesting to hear his response to Lehigh’s column.

The Globe’s Geoff Edgers today reports that right-wing/ libertarian/ frat-boy radio-talk-show host Jay Severin is going national. Severin, of course, is best known for his charming descriptions of Hillary Clinton as a “socialist” and a “pig,” and for his blow-torch rhetoric against “towelheads” and “wetbacks.”

The silver lining in Edgers’s piece is that there’s a chance Severin will disappear from the local airwaves.

Meanwhile, longtime Severin nemesis Scot Lehigh, in his Globe column today, accuses Severin of having falsely claimed to have won a Pulitzer Prize. No doubt Severin will be trashing Lehigh today from 3 to 7 p.m.

Oh, look: here’s a website that claims Severin is too liberal. Good grief.