Boston Herald Gives David Ortiz a Pass on LIV Sellout

September 5, 2022

Last Thursday Michael McCarthy at Front Office Sports reported that LIV Golf was enlisting] David Ortiz to welcome fans to its tournament in [checks notes] Bolton not Boston.

LIV Golf is turning to one of the most popular athletes in New England sports history to promote its Boston tournament: David “Big Papi” Ortiz.

The Boston Red Sox legend will appear in a video for the LIV Golf Invitational Boston this weekend, according to Will Staeger, LIV’s chief media officer.

Ortiz will welcome LIV fans to Boston in a video debuting Friday during the first of the three-day tournament. On the planned video, the 46-year-old will humorously compare the golf and baseball swings.

“This weekend, they’re in my town. Boston, where revolution was born,” Ortiz says in the video. “Where the impossible became possible. And where LIV continues to up the game.”

Ugh.

In his Sunday picked-up-pieces piece, Boston Globe Ortizinal critic Dan Shaughnessy was quick to pop Big Papi.

Perfect partnership. David Ortiz is promoting the LIV Golf Invitational Boston this weekend. “We’re really excited to have a partnership with him in our coverage,” LIV chief media officer Will Staeger told Front Office Sports. Is there nothing Big Papi won’t promote?

Meanwhile, crosstown rival Boston Herald (crosstown strictly in a virtual sense, of course, since the flimsy local tabloid no longer maintains its own newsroom, instead forced by its penny-pinching owners to couch-surf in Lowell) has had bupkis on the Big Papout.

Then again, the Boston Herald has bupkis on a whole lot these days, through no fault of its neutron-bombed news staff. That’s just what you get when the vultures are circling every day.

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Wait, What? The Boston Herald Now Costs $4.50?

July 1, 2022

From our Déjà Vu All Over Again desk

Two years ago, sharp-eyed commenter Mark notified the hardreading staff that the Boston Herald had jacked up the price of its daily print edition by 40%, from $2.50 to $3.50

Maybe it’s the lack of ads, but did you notice that the newsstand price of The Herald went up to $3.50 last week? $3.50! More than The NY Times, the Globe, and almost as much as the New York Daily News and the New York Post together! Who is going to be so devoted to Howie Carr, yet so undevoted to home delivery or ipad reading, as to pay that much every morning?

Good questions all.

Now – in response to our recent post about the Boston Globe’s knee-buckling decline in its daily circulation to 68,806  – comes Mark’s latest Herald price-hike heads up.

I don’t see the Herald anywhere on this [Top 25 U.S.newspaper circulation] list. This won’t help: their single copy price apparently went up to $4.50 this week. Seriously?

Seriously. Last Sunday the flailing local tabloid cost $4.

One day later, the daily edition went for $4.50.

That makes a certain amount of sense, since the Sunday Herald’s circulation has long lagged behind the daily’s distribution.

But $4.50? For the flimsy local tabloid?

What the hell, right?

For those of you keeping score at home: Boston Globe print edition, $3.50. New York Times print edition, $3.00. Wall Street Journal print edition, $5.00.

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.”

Your back-of-the-envelope update goes here.

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Boston Herald Outsources Its Gardner Heist Coverage

March 1, 2022

The hardreading staff was captivated – as no doubt you splendid readers were – by the latest Gardner-Museum-Chasing-Its-Ghosts tale that played out in the local dailies yesterday.

Let’s start with the redoubtable Shelley Murphy’s Page One piece in the Boston Globe.

Investigators suspect a link between the Gardner Museum heist and an execution-style murder in Lynn

On a February night in 1991, James Marks had just returned from Maine and was unlocking the door to his Lynn home when a gunman crept up behind him and opened fire, killing him with two blasts from a shotgun, according to police.

The killer fled on foot, leaving a few footprints, but the case remains unsolved, although a mob associate who died years ago has been implicated.

Some authorities now say they suspect there may be a link between the execution-style murder of Marks — a hustler and convicted bank robber — and one of Boston’s most famous unsolved crimes: the 1990 theft of masterpieces valued at more than $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

(That’s “Anthony Amore, the security director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum . . . reflected in the empty frame that held the painting ‘The Concert’ by Vermeer,” for those of you keeping score at home.)

Crosstown at the Boston Herald – actually it’s no longer crosstown since the Globe barely occupies its stately State Street headquarters and the Herald newsroom is couch-surfing at the Lowell Sun – the new Gardner revelation was also a big story.

 

 

Except check out the byline.

That comes as no surprise given this post we published a few months ago.

Boston Herald Publisher Moonlights at Hartford Daily

Kevin Corrado is the publisher of the Boston Herald, as the feisty local tabloid duly – and daily – notes on its masthead.

But now Corrado, who in his spare time is also Regional Publisher at MediaNews Group:Northeast Cluster: Massachusetts & New York, is expanding that expansive portfolio to include the Nutmeg State.

According to Stephen Singer’s piece in the Hartford Courant, its publisher and editor-in-chief Andrew Julien – a 30-year veteran of the paper – is switching teams to become executive editor of Tribune Publishing’s New York Daily News.

Meanwhile . . .

MediaNews Group Regional Publisher Kevin Corrado will take over business operations at the Courant on an interim basis and begin the search for a new editor in Hartford.

“Andrew has been a wonderful steward for the Courant, and while we’re sorry to see him go, our loss is New York’s gain,” Corrado said.

To call that eyewash is an insult to saline solution everywhere . . .

Meanwhile, the flimsy local tabloid’s Incredible Shrinking Newsroom is bidding adieu to Erin Tiernan, who has blissfully decamped to MassLive.

Here’s guessing the filching local tabloid will feature plenty more out-of-town bylines in the days and weeks ahead.

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Two Buck Shuck: Boston Herald Touts ‘Premium Plus’

July 28, 2021

Well the hardrreading staff opened up the old emailbag yesterday and here’s what poured out.

According to the Herald’s Digital Subscription Frequently Asked Questions, a regular digital subscription includes:

  • Unlimited, exclusive journalism from our reporters and photographers.
  • Opinions and reviews from columnists and critics.
  • Daily access to the Digital Replica edition, an exact replica of what we print and produce each day.

So your two bucks is basically buying you a) No Pop-up or Video Ads, and b) 2x Faster Page Loads for the next  six months. Which is all good. Except . .

1) You’ll pay $4 per week for Premium Plus after that, and

2) That whole “trusted news, analysis, and interviews” thing has been gutted like a sea bass by the Herald’s bloodsucking hedge fund owner, Alden Global Capital.

The Herald newsroom – which, again thanks to the paper’s vulture-capital owners, has been forced to shack up with its kissin’ cousins at the Lowell Sun – can barely field a soccer team at this point. It’s gotten so bad at the scrawny local tabloid that executive editor Joe Dwinell has been known to write two or three pieces in a day for the paper.

Go ask the Boston Globe’s Brian McGrory how often he hits send on a story about, say, a Martha’s Vineyard porn lawsuit.

The hardreading staff – despite our often gimlet eye – has long been #TeamHerald, if only to keep the stately local broadsheet a bit less overbearing. But we wonder how long the flimsy local tabloid can keep offering less content for more money, as Alden relentlessly strip mines it like West Virginia coal country.

Maybe a “Premium Minus” Go Fund Me page is in order right about now.

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Mike Bloomberg Even Has Ads in the Boston Herald

February 9, 2020

The chattering classes have no idea how far Mike Bloomberg’s staggering 300-million-going-on-one billion-dollar ad campaign extends.

Here’s conservative hall monitor Rich Lowry in yesterday’s Boston Herald op-ed page.

The level of his spending is truly astonishing — Croesus goes all-in on Super Tuesday. He’s spent more than $300 million on various forms of advertising. By the end, he’s going to make the profligate self-funder Tom Steyer — who managed to pointlessly buy himself onto the Democratic debate stage — look like a penny-pincher.

Bloomberg is running a presidential campaign that Curtis LeMay would love, carpet-bombing the airwaves every single day. He’s single-handedly changed the market for TV ads in many places. He spent $10 million on a Super Bowl spot, or about half of what Joe Biden raised in the entire fourth quarter.

 

And here’s what appears right below that on the Herald’s website.

 

 

Megabucks Mike is also running ads in the Herald’s E-Edition. This is what we got when we double-clicked for the text version of a Sinn Fein piece.

 

 

Most analysts – Lowry included – have focused on Bloomberg’s TV buys. But when a campaign is peppering the likes of the flimsy local tabloid with ads, it’s way beyond carpet-bombing.

Mike Bloomberg has gone nuclear.

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NESN Has NUSN for the Boston Herald

April 10, 2016

Well tomorrow is the Red Sox home opener and, say, there’s rejoicing throughout the land – including in today’s Boston Globe Sports section, which features this full-page ad.

 

Screen Shot 2016-04-10 at 12.40.12 PM

 

You know what comes next: The ad did not run in today’s Boston Herald, sports section or otherwise.

Well, you might say, that’s because the flimsy local tabloid has managed the improbable feat of having a circulation that’s smaller on Sunday than on weekdays. The Herald claims 96,403 daily and 75,405 Sunday circulation, but here’s what the Herald published last fall:

 

Screen Shot 2016-04-10 at 5.00.35 PM

 

Note the Total Paid Distribution: 60,212. And that was on a Friday.

So let’s use the Herald’s own ratio and estimate Sunday circulation around 50,000. That should make a Sunday ad in the Herald less expensive, not less likely.

But apparently NESN has all the viewers it needs.

So nothing for the thirsty local tabloid.

That’s just sad, with a capital A-D.

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