By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
I think I was traveling when the latest changes at the Boston Globe were announced. Anyway, metro reporter Donovan Slack is heading for the Globe’s Washington bureau to replace Susan Milligan, who’s taking a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Jessica Heslam of the Boston Herald has the details, as well as memos from the Globe’s Washington bureau chief, Chris Rowland.
In a very smart move, Boston magazine announced today that it has persuaded former Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara to write a monthly column. Romenesko has the details and the press release.
McNamara, who won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, is now a journalism professor at Brandeis University. Says McNamara:
These are challenging times for the city and for the commonwealth. I am eager to rejoin the public conversation and excited to join the talented team of journalists at Boston magazine.
Like many others at the Globe, McNamara in 2007 took an early-retirement buyout while the paper was going through several rounds of painful downsizing. Her voice has been missed, and I’m glad to learn that we’ll be hearing from her once again.
Boston Globe reporter and editor Jim Smith is leaving the paper in order to become director of communications at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Last August, Smith won the 2009 International Perspective Award from the Associated Press Managing Editors Association.
What follows is an internal e-mail from deputy managing editor Mark Morrow, sent on behalf of himself and editor Marty Baron. Media Nation obtained a copy a little while ago.
All: Hard news today — Jim Smith, who brought his remarkable talent and humane presence to the Globe eight years ago, will be leaving us this month for a new foreign posting — in Cambridge. Jim has just been named the director of communications at the JFK School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the school’s global policy issues hub, joining the growing Globe ex-pat community at Harvard.
Jim came to the Globe, from the LA Times Mexico City bureau, in March 2002, which meant that he started as foreign editor at a time of maximum tumult, complexity, danger and opportunity. It was one of the finest hours for our small but astonishingly gifted team of foreign correspondents, and a time when the Globe, under Jim’s leadership, extended itself to the limit to bring thoughtful, nuanced, enterprising and brave coverage of the Afghan and Iraq wars to our readers. By early 2003, 14 reporters and photographers were covering the conflict, not to mention terrorist attacks in London, Madrid and 2006 war in Lebanon.
Near disaster, and unthinkable loss also marked his tenure. Within weeks of Jim’s start as foreign editor, Anthony Shadid was shot in the shoulder in Ramallah. Two months later came one of the greatest tragedies ever suffered by the Globe staff, when Elizabeth Neuffer, one of the most brilliant, resourceful and courageous reporters ever to work here, died in Samarra, north of Baghdad. Jim’s gift of humanity and personal connection helped his staff, and helped us all, to make it through and eventually out of the darkness.
With the closure of our foreign bureaus in 2007, Jim took on another extraordinarily demanding challenge, working side-by-side with Peter Canellos in managing our standout coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, right up through an Extra Edition on the morning of Obama’s inauguration. And then it was on to his latest endeavor, creating out of whole-cloth a new beat mining Boston’s many remarkable connections to the world, and the world to it. This meant not only penning a stream of enterprising pieces, but also mastering a newer art form, the blog.
To say Jim made a swift success in his new beat would be to understate the case. Within six months, he won the Associated Press Managing Editors award for international perspective. It was, in fact, the second time the Globe won that prize for work in which Jim played a central role. The first was for the Lives Lost project, a 16-page special section focused on the 24,000 people around the world who die every day for want of basic medical care. Searching, smart, compassionate and richly readable work — that, start to finish, was Jim’s gift to us.
We’ll find just the right way to say good-bye and make Jim blush one day — and evening — soon. But in the meantime, wish him well and book your place on his lunch schedule soon. It gets lonely on the other side of the Charles.
Mark and Marty
Have we reached the final days for anonymous news-site commenters? Probably not — that’s more hope than reality. But there’s no doubt the tide is shifting away from the anonymous and pseudonymous insults, libel and hate speech that comprise the majority of comments at news sites.
This past Sunday, the Boston Globe Magazine posted a feature by Neil Swidey on the anonymous commenters who waste electrons on the Globe’s website, Boston.com. Except that Swidey didn’t quite succeed. The truly anonymous whackos with whom he hoped to connect refused to crawl out from under their rocks. Instead, he ended up with a highly entertaining profile of two men who didn’t mind revealing their identities and to a female Red Sox fan who all but identified herself. Swidey writes of his quest to interview the worst of the worst:
[H]ere are the people I didn’t hear back from: the screamers, troublemakers, and trolls (Internet slang for people behind inflammatory posts). Not a single one. The loudest, most aggressive voices grew mum when asked to explain themselves, to engage in an actual discussion. The trolls appear to prize their anonymity more than anyone else.
The story is accompanied by a video starring the two men. Also, last night Swidey talked about the story with “Greater Boston” host Emily Rooney on WGBH-TV (Channel 2). I couldn’t find a direct link, but you’ll find it easily enough if you click here or on the image above.
For much of the year, the news business has been growing increasingly uneasy over anonymous comments. Swidey himself discusses some of the problems — legal challenges that could force news organizations to help potential libel plaintiffs expose commenters they want to sue, and the bizarre situation at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which outed a judge who had apparently been commenting on her own cases under a pseudonym. (For what it’s worth, Media Nation started requiring real names earlier this year.)
As Rooney points out in her interview with Swidey, just yesterday the Buffalo News announced that it would soon banish anonymous comments. And American Journalism Review editor Rem Rieder has called for an end to anonymity, pointing out that the same newspapers that allow them customarily ban anonymous letters to the editor and do not allow unnamed sources to level personal attacks. Rieder writes:
Comments sections are often packed with profanity and vicious personal attacks. The opportunity to launch brutal assaults from the safety of a computer without attaching a name does wonders for the bravery levels of the angry.
One alternative, which I’ve mentioned before, is to use Facebook as a commenting system. Nearly everyone on Facebook uses his or her real name, usually accompanied by a photo. The Globe itself is among newspapers that posts links to some of its stories on Facebook, where you will find a far more civil conversation than what’s on Boston.com.
Anonymous commenting is an idea whose time has come and gone. Whatever hopes early Internet visionaries had that anonymity could be compatible with community have long since proven to be wrong. I hope Swidey’s story serves as an inadvertent spur to the Globe — and to other news organizations — to end this failed experiment.
Congratulations to WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) and John Davidow, the executive editor of WBUR.org, who won a $250,000 Knight News Challenge grant to experiment with how digital tools should be used to cover trials and other court proceedings.
Davidow tells Laura McGann of the Nieman Journalism Lab that Quincy District Court will be used as a model to come up with a consistent set of guidelines that will foster greater openness.
Issues to be dealt with include whether and under what circumstances citizen journalists can live-blog a trial, and if one of the parties may post to Twitter in real time — as former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who faces federal corruption charges, wanted to do. Davidow tells McGann:
The courts have sort of gone further and further way from the public and public access. In the old days, they were built in the center of town. The community was able to walk into the courts and see what was going on. Modern life has done away with that. The bridge that was going in between the courts and the public was the media. The media has just less resources.
Davidow’s was one of 12 projects that will receive $2.74 million in the coming year. The others range from ideas to crowdsource the funding of public radio stories to various efforts aimed at melding mapping and gaming features with news presentations. Here is the complete list.
The Boston Globe, too. The Knight folks have announced that the Globe will receive a contract for more than $130,000 to develop and test a widget based on EveryBlock, an automated, hyperlocal aggregation platform, as part of a $450,000 program called OpenBlock.
The Boston Globe, in an “Editor’s Note,” acknowledges that a biased report on Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s recent commencement speech at Brandeis University was produced by a correspondent who had written blog posts opposing Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. (Via John Carroll.)
Mark Feeney has a nice tribute to Robert Healy in today’s Boston Globe. But Healy, the paper’s former executive editor, who died on Saturday at 84, was a lot more important to the Globe than Feeney lets on. In fact, Healy, with considerable help from future House Speaker Tip O’Neill, had much to do with the Globe’s rise as New England’s dominant media institution.
O’Neill’s actions in the 1960s, goaded by Healy, revealed that Robert “Beanie” Choate, owner of the Boston Herald Traveler, had improper dealings with the FCC that allowed him to circumvent the ban against owning a daily newspaper and a television station in the same market. The Herald was stripped of its license to operate Channel 5 in 1972, leading to the death of two separate incarnations of the Herald. (Today’s Herald is essentially a start-up that dates back to the early 1980s.)
The story was revealed in John Aloysius Farrell’s biography of O’Neill, “Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century,” which I had the great pleasure of writing about for the Boston Phoenix in February 2001. The story of how O’Neill and Healy made common cause is a rollicking tale involving the Kennedys, a corrupt deal that resulted in John Kennedy winning an undeserved Pulitzer Prize for “Profiles in Courage” and O’Neill’s fear that if his role in helping the Globe were discovered, the Republican Herald would crucify him.
Farrell has a great quote from Ben Bradlee, retired executive editor of the Washington Post, who said of Healy: “This little angelic-faced Healy. He looked like a choirboy. Nobody would think what he was up to. He and I shared stuff. I loved the fact Choate was in trouble.”
Healy himself said of O’Neill: “He did right by the Globe and all right in the Globe through the years.”
Not exactly a tribute to the journalistic ethics of the era. But a great story nevertheless.
In my latest for the Guardian, I follow up my recent interview with SeeClickFix co-founder and chief executive Ben Berkowitz by taking a look at how news organizations such as the New Haven Independent and the Boston Globe have put its tools to work.
The Boston Globe Spotlight series on the state Patronage Department — ah, I mean Probation Department — is public-interest journalism at its best.
Commissioner Jack O’Brien has been suspended. There’s a chance for genuine reform. And the absurd gubernatorial candidacy of hacked-up state treasurer Tim Cahill has been brought to a merciful end, even if he doesn’t know it yet.
But credit should also go to CommonWealth Magazine and its blog, CW Unbound, which has been beating the drums about the Probation Department for months. CommonWealth, published by the nonpartisan Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassINC), has put together a compilation of stories it’s posted on the Probation Department mess. (Disclosure: I used to be a regular contributor to CommonWealth, and I’m still listed on the masthead.)
On May 3, for example, CommonWealth reporter Jack Sullivan wrote about a court case involving Stephen Anzalone, who was challenging his rejection as a probation officer even though he would have been the seventh member of his family to draw a paycheck from the agency.
And on April 14, editor Bruce Mohl interviewed House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Murphy on why he opposed a plan by Gov. Deval Patrick to bring the out-of-control agency under the executive branch’s wing.
The Globe, as the region’s largest and most influential news organization, is doing what it does best: driving the agenda and forcing public officials to do what they should have done a long time ago. And CommonWealth, like other smaller players, is performing its role admirably as well: by keeping the story simmering until it was ready to come to a boil.
Former Boston Globe reporter Tom Palmer, who covered development for many years before switching sides and becoming a communications consultant, is urging his clients to bombard the Globe’s online-comments system.
Another former Globe reporter, CommonWealth Magazine editor Bruce Mohl, has obtained an e-mail from Palmer in which he urges residents of Harbor Towers to comment early and often in their opposition to plans by developer Don Chiofaro to build a skyscraper next to the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. Palmer writes:
[Newspapers] don’t like it, and some of them are even considering getting rid of the “comment” feature because it clearly weakens their power. But for now we may comment and comment and comment — just as Don’s supporters do.
Mohl posts the full text of Palmer’s e-mail (pdf), and it’s a hoot. Among other things, Palmer includes step-by-step instructions for how to register and post comments, writing, “It is COMPLETELY ANONYMOUS.”
Maybe Palmer doesn’t find this embarrassing, but it seems to me that he has forgotten both the Lomasney rule and the Spitzer corollary: “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink”; and “never put it in e-mail.”
