The hardreading staff has long whacked around the Boston Herald for celebrating itself and singing itself in so-called news reports. Now it’s time to give the Boston Globe a dope slap.
For starters, here’s what headlined the Globe’s homepage at 12:45 this morning:
That’s the residue of this Michael Levenson piece at the top of yesterday’s Globe front page:
HUBweek aims for wider appeal
There will be a party in the South End with music, art installations, and an unusual tasting competition featuring six beers brewed with water from the Charles River that’s been purified (they promise) by a local company.
There will be intimate seven-person lunches in Kendall Square where anyone can ask a Broad Institute geneticist why science hasn’t cured cancer or delve into the dangers of artificial intelligence with a director of the Harvard Innovation Lab.
And just before the first presidential debate, a prominent philosopher will lead an even more high-minded debate at Faneuil Hall, asking: Is it fair to tax the rich to help the poor? And should rich countries have the right to restrict immigration?
Such are the events — both playful and provocative — that organizers are planning for the slightly revamped second year of HUBweek, a festival devoted to the arts, science, and technology that is aiming to become Boston’s answer to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.
Reality check: Those four paragraphs feature roughly the same number of plugs as Joe Biden’s head.
It’s not until the sixth graf (on the jump page) that readers learn this:
[O]rganizers are . . . grappling with how to ensure that the annual festival — which is sponsored by The Boston Globe, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — does not cater solely to the business and academic elite in downtown Boston, the Seaport, and Cambridge, where most of the events are held.
Maybe the Globe should grapple with how to ensure that promotional material is not presented as news. The hardreading staff would be happy to participate in that high-minded debate.
We tend to think of the Boston Herald as the town’s stern grandpa, holding everyone to the straight and narrow. While the Herald continues to be narrow, though, it’s not always straight. The tokey local tabloid features this full-page ad from Boston Smoke Shop in today’s edition.
The ad fails to mention where and when the Boston Freedom Rally will occur (Saturday and Sunday on the Boston Common), but that’s weed for you.
Meanwhile, not high but in high dudgeon is the Herald editorial page, which weighs in with this bit of pearl-clutching.
Pot limits in order
Secretary of Transportation Stephanie Pollack is right — Massachusetts needs a reliable test to determine whether a driver is impaired by marijuana. And if Question 4 passes, legalizing the recreational use of pot, the importance of developing such a test will be even more important.
“One of the concerns with marijuana is, it is clear at some point, you are impaired legally, but we don’t have a test like we do for alcohol,” Pollack said on Boston Herald Radio this week.
There is an interim step that Beacon Hill could take — and frankly already should have taken. They could make it illegal to drive while in possession of marijuana, as it is with an open container of alcohol.
And remember: It’s against the law to smoke anything on the Common. Not to get technical about it.
Crosstown at the Boston Globe, there’s no Boston Smoke Shop ad, but there is this pot headline on Page One: “Colorado serves edible marijuana with a side of controversy.” And brownies you can eat on the Common.
Well, this is something new from the pluggy local tabloid: Roughly 40% of the Edge section in today’s Boston Herald is “Presented by Lexus Broadway in Boston.”
Starting on page 23 . . .
All of page 24 . . .
All of page 30 . . .
Top half of page 32 . . .
All the editorial carries Herald bylines, which makes things pretty blurry. Then again, as our kissin’ cousins at Sneak Adtack noted earlier this week, “A study from FIPP and the Native Advertising Institute found that over two-thirds of magazine publishers employ their own editorial staffs to produce native ads.”
Maybe it’s time to do a study of newspaper publishers as well.
Sunny Joe White was the original Program Director of legendary Boston radio station Kiss 108. The former Beautiful Music station in Medford known as WHIL-FM set the market on fire when it became a full-time disco station in 1979. Sunny was the connection to the stars. As disco died in the early 80’s, Sunny transformed Kiss 108 into a major Top 40 station which still holds national records for huge ratings. When the Kiss Concert started in the 80’s it was Sunny’s relationship with the promoters and record labels that enabled the Kiss Concert to become the preeminent radio station concert in America.
White died of heart failure in 1996. He was 42 years old.
The Facebook page listed in the ad describes itself as “a place for those who were reached by his voice and his spirit to share memories.” Such as this one:
Let’s start with this: For the past several years, the Boston Globe has featured only a handful of comic strips worth reading: Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley, Rhymes with Orange by Hilary Price (both of whom are Bay State artists), Bizarro by Dan Piraro, and, on a good day, Mother Goose & Grimm, Monty, and Doonesbury (Memory Lane edition).
Also – the best of the lot – Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead. Until yesterday, that is, when Globe readers learned that the paper had performed a Zipectomy and dumped the strip.
The hardreading staff, of course, protested vehemently, railing against the shortsighted decision by Globe bigwigs. We also sent an email to Bill Griffith, asking what happened. His reply:
It’s an outrage, and we call on all Pinhead-heads to contact Globe editor Brian McGrory and register their disapproval.
Thank you for your support.
P.S. Here’s the latest Zippy, but, really, we can’t do this every day.
At least last time the Globeniks performed a Zipectomy, they had the decency to publish an editor’s note.
(Just for the record, WuMo no longer appears in the Globe’s increasingly lame Sunday Comics section.)
This time around, though, there’s not a word about the Globe’s dropping the strip altogether. That’s just wrong.
The hardreading staff is sending a note to Bill Griffith to ask what happened. Meanwhile, Boston Globe editor Brian (Hey – let’s reimagine the paper! We can use John Henry’s garage!) McGrory has now become a first-ballot entry into the Comic Strip Hall of Shame.
P.S. Here’s today’s Zippy that McGrory so shamefully withheld.
The Boston Herald is so far in the tank for Donald Trump these days, its editors should be wearing scuba gear.
Exhibit Umpteen: Today’s edition of the flunky local tabloid, starting with Page One.
(To be fair graf goes here)
To be fair, there’s nothing really wrong with the report headlined “Trump visits LA’s beleaguered bayou.” But right alongside it is a piece by Trumpkin Adriana Cohen that’s just knee-buckling in its simple-minded sycophancy.
Who needs Hill, Obama? The Donald to the rescue
The catastrophic flooding in Louisiana is now being called the worst natural disaster in the U.S. since Superstorm Sandy.
Yet with callous indifference to those suffering, Hillary Clinton and President Obama are missing in action. Clinton has come up with lame excuses why she’s a no-show. And Obama is working on his golf swing with millionaires, billionaires and celebrities on Martha’s Vineyard.
Who needs them.
Donald Trump showed the country who’s boss yesterday by flying to Louisiana to comfort those affected by the catastrophic flooding.
Cohen proceeds to gush over Trump’s “mission of mercy,” proclaiming that “Trump showed voters that in a time of disaster and calamity, he’s not an Ivory Tower guy. He shows up and rolls up his sleeves.”
Right. For about 49 seconds.
From the occasionally readable Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:
On Friday morning, freshly-minted Donald Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told ABC News that Trump and running mate Mike Pence would be traveling to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to “help people on the ground” in a “decidedly nonpolitical event” with “no press allowed.”
As it turns out, though, there actually were members of the press allowed, and the candidate did use the occasion to attack his political opponent, and there were opportunities for photographs, but true to his word, Trump did “help out.” Pool cameras trailed Trump for his entire visit, and over the course of those several hours, Trump “helped out” by unloading a truckload of toys for 49 seconds.
Here you go:
The flood victims of Louisiana should absolutely get all the help America can give them. But from the evidence in the chumpy local tabloid, the Heraldniks should get themselves some help as well.
Quite a car-tastrophe in Downtown Crossing yesterday, leading to some quick heroics from locals and tourists alike. Correspondent Miguel Otárola had the story for the Boston Globe.
Car hits, injures 3 in tour group along Freedom Trail
Craig Caplan was selling Boston caps and T-shirts at noon Thursday from his carts near Washington and School streets when he heard an eruption of terror.
“There was a collective scream of about 100 people,” Caplan said. “Everybody screamed and came running.”
He turned his head and saw a scene of chaos. Bystanders surrounded a silver Mercedes-Benz that had just barreled into a tour group walking the Freedom Trail. They were lifting the car to free a woman pinned underneath. The driver had run into a nearby building, witnesses said.
Otárola also included this narrative: “[Bystander Brendan] Kearney spoke to [a] tour guide, who was dressed in a Colonial outfit. After the crash, the tour guide ‘went over to the car, opened the door, and put the car into park,’ Kearney said.”
Kearney went on to call the anonymous tour guide “a great citizen of Boston.”
At the Boston Herald, meanwhile, the tour guide not only had a name (Richard Holland), he also got a sidebar via reporter Antonio Planas.
Give this Downtown Crosstown bakeoff to the firsty local tabloid, no?
Nice piece by Laura Crimaldi in today’s Boston Globe about the return of a Korean War vet who died in a prisoner-of-war camp.
Remains of Korean War POW coming home to Cambridge
US Army Corporal Ronald M. Sparks spent his last night in Cambridge more than 65 years ago, baby-sitting for his three young nephews before he left to fight in the Korean War.
The night made a lasting impression on one of the boys, 3-year-old Bob, who woke up and found Sparks reading a newspaper in his family’s living room.
Sparks, who was 19 then, never returned.
But Bob, who met Sparks for the first and only time that night, has found his lost uncle and is bringing him home decades after he died in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Korea.
The Globe piece has everything you want in a human-interest story – drama, history, valor, persistence, and a happy, if bittersweet, ending.
It’s missing only one thing: A nod to Boston Herald columnist Joe Fitzgerald, who had the story in yesterday’s paper.
‘Uncle Ron is home at last’
Quest brings Korean War casualty back for burial
Bob Sparks was almost 4 the first time he saw his uncle Ron.
“It was just before he shipped out,” Sparks remembers. “He was babysitting me.
“When I awoke and saw him, I was frightened. I asked, ‘Who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m your Uncle Ron, your dad’s little brother.’ He was in his uniform, and when I asked ‘Are you a soldier?’ he smiled and gave me this crisp salute. It’s my only personal memory of him.”
Ron Sparks, 19, then left the family home in Cambridge, bound for the Korean War with the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division . . .
It’s not unusual for one of the Boston dailies to draft off the other on certain stories, and it’s not like the Herald bats a thousand in the credit where credit’s due department. But still . . .
As our kissin’ cousins at Campaign Outsider have noted, virtually every ad campaign for Legal Sea Foods over the past several years has been equal parts puerile and unfunny. But the current Berkowitz for President effort stands out for its excessively bad taste.
Back in March, there was this ad that drew protests from numerous quarters.
Last week the big guffaws came from the size of Donald Trump’s hands. Now comes this full-page ad in today’s Boston dailies.
Note that once again the Boston Herald has marked this “Advertisement,” and once again the Globe has not. Who ever imagined the thirsty local tabloid would be more fastidious than the $tately local broadsheet?
Regardless, Roger Berkowitz is getting hustled by his fancy-pants New York ad agency, DeVito/Verdi. In this case, he’s the fish.
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