Media Nation

Another local newspaper owner bit the dust yesterday, as the Eagle-Tribune Company announced it was selling its four Massachusetts dailies – and a few assorted weeklies – to an Alabama-based holding company. Mark Jurkowitz had details on this yesterday; the Herald and the Globe follow today.

It was only a few years ago that the Eagle-Tribune Company, whose flagship is the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, bought three North Shore papers from Dow Jones’s Ottaway division: the Salem News, the Daily News of Newburyport and the Gloucester Daily Times. As a reader of the Salem News, I haven’t been particularly impressed by the Eagle-Tribune’s stewardship. News coverage seems thinner, and the editorial page has moved considerably to the right, out of step, I think, with the liberal communities it serves.

But local ownership has its advantages, and there’s no question that the Rogers family put considerable resources into the Eagle-Tribune itself, which has won two Pulitzer Prizes over the years. (Disclosure: My wife, Barbara Kennedy, is a former photographer for the Salem News.)

It struck me as oddly inappropriate for a newspaper company that no Eagle-Tribune officials would speak to the media after the sale was announced. Indeed, NECN’s Mont Fennel (scroll to “Alabama company to buy Eagle-Tribune”), hardly a pit bull, traveled to Eagle-Tribune headquarters in North Andover only to be told that no one was talking. Maybe Chip Rogers was afraid someone would ask some tough questions about the intentions of the new owner, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. (CNHI).

In a statement, Rogers said the right things about CNHI being dedicated “high-quality local journalism.” But the fact is that the company is largely funded by the Teachers’ Retirement System of Alabama, which, one can safely assume, has a fiduciary responsibility to earn the highest possible rate of return for all those retired schoolteachers. I’m sure that if you asked any of them whether they’d rather have an extra city-hall reporter in Peabody or another $20 in their monthly check, every last one of them is going to vote for Andrew Jackson.

Check out the top of this May 26, 2004, story from the Birmingham News, which reports on the not-so-glowing outlook of the retirement system:

MONTGOMERY – A looming rise in interest rates and concerns over oil, Iraq and China mean investment returns won’t be as rosy in coming months for the Teachers’ Retirement System, system executive David Bronner predicted Tuesday.

Teachers’ Retirement System is Alabama’s pension program for 186,000 active and retired public education employees.

It held stocks, bonds and other assets worth nearly $17.1 billion on March 31, and reported a six-month return on investments of 11.98 percent, according to State Street Corp. in Boston, the system’s custodian.

That was less than the return of 15.98 percent the pension program posted for the 2003 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Even so, Bronner said he was pleased with the “fantastic” results from the first half of the system’s 2004 fiscal year.

But Bronner predicted performance would slow even more in the year’s second half, which ends Sept. 30. “It would be nice if we had that for the whole year, but it’s highly improbable,” Bronner said. “It’s sliding day by day the other way.”

Bronner said he would be happy if investment returns for the six months ending Sept. 30 managed to grow by 5 percent.

“Hopefully, it’ll be positive, but with the exterior volatility out there, it could easily be the opposite and be a losing half year,” Bronner said.

Teachers’ lobbyist Paul Hubbert, who chairs the system’s board, said he would be pleased if the return for 2004 ended up at 8 percent or 9 percent.

“You like to see those 18 to 20 percent years, but they don’t come very often,” Hubbert said.

You like to see those 18 to 20 percent years, but they don’t come very often. There’s the essence of it. Journalists in the Merrimack Valley and on the North Shore can be expected to help Alabama’s retired schoolteachers earn 18 to 20 percent on their pension money, on top of whatever debt CNHI took on in order to buy out the Rogers family.

This is not a happy day for local news consumers.

Former Boston Herald sports columnist Michael Gee, who’s had his troubles of late, contributes a nice piece to the Village Voice on what he sees as the fading Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. A sample:

GEE: A rural game, baseball is based on the growing cycle. The Yanks and Sox are hothouse plants, hybrids generated by deranged agronomists in their front offices and owners’ suites. Each team and its fan base have come to see the presence of a rookie in the starting lineup as a symbol of failure. That’s a guarantee of sterility. All societies have myths cautioning that wealth cannot buy youth. The Sox and Yanks have become baseball’s.

It’s good to see Gee stretch out, as he used to do in the Phoenix but was unable to do in the Herald. Someone ought to take a chance on this guy.

I’ve changed the name of this blog yet again, moved it Blogspot.com, and turned on comments and syndication. If everything shakes down properly in the next day or so, I’ll revise this to version 1.0.

The New York Times yesterday reported on the cases of two self-described journalists who have been jailed in the Middle East under American auspices. One, a filmmaker named Cyrus Kar, is now free; he had been imprisoned in Iraq after the vehicle in which he was riding was found to contain timers that are often used in explosives. Though what happened to Kar is troubling, it at least appears that officials eventually did the right thing. But the matter of Edward Caraballo, a Bronx documentarian with four Emmys to his credit, is – at least based on what we know – outrageous.

Both of these cases have gotten some media attention; I was not entirely unfamiliar with either of them. But neither story has received the coverage it deserves. Caraballo, in particular, appears to have been abandoned. When I visited the website of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, I could find only one reference, a link to a wire story from last fall. And I came up with nothing when I searched the websites of the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.

To be sure, Caraballo’s is not an easy case. According to the Times report, he accompanied two American military veterans who were convicted of entering Afghanistan as mercenaries and engaging in torture. Caraballo has been accused of being employed by the ringleader, Jack Idema. Caraballo insists he was there as an independent journalist, although he admits to having had a business relationship with Idema in the past.

According to this “Democracy Now!” report from last September, Caraballo’s lawyer and brother claim that Idema’s crew was acting as bounty hunters for the United States, and that Idema had a Pentagon contact with whom he frequently exchanged messages. If true, that would certainly give US and Afghan officials powerful incentive not to let Caraballo go free until he has finished serving his two-year sentence in a Kabul prison, where he has been the target of anti-American violence. In the “Democracy Now!” transcript, Richard Caraballo, Edward’s brother, claims that the Committee to Protect Journalists refused to take up his brother’s cause because of Edward Caraballo’s alleged business ties to Jack Imeda.

At the very least, the mainstream media ought to follow up on the charges contained in the “Democracy Now!” report, which raise the specter of a journalist being silenced under extreme conditions in order to cover up a dubious secret operation.

The New York Times has a typo on its website right now – a headline that reads “Britian [sic] Says Man Killed by Police Had No Tie to Bombing.” So, naturally, Drudge goes ahead and copies it – typo and all.

I will be away for the next week, so no posts. In fact, the reason I’m leaving this in beta for the moment is that I won’t be ready to post regularly until mid-August or so. But please stay tuned.

A rather odd construct in David Brooks’s column in today’s New York Times. The piece – an ode to Judge Michael McConnell, whom Brooks would like to see named to the Supreme Court – includes this sentence: “McConnell (whom I have never met) is an honest, judicious scholar.”

Whom he has never met? Okay. Then I guess we have to assume Brooks has met everyone else he names in the column: Harry Reid, Arlen Specter, Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Mary Ann Glendon, and George W. Bush. And yes, I imagine he has. But so what?

We can probably rule out three others named by Brooks (whom I have met): Jesus, Rousseau, and Jefferson. The question remains: What was the point of this particular disclosure?

Robert Luskin, the lawyer for White House chief political adviser Karl Rove, has given an interview to Byron York in National Review Online that fleshes out the theory that Rove was not exposing CIA operative Valerie Plame but, rather, was seeking to warn Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper off a bad story. This is worth reading, not least because it might actually be true.

The whole Plame matter could turn out to be one of those celebrated scandals that falls apart upon close inspection – although President Bush still has to deal with the fact that he said he would fire whoever leaked Plame’s name to the media. Rove may not have broken any law, but it appears that he did leak her identity, if not her actual name.

How complicated is this? Check out Boston Globe columnist Robert Kuttner’s piece today, headlined “Second Thoughts on Leak Case.” For that matter, I’m prepared to take back at least some of this, depending on how events play out.

Steven Greenhouse has a good and important story on the front page of today’s New York Times about the exploitation of janitors, especially those who are illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, it’s undermined by a failure – it’s not clear whose – to do some elementary fact-checking.

Greenhouse writes that Isaias Garcia, who claims he’s owed $22,000 in back pay, is “a 24-year-old immigrant from Mexico … who lives with his wife, 5-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter in a one-bedroom apartment in Anaheim.” But the accompanying photo, by Monica Almeida, shows not two but three children. The caption reads: “Isaias Garcia says he is owed $22,000 in overtime pay and has complained to the California labor department. Mr. Garcia is shown with his son Diego, 13; wife, Rosario; daughter, Adela, 4, and son Josue, 5.”

If Diego is indeed Isaias’s son, then Isaias became a father when he was 11 years old. Not scientifically impossible, but it certainly strains credulity. Could Diego be a neighbor? A nephew? Isaias’s younger brother? For the answer, I suggested keeping an eye on tomorrow’s corrections.

If there’s one thing to love about the Boston Globe’s new Sidekick insert – and there may indeed only be one thing – it’s that the comics are finally the right size. When the Globe moved the funnies from the main part of the paper into Sidekick, they got bigger, too. For those of us who spend a few minutes with the comics each morning, this is a cause for celebration.

Some history, pulled up not from any research I’ve conducted, but from the imperfect recesses of my memory:

The large-format comics in Sidekick are nothing new, but, rather, are a return to the size that comics were in the past. Broadsheet newspapers were traditionally much wider than they are today. Most of us recall that, a few years ago, the Globe shrank itself a few inches, and is today narrower than the New York Times. But I’m not talking about that. A true broadsheet is the width of the Wall Street Journal, which is at least a half-column wider even than the Times. Today the Journal looks like an anomaly; but that format was once standard. That was the width of the Woonsocket (Rhode Island) Call, for instance, when I was a Northeastern co-op student there in the 1970s.

With such a wide format, comics could be published side-by-side at the size that God – or at least Charles Schulz – intended them. But as the pages got narrower, the comics got squeezed. There are a few exceptions. When Garry Trudeau returned from a leave of absence in the 1980s in order to resume “Doonesbury,” he won a concession forcing newspapers that wanted to carry it to run it at the old, traditional width. Bill Griffith, who does “Zippy,” may have the same arrangement: in looking at the Globe of July 1, I see that both “Doonesbury” and “Zippy” are 6 3/8 inches across, whereas everything else is less than 5 3/4 inches.

In Sidekick, by contrast, every comic strip is right around 6 1/2 inches wide. It’s much more readable that way, and the art pops out as well. It would be nice if other newspapers were to emulate the Globe. It might even encourage artists to go for more detail and complexity than can be accommodated at the narrower width.

Elsewhere, Mark Jurkowitz talks with Globe publisher Richard Gilman about Sidekick.