As the hardreading staff has previously noted, the Boston Globe all this past week conspicuously failed to publish any letters about the sale of the stately local broadsheet to Red Sox owner John Henry.
But Saturday’s edition finally ended the Sale-itary Confinement:
Okay then.
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When a beer truck “plowed through a guardrail on northbound Interstate 93 and dangled precariously over the Leverett Connector” yesterday, both local dailies made it front-page news.
The Boston Globe ran a photo/map combo on Page One.
The piece on B2 featured this shot as well.
Crosstown, the Boston Herald provided this front-page beauty:
And this inside:
Good day for both dailies, yeah?
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Among its many and varied talents, the Boston Herald has an uncanny ability to find the cloud inside the silver lining. Especially when it comes to crosstown rival Boston Globe.
To wit, today:
It’s wait, see for Globe’s unions
Union bigs at The Boston Globe said they’ll keep an open mind about new owner John Henry even as they face the unpleasant task of immediate negotiations over new contracts.
“I think guarded optimism is the right term,” said Martin Callaghan, the president of the Boston Newspaper Printing Pressmen’s Union. “John Henry seems to be saying the right things, but ultimately it comes down to who he surrounds himself with. We don’t necessarily view him as a newspaper guy, so it’ll be interesting to see if he keeps the current management and who he brings in for day-to-day operations.”
Union contracts at the Globe expired seven months ago. They won’t be addressed until Henry takes full ownership, but we’re not sure the following was a good omen:
Henry toured the Globe newsroom Monday and met with editors and reporters, but hasn’t held any meet-and-greets with either the pressmen or delivery drivers.
Uh-huh. You think dealing with the MLB Players Association is tough, Yacht Boy? Wait till you sit down with the Teamsters.
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Boston Newspaper Printing Pressmen's Union, John Henry, Linda Pizzuti, MLB Players Union, Red Sox, Teamsters | Permalink
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From our Walt Whitman desk
The Boston Herald’s incessant Garage Broadband Radiostream gets front-page treatment for the umpteenth time in a row today.
And what is this “National Honor”?
36th place in a list published by a radio industry website whose traffic numbers are too low to be tracked (see here).
Regardless, here’s the story:
Talk radio journal recognizes Herald
Boston Herald Radio’s launch has been named to the prestigious Frontier Fifty list of outstanding talk media webcasts in the nation by the respected industry bible Talkers Magazine.
Talkers singled out Herald President and Publisher Patrick J. Purcell and Editor-in-Chief Joe Sciacca in its recognition of the innovative Internet radio platform.
Talkers editor Michael Harrison added, “[t]he Boston Herald is playing a pivotal role in the evolution of the 21st century ‘media station,’ which is the obvious model of the communications platform of this unfolding new era.”
If you say so.
Then there’s this:
“We don’t call it the Frontier Fifty for nothing,” [Harrison] added. “These guys are like Lewis and Clark. History will reward them with honor even if the immediate road ahead is strewn with challenges and pain.”
Yes, well, the challenges and pain part sounds about right.
Anyway, here’s a nice shot of the National Honor:
One last thing.
“We don’t call it the Frontier Fifty for nothing”?
Does that mean they pay?
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: Boston Herald, Boston Herald Radio, Frontier Fifty, Garage Broadband Radiostream, Joe Sciacca, Michael Harrison, Patrick J. Purcell, Talkers Magazine, Walt Whitman | Permalink
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This is Day Four of the Sale-itary Confinement of letters to the editor about John Henry’s purchase of the Boston Globe. As the hardreading staff noted earlier, there wasn’t a single letter in the Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday editions of the stately local broadsheet that addressed what certainly can be viewed as a controversial and significant development for Globe readers.
Now comes today’s edition. Top half of Letters column:
Bottom half:
Really, Globe editors? You mean to tell us that no one has written to you about the sale? And don’t give us any of that web eyewash. It’s the print edition that counts.
Crosstown, the Boston Herald has been uncharacteristically quiet in the letters department, with the feisty local tabloid going 0-for-this-week. Here are letters that beat out the Globe sale today:
Really, Herald editors? You mean to tell us that no one has written to you about the sale? And don’t give us any of that web eyewash. It’s the print edition that counts.
Geezlepete.
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Boston Globe, Boston Globe sale, Boston Herald, John Henry, Letters to the Editor, Sale-itary Confinement | Permalink
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Red Sox owner John Henry’s bargain-basement purchase of the Boston Globe has generated plenty of news coverage this week.
But, oddly, no Letters to the Editor in the stately local broadsheet.
Monday’s letters:
Tuesday’s letters:
Wednesday’s letters:
Even odder, there’ve been no letters in the Boston Herald.
Not on Monday. Or Tuesday. Or Wednesday.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, yeah?
Let’s see what happens today. But the hardreading staff is not optimistic.
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Globe sale, John Henry, Letters to the Editor, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot | Permalink
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It’s official. The Boston Herald is no longer a newspaper. It is merely a promotional vehicle for the Herald’s Garage Broadband Radio webstream.
Today’s edition of the dicey local tabloid features four – count ’em, four – pages devoted to BHR, starting with Page One.
(The hardreading staff has changed its mind about the Little Green Numbers Facebook group, partly because we don’t want to give the Herald the exposure, but mostly because it’s a pain in the ass to create a Facebook group.)
Then there’s the obligatory two-page spread flacking the radiostream.
And then there’s this special bonus page.
The thing is, when you go to the Herald website the way it keeps telling you to, you see this:
And if you click on Listen Live you get this:
And if you click on the Play button you get this:
Nothing.
How fitting is that, eh?
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: BHR, Boston Herald, Boston Herald Radio, Garage Broadband Radio, The Michael Graham Show | Permalink
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From our Walt Whitman desk
Well our feisty local tabloid won another big award yesterday – a coveted Top Ten Front Pages nod from the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages.
Judgment Day
Today is the day that Major League Baseball is expected to suspend 10 players for their ties to a Florida anti-aging clinic. The biggest catch among them: New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who could be suspended through 2014. Some of the front pages in today’s Top Ten have already passed judgment. Don’t hold back, New York Post. Don’t hold back.
Here’s yesterday’s Boston Herald contribution:
(That’s it – we’re definitely starting a Boston Herald Little Green Numbers group on Facebook.)
And here is today’s Herald putting on the pom-poms:
Their Moms must be so proud.
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez, Boston Herald, New York Post, The Newseum, Today's front Pages, Top Ten Front Pages, Walt Whitman | Permalink
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The Boston Herald launched its new Garage Broadband Radio station yesterday, which the dicey local tabloid’s Monday edition trumpeted in a full-page newsvertisement.
(The hardreading staff is thisclose to starting a Boston Herald Little Green Numbers Facebook group).
You can access BHR here.
But we don’t necessarily recommend it.
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For the second straight day the Boston Herald reports on a disgruntled runner-up in the New York Times Co.’s sale of the Boston Globe to Red Sox owner John Henry.
Second Globe bidder: Fix was in
Another losing Boston Globe contender — Springfield TV station owner John J. Gormally Jr. — is crying foul and saying he also outbid John Henry, a day after a San Diego media outfit claimed The New York Times Co. brushed off its offer, even though it was higher than the Red Sox owner’s $70 million winning bid.
Gormally confirmed to the Herald that his was the highest-end $80 million offer mentioned in a July Globe story and accused the Times of wanting to create a more PR-friendly storyline around the sale, which came two decades after the Times spent $1.1 billion to acquire the broadsheet.
Gormally adds that he thinks the sale was rigged all along to go to Henry because “If they had sold it to anyone else, the story would have been, ‘Times loses 1 billion dollars of stockholder value.’ By selling it to John Henry the story then becomes, ‘Red Sox owner saves Globe.’”
Interesting.
Crosstown at the stately local broadsheet, they do the Herald one better.
3 groups say they topped Henry’s bid for Globe
Three of the groups that lost out in the bidding for The Boston Globe say their offers were higher than Red Sox owner John W. Henry’s winning $70 million bid — prompting them to question the New York Times Co.’s sales process.
John Gormally, a Springfield television station owner and publisher of BusinessWest magazine, said that after meeting the Times Co.’s final bid deadline on July 26, he heard nothing from the company until a week later, in the early hours of Saturday morning, when an e-mail around 3 a.m. from the investment bankers announced the sale to Henry.
“I was surprised. Our offer was considerably higher than Henry’s,” Gormally said, at the “upper range” of the $65 million to $80 million the Globe had previously reported for bids. He noted that the Times Co., as a public company, has a responsibility to shareholders to maximize value.
“All the bidders expended considerable time, energy, money, and the process was not transparent at the end to the bidders,’’ Gormally said.
Also disgruntled: “Robert Loring, a Massachusetts native and founder of Revolution Capital, a West Coast investment company that owns the Tampa Tribune . . . [and] John Lynch, chief executive of the U-T San Diego newspaper.”
Damn. Any more of these unhappy rejects and we’re gonna need a bigger blog.
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It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town 