February 5, 2019
From our never-ending Local Dailies DisADvantage desk
In the wake of the New England Patriots’ victory in Stupor Bowl LIII, yesterday’s editions of the Boston dailies marked Celebration Day for the six-time champions.
Begin with the Boston Globe, where the Kraft Family bought page 3 of the Score section.
From there the congradulations took an oddly retail turn, starting with this sort of oblique Hood full page.
Next up was this 7-Eleven full page ad offering some Hangover Relief Specials.
Representative copy:
And then the back page of Score, brought to you by Pepsi, the Official Soft Drink of the New England Patriots and Super Bowl LIII.
Yes, that is the Chris Hogan of six targets, zero receptions, and zero yardage in the Big Game. But why get technical about it.
Finally, the A section of the Globe featured this full-page shoutout from Bank of America.
Of all the ads above, only that last one ran in the Boston Herald.
Today it’s a different story – it’s Tchotchke Day in the local dailies! Here’s a sample of the Patsabilia you can find in today’s Globe.
And here’s what the Herald is offering.
Not for nothing, but the hardreading staff gravitates toward the Levitating Football.
One final, poignant note: The thirsty local tabloid, after being passed over by so many advertisers yesterday, was finally reduced to running a congratulatory ad from . . . “the entire staff at the Boston Herald.”
That’s just, well, sad.
Leave a Comment » | 
Uncategorized | Tagged: 7-Eleven, Bank of America, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Hood, Kraft Family, New England Patriots, Patsabilia, Stupor Bowl, Super Bowl LIII, Tchotchke Day | 
Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
January 7, 2019
As the hardreading staff noted at the time, last month the Boston Globe announced that the cheapskately local broadsheet had “discontinued several [comics] strips and two games.”
By “several,” of course, they meant 11.
(The Globe’s math skills leave much to be desired, as we discovered when the paper played DNA newsletter for Elizabeth Warren last year.)
Regardless, that relegated the comics to a single anemic page.
Cut to today’s edition of the Globe, where the editor moonwalks on his strip mining of the comics pages.
We’ve already indicated our choices: Zippy, Get Fuzzy, Mother Goose & Grimm, Bliss, and Bizarro.
Make sure to weigh in on yours as well.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Adam @ Home, Arctic Circle, Arlo & Janis, Bizarro, Bliss, Boston Globe, cheapskately local broadsheet, Curtis, DNA correction, DNA test, Dustin, Elizabeth Warren, For Better Or For Worse, Get Fuzzy, Jumpstart, Mother Goose & Grimm, Mr. Boffo, Pinheads, Pooch Cafe, Red & Rover, Rose Is Rose, The Pajama Diaries, Zits | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
December 31, 2018
The hardreading staff has noticed – as perhaps you splendid readers have also – that the Boston Globe’s Names column tends to be a weak carbon copy of Olivia Vanni’s Inside Track at the Boston Herald.
Latest case in point: Rob Delaney’s blue Christmas without his son Henry, who died at the age of 2 1/2 earlier this year.
Vanni’s Herald piece on Friday.
Rob Delaney publicly grieves loss of son
While the holidays are meant to be a time for all that’s merry and bright, Rob Delaney gave everyone a friendly reminder that grief doesn’t take a break. The Marblehead-raised comedian/actor/writer recently got real on Twitter, opening up about his family’s first Christmas since the passing of his toddler son, Henry, in a series of emotional posts.
“Our first Christmas without Henry came & went,” he wrote. “The day itself was okay, maybe because there were so many horrible, painful days leading up to it; we must have hit our quota or something. We talked about him a lot & included his memory throughout the day.”
Boston Globe Lames – sorry, Names – item yesterday.
Rob Delaney shares experience of first Christmas without son
The day after Christmas, Rob Delaney tweeted about what the holiday was like without his son Henry, who died at age 2½ earlier this year. The “Catastrophe” actor and Marblehead native wrote that he talks publicly about Henry to help “destigmatize grief” for other families who have experienced loss. Henry was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2016 and died in January.
“Our first Christmas without Henry came & went,” Delaney wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “The day itself was okay, maybe because there were so many horrible, painful days leading up to it; we must have hit our quota or something. We talked about him a lot & included his memory throughout the day.”
The daily Herald costs two bucks. The Sunday Globe costs five. You tell us which is worth your gossip dollar.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Blue Christmas, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Inside Track, Names, Olivia Vanni, Rob Delaney | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
December 26, 2018
From our Late to the Christmas Party desk
Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court’s favorite toy store, ran double-barreled holiday ads in both local dailies yesterday.
First, this after-Christmas ad appeared in the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.
The Hobby Lobbiacs also advertised some soul saving in the papers.
Gift with Jesus: A free Bible app for your phone.
No surprise that the Herald would be the local Amen Corner, but the Globe as well? Will wonders never cease.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Amen Corner, Bible download, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Hobby Lobbiacs, Hobby Lobby, Supreme Court | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
December 24, 2018
Are we having none yet?
The powers that be at the Boston Globe have continued their assault on the comics pages, as this note in today’s edition indicates.
Before:
After:
Let’s call the roll of the “several” strips that have been dumped. First, the good ones: Zippy (second time the Globe Pinheads have dropped him), Get Fuzzy, Mother Goose & Grimm, Bizarro, Bliss.
Then the no-great-loss ones – Rose Is Rose, Jumpstart, Pooch Cafe, Adam @ Home, Dustin, Mr. Boffo.
That would be 11 dropped comics if you’re keeping score at home.
Worse yet, consider some of the dogs they’ve kept: Red & Rover, Zits, Arctic Circle, The Pajama Diaries, For Better Or For Worse, Curtis, Arlo & Janis – all mind-numbingly either a) stupid, or b) unfunny.
Of course, the stately local broadsheet doesn’t care what old fogeys like the hardreading staff think. It’s too busy chasing the millennial crowd that it will likely never get.
But as Don Seiffert reported last week at the Boston Business Journal, “[a]s of Sept. 30, the paper had 109,409 weekday subscribers and 190,787 Sunday-only subscribers — down year-over-year by 11 percent and 13 percent respectively.”
And that, of course, is no joke.
3 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Adam @ Home, Arctic Circle, Arlo & Janis, Bizarro, Bliss, Boston Business Journal, Boston Globe, Curtis, Don Seiffert, Dustin, For Better Or For Worse, Get Fuzzy, Jumpstart, Mother Goose & Grimm, Mr. Boffo, Pinheads, Pooch Cafe, Red & Rover, Rose Is Rose, The Pajama Diaries, Zits | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
December 23, 2018
The hardreading staff gave the local dailies two days to piggyback on Jo C. Goode’s dustup with Fall River Mayor Jasiel Correia in his increasingly desperate attempt to hold onto his office.
But the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald got nothin’.
So let’s repair to The Herald News for the story (tip o’ the pixel to Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources newsletter).
Herald News backs reporter as Mayor Jasiel Correia admits to creating website pushing ‘fake news’ meme
FALL RIVER — The Herald News is standing behind its reporter Jo C. Goode as Mayor Jasiel Correia II has repeatedly attempted to discredit her reporting through a website he created.
For the second time in a month, Correia posted the link to jogoode.com on Twitter, which brings people to a website displaying a meme of President Donald Trump declaring “You are fake news.”
The latest link came in response to a Tweet from Goode that a crew affiliated with HBO and Mark Wahlberg was filming Correia in Government Center Thursday afternoon. The first instance came after Goode posted a question on Twitter on Nov. 24 asking if Correia was moving from his Bank Street apartment. The Herald News previously had reported that Correia had been served a notice to quit by Dec. 1, sharing the document on heraldnews.com.
When asked about the site, Correia told the Herald News ““It just is what it is. Jo reports fake news and I stand by it.”
Not even sure what that means, but clearly the guy has issues. They just have yet to register with the Boston dailies.
(For those of you keeping score at home: Here’s the link for jogoode.com and here’s Correia’s Twitter feed. Enter at your own peril.)
Two Daily Town Official Prediction ™
Jo C. Goode will land at at major metro daily right soon. Maybe even the Boston Globe.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Brian Stelter, fake news, Fall River, Jasiel Correia, Jo C. Goode, Reliable Sources, The Herald News | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
December 2, 2018
As the hardreading staff worked its way through Saturday’s local dailies, we encountered this headline on Hiawatha Bray’s latest tech column in the Boston Globe.
Of course the headline should have read “have you worried.”
Then again, grammatical glitches in the shrinky local broadsheet are no surprise, given that the Globe is shedding editorial staff like a Corgi in spring.
Which should have your worried, no?
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Boston Globe, Dan Kennedy, Hiawatha Bray, Marriott data breach, Media Nation, shrinky local broadsheet, Tech Lab | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
November 22, 2018
Recipients of the latest Boston Globe Weekender newsletter were greeted with this cheery offering from local scribe Michael Andor Brodeur.
From now through what is still for some reason called “Cyber Monday,” Weekenders can score a one-year subscription to the Globe online for just a buck a week for a year. I just did the math on that and it comes out to just $52, which is objectively less than other prices (including the usual $360).
Stop the presses!
On second thought, don’t. For several years now the Globeniks have staked their future on expanded digital revenues, as the redoubtable Dan Kennedy noted last month in Media Nation.
[T]he paper is reporting that it has passed the 100,000 level for digital-only subscriptions, a benchmark the paper’s executives had originally hoped to reach by the end of June. Don Seiffert of the Boston Business Journal has the details.
When I interviewed Globe editor Brian McGrory for “The Return of the Moguls” nearly two years ago, he said the paper would start to look like a sustainable business if it could hit 200,000.
Not to be the skunk at the garden party, but given that 1) the Globe introduced its paywall in 2011, and 2) it’s taken seven years to get to 100,000 digital-only subscribers, the question remains: Will Globe owner John Henry have the patience to wait until 2025 for the paper “to look like a sustainable business”?
As the BBJ’s Seiffert noted:
[G]etting to the second 100,000 subscriptions will be a heavy lift for a paper like the Globe that’s bound by geography. Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, said in an email interview a couple weeks ago regarding the Globe’s digital progress that “as with print circulation, (digital) growth can be hard to sustain.”
“It takes marketing, a steady effort to convert people to fully paid, keeping renewal rates up and replacing churned subs with new ones at the discounted price,” said Edmonds. “If times are tight and (Globe owner) John Henry is impatient with losses as he has said — I can see the budget for all of that being cut back.”
Maybe even cut back to a dollar a week.
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: Boston Business Journal, Boston Globe, Dan Kennedy, digital subscription, Don Seiffert, John Henry, Media Nation, Michael Andor Brodeur, Poynter Institute, Rick Edmonds, The Weekender | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
November 20, 2018
The hardreading staff is guessing its no coincidence that today’s edition of the tokey local tabloid . . .
. . . features this ad on page 17.
But, kids! – make sure you read the fine print.
That’s right: There’s no THC in Hemp Gummies – just hemp.
See here for further details.
And watch the Herald for more ads like the one above.
P.S. The Boston Globe just launched its Marijuana vertical. We’ll see if the Herald follows suit.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Hemp Gummies, Marijuana, tokey local tabloid | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
November 16, 2018
The racist elements of Reading, Mass. are at it again, as the Boston Globe’s Cristela Guerra reported on Page One yesterday.
Reading’s new struggle with an old evil
More than 30 incidents of racist, anti-Semitic graffiti have been reported since May 2017, school officials say
READING — Nearly every day, teachers at Reading Memorial High School scan their classrooms carefully, sweeping their eyes across floors and furniture — in search of swastikas.
In this school of more than 1,200 students, the Nazi symbol and other racist graffiti have become a haunting presence, surfacing again and again, defacing bathroom stalls and stairwells, scrawled on bench legs, carved into railings around the high school.
But the Globe piece on the “old evil” overlooked the evilest incident of racism in Reading’s history: The vile attacks on Celtics great Bill Russell when he lived there during the 1950s.
From the Globe’s own Adam Himmelsbach’s 2017 piece Why was Boston Garden nearly empty when Bill Russell’s number was retired in 1972?
After Russell joined the Celtics in 1956, he became the city’s first black star athlete. Although he emerged as a sports icon, his status made him a more visible target. His home in the mostly white suburb of Reading was once broken into and vandalized, with a racial epithet spray-painted on the walls.
For some reason, Himmelsbach left out the worst part: The vandals also defecated on Russell’s bed.
Memo to Boston Globe and Boston Herald editors: When covering the Reading disgrace, remember Bill Russell.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Adam Himmelsbach, Bill Russell, Boston Celtics, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Cristela Guerra, racism, Reading MA, Reading Memorial High School | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town 