Hark! The Herald Angles Sing!

December 11, 2012

While the Boston Globe is makes its Pulitzer push with a three-part megaseries about felonious illegal immigrants, the Boston Herald has been scooping up stories hither and yon.

From the feisty local tabloid’s Yon desk: yesterday’s Page One story on Gov. Patrick tolling the bell for Mass. Pike tollbooths.

11afbc_tollsplash_12102012Gov. Deval Patrick plans to take toll on toll takers

Gov. Deval Patrick is putting toll takers on notice and quietly moving forward with a pricey plan to install electronic tolling across the state, despite a budget crisis that’s triggering massive cuts in spending, the Herald Truth Squad has learned.

Patrick’s transportation officials inserted a new clause in a Nov. 21 union contract proposal, obtained by the Truth Squad, that gives the administration power to “have the unlimited right … to eliminate manual toll collection” on all Massachusetts highways.

 

Both Patrick and the Globe gave the Herald a shoutout today (although the paragraph-eight mention in the Globe was more like a whisperout).

From the feisty local tabloid’s Hither desk comes this scoop:

849694_010307radionl02A possible switch to music is all the talk around WTKK

Keep your ears tuned for some big changes at WTKK-FM (96.9).

WTKK NewsTalk owner Greater Media could soon be switching back to all-music because, experts said, “toxic” all-talk formats aren’t attracting enough younger listeners.

Speculation about a format shift reached a fever pitch yesterday when news broke that Internet domain names such as 969Bostons Beat.com, 969TheBeat.com, and Power969 had been gobbled up.

 

Not good news at all, at least from our standpoint.  (Full disclosure: The hardyakking staff does a turn every Friday morning on the Jim & Margery show.)

Others, however – like the redoubtable Dan Kennedy – would disagree.

UPDATE: Dan writes, “I specifically said I hope J&M land elsewhere — you make it sound like I’ll be glad when they’re gone.”

Sorry – that was entirely unintentional. It’s the rest of that lot he won’t miss.

Dan also adds this:

“Some scoop for the Herald, eh? That’s what I thought until this got posted [on Media Nation ].”

Sorted.

Sorta.

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Marty Baron’s Swan Song

December 10, 2012

Call it Marty Baron’s Last (Pulitzer) Waltz.

The Boston Globe editor is leaving to become editor of the Washington Post in January, but in the meantime he’s leaving this: A three-part series called Justice in the Shadows, which details – in impressive detail – the thousands of “convicted criminals released since 2008 because their native countries would not take them back.”

The first installment ran in the Boston Sunday Globe:

greene_secretcriminals2_metJUSTICE IN THE SHADOWS | SECRET CRIMINALS

UNWANTED AT HOME, FREE TO STRIKE AGAIN

The vast and secretive US prison system for immigrants, stymied when it tries to deport some criminals, has quietly released thousands, including killers, a Globe investigation shows.

FLUSHING, N.Y. — Qian Wu thought the man who brutally attacked her was gone forever.

She was sure that Huang Chen, a Chinese citizen who slipped into America on a ship and stayed in the country illegally, would be deported as soon as he got out of jail for choking, punching, and pointing a knife at her in 2006.

But China refused to take Chen back. So, after jailing Chen on and off for three years in Texas, immigration officials believed they were out of options and did what they have done with thousands of criminals like him.

They quietly let him go . . .

Chen then finished what he had started earlier, bashing Wu on the head with a hammer and slashing her with a knife. As she lay crumpled in a grimy stairwell, he ripped out her heart and a lung and fled with his macabre trophies . . .

Wu is just one casualty of an immigration system cloaked in a blanket of secrecy that the Founding Fathers could not have imagined, a blanket that isn’t lifted even when life is at risk.

The Globe has dedicated some serious newshole space to this series. Sunday’s real estate review:

Picture 1

 

Picture 3

 

Picture 4

Picture 5

And still two parts to come.

Like we said – serious newshole space, serious Pulitzer push.

 

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It’s Good to Live in a Two-Times Co. Town (Paywall Edition)

December 9, 2012

As newspaper revenues continue to go down like the Hindenburg, more and more dailies are looking to erect paywalls to corral new cashflow.

Exhibit Umpteen: The Washington Post.

From David Carr’s post on the New York Times Media Decoder blog (via Politico’s Playbook):

fence-decoder-blog480Pay Wall Push: Why Newspapers Are Hopping Over the Picket Fence

When The Wall Street Journal broke the news that The Washington Post was likely to start charging for online content sometime next year, it should not have come as a surprise, but it did.

The shock had something to do with the certainty that Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company, has always displayed on the subject. He has long had serious reservations about putting the work of his company’s journalists behind a wall. According to GigaOm, he explained it in the following way to Walter Isaacson at an Aspen Institute event:

The New York Times or Wall Street Journal can say we’re going to charge, but we’re not going to charge you if you subscribe to the newspaper. The Washington Post circulates in print only around Washington, D.C., but way over 90 percent – I think over 95 percent of our Internet audience is outside Washington, D.C. We can’t offer you that print or online choice. So, the pay model would work very differently for us.

But now The Post is contemplating a model in which the homepage and section fronts will be free, but the rest will require a subscription, which is a pretty nifty way to allow for snacking while hoping that people stick around to eat.

 

But some who’ve gone this route aren’t getting all that many bites. Among them is NYT kissin’ cousin the Boston Globe. Here’s what Carr writes about the two:

The New York Times’s positive experience with online subscriptions is probably not one that will scale across the industry. As a national newspaper with international resources, The Times is fishing in a pool of many millions of potential readers, so the fact over a half a million of that audience has opted in is a good sign for the organization, but not necessarily for the industry.

Mr. Graham noted that The Boston Globe, the former home of the incoming Post editor Martin Baron and a high-quality publication, had just 25,000 people sign up. That is a scary low number. But it is a place to begin.

 

Yeah, so’s zero. That don’t make it good news.

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Names & Facial

December 7, 2012

Ever since we found out that Mrs. Tom Brady had a Bundchen in the oven, we knew there’d be a race in the news media to announce  the arrival of the Littlest Ugg Model.

And on the local dailies front, we now have a winner.

The Namesniks at the Globe beat the Track Gals (without Megan!) at the Herald like a Boston traffic light.

The Globe item:

Picture 2

Sure, the story’s up on the Herald’s website now:

112a28_ltp120712baby01It’s a girl for Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady

Patriots QB/QT Tom Brady [stats]’s supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen took to Facebook this morning to announce the birth of Vivian Lake, a daughter born “healthy and full of life,” at home on Wednesday.

 “We feel so lucky to have been able to experience the miracle of birth once again and are forever grateful for the opportunity to be the parents of another little angel,” Gi posted along with a touching photo of her hand holding Vivie’s tiny hand.

Yeah yeah – whatever.

We all know it’s the dead-tree bakeoff that really matters. Score another one for the Boring Broadsheet, eh you feisty local tabloiders?

 

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All’s Weld That Ends Weld

December 6, 2012

Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld (R-Amber-Colored Liquid) made a house call at the Boston Herald yesterday, and the feisty local tabloid made him its coverboy today (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages).

MA_BH

Inside was a two-page Weldian trifecta, starting with Big Red’s pooh-poohing the charges in the Tim Cahill rumpus over his use of Lottery ads during his boneheaded 2010 gubernatorial trot.

e36a1d_ltpwilliamw20121206Ex-gov: Cahill ads just politics

Former governor and ex-U.S. Attorney William F. Weld, in a surprising slap to law enforcement, criticized prosecutors for targeting state lawmakers and ex-Treasurer Tim Cahill in corruption cases that he called just the “business” of politics.

“It seems to me that the theory of the case in both instances is a difficult one for the government,” Weld said in an exclusive interview with the Herald.

Weld, who just moved back to Boston, defended Cahill, who is now awaiting a jury verdict on charges of scheming to use Lottery ads to help his gubernatorial campaign. Asked whether as U.S. attorney he would have brought charges against Cahill, Weld responded: “I don’t think so.”

 

Weld also doesn’t think he’ll be running for the US Senate or governor, deferring to Scott Brown (R-Empty Barn Coat) and Gone-Time Charlie Baker –  for now, anyway.

Margery Eagan rounds out the coverage with some reflections on the Charmin’ Brahmin.

5a8481_010406weldRegular-guy routine refreshing with Bill

Bill Weld has never done what so many politicians now feel they must: pretend to be a regular guy.

At the Boston Herald yesterday, the Brahmin out of Harvard, where buildings are named for his family, talked about the rules of squash and a “dish of tea.”

Oh, how very “Downton Abbey.”

 

Yeah, but who gets to play the Dowager Countess?

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Hey, Howie – Where You At? (Barack Obama’s Uncle Omar Edition)

December 5, 2012

From yesterday’s Boston Globe front page:

04042012_04uncle_photo1-8233637Obama’s uncle gets expulsion rehearing

Immigration lawyers surprised

President Obama’s uncle has won a new deportation hearing in Boston immigration court, more than a year after a drunken- driving arrest in Framingham revealed that he had violated a longstanding order to return to Kenya.

Last week, the Board of Immigration Appeals granted Onyango Obama’s request to reopen his immigration case based in part on his contention that his prior lawyer was ineffective, according to a government official with direct knowledge of the case. Obama’s new lawyers have also argued that the 68-year-old Obama has lived in the United States for nearly half a century and deserves a chance to make his case.

Brian P. Hale — spokesman for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is prosecuting the deportation — confirmed that the board has reopened the case but declined to elaborate.

The board’s decision raised eyebrows among immigration lawyers who say it is difficult to persuade the immigration courts to reconsider a case that involves an arrest and a flagrant violation of a deportation order, last issued in 1992.

What’s really surprising is that Boston Herald drive-by columnist Howie Carr was a day late and a dollar short on the story.

Carr’s catch-up column today:

One lucky uncle? He’ll drink to that!

There are three chances that Barack Obama’s illegal-alien Uncle Omar will be deported by his nephew’s government.

Slim, fat and none.

He’s 68, he will take a drink under extreme social pressure, and he has to wait until March before this OUI in Middlesex is erased from his record. Oh yeah, and when he was lugged in Framingham in August 2011, he said to the cops, “I think I will call the White House.”

In other words, do you know who I am?

Hey, Howie – do you know who you are?

A hack (sorry, that was rude) guy who mails it in so often, you should have your own US Post Office stamp.

And a guy who just got beat by the Boring Broadsheet.

UPDATE: Michael Graham plays caboose in this piece from the op-ed page.

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Brain Freeze at Boston Herald

December 4, 2012

Monday’s Boston Globe featured major coverage of a major brain injury study from Boston University.

Via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages:

MA_BG

(Full disclosure: The hardreading staff moonlights as a mass communication professor at BU.)

Monday’s Boston Herald, on the other hand, featured . . . nothing.

But the feisty local tabloid did post this AP story to its website Monday morning:

BU study links head injuries to brain damage

BOSTON — An extensive study of the brains of dead athletes and others shows that most had signs of brain damage after suffering repeated head injuries.

The study published Monday by the Boston University School of Medicine reports on the autopsies of 85 brain donors.

The autopsies revealed extensive evidence of protein tangles clogging brain tissue and causing the destruction of brain cells in football players, wrestlers, hockey players, boxers, and military combat veterans.

 

The AP report even credited the Globe piece, which had to hurt over at Wingo Square.

Just like a brain freeze, eh?

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Twinkie Winkie

December 3, 2012

Junk-food journalism in Sunday’s local dailies.

From the Boston Herald:

Chew on Twinkie poll

Now that the election is over, pollsters have a lot more time on their hands to measure America’s barometer for other important topics. Such as the Twinkie.

Rasmussen Reports released a poll last week showing that 57 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Hostess Twinkies.

The endangered cream-filled cake actually polled higher than the brain trust in Washington, D.C.

A Rasmussen Reports poll taken just two days earlier showed 34 percent have a favorable opinion of the federal government.

From the Boston Globe:

ad63d379c1a747e89d862a985edd034b-30a09f3f4dc41320210f6a7067005d73The Twinkie defense

Wait, are you really telling me it’s over?

Seriously, it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I’m a golden white cake in the snack-addicted United States.

I lifted America through the Great Depression.

I built bakeries and factories. I created jobs.

I joined Facebook, darn it.

Polls had me pulling ahead.

They said there was no way a perfectly groomed treat like me could lose.

It’s not my fault that 47 percent of America wants some wheaty lefty cholesterol-freebie.

I earned my success. I did the 100-calorie thing, shed my transfats.

Of course, there were places I could not compromise: high fructose corn syrup.

Did this anger Ohio?

I know how to run a business, to run a country.

And it’s not handing out gifts.

Not even to the workers who make me.

You know who says, “Better days are ahead.”

We’ll see about that.

Yes we will.

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Safe-T First?

December 2, 2012

Saturday’s local dailies duly reported on Thursday’s MBTA trolley-car crash, the latest in a series of T-bonehead incidents over the past several years.

The Boston Herald, as usual, has the basics:

193715_T_11302012Driver in T trolley crash cited for speeding in 2009

The operator of a Green Line trolley that rear-ended another train parked at a downtown station Thursday had been cited by the MBTA for a speeding violation in 2009, according to the T.

The citation, for running a C branch trolley 13 mph over the speed limit along Beacon Street in Brookline, was the only prior issue concerning train operation in the man’s six-year career at the T, said MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo.

“He has traveled through hundreds of speed checks since then, with no violations,” he said.

Pesaturo said the operator was disciplined and retrained after the citation.

The T hasn’t identified the 46-year-old operator, who was to receive a safety recognition pin yesterday for three years of accident-free driving but skipped the ceremony because he is on unpaid leave, MBTA acting General Manager Jonathan Davis said.

 

Crosstown rival Boston Globe added this ironic detail:

The accident occurred a day before that operator was scheduled to receive a “safety pin” along with other Green Line drivers, including the one whose trolley he hit, for three straight years of driving without an accident or moving violation. Instead, he remained on paid leave and did not collect his pin, officials said.

 

But, as the Globe noted elsewhere in Saturday’s edition, this operator did:

Picture 2

 

Safety First?

That’s just how the T rolls, yeah?

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Track Gals (and Megan!) Rip Off Hardworking Staff

November 30, 2012

Yesterday the hardworking staff at kissin’ cousin Campaign Outsider noted that the Boston Globe was having a difficult time distinguishing between the late Tip O’Neill and Ken Howard, who played Tip in a local stage production.

From yesterday’s boston.com homepage:

picture-21

 

Then, lo and behold, the Track Gals (and Megan!) include this in their Boston Herald column today:

Boston.com, the website of our favorite Boring Broadsheet, posting a picture of actor Ken Howard, in costume as Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, and identified it as the late House speaker in a story about a new federal building named for Tip. (It was later swapped for the real ONeill)

 

So not only can’t we get quoted in the feisty local tabloid (they know what we’re talking about), we can’t get credited either.

That’s just wrong.

Meanwhile, the Globe took the high road and didn’t mention our post at all.

UPDATE: Unbeknownst to us, Megan Johnson had left the Track before this item ran.

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