Tag: Boston Globe

Obama’s Kenyan-Boston connection

The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald are scrambling to catch up with a story that Barack Obama’s Kenyan aunt Zeituni Onyango may be living in Boston. Who broke it? The Times of London, believe it or not.

I’m already hearing that the local media fell down on the job by not having this story first. No doubt Globe editor Marty Baron and Herald editor Kevin Convey are wishing they’d found it. But this strikes me as the ultimate example of Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns. You can picture the typical news meeting:

Editor: Marie, you check in with the cops. There were three similar robberies last night in three different parts of the city.

Marie: OK.

Editor: Ed, see if City Hall has acted on our FOIA request yet for those payroll records.

Ed: Sure.

Editor: And all of you — if Obama’s got any Kenyan relatives living in Boston, make sure we have that first.

All: Right! Let’s go!

Obviously the Times was acting on a tip. The connection may be British rather than American. I’m eager to find out how the Times got this story, but I’m virtually certain it wasn’t because local journalists were asleep at the switch.

Dianne Wilkerson, then and now

Some years back, the Boston Herald’s Joe Sciacca and I were standing on the arena floor at the Democratic State Convention, which was to be held the next day. It was a Friday night, a little after 9 p.m. I think it was in 1994*, and I can’t remember whether it was in Lowell, Worcester or Springfield.

As we were talking, state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, D-Roxbury, sauntered by. Sciacca and I looked at each other. At the time, Wilkerson was under partial home detention for not paying her taxes or some damn thing, and — if I’m recalling the details correctly — she had a 9 p.m. curfew.

Sciacca went tearing off to the press area. As it turned out, there was no news — he found out that Wilkerson’s punishment had just come to an end, and so there was no curfew for her to violate.

No more than a funny little anecdote on a day when Wilkerson’s political career has come to a final, sickening end.

Her arrest comes during a week when the Phoenix’s David Bernstein is reporting still more wrongdoing on her part. And at Universal Hub, Adam Gaffin explains how Wilkerson unwittingly drew the Boston City Council and Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker into her orbit.

Wilkerson’s once-bright promise flamed out many years ago. It’s amazing she lasted as long as she did.

*Update: After reading the Wednesday coverage, I now think it was 1998.

Repackaging the Globe

At a time when the outlook for the newspaper industry is becoming ever grimmer, the Boston Globe today unveils a repackaging of its print edition.

It’s not quite a redesign — the fonts and the basic layout remain the same. But it’s been reorganized “to help you better navigate the news,” editor Marty Baron writes. (No link; Baron’s “To our readers” note does not seem to be online.)

We’ll see about that.

My overall impression is that Baron and company have made a virtue out of necessity. That is, the print edition is shrinking, which gives the Globe an opportunity to reconfigure its sections in a way that’s not unlike what its bigger cousin, the New York Times, did some years ago.

In an interview with WBUR Radio’s Deb Becker, Baron says the paper will shed 24 pages a week, though he adds that the news hole will shrink by considerably less than that.

The biggest, splashiest change is the expansion of Sidekick into a daily tabloid called “g,” which gathers together all of the paper’s arts and entertainment coverage. I’ll let others judge the execution, but overall I think it’s a good idea, and you’ve got to love color comics. Given that the paper recently got rid of the weekly television supplement that had appeared in the Sunday Globe, it’s nice to see them in “g,” and in color, too. But the listings are for evenings-only. Of course, that’s why God made Yahoo.

Columnist Alex Beam is showcased at the back of “g,” magazine-style, opposite a photo feature called “Parting Shot,” which appears not to be in the Web edition.

To me, the most significant aspect of “g” is what the Globe might do: give it away at a few choice locations around the city, thus potentially attracting new readers and advertisers. I have zero insight into whether any consideration is being given to that. But the current thinking in the newspaper business is that it’s better to have a variety of different publications and Web sites, each aimed at a different audience, than to take the old one-size-fits-all approach.

As for the rest of the paper, a few quick hits:

• The national and world news briefs have been dumped from pages A2 and A3, replaced with short stories that are collectively called the “Daily Briefing.” What’s unclear is whether we are supposed to regard these stories as the most important national and world news (other than what makes it onto the front), or if the meatier stories farther inside the “A” section are actually more important.

• For the first time in years, the Metro section is being called — well, the Metro section, as the City & Region moniker has been banished. The columnists have new headshots. A story on an offensive remark that comedian Denis Leary made about autism is accompanied by a note explaining that it grew out of a reader’s tip, a wrinkle that I don’t think I’ve seen before.

• The rest of Metro looks no different, but Business has been moved into the section — seemingly without the loss of any column-inches, which is what really matters. Given the primacy of economic news, this is perhaps not the best timing. Personally, though, I’d rather have fewer sections, as long as it doesn’t mean fewer pages.

• Sports is unchanged. Supposedly there will be more color.

Overall, I like it. So let me quote an opposing view sent in by a devoted Media Nation reader and newspaper junkie who takes a different view:

G for grim. Befits an institution whose debt is now selling at junk level. My God, look where they’ve relegated poor Alex Beam to. I don’t see how they do those arts profiles any more. They’ve basically taken Calendar, which used to be a weekly arts supplement, made it daily and eliminated all other coverage.

What’s this about junk-level debt? Oh, yes. Yesterday Henry Blodget wrote an extremely downbeat assessment of the Globe’s corporate parent, the New York Times Co., saying that it “is approaching the point where it will have to manage its business primarily to conserve cash and avoid defaulting on its debt. This situation will only get worse as advertising revenue continues to fall, and it will be very serious by early next year.” The Herald picks up on that today.

The Times Co.’s ownership of the Globe is news on another front, too, as state Rep. Dan Bosley, D-North Adams, a stalwart in the battle to keep casino gambling out of Massachusetts, rips the Globe’s negative coverage of House Speaker Sal DiMasi, well-known for his own opposition to casinos.

Jeremy Jacobs pulls together the details at PolitickerMA.com, reporting that Bosley, in a comment on the Outraged Liberal’s blog, links the Globe’s harsh coverage of DiMasi to the Times Co.’s lust for advertising revenue from gambling casinos.

For the record, I don’t accept the view that the Globe’s news coverage of DiMasi is being shaped by the Times Co.’s business imperatives. Clearly, though, Bosley doesn’t agree.

A big to-do over Reese Who?

Memo to Boston Herald editor Kevin Convey: When leading with a celebrity-arrest story, make sure the arrestee is an actual celebrity. It’s always tough to go with one of these stories when you have to give over a good part of it to explaining who Reese Hopkins is. I mean, was.

At least us old-timers have heard of Bob Gamere, the former television sportscaster who’s been arrested on child-pornography charges (Herald coverage here; Globe coverage here).

A friend of Media Nation asks if it really makes sense to lock up Gamere. Since Gamere is innocent unless found guilty, let me change the question: Does it make sense to lock up a 69-year-old man if he’s been distribuing child pornography via e-mail? Of course, I’m talking about a theoretical 69-year-old man, strictly in a hypothetical sense.

Answer: Hell, yes. This is not mere possession, which probably shouldn’t be punishable by prison. Anyone who would do what our hypothetical 69-year-old man has been charged with doing is a danger to society.

OK. Off to look at the redesigned Boston Globe. More in a bit.

A weird, sad tale comes to an end

At least one chapter in the weird, sad tale of Tania deLuzuriaga has come to an end, as she has resigned from the Boston Globe. As you may know, deLuzuriaga was recently found to have exchanged inappropriate e-mails of a sexual nature with a high-ranking school official when she was a reporter for the Miami Herald.

Journalists know they can’t secretly carry on an affair with people they cover. At the Miami New Times, Kyle Munzenrieder reminds us of the great Abe Rosenthal rule: “You can fuck an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can’t cover the circus.” DeLuzuriaga’s ethical breach was a serious one.

But to the extent that some people at the Globe agitated for her to leave, as Christine McConville reported in the Boston Herald last week, I think her situation raises an ethical question for management, too: Should wrongdoing in a previous job be held against someone if she is performing competently and without incident in her current job?

I’ve done no independent reporting on this, and there may well be issues about which I’m not aware. But assuming deLuzuriaga kept her personal and professional lives separate while she was at the Globe, it strikes me that that should have been good enough.

Gender hypocrisy raises its ugly head, too. As Amy Derjue notes at Boston Daily, and Rick Sawyer observes at Bostonist, deLuzuriaga’s erstwhile and extremely married alleged paramour not only has paid no penalty, he just got a promotion. Nice.

Time out on OT

The Boston Globe keeps adding to its roster of niche publications, which is smart. It plans to charge 50 cents for its new sports weekly, OT, which may not be so smart.

I could see something like OT being a howling success with advertisers if it were freely available. But I’m not sure people are going to lay out money for sports news that is not substantially different from what’s on the Web — even if OT is better written and more insightful, which it may well be with the likes of Charlie Pierce and Tony Massarotti writing for it.

We’ll see.

The Red Sox’ first Latino superstar

In today’s Boston Globe, Keith O’Brien writes about the diminishing number of Latino players on the Red Sox — and compares the current team to the all- or mostly white teams of the past.

Point taken. But O’Brien steps in it when he refers to a “team whose stars typically looked like Ted Williams or Carl Yastrzemski” in describing those mostly white line-ups. The problem here is that Williams, as many knowledgeable fans know, was only the greatest Latino star in baseball history.

Williams’ mother, Micaela “May” Venzor, was the daughter of parents who were born in Mexico, Pablo Venzor and Natalia Hernández. In his 1969 autobiography, “My Turn at Bat,” Williams, who himself was born and grew up in San Diego, writes of his mother:

Her maiden name was Venzor, and she was part Mexican and part French, and that’s fate for you; if I had had my mother’s name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, the prejudices people had in Southern California.

May Venzor Williams was a volunteer for the Salvation Army, an avocation that kept her away from home most of the time, and about which her son complains bitterly in “My Turn at Bat.”

O’Brien’s mistake is not unusual. In 2005, the New York Times groused that Williams had been left off Major League Baseball’s list of “Latino Legends.” Williams’ Latino background is not well-known. But that makes it no less real.

He still can’t write about it

What struck me about David Filipov’s account in today’s Boston Globe of his first visit to Ground Zero is that he still can’t bring himself to write about his father’s death on Sept. 11, 2001.

That’s what his piece is purportedly about; but it isn’t, as he instead interviews a security guard, two young women from Kazakhstan, a student — anyone, really, who pulls him away from his grief.

It’s a moving piece, because it’s a reminder of how difficult Filipov and thousands of others still find it to come to terms with what happened on that day.

The online version includes a link to a Filipov piece that was published in the Globe on Oct. 11, 2001, which he filed from Afghanistan.

Driving to work this morning, I started thinking about how much it seemed as it did seven years ago — clear and cool, a perfect September day. It’s become a cliché, but it’s the truth: Just as all people in our parents’ generation know exactly where they were and what they were doing on Dec. 7, 1941, so will all of us remember what happened seven years ago today.

Department of Defense photo by Denise Gould.