Tag: Boston Herald

The Herald unbound

I’m of a mixed mind about Howard Kurtz’s story in the Washington Post today on the Boston Herald’s struggle to survive and thrive.

On the one hand, it’s well-reported and hits most of the right notes. On the other, the central theme — that of the “scrappy,” “feisty” tabloid trying to carve out a niche in the shadow of the dominant Boston Globe — is one that could have, and often has, been written about at any point during the past quarter-century. I’ve cranked out more than a few of those myself.

The article’s principal shortcoming, I think, is that Kurtz does not attempt to assess where the Herald’s Web site fits into the overall picture. BostonHerald.com is unusual in that it is almost entirely divorced from the print edition — it’s continuously updated, and there’s no good way of knowing whether a particular story ever made it into print or how it was played. Given its status as almost a free-standing entity, it’s an interesting experiment in online journalism.

As of last June, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, BostonHerald.com was drawing some 1.2 million unique visitors a month. That’s not nearly as many as the Globe’s site, Boston.com (4.2 million). But it’s still a lot of people. And you would think, at least anecdotally, that online readers do not fit the aging, blue-collar profile of the typical tabloid reader.

If Kurtz wanted to write another story about the struggle of a gritty urban tabloid, that’s fine. Personally I’d be more interested to read about how a gritty urban tabloid is struggling to reinvent itself as a news source whose online presence is at least as important as its print edition.

That’s especially true on a day when we learned that newspaper circulation took another dive (check out those wretched Globe numbers), and when the venerable Capital Times of Madison, Wis., made the switch to its much-discussed mostly online distribution model.

More on the Capital Times. Jay Rosen weighs in.

Making sense of the mortgage crisis

The mortgage crisis is impenetrable. One day, people can borrow all the money they want for houses whose values are skyrocketing. The next day, it’s all over. Bad behavior is somehow involved.

This week the Boston Herald’s Laura Crimaldi has a three-part series centered around one player — Dwight Jenkins (photo at right), a former felon from Dorchester who is accused of sweet-talking people into buying houses they couldn’t possibly afford, getting them loans based on false information about their income, and then secretly skimming tens of thousands of dollars off the top of each mortgage.

The series debuted on Sunday and concludes today. The Herald Web site can be pretty difficult to navigate if you’re looking for something other than breaking news, so here you go: part one, part two and part three. You should find most of the sidebars here.

When you read some of the details, you’ll be appalled that anyone could be as naive as Jenkins’ alleged victims. Then you realize that, for the most part, these are people with no financial savvy whatsoever, being told that they can get rich if they’ll just sign on the dotted line.

One alleged victim now suing Jenkins, a former Marine named Robert Smith, is described as “suffer[ing] from schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, a learning disability and mild retardation, [and] was told he could turn a profit even though he didn’t have money to invest or experience in real estate.”

Here’s another eye-opening excerpt:

Much of the business was conducted on street corners or at a Dunkin’ Donuts on Dorchester Avenue, according to plaintiffs suing Jenkins. He did not have business cards, plaintiffs say, and used multiple cell phone numbers, which were sporadically turned off….

“I didn’t really look at the mortgage application,” said Daniel Montrond, now 27, of Dorchester, a State Street fund accountant, who purchased 36 Milton Ave. in Dorchester for $487,500 on Aug. 13, 2004. “He said: ‘Don’t worry about nothing. Just sign and I’ll take care of everything.’ I was like, alright. Cool.”

Not cool at all, as it turns out. And good on Crimaldi and the Herald for bringing this to light.

Going deep and narrow online

The Outraged Liberal, a former journalist and a good one, offers some useful observations on how newspapers can best employ their Web sites. He specifically singles out the Globe, which yesterday published a medium-length, interpretation-heavy story on Gov. Deval Patrick’s speech about his $3.8 billion bridge-repair plan and the cool reception it received from state Treasurer Tim Cahill.

You can like the Globe’s story or not. Mr. O.L.’s point is that the Globe missed an opportunity by not using its Web site, Boston.com, to run the full details of Patrick’s plan (Blue Mass Group did that), or a video of Patrick’s speech (ditto), or the spin from the governor’s office (taxpayer-supported and thus free for the taking).

We’ve entered into what will probably be a lengthy period in which a typical newspaper’s print product will continue to produce most of the profits, even as it shrinks, while the Web site grows and becomes increasingly important to the bottom line. Most newspaper Web viewers read the print product, too. So it’s crucial that the two sides work together.

Among the larger challenges facing news Web sites is that people spend far less time with them than with the print edition. A recent study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the average visitor to a newspaper Web site spends less than 50 minutes per month, a number that I think is based on flawed assumptions. (I might spend a minute or two per month at the San Francisco Chronicle’s site, for instance, thus pulling its numbers down.)

But there’s no question that news-site editors need to find ways to bring people back over and over, and to spend some time once they’re there. Now, I like Red Sox pet photos as much as the next person (actually, that’s not true), but that’s not going to induce me to keep coming back. I think there are various ways to do it.

You do it through multimedia presentations of some of your best journalism, stuff that holds up well beyond the week it was published, as the Globe does with its special reports. You do it through databases that invite repeat visits, such as the Globe’s gubernatorial political-contributions map from 2006 or, as Mr. O.L. notes, the Herald’s database of state-employee salaries. You do it by inviting a conversation built around your journalism. Boston.com has discussion boards and the Herald lets readers post comments to stories, but the more interesting news conservations are taking place elsewhere, at sites such as Universal Hub and Blue Mass Group.

And you do it be offering deep information on narrow subjects. The idea behind Mr. O.L.’s post is that Boston.com should have been the first place people thought to go to find out more about the governor’s bridge proposal. In this case, if they thought of it, they wouldn’t have found much.

Saturday morning roundup

If I were Ernie Roberts, the great Globe sports columnist, I’d tell you what I had for breakfast this Saturday morning. I’m not, so herewith a few observations about this and that.

Deval Patrick’s corporate benefactors. The drip-drip-drip over Gov. Patrick’s book proposal has been more a source of amusement than a cause for genuine concern. Today’s Globe story, in which we learn that he takes credit for the 10,000 people who turned out for a Barack Obama rally on the Common, is a hoot.

But yesterday’s Globe story properly noted a real problem — Patrick’s reliance on corporations, some of which will have business before the state, to buy books by the truckload in order to hand out to employees and clients. The impression you get is of a governor so convinced of his own rectitude that he believes he’s above the rules mere mortals have to follow.

Judge Murphy’s future on the bench. A Globe editorial today urges the state Supreme Judicial Court to suspend Judge Ernest Murphy, who was may be fined earlier this week for his bizarre and threatening letters to Herald publisher Pat Purcell after Murphy won a $2.1 million libel case against the Herald. [Correction: The Commission on Judicial Conduct has recommended that Murphy be censured, suspended for 30 days and fined $25,000.]

I assume the Globe means without pay. As a Herald editorial noted on Wednesday, Murphy has been out on paid leave since sometime last year, collecting his salary of nearly $130,000. It’s hard to think of a public official who has profited so handsomely from media criticism of his performance — which, no matter how imperfectly it may have been executed, is supposed to receive the highest possible protection from the First Amendment.

Helping the fans by gouging them. The Herald goes B-I-G today with the fact that the Red Sox are auctioning off Green Monster tickets to the highest bidder, with some seats going for more than $500.

The best quote is from Ron Bumgarner, the Sox’ vice president of ticketing: “We feel it’s our civic responsibility to keep tickets affordable for fans, and at the end of the day, this helps keep other ticket prices down.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Newspaper-killing chain faces death. The Journal Register Co., known within the business as the cheapest chain on earth, is sinking in a sea of debt and is in danger of being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. The Journal Register’s best-known paper is the New Haven Register, but it also used to own the Taunton Gazette and the Fall River Herald News, now held by GateHouse Media. It also used to own the Woonsocket Call, where I was a co-op student in the mid-1970s.

Cape Cod Today publisher Walter Brooks sent out a blast e-mail with the news, which he titled “Every tear remained unjerked in its little ducts.” No kidding.

A free Herald?

The plunge in Metro Boston’s circulation remains a mystery, with the biggest mystery being whether there really was a plunge or just a change in accounting. (Like, the auditors discovered 50,000 copies in a Dumpster somewhere?)

Boston Herald editor Kevin Convey suggests a new slogan to Boston Magazine’s Amy Derjue: “Metro: We Can’t Even Give It Away.” More substantively, Convey says, “If economics were ever to permit us to go free we would give away one hell of a lot more papers than the Metro has managed to do during its lifetime.” (Via Adam Reilly.)

Maybe, maybe not. It all comes down to those economics. If I could choose between a free Herald as it is today and a free Metro, there’d be no contest — I’d grab a Herald every time. Trouble is, it’s highly unlikely that you could turn the Herald into a free paper without laying off most of the staff, cutting way back on pages and — yes — turning it into something very much like Metro. Or BostonNOW.

Unless — and here’s the big unless — the Herald could find a way to make the Web pay, and then publish a small, free paper as a supplement to the online edition. But we’re probably a long way from that becoming realistic.

Globe op-ed page gets bloggy

I’d think this was a good idea even if Media Nation wasn’t featured in the debut. The Globe op-ed page today unveils “VoxOp,” a round-up of opinion from outside sources such as local blogs and student newspapers.

One suggestion: It would be more useful to online readers if the items were attached to the permalinks of the actual blog posts rather than to the home pages.

By the way, the Herald has been quoting bloggers in its “Monday Morning Briefing” for quite a while, though none this week.

Eats shoots and leaves

Don’t know whether Howie Carr was tired or a Boston Herald copy editor has never heard of the term “plug ugly.” But an extra a misplaced comma provides an unintended bit of hilarity in Carr’s column today: “Mitt not only got his teeth knocked out by Mike Huckabee, but the Huckster and his new plug, ugly Ed Rollins, mussed up his hair pretty good, too.”

Online sidebars to the Everett fire

The local media have gone all out in their coverage of the Everett fire. I’m not going to try to evaluate it — from what I’ve seen, it’s all been good. Instead, I want to call your attention to what’s taking place just outside your peripheral vision.

Both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald have done some interesting work on their Web sites. The Globe has two slide shows, one on the ground, the other from on high. The Herald has a gallery as well, although it’s on a page that doesn’t allow me to provide a direct link. Click here and scroll down.

I particularly like an interactive map the Globe has posted (above). It takes you through the accident step by step and gives you a much clearer idea of what happened than the static graphic that appears on page one of the print edition. The Globe is also asking readers to send in photos (I don’t see any yet) and to share their stories (so far, it looks like people are mainly interested in pointing out that the Globe has mislabeled Route 99 in some of its coverage).

The Herald has posted a couple of videos — a two-minute clip that was shot at the scene of the fire, and an interview with a witness. They’re not slick, but they have a compelling raw-video feel to them that you don’t get from television newscasts. Unfortunately, the Globe is hampered in experimenting with video because of its content-sharing arrangement with New England Cable News, several of whose stories are posted alongside the Globe’s content.

I was somewhat surprised that I couldn’t find any amateur content on Flickr. However, I did come across a nearly six-minute video on YouTube, taken at the scene, that was uploaded by someone who goes by “97K.” Overall, though, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of citizen journalism coming out of the fire. Adam Gaffin, who does a great job of rounding up such things at Universal Hub, has very little. Adam did lead me to a local blog called the Everett Mirror (link now fixed; thanks, Ron), but so far there’s not much there, either. I’m not sure why, but it could be that Everett, as a working-class city, has fewer citizen-media types wielding video cameras than some other communities.

A little more than a year ago, an immense explosion in Danversport, right down the street from Media Nation, resulted in no deaths and little in the way of injuries. This week, another miracle occurred.