The Associated Press vacates the Statehouse’s shrinking press gallery; plus, two more AP tidbits

The Massachusetts Statehouse
The Massachusetts Statehouse. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.

One of the first media pieces I wrote for The Boston Phoenix was about the declining number of reporters who were covering state government in Massachusetts. I spent some time in the press gallery at the Statehouse interviewing members of the shrinking press corps, including Carolyn Ryan, then with The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, now managing editor of The New York Times.

Although I can’t find the story online, I know this was in 1995 or thereabouts. The situation has not improved over the past 30 years.

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Last week Gintautas Dumcius of CommonWealth Beacon, who definitely knows his way around the Statehouse, reported that The Associated Press’ Steve LeBlanc is leaving Beacon Hill after taking a buyout and is unlikely to be replaced. Although an AP spokesman said the wire service will continue to cover the Legislature, Glen Johnson, who’s a former AP Statehouse bureau chief, told Dumcius that it won’t be the same without someone in the building:

There’s no substitute for being physically present where news happens and in a statehouse, there’s few things more powerful than being able to confront a newsmaker in person and at times other than official events. That only comes from proximity to power….

Some of the biggest stories I got as a statehouse reporter came because I bumped into somebody unexpectedly or saw something that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen.

As Dumcius points out, the move comes at a time when two newspaper chains owned by hedge funds, Gannett and McClatchy, have dropped the AP as a cost-cutting move. It’s a vicious circle. An AP subscription is expensive. News organizations walk away. The AP is left with fewer clients and thus has to increase its prices even more or cut back on coverage. Or both.

Jerry Berger, a former Statehouse bureau chief for United Press International who’s now a journalism professor at Boston University, recalls a time when the AP and UPI competed fiercely for news about state government. In his newsletter, “In Other Words…,” Berger says:

The Massachusetts Statehouse Press Gallery used to be a rowdy and raucous place, where reporters for two wire services and outlets from around the state worked side-by-side, in fierce competition, to document the daily workings of Massachusetts government.

Today, you can hear a pin drop — and the echoes just got a bit louder with word the Associated Press no longer has someone stationed in Room 456.

While I continue on my trip down memory lane, I’ll observe here that The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, where I worked in the 1980s, got its Statehouse news from UPI. I used to do a bit of stringing for the agency, and I think I’m the only freelancer who ever wrote for UPI and got all the money that was due him. Today, as Berger notes, UPI is owned by a company affiliated with the Unification Church, once headed by the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Fortunately, there are still multiple news outlets covering state government in Massachusetts, including The Boston Globe, State House News Service, CommonWealth Beacon, Politico, WBUR, GBH News and local television newscasts. Just last week on our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Alison Bethel, the chief content officer and editor-in-chief of State Affairs, yet another statehouse-focused news organization that is rolling out a Massachusetts edition in partnership with State House News.

Still, it’s a far cry from when the Statehouse press gallery was full of reporters hanging on every word from governors, legislative leaders and reform-minded rebels — that last category something that has virtually disappeared. Maybe if there were a few more reporters at the Statehouse keeping tabs on what’s going on, there would be a few more rebels as well.

More on the AP

The Associated Press is in the news for two other reasons today.

First, editors of the influential AP Stylebook have announced that they’re sticking with the Gulf of Mexico, despite President Trump’s insistence that it be called the Gulf of America, but that they’re following Trump’s lead in referring to Alaska’s Denali mountain as Mount McKinley, as it had been known previously.

The reason, the AP explains, is that the Gulf of Mexico name goes back 400 years and that the body of water is international. Denali, by contrast, is entirely within U.S. borders, and the president has the right to change its name by executive order, as President Barack Obama did in 2015.

Second, a new documentary film claims that AP photographer Nick Ut did not take an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a Vietnamese girl running naked from an American napalm attack, an image that may have hastened the end of the Vietnam War. The AP vociferously disagrees, saying that its own investigation shows Ut was indeed the photographer. Poynter media columnist Tom Jones has the details (fourth item).

Three Globe stalwarts move on

Brian Mooney. I took this photo in late 2007 at a Rudy Giuliani campaign event in New Hampshire. He was covering it for the Globe and I for the The Guardian.
Brian Mooney at a Rudy Giuliani campaign event in New Hampshire in 2007.

One morning in February 2000, I was killing time at a conference center in South Carolina, where I had showed up at a campaign event for George W. Bush. Sitting on the carpeted floor, banging away at his laptop, was Glen Johnson, then with the Associated Press.

I was covering the media campaign. The press that year was in love with the insurgent Republican, John McCain, whose caravan I had connected with earlier in the week. Johnson and I talked.

“The Bush people really feel that McCain has gotten a free ride, or an easier ride than Bush has,” he told me. It was a telling quote, and it made its way into the story I was writing for The Boston Phoenix.

Johnson, who worked two stints each at the AP and The Boston Globe, got his start in Massachusetts at The Sun of Lowell and The Salem News. On Thursday, he announced that he was leaving the Globe, where he was politics editor of Boston.com, in order to take a senior position with incoming Secretary of State John Kerry.

“It is a humbling opportunity, especially in these turbulent times,” Johnson wrote, “but one that I embrace with relish.”

And thus departs another piece of the Globe’s institutional memory.

The big departure during the past year, of course, was that of Globe editor Marty Baron, now executive editor of The Washington Post. But other veterans have continued to trickle out as well, with Johnson being only the latest.

Two more who will be missed:

• Brian Mooney, a longtime political reporter who covered the national, state and local scenes with aplomb. Mooney is as accomplished a writer as he is a reporter.

I still remember a piece he wrote on former Boston mayor Ray Flynn’s frenzied Primary Day sprint in his failed 1998 congressional campaign, and I wish it were freely available online. Mooney was also an outspoken union advocate when, in 2009, the New York Times Co. threatened to shut down the Globe unless it could use Garcinia Cambogia extract for some $20 million in union givebacks. (The Times Co. eventually got its way.) I still consider this to be a legendary moment in Media Nation history.

Mooney stuck around for one last presidential campaign and retired shortly thereafter. Several weeks later we found ourselves sitting next to each other at a Harvard event honoring the late Globe columnist David Nyhan, and Mooney clearly seemed to be enjoying himself.

• Alex Beam, a veteran lifestyle columnist who was among the Globe’s very few writers who could make you laugh. Beam took a book leave last year and decided during a round of downsizing that he’d rather retire than go back.

In 2003 Beam wrote a column about three writers named Dan Kennedy. I’m DK1, and he describes the dilemma I faced launching a book alongside a get-rich-quick artist (DK3) and a humorist with a McSweeney’s connection (DK2).

“I planned to stay on the deck ’til the ship went down, but managers apparently wanted the budget cut more,” he recently told me via Facebook. “We were all ‘targeted’ for ‘voluntary’ buyouts, and many were happy to have them.”

• Finally, the paper’s terrific editorial cartoonist, Dan Wasserman, has sort of left, but not in a way that will affect readers. He has retired from the Globe, but continues to work out of 135 Morrissey Blvd. as a contract contributor.

“More freedom for me, less overhead for the paper,” Wasserman told me, also via Facebook. “I do a Sunday local cartoon and continue to draw syndicated cartoons that the Globe picks up several times a week.”

More: I’m a political junkie, not a movie buff. But I shouldn’t let pass the opportunity to note that Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Wesley Morris departed for Grantland recently.

Photo (cc) by Dan Kennedy. Some rights reserved.

Boston.com boosts its political coverage

Later this year, the Boston Globe will move most Globe content off its free Boston.com site and onto a paid, redesigned BostonGlobe.com. Which raises a question: Will the still-free Boston.com include enough high-quality, original material to stand on its own?

We got an encouraging answer to that this week in the form of an announcement that veteran political reporter Glen Johnson will be returning to the Globe as Boston.com’s political editor. According to a staff-wide e-mail from deputy managing editors Jen Peter and Bennie DiNardo, Johnson —

— will oversee the expansion and redesign of the site’s political coverage leading into the 2012 presidential race and beyond, with a blog, videos, aggregated content, the smart display of original Globe stories, and any other creative ideas we can come up with.

You can be sure that Eric Fehrnstrom is thrilled.

Peter and DiNardo’s full statement follows:

We are thrilled to announce that Glen Johnson, most recently of the AP’s State House bureau in Boston, will be returning to Morrissey Boulevard to become boston.com’s political editor. In this role, Glen — who has covered Massachusetts politics for nearly two decades — will oversee the expansion and redesign of the site’s political coverage leading into the 2012 presidential race and beyond, with a blog, videos, aggregated content, the smart display of original Globe stories, and any other creative ideas we can come up with. He will draw on the expertise of our political staff, both locally and in D.C., to make the page a must-read for anyone interested in Massachusetts and New England politics. We will also look for opportunities to republish some of Glen’s politics blogs in the Globe, and we contemplate a regular presence for Glen in the Globe in the form of a regular political column that would be based on his reporting and analysis. With his deep knowledge of the local political scene, his agility as a writer, and his embrace of new media, Glen is the ideal candidate to fill this position. And it couldn’t come at a better time for us, as we prepare to strengthen our web presence with a two-brand strategy and gear up for a presidential primary in our backyard.

This is a homecoming for Glen, who worked for the Globe for more than five years, from 2000 to 2005, in between two stints at the Associated Press. He has covered four presidential races — including Paul Tsongas’ 1992 bid, when Glen worked for the Lowell Sun — and four administrations on Beacon Hill, stemming back to the Weld years. Most recently, he served as the AP’s lead Romney reporter in 2008. He lives with his wife in North Andover and has two college-age sons. He is an avid cook and observer of professional cooks (ask him about his stint in the kitchen at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon). Glen will join us on Jan. 31, and we couldn’t be happier to have him back on board. All cooking tips welcome.

Jen and Bennie

Glen is a good guy and a dogged reporter. A very smart move by the Globe.