Tag: Boston Globe

Whitey Bulger plays unfavorites in the press

James_Whitey_Bulger_capturedA few days ago we learned that Whitey Bulger had named Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy, Globe columnist Kevin Cullen, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr and former Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill as possible witnesses in his federal trial.

Today we learn the likely reason: the five, all of whom have written books about Bulger’s murderous ways, might be barred from attending the trial if Judge Denise Casper rules that potential witnesses must be kept out of the courtroom.

Murphy writes that her paper has asked Casper to allow her and Cullen to attend the trial on the grounds that they are the Globe’s leading experts on the Bulger case, having covered it since the 1980s. She reports that prosecutors have called Bulger’s witness list a ploy to keep out certain media and non-media witnesses.

In the Herald, Laurel Sweet quotes Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kelly as saying, “It’s not a real witness list. He’s just putting names on there in order to keep them out of the courtroom.”

Let’s hope Judge Casper refuses to go along with this travesty.

A strange, angry column about Angelina Jolie

What a strange, angry column Jennifer Graham has written for The Boston Globe about Angelina Jolie.

To read it, you would never know that Jolie had an 87 percent chance of getting breast cancer. Instead, Graham portrays it as a choice any woman could have made, and one that Jolie indulged because she is privileged, rich and has tattoos, which, we are told, proves she likes to mutilate her body.

Why would Graham’s editor not kick this back and say, “Try again”?

In latest circulation numbers, the difference is digital

Print circulation at the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald continues to slide, according to the latest data from the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations).

But the Globe’s success in selling digital subscriptions has led to a healthy 8.9 percent increase in its Monday-through-Friday paid circulation and a 4.6 percent increase on Sundays. The Herald’s paid circulation, by contrast, is down 11.6 percent on weekdays and 10.8 percent on Sundays.

The numbers are based on a comparison between the six-month periods ending on March 30, 2013, and March 30, 2012. Here are the topline figures:

  • Boston Globe: Weekdays, 245,572, up from 225,482. Sundays, 382,452, up from 365,512.
  • Boston Herald: Weekdays, 95,929, down from 108,548. Sundays, 73,043, down from 81,925.

The underlying totals tell an interesting story. The Globe’s weekday print circulation dropped from 195,947 to 172,048 (down 12.2 percent), and its Sunday print edition fell from 343,194 to 309,771 (down 9.7 percent). But the number of readers who use the Globe’s paid website, BostonGlobe.com, rose from 19,313 to 60,134 on weekdays and from 19,599 to 60,301 on Sundays.

(Note: Despite the seeming precision of these figures, there may be some minor discrepancies. The 2012 totals in the just-released “Newspaper Snapshot” do not perfectly match the audit reports posted elsewhere on the AAM site.)

As I’ve explained before, the actual number of digital subscribers is about half that reported by the AAM, since its totals include print subscribers who also make regular use of BostonGlobe.com, which home-delivery customers can access for free.

The Globe totals also include readers who access the ePaper — that is, the digital replica edition, which looks exactly like the print edition. A year ago, the ePaper was just barely getting off the ground. Now it accounts for 13,390 paid weekday subscriptions and another 12,380 on Sundays.

The challenge for the Herald is that, as readers lose the print habit, the paper is not offering a compelling paid digital alternative. The Herald has free smartphone and tablet apps, and, like the Globe, it posts a paid replica edition (the Electronic Edition), which is how we do most of our Herald-reading at Media Nation.

But replica editions just aren’t that compelling. Currently the Herald’s e-edition attracts 9,810 paying customers on weekdays and 1,216 on Sundays.

BostonHerald.com remains free. In the past, publisher Pat Purcell has dropped hints that that could change. Certainly it would surprise no one if that change came sooner rather than later.

Boosting digital subscriptions. The Globe’s free website, Boston.com, began running brief summaries of Globe stories today in an attempt to boost digital subscriptions.

The move had been expected for some time, as editor Brian McGrory talked about it in an interview with Andrew Beaujon of Poynter.org in February. But the timing could prove to be interesting, since it follows the Globe’s widely praised coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings.

The paper lowered the paywall during the worst of it, which, as Seth Fiegerman reported for Mashable, resulted in an enormous increase in Web traffic. It bears watching to see how many of those readers can now be converted into paying customers.

Two more for your must-read list

Eric Moskowitz’s Boston Globe interview with the Tsarnaev brothers’ carjacking victim is just astonishing — detailed, full of suspense (even though we know the outcome) and tautly written. And the Globe’s Kevin Cullen continues to show why he has emerged as the voice of the city following the Boston Marathon bombings.

Casting some doubt on the official marathon accounts

Boston Marathon bombing memorial at the Boston Common Gazebo

For the police — and for the public — last Friday was a day of fear, rage and confusion. So it takes nothing away from the work done by law-enforcement officials to point out that things didn’t go down exactly the way they were described in real time.

Three big stories today underscore that confusion. The most significant is in the Washington Post, which reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was probably unarmed when police fired on the boat in Watertown where he was hiding. They quote an anonymous official as saying that an officer may have accidentally fired his gun, setting off a fusillade.

Such a “fog of war” situation, as the Post describes it, is totally understandable. And yet, if authorities lost a chance to bring in a high-value terrorism suspect alive for questioning, it would have been a serious loss.

In the Boston Globe, a team of reporters quotes law enforcement as saying that it is now believed Tsarnaev’s neck wound came from flying shrapnel rather than a self-inflicted bullet wound, which fits in with the emerging theory that he was unarmed.

And from the New York Times we learn that the boat was actually inside the search perimeter, contradicting earlier reports. Again, not to second-guess the police, but it makes you wonder what sort of search they conducted during all those hours on Friday.

Journalists should approach the official account with skepticism, not cynicism. We need to know exactly what happened last week — including, of course, whether the Boston Marathon bombings can be attributed to a breakdown in intelligence-sharing among the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, which is the main focus of the Globe article.

Photo (cc) by AnubisAbyuss and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

The problem is the reliance on anonymous sources

On Wednesday afternoon, as the media were having a nervous breakdown over the bombing suspect who was/was not in custody, I received a private message over Twitter from a friend who’s a longtime newspaper reporter:

They were saying they had multiple sources. You know what the problem is, they don’t name their sources. If you had no anonymous sources, then whoever gave them the information would be on the hook. Only in extreme cases do we use anonymous sources!

Leaving aside the obvious fact that this really is an extreme case, my friend is exactly right. Every time there’s a huge breaking news story, it seems, news organizations report developments that turn out to be wrong — and that were based on anonymous law-enforcement sources.

Maybe that could be justified a generation ago, when such leaks were used to develop reliable stories. But now the pressure to publish/broadcast/tweet immediately is so overwhelming that a bombshell from an anonymous source leads not to more reporting but, rather, to an immediate, breathless update.

CNN got most of the attention on Wednesday, and, as a repeat offender, it really ought to be more careful. The Associated Press got it wrong, too, and that matters because editors generally don’t double-check the AP — they’re paying for the service, after all, and the AP is treated as an extension of their own newsrooms.

The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald and local TV and radio stations got it wrong, too. The Herald has a useful timeline on page 4 today. I couldn’t find it on the paper’s website, but I’ll add a link if someone has it.

So was the source or sources normally reliable, which is the argument we’re hearing from some of those who got burned? I think that’s the wrong question. It’s the reliance on anonymous sources that’s the problem, not whether those sources were right or wrong. That may be the way it’s always been done. But if Wednesday didn’t prove that there’s something wrong with the old model, then what will?

Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple has a good take on what happened Wednesday, including the full text of the FBI smackdown. At Poynter, Andrew Beaujon and Mallary Jean Tenore put together a Storify that tracks how the initial news and the embarrassing walkback played out on Twitter.

Carly Carioli is now tweeting for Boston.com

More good news from the land of the former Phoenicians: Carly Carioli, the last editor of the Boston Phoenix, has been hired by Boston.com, the Boston Globe’s free website. “I’m working on new projects aimed at attracting younger readers,” he tells me.

Carly is as smart as they come and did a great job of steering the Phoenix through its last couple of years — including its final incarnation as a glossy magazine. You can (and should) follow him on Twitter at @carlycarioli.

Herald questions Globe over account of cab accident

In case you missed it, in part three of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team series on the Boston cab industry we learned that Globe staff member Bob Hohler got in an accident while driving a taxi in the course of his reporting:

Before his stint behind the wheel ends, the reporter will see what it means to be cheated by a taxi company and his ­passengers. And he will survive a harrowing crash — a ­not-uncommon occupational hazard — after a motorist runs a red light near Copley Square. The collision will send the reporter and his passengers to the hospital and destroy the taxicab.

Today the Boston Herald comes back with a front-page story by Matt Stout questioning the Globe’s account of the accident as well as Hohler’s hands-on reporting technique:

A Boston Globe reporter masquerading as a Hub taxi driver gave a disputed version of a two-car crash that sent him and his two passengers to the hospital in a front-page story yesterday that’s raising questions about liability and whether he misrepresented himself.

The Herald also quotes a statement from the Globe that appears to deny Hohler was under cover — it says Hohler identified himself to Boston Police and his passengers. It’s a little unclear, though, whether that was before or after the accident. [Update: The police knew ahead of time, but the cab company didn’t, though Hohler says he would have identified himself if asked.]*

Coincidentally, last week I had an opportunity to spend some time with New York University journalism professor Brooke Kroeger, who argues in her book “Undercover Reporting: The Truth about Deception” that such techniques have gotten an undeserved bad rap. Kroeger, among other things, is the biographer of Nelly Bly, the ultimate undercover reporter.

I am reasonably sure that John Carroll will weigh in on the latest Globe-Herald dust-up later today. Should make for interesting reading.

*More: Hohler talks about the experience in a Globe video.

Still more: John Carroll takes his first cut, but appears to be withholding his judgment for the time being.

More and more: Earlier today, I had the following Twitter exchange with the redoubtable Seth Mnookin:

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/319415805542539264

Now Carroll has taken his second cut, and characterizes Mnookin and me as taking the position that the Herald’s reporting is “totally without merit.” In fact, I wouldn’t characterize it that way. I was agreeing with Mnookin as to why the Herald jumped into the fray, but I didn’t mean to imply that the tabloid was shooting nothing but blanks.

Essentially, I agree with Carroll: the Herald raised a legitimate question, but overplayed it, as is its wont.

Ex-Phoenician David Bernstein’s big Menino win

Tom Menino in 2008

My former Boston Phoenix colleague David Bernstein, now looking for work, scored a big win on Wednesday, reporting before anyone that Mayor Tom Menino would not seek re-election. With the Phoenix now history, Bernstein posted the news on his blog — first as rumor, later as confirmed fact.

Given that Menino gave major interviews Wednesday to the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, it strikes me as exceedingly likely that a media embargo was in place — and I received additional, direct confirmation of that this morning. Which just goes to show the futility of embargoes in the Internet age. Good for Bernstein for operating outside the system, even if it’s not by his own choice. News organizations might consider rethinking their participation in such attempts at media manipulation.

Both the Globe and the Herald offer excellent coverage of the Menino era today. And how about Globe editor Brian McGrory jumping back into the fray by interviewing Menino and writing a column? McGrory was the Globe’s signature voice for years. Returning to the trenches for one day was a smart move.

More: Andrew Beaujon of Poynter has a nice Storify on how Bernstein’s scoop played out on Twitter.

Photo (cc) by Dan4th Nicholas and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Boston Globe recycles a year-old AP story

The Boston Globe does some major recycling today by publishing a year-old story on the political battle over same-sex marriage. The story, by David Crary of the Associated Press, appears on page A11 of the print eReader edition* and begins:

Foes and supporters of same-sex marriage are gearing up for five costly and bruising statewide showdowns in the coming months on an issue that evenly divides Americans.

It’s an election year subplot sure to stir up heated emotions …

And yes, that would be the 2012 election year.

It turns out that Crary’s article ran on the free Boston.com site on March 8, 2012, under the headline “Bruising gay-marriage showdowns likely in 5 states.” The classics are classics for a reason, I guess.

Subplot: The story appears nowhere today at the paid BostonGlobe.com site. I had to look it up in the ePaper edition after being asked about it on Twitter by @NotSoNiceville. Isn’t BostonGlobe.com, which is a paid site, supposed to include every story in the print edition?

*Update: Eagle-eyed David Bernstein reports that the entire page A11 of the eReader edition is from March 8, 2012. So apparently this is a problem with the eReader edition only — not with the print edition, which only appears up here in Media Nation on Sundays.

Update II: From @BostonGlobePR: “Due to a production error, pages from 3/11/2012 were appended to today’s ePaper. The edition will be corrected and reprocessed.”

Update III: As commenter Bill Ritchotte noted earlier today, the Globe’s free Boston.com site posted an item from a syndication service called the Prudent Investor “reporting” that Nobel Prize-winning economist (and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman had declared bankruptcy.

In fact, the Prudent Investor had been taken in by a satirical site called the Daily Currant. There’s a German angle as well. Mediaite has the details and Romenesko has an image of the Boston.com page before the item was taken down. For what it’s worth, I’m told Boston.com runs the Prudent Investor feed on autopilot.

Update IV (2:30 p.m.): I just received an email from Globe spokeswoman Ellen Clegg. She writes: “The post about Paul Krugman was an automatic feed on a partner website, FinancialContent.com, which Boston.com uses to provide stock and other financial data. The story did not originate with the Boston Globe or Boston.com, and we worked to get it taken down as soon as we heard about it from readers. We have asked FinancialContent.com to provide us with more information as to how this story was added into their financial news feed.”