Hark! The Herald! (Lame Subscription Edition II)

June 17, 2013

The Boston Herald wants to increase its number of home subscribers from the current level of 17, so it’s been running this ad the past few days:

 

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Always Relevant, eh? So how come Herald home subscribers got no coverage of last night’s NBA Finals game in their one-star editions today? (Sorry – no pictures. The Missus has a real job.)

Lucky for the fusty local tabloid, any suckers who fall for its home delivery pitch won’t know what they’re missing until it’s too late.

Heisty, eh?

 


Hark! The Herald! (Lame Subscription Edition)

June 16, 2013

THE BOSTON HERALD WANTS YOU to swell the ranks of its current 17 home subscribers. So it ran this ad in today’s edition:

 

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Always Relevant? Seriously?

Here’s Page One of the sports section Herald home subscribers received this morning.

 

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Page 2 (photos courtesy of the Missus):

 

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And that was the four-star edition.

Once again, crosstown rival Boston Globe delivered an eight-page Stanley Cup section.

 

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Hey, Heraldniks: You haven’t just lost your fastball. This is like tee ball for the hardreading staff.

Seriously.


Globe Take on Parking Wars Is Spot-On

June 14, 2013

It’s not often that the Boston Globe out-tabloids the Boston Herald, but today’s one of those times thanks to this Page One story:

 

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The, er, money quote:

[T]he winner, Lisa Blumenthal, who lives in a single-family home with three parking spots on Commonwealth Avenue valued at more than $5.8 million . . .  said the auction was a unique opportunity to get more parking places for guests and workers, although she admitted she didn’t expect the bidding to go so high.

 

Guests and workers? Seriously? That’s got Herald front page written all over it.

Except here’s what the musty local tabloid ran instead:

 

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C’mon, Heraldniks – you can cuff Ed Markey around anytime. But how often do you get his ‘n’ her parking spaces . . . in the Back Bay . . . at $280,000 a pop . . . for guests and workers?

You’re losing your fastball, guys.


The Puck Stops at the Herald

June 13, 2013

After the hardreading staff watched last night’s fabulous triple-overtime Stanley Cup final between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Boston Bruins, we trundled off to bed confident that there would be excellent coverage in today’s local dailies.

But what did we find on our doorstep this morning masquerading as a daily newspaper?

The Boston Herald one-star edition.

Which featured this back page:

 

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And this inside back page (photos courtesy of the Missus):

 

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The heisty local tabloid’s coverage spanned an entire two periods, which turned out to be roughly 40% of the game.

Is that any way to treat the 17 home subscribers the Herald boasts? Sure, the three-star edition had this back page:

 

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BUT WE DIDN’T GET THE THREE-STAR EDITION, DID WE?

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe that plopped onto our front porch had a separate section with eight – count ’em, eight – pages of honest-to-God coverage.

Page One:

 

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Page 8:

 

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Yeah, we know – the Herald subcontracts the Globe’s printing presses so the stately local broadsheet has the advantage. But maybe the Heraldniks should put on some big-boy pants and find an arrangement that doesn’t force them to print a first edition at 11 pm the night before.

If not for their own sake then at least for the few, the proud, the 17.

 


Battle of the Bulger (Rat-tat-Ptooey Edition)

June 13, 2013

The Boston Herald goes all news noir in today’s edition, starting with its Page One “Whitey and Crew in Their Lair” collage.

 

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(Just checked – Whitey and Crew aren’t on Pinterest yet)

Inside we get this rogues’ gallery of State Police surveillance shots.

 

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Crosstown at the Boston Globe, it’s Trial Coverage 101 for a non-televised case: courtroom sketches, transcript excerpts, and etc.

 

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One place the two dailies do intersect, though, is in these dueling columns.

 

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Both columnists paint Bulger’s lawyer, Jay Carney, as a man trying to lead the jury down the garden path by contending that Bulger was just a crook, not a murderer or an informant.

From Howie Carr’s column:

“Jim Bulger is of Irish descent and the worst thing an Irish person can do is become an informant.”

There’s not enough space in the paper to refute that one. So how about this one?

“Jim Bulger made millions upon millions upon millions of dollars.”

Then why are we the taxpayers picking up the tab for this “indigent” 83-year-old defendant?

 

From Kevin Cullen’s column:

It is obvious the defense strategy is to acknowledge that Whitey was a top echelon criminal but to refute any suggestion that he was a top echelon informant for the FBI who used his status to allow him to murder and maim with impunity.

Of course, that plays to Whitey’s grossly inflated view of himself. He was a millionaire! Admire his asset acquisition skills! He got an FBI agent to feed him information about criminal rivals and honest law enforcement efforts to nail him. Admire how he read Machiavelli and took those lessons to heart!

It’s classic Whitey: I’m the smartest guy in the room, and the rest of you are a bunch of rubes who just fell off a turnip truck.

 

Rats!

 


Herald a Lively Index to the Globe (Mayoral Hopefuls’ Income Edition)

June 12, 2013

From our Compare and Contrast in Clear Idiomatic English desk

Coincidentally (or not) both local dailies have salary surveys of the Boston mayoral candidates today, with – wait for it – mostly different numbers.

Start with the Boston Herald:

AN3V9806.JPGBIG BUCKS BACKING BIDS

Herald review shows top earners in mayor’s race

Dorchester health care executive Bill Walczak is the wealthiest among the top tier of mayoral candidates, reporting a staggering $450,000 salary, while state Rep. Martin J. Walsh and City Councilor Michael P. Ross each reported earning more than $200,000, and two others hauled in a quarter-million dollars with their spouses, a Herald review of candidates’ tax returns found.

Walczak, co-founder of the Codman Square Health Center, and his Boston schoolteacher wife, Linda, reported earning a combined $526,000 in 2011, according to a tax return supplied by the Walczak campaign.

 

Like that “staggering”? That’s the Herald all over.

The feisty local tabloid also listed the incomes of former state representative Charlotte Golar Richie, Boston School Committeeman  John Barros, Boston City Councilors Felix Arroyo, Rob Consalvo, and John Connolly, and Suffolk District Attorney Dan Conley.

Crosstown at the Boston Globe, the story looked like this:

Income of Boston mayoral hopefuls varies

Many looking to succeed Menino now earn more than city’s median income

There are no Mitt Romneys in the bunch, no nine-digit personal fortunes, no eye-popping investments. But roughly half of the candidates hoping to succeed Thomas M. Menino as mayor of Boston earn more than double the city’s annual median household income of almost $52,000.

Four of the aspirants would face pay cuts if they move into the fifth-floor office that belongs to the mayor, a job that pays $175,000 a year.

As campaigns clash this summer over affordable housing and the plight of the middle class, tax returns can provide a glimpse of each candidate’s socioeconomic status. The Globe requested 2012 state and federal tax returns for all 15 people running for mayor and found that income varied from roughly $59,000 to $700,000. One candidate gave almost $19,000 to charity; another donated a few hundred dollars, the returns showed.

 

The stately local broadsheet also included this helpful chart.

 

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Notice not just the different numbers, but the Globe’s inclusion of Robert Cappucci, “a former School Committee member and retired Boston police officer who collects a pension,” and its listing of tax rates and charitable donations – both quite telling.

Notice also who failed to provide tax returns, most conspicuously Councilor Charles Yancey.

Follow-up, anyone?


Boston Herald Gives Belichick a Pass

June 11, 2013

Tim Tebowpalooza gets plenty of play in today’s Boston Herald, from Page One

 

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to the double-barreled columnists here

 

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to this Sports Section piece

 

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to the back page of the feisty local tabloid.

 

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But nowhere is there any mention of this from a Yahoo! Sports piece last month:

67429761-806c-4001-8137-34de570d376c_135613979[W]hile there’s plenty of media chatter that Tebow could land with the Patriots (whose offensive coordinator, Josh McDaniels, was the man behind the Broncos’ decision to draft Tebow in the first round), my organizational sources tell me that’s very unlikely to happen, with one going so far as to say that Coach Bill Belichick “hates” Tebow as a player.

 

Belichick waited four weeks to deny that, which seems like mighty convenient timing and sort of undermines the outrage in his statement to ESPN Boston: “[F]or anyone to have represented that is the way I feel about Tim Tebow is completely untrue, baseless and irresponsible. It is unfortunate that something so inaccurate was reported.”

And not repeated in today’s Herald. A Boston Globe report by Shalise Manza Young, however, did make reference to it:

It seemed odd last Thursday that Belichick suddenly decided to dispute a Yahoo! Sports story from nearly a month earlier that cited a Patriots source who said Belichick “hates” Tebow as a player. Belichick told ESPNBoston.com that was “untrue, baseless, and irresponsible” to report that he felt that way about Tebow.

Now it makes a bit more sense.

 

Again, just not to the Herald.

 


Rivers Flows Only Toward Globe

June 10, 2013

Looks like Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers is playing favorites with the local dailies.

From today’s Boston Globe:

rivers-bigDoc Rivers mum on returning to Celtics

MIAMI — Doc Rivers reached out to the Globe for the first time since the Celtics’ season concluded, but would not offer any hints as to whether he will return to the team as coach in a text-message exchange Sunday evening.

Rivers said he needed to “detox” after the season and apologized for being inaccessible to reporters . . .

Which apparently still applies to the Boston Herald. The feisty local tabloid has nothing in today’s print edition, and hasn’t even fudged a web piece the way it usually does.

Hey, Heraldniks: Like Howie always says, when the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s Doc.


Herald Hitches Carr to Globe

June 9, 2013

Apparently Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr has run out of ways to milk his presence on Whitey Bulger’s witness list, which would presumably keep him from covering the mobster’s trial in person.

So the feisty local tabloid has followed in the Boston Globe’s footsteps and asked the court to let their Howie go.

jacobs_howie_3-6288449Herald wants columnist in courtroom

The Boston Herald filed a request in federal court Saturday to exclude the newspaper’s columnist Howie Carr from a sequestration order that would prevent him from sitting in the courtroom during the trial of James “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious gangster who has been the subject of countless Carr columns and several books.

The motion came a day after US District Court Judge Denise Casper granted a similar request from The Boston Globe to exclude veteran journalists, reporter Shelley Murphy and columnist Kevin Cullen, who wrote a book together about Bulger, from the same sequestration order. “The Boston Herald and Mr. Carr respectfully submit that the reasons supporting exemption of those journalists similarly require exclusion of Mr. Carr from the sequestration order,” the newspaper’s lawyer, Elizabeth A. Ritvo, said in the filing Saturday.

 

Funny thing is, that report appeared in the Globe. Nothing in the Herald about it.

The hardreading staff is checking with our Walt Whitman desk for clarification.


Battle of the Bulger (Cullen the Facts Edition)

June 8, 2013

The Boston Herald wants you to know it’s on the Whitey Bulger trial like Brown on Williamson, so they’re running this ad in today’s edition:

 

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And here’s an example of that “complete coverage.”

060713bulgermg002Witness ban lifted for Globe duo

Judge Denise J. Casper ruled yesterday that Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy and columnist Kevin Cullen can attend James “Whitey” Bulger’s trial, exempting them from her order to keep witnesses out of the courtroom except to testify . . .

In a separate court motion yesterday, Bulger’s lawyers threatened a push to isolate the jury from the outside world throughout the expected four-month trial “if the editors of the Globe do not show better judgment in the publication of columns that are designed to sell newspapers and for-profit books written by this columnist (Cullen).”

 

Interesting, yes? But hardly complete.

Here’s the same issue in the Globe:

Earlier Friday, Bulger’s defense attorney J. W. Carney Jr. filed a court motion in support of the request to ban Murphy and Cullen from the courtroom, alleging that Cullen’s Friday column on Bulger was sensational and would prejudice a jury.

Carney later said he would consider asking that the jury in the case be sequestered, which would prove to be costly and a hardship for jurors, if the Globe does not “show better judgment in the publication of columns that are designed to sell newspapers and for-profit books written by this columnist.”

But Casper rejected Carney’s argument when she granted the newspaper’s request to exclude Cullen and Murphy from the courtroom during testimony, noting the journalists’ constitutional rights in reporting on Bulger’s past and covering his trial.

Casper said she read the column Friday morning and indicated it seemed to support the Boston Globe’s argument, telling Carney, “From a 1st Amendment point of view I don’t know if it lends more support to your position, or more support to your opposing party’s point of view.”

 

[To be sure graf goes here.]

To be sure, both papers are pursing their own interests: the Herald to make the Globe look bad, the Globe to make itself look good. (The stately local broadsheet for the most part doesn’t concern itself with the feisty local tabloid.)

That’s all to be expected. But hey, Heraldniks: Complete coverage? Try again.