It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

From our One-And-A-Half Daily Town desk

The Boston Herald newsroom is so threadbare nowadays, the flailing local tabloid has turned its Red Sox beat reporter into a TV critic.

Boston Globe scribe Dan Shaughnessy noted the shrink local tabloid’s Hexit™ from Red Sox road games in his piece yesterday about how the Sox are living rent-free in the heads of the New York Yankees (with last night’s outcome an obvious exception).

Count this observer as one discouraged by a lack of New England media presence in the Yankee Stadium press box Friday. Only the Globe (three reporters) and MassLive bothered to cover the Sox in this “big” series before the All-Star break. It made me wonder when was the last time only one Boston newspaper covered the Red Sox in New York. Probably never.

Sure enough, check the ledes in the two dailies’ coverage of Friday night’s game.

Pop quiz: What does Shaughnessy’s piece have that Mastrodonato’s doesn’t?

That’s right. A New York dateline.

So the Red Sox beat reporter at the fading local tabloid has to cover the team’s road games with no access to a) players pre-game, b) players post-game, c) other beat reporters, and d) team executives, fans, and etc.

Seriously?

The hardreading staff has total respeck for all the Herald journalists who – remarkably – produce a newspaper every day.

But take a step back, and the Boston Herald looks like a dead daily walking, as we noted earlier this month.

Two years ago the Boston Business Journal’s redoubtable Don Seiffert reported this about the flailing local tabloid: “The Herald’s print circulation was just under 30,000 as of the first quarter of 2020, with more than half of that from single-copy sales at newsstands around and outside the city. That’s down 46% from four years earlier.”

And this: “The size of the Boston Herald has gone from about 240 employees at the end of 2017, before its purchase by MediaNews Group, to just a few dozen today.”

That was two years ago.

We’re guessing the Herald’s daily print circulation is now somewhere south of 20,000, which is alarmingly close to mimeograph territory.

We’ve often – at times, arduously – put on the pompoms for the Boston Herald, if only to keep the Boston Globe on the straight and narrow.

But it increasingly feels like Kaddish for the feisty local tabloid.

So . . . the sadreading staff at It’s Sad to Live in a One-Daily Town is clearly not going anywhere.

P.S. Same thing in today’s editions of the two dailies – Shaughnessy in the Big Town, Mastrodonato on his lonely couch at home.