As the hardreading staff has noted many many many times, memorial/institutional/advocacy advertising in the local dailies almost invariably migrates to the Boston Globe – and the Globe alone.
The ad war over demolishing the Prouty Garden at Children’s Hospital, however, is the exception that’s proving the rule.
Last week’s setback for Children’s, in which the Department of Public Health forced the hospital to postpone its plan to replace the garden with a billion-dollar expansion pending a cost study, has seemed only to increase the hospital’s desire to win the battle for public opinion.
Thus, this new full-page ad in today’s Boston Herald.
Unusually, the ad did not run in the Globe. But that doesn’t mean readers of the stately local broadsheet were deprived of Children’s spin du jour. Instead of an ad, they got this op-ed by Sandra Fenwick, president and CEO of Children’s.
Hey – why buy the cow when the milk is free, eh?
Let’s see if the Save the Prouty Garden folks get equal op-ed time.
It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town 
[…] So here’s our question, again: […]
The skunk at the party is the chainsaws that have ALREADY started taking down trees and bushes in the Prouty Garden, before the new building is even approved; this shows beyond a shadow of a doubt there is a very strong and real desire to destroy Prouty, whether a building goes up or not. The “Friends of Prouty” failed to anticipate this, and did not get a restraining order against the hospital to prevent this destruction. Even if the new building is denied by DPH, by the time the decision is made, what’s left of Prouty will be dirt and saw dust.
[…] Except this, yesterday, from splendid reader SFR: […]