Hark! The Herald! (Front Page Twofer Edition)

September 12, 2013

From our Walt Whitman desk

You can’t spit without hitting a Top Ten Front Page at the Boston Herald these days.

The Newseum tapped Monday’s Page One as a Top Ten choice, and it did the same for yesterday’s.

 

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The text says: “Today’s front pages offered a fascinating juxtaposition of two major news stories: President Barack Obama’s speech on the possibilities of diplomacy and force with Syria, and the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The pairing of these stories offers quite a lot of food for thought on a day that encourages us to ‘never forget.'”

And, as night follows day, today’s edition has this:

 

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As foolish as the Herald’s back-patting practice might be, the hardreading staff says unreservedly that yesterday’s front page was terrific.

Nicely done, Heraldniks.

But hardly all done. Today’s front page didn’t receive any accolades, but it does engage in more self-promotion.

 

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The inside scoop:

IMG_8368.JPGA Herald(ed) treat: Boston Cream Shake takes the cake

Thanks to the delicious inspiration of a Marblehead reader, Hub frappe fans can sip a sinfully delicious homage to the Boston Herald.

Welcome the Boston Cream Herald Shake, which debuts on Blue Inc.’s menu this month.

 

Chef Jason Santos, the Herald reports, “wanted to craft a milkshake in honor of the Boston Herald. Last month he launched a contest for Fork Lift readers to submit flavor and/or recipe ideas.”

The winning shake has 700 empty calories. Strikes us as the perfect tribute to the feisty local tabloid.

 

 

 

 

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Hark! The Herald! (Breaking Newseum Edition)

September 10, 2013

From our Walt Whitman desk

The Boston Herald is once again trumpeting the receipt of a Newseum Top Ten Front Pages designation for yesterday’s edition. Under the headline “They’re Baack!” the Newseum site noted:

Sunday’s kickoff of the new NFL season marked the return of great front-page photographs of the winners and losers, as well as the winning headlines. The best two: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s “Adding Injury to Insult, ” and “Victo … no, a loss, ” in the Tampa Bay Times.

 

And don’t forget the Herald, with this Page One.

 

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Which turned up on Page 10 of today’s edition.

 

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Notice that only the top half of that front page is devoted to the Patriots. And still the feisty local tabloid won! That’s like winning a fight with one hand tied behind your back!

Just amazing, eh?

 

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Stop the Presses! Boston Herald Prints Correction!!

September 9, 2013

It’s a rare day when the Boston Herald admits in print that it’s made a mistake – sort of the tabloid equivalent of Halley’s Comet.

But get a load of today’s Page 2.

 

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This special occasion certainly deserves the coveted Cecil B. DeMille Memorial Close-up:

 

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Mark your calendars, folks. Concessions to accuracy don’t come easy for some.

 

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Boston Herald at a Distinct DisADvantage

September 9, 2013

Here are some of the ads that ran in the Boston Sunday Globe.

 

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And here are their counterparts in Sunday’s Boston Herald.

 

 

 

 

 

That’s right – none of those ads ran in the feisty local tabloid.

Draw your own conclusions.

 

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Sunday Herald Wins Boston Mayoral Race

September 8, 2013

If you’re looking to dig into Boston’s mayoral scrum, today’s Boston Herald is the place to go.

The feisty local tabloid devotes three full pages to the preliminary race.

 

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The City Hall bakeoff also gets a column from Suffolk University’s Herald embed John Nucci, along with half of Matt Stout’s Pols & Politics piece.

Crosstown, the Boston Globe has . . . well, a lot less. There’s this story on B2 (print headline):

Lee_conley2_metConley criticizes rivals on casino

Says councilors should back citywide vote

Suffolk County district attorney and Boston mayoral candidate Daniel F. Conley on Saturday doubled-down on his calls for a citywide vote on a proposed casino in East Boston and sharply criticized the city councilors running against him for not holding community hearings on the issue.

But despite his repeated calls for a citywide vote, council members continued to stand by their decision to allow East Boston residents exclusively to decide if their community becomes home to casino gambling.

 

The stately local broadsheet also features this opinion piece by Boston Review managing editor Simon Waxman.

wide-cityhall0908Can Boston break identity politics?

In Boston, identity politics have been such a powerful influence in local elections that candidates have literally changed their identities. Early in his career, future US House Speaker John McCormack rewrote his family history to better align it with those of the local political bosses and to erase any hint of Protestantism. Among other revisions, his Scottish-Canadian father and Boston-born Irish-American mother became Irish immigrants. He was inspired in part by John Way, a Yankee Democrat who repeatedly failed to win office despite running on a staunch pro-Irish-Catholic ticket.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Louise Day Hicks, William Bulger, and others updated identity politics in Boston. Hicks gained popularity as a defender of working-class white interests against desegregation and what she called “civil rights infiltrators.”

 

And, Waxman writes, “in 1983, the only time a black candidate made it to the final round of a Boston mayoral contest, an electorate sharply divided on racial lines handed Ray Flynn a landslide victory over Mel King.”

What does he want?

For Bostonians to rely less on racial identity in their voting decisions, and “for the candidates to set out individual agendas and give the voters more, and perhaps better, reasons to support them.”

When does he want it?

Now.

 

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Baker’s Double in Boston Globe?

September 6, 2013

Would Charlie Baker by any other name be more electable?

From today’s Boston Globe (print headline):

06baker01Baker working to project a warmer image

GOP candidate for governor vows to listen, not repeat ’10 mistakes

SWAMPSCOTT — Seated next to his wife on Thursday morning in the sun-soaked foyer of their sprawling home, Charles D. Baker said friends had approached him after he lost his 2010 challenge to Governor Deval Patrick with a damning verdict on the level of authenticity he had projected on the campaign trail.

“The guy I know, I didn’t see him,” Baker said they told him.

Lauren Baker laughed, “I even felt that way.”

Hey, imagine how we feel. We thought his name was Charlie.

(Not to get technical about it, but going from Charlie to Charles D. doesn’t exactly “project a warmer image.”)

Crosstown, the Boston Herald still thinks he’s (Two-Time) Charlie. Witness the Bakerama in today’s edition:

 

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I count ten Charlies total for the two pages. And not a Charles D. in sight.

Now maybe the whole Charles D. thing is just one more example of the stately local broadsheet trying to sabotage the electoral chances of a GOP candidate. (The Globe also calls him Charles D. in the photo caption and in the headline of the digital edition.)

So . . . will there be a Baker’s Double in the local dailies for the coming year?

Two-Time will tell.

 

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Ed Markey Is the Emptiest Suit on Capitol Hill

September 6, 2013

From our Late to the (Democratic) Party desk 

Massachusetts amateur – sorry, junior – Sen. Ed Markey’s “present” to the GOP got front-page treatment in both Boston dailies Thursday.

Start with the Boston Globe.

Print edition headline (with one very weird photo):

Members on left, right uniting in wariness

2013-09-03T192245Z_1964575055_GM1E994099301_RTRMADP_3_SYRIA-CRISIS-CONGRESS

WASHINGTON — A Senate committee voted on Wednesday to give President Obama the authority to use military force in Syria, providing momentum to the White House plan to punish President Bashir Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons.

But in twist that signaled the issue still faces an uncertain outcome, Senator Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, voted “present,” choosing not to register his position on the highest-profile issue to come before him since he was sworn in nearly two months ago. He was the only senator to cast a noncommital vote.

 

Crosstown at the Boston Herald, Markey’s “noncommital vote” (and senior Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s squishiness on Syria) got a decidedly rougher reception.

 

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Wethinks the Herald got it right on this one.

 

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Herald: Tom Menino Gets Bombed

September 4, 2013

Our feisty local tabloid has this story all to itself today.

 

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This all comes out of an interview Menino gave to the New York Times Magazine. Headline (from the print edition):

MeninoMenino’s comment bombs

Mayor’s ‘blow up’ gaffe angers Detroit officials

Mayor Thomas M. Menino admitted today it was “a poor choice of words” to declare he would “blow up” struggling Detroit and “start all over there” to fix its problems but stopped short of saying he would apologize to the Motor City’s mayor.

“It was a poor choice of words,” Menino told the Herald at an event today in the North End, referring to the comments he made in a recent New York Times interview. “Let me tell you, I look at our city, I look at their city….Cities need help.”

 

That got a quick response from Menino’s Detroit counterpart.

“I would think the mayor of a city that recently experienced a deadly bombing attack would be more sensitive and not use the phrase “blow up,” [Mayor Dave] Bing said in a statement.

 

Menino told the Herald he would call Bing not to apologize, but to “offer help.”

Just so long as it’s not elocution lessons.

Crosstown, the Boston Globe had an item about the Times interview two days ago, but noting else.

Here’s guessing it’ll stay that way.

 

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Seriously? FOURTH Day with No Herald Heaney Obit?

September 3, 2013

This is really disgraceful: For the fourth straight day the Boston Herald has ignored the death of Seamus Heaney, a major literary and local figure who graced Harvard University with his presence for many years.

Here’s who aced out the great Irish poet today:

 

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We know what you’re thinking: How long will the hardflogging staff keep this up?

Tell you what: Assume the Herald has maintained its misguided ways until we tell you otherwise.

UPDATE: Tuesday’s Boston Globe even featured a Names item about Heaney’s funeral.

Poet Seamus Heaney laid to rest in Dublin

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DUBLIN — Ireland mourned the loss of its Nobel laureate poet, Seamus Heaney, with equal measures of poetry and pain Monday in a funeral full of grace notes and a final message from the great man himself: Don’t be afraid.

Among those packing the pews of Dublin’s Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart were government leaders from both parts of Ireland, poets and novelists, Bono and The Edge from rock band U2, and former Lebanese hostage Brian Keenan.

Ireland’s foremost uilleann piper, Liam O’Flynn, played a wailing lament before family members and friends offered a string of readings from the Bible and their own often-lyrical remembrances of the country’s most celebrated writer of the late 20th century. The 90-minute service ended with a cellist’s rendition of the childhood bedtime classic ‘‘Brahms’s Lullaby.’’

 

Sleep the Big Sleep, Seamus.

And sleep fitfully, Heraldniks.

 

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Seamus on the Boston Herald! STILL No Heaney Obit

September 2, 2013

Today marks the third edition of the Boston Herald to ignore the death of the great Seamus Heaney.

It’s not like anyone at the dicey local tabloid would have to actually read some of Heaney’s poetry. They could just run a wire story, they way they did today with David Frost’s obituary.

 

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Better yet, they could pick up this appreciation by Roy Foster in The Guardian:

Obs New Review this weekend Please leave !!!Seamus Heaney remembered

Seamus Heaney, who has died at the age of 74, was a poet of immense power, a brilliant intellect, an inspiration to others – and the best of company

My first thought on hearing the immeasurably sad news of Seamus Heaney‘s death was a sensation of a great tree having fallen: that sense of empty space, desolation, uprooting. Heaney’s place in Irish culture – not just in Irish poetry – was often compared to that of WB Yeats, particularly after he followed Yeats in winning the Nobel prize in 1995. He possessed what he himself ascribed to Yeats, “the gift of establishing authority within a culture”. But whereas Yeats’s shadow was seen, by some of his younger contemporaries at least, as blotting out the sun and stunting the growth of the surrounding forest, Heaney’s great presence let in the light. Part of this was bound up in his own abundant personality. Generosity, amplitude and sympathy characterised his dealings with people at every level, and he was the stellar best of company. It was as if he had learned the lesson prescribed (though not really followed) by Yeats: that the creative soul, “all hatred driven hence”, might recover “radical innocence” in being “self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting”.

For God’s sake, Heraldniks – just run something.

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