Two Buck Shuck: Boston Herald Touts ‘Premium Plus’

July 28, 2021

Well the hardrreading staff opened up the old emailbag yesterday and here’s what poured out.

According to the Herald’s Digital Subscription Frequently Asked Questions, a regular digital subscription includes:

  • Unlimited, exclusive journalism from our reporters and photographers.
  • Opinions and reviews from columnists and critics.
  • Daily access to the Digital Replica edition, an exact replica of what we print and produce each day.

So your two bucks is basically buying you a) No Pop-up or Video Ads, and b) 2x Faster Page Loads for the next  six months. Which is all good. Except . .

1) You’ll pay $4 per week for Premium Plus after that, and

2) That whole “trusted news, analysis, and interviews” thing has been gutted like a sea bass by the Herald’s bloodsucking hedge fund owner, Alden Global Capital.

The Herald newsroom – which, again thanks to the paper’s vulture-capital owners, has been forced to shack up with its kissin’ cousins at the Lowell Sun – can barely field a soccer team at this point. It’s gotten so bad at the scrawny local tabloid that executive editor Joe Dwinell has been known to write two or three pieces in a day for the paper.

Go ask the Boston Globe’s Brian McGrory how often he hits send on a story about, say, a Martha’s Vineyard porn lawsuit.

The hardreading staff – despite our often gimlet eye – has long been #TeamHerald, if only to keep the stately local broadsheet a bit less overbearing. But we wonder how long the flimsy local tabloid can keep offering less content for more money, as Alden relentlessly strip mines it like West Virginia coal country.

Maybe a “Premium Minus” Go Fund Me page is in order right about now.

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Only Boston Herald Readers Buy Black Market Cigs?

July 15, 2021

Last month Philip Morris International launched an advertising campaign to spotlight, and obviously decry, illicit trafficking of cigarettes. The campaign also mentions other counterfeit goods – cell phones, laptop batteries, Marilyn Monroe-abilia –  just to make it seem a bit less self-serving.

PMI press release:

Philip Morris International Launches New Campaign to Combat Black Market Trade

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Philip Morris International Inc. (PMI) today launched a public education initiative entitled United to Safeguard America from Illegal Trade (USA-IT) to combat black market trade. Supported by a coalition of national and state private and public sector partners, the campaign will provide local officials, law enforcement, and thought leaders with information and training programs to help tackle illegal trade and raise public awareness of the depth of the problem as well as the severe consequences inflicted on states and municipalities by black market profiteers.

The campaign will run through 2021 in eight states facing critical illegal trade issues: Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

The PR flack forgot, however, to mention Massachusetts; PMI’s campaign came to the Bay State yesterday via this full-page Boston Herald ad. (The campaign’s website also omits Massachusetts.)

Here’s the text.

Interestingly, the hardreading staff looked in vain for the ad in the Boston Globe – both yesterday and today. What to make of that? Are we to infer that the readers of the stately local broadsheet are unconcerned about the trafficking in illicit goods? Or that they’re too posh to stoop to black market cigarettes, unlike their counterparts at the sneaky local tabloid.

Your conclusion goes here.

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Boston Dailies Ignore Intercept’s Baker Bomb$hell

July 7, 2021

Let’s stipulate from the outset that The Intercept is a media outlet that pushes a progressive agenda hard enough to break a wrist (h/t Raymond Chandler). Even so, Matthew Cunningham-Cook’s deep dive into how Gov. Charlie Baker has appeared to play footsie with his financial backers is pretty eye-popping.

FIRMS THAT BACKED GOV. CHARLIE BAKER’S PRO-CHARTER INITIATIVE SCORED MILLIONS IN CONTRACTS WITH MASSACHUSETTS PENSION FUND

Three private equity investment managers who supported the Yes on 2 campaign in 2016 have since seen their companies receive a windfall of new investments.

IN THE 2016 ELECTION, executives at high-fee, high-risk investment firms poured cash into a Massachusetts pro-charter school initiative championed by Gov. Charlie Baker. In the years since, those investment firms have reaped a total of $320 million in new lucrative investment management contracts with the state pension fund.

The Massachusetts Pension Reserve Investment Management Board, which oversees more than $74 billion in assets covering 300,000 beneficiaries, frequently touts its investment performance that helps to provide $1 billion in benefits annually. Baker sits on the MassPRIM Board via a designee and appoints two additional members.

A comparison of the pension fund’s return to a straight and simple 70/30 portfolio — wherein 70 percent is allocated toward the S&P 500 and 30 percent goes to a blue-chip bond index fund — reveals underperformance, with the pension returning 10.4 percent annualized for the five years ending December 31, 2020, and the index fund returning 11.58 percent, costing the commonwealth of Massachusetts, its taxpayers, and active and retired public employees more than $5 billion over that period

The numbers are knee-buckling. According to the Intercept piece, executives from three private equity investment managers – Summit Partners, Berkshire, and Charlesbank Capital Partners – funneled $1.34 million in contributions to various pro-charter school groups in 2016 and subsequently reaped $475 million in MassPRIM investment commitments between 2016 and 2018.

Beyond that, according to the Intercept piece, the three firms are reaping unusually large profits from their management of taxpayer dollars.

Summit, Charlesbank, and Berkshire are all so-called alternative investments, meaning that they are subject to much less regulation than public companies and charge enormous fees that are typically 2 percent of assets and 20 percent of performance, which is over 5,000 percent higher than index funds for ordinary stocks and bonds, which can have fees as low as 0.04 percent or lower.

Even worse, the piece says that two of the investment firms have produced returns that significantly trail those of the S&P 500. MassPRIM declined to provide performance data about the third firm.

Also trailing? The local dailies. The Intercept piece dropped five days ago, and so far we haven’t heard a peep out of the Boston Globe or the Boston Herald. We get it that news organizations avoid Xerox journalism whenever possible, but surely five days is long enough to 1) move the story forward,  2) poke holes in it, or 3) get Charlie Baker to address it.

Or are we missing something here.

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