Boston Globe Love Letters No Longer a Kept Column?

July 3, 2018

As the hardreading staff has previously noted, the Boston Globe is increasingly willing to rent out its editorial content willy-nilly to marketing sponsors.

Exhibit Umpteen, as related in this space last month:

Crosstown at the Boston Globe, the $tately local broadsheet has allowed a marketer to get to second base with Love Letters columnist Meredith Goldstein. As we previously noted, ever since April the column has been leased out to – sorry, presented by – the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. Today, the relationship got even chummier.

 

Beyond that, the Globe has relentlessly flogged the Kripalu-sponsored Love Letters podcast in quarter-page ads.

So imagine our surprise when we saw this, well, naked edition of Love Letters in today’s Globe.

Wait – have the Lovebirds torn the (broad)sheets?

And was the breakup really necessary?

Not to rub it in or anything.

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State of the Cuisinart Marketing in the Boston Dailies

June 5, 2018

It’s not as if the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald have stuck advertising and editorial into a blender and hit puree. But they’re getting closer. Take, for example, today’s editions of the local dailies.

Here’s page 23 of today’s Herald.

 

 

What we have here is a half-page ad for Parker Professional Driving School right beneath an article about the school with this sort-of byline.

 

 

So, from all appearances, Parker paid for roughly five-sixths of the page but only half of it is clearly an ad. About a week ago there was a similar aditorial in the Arts section of the stealthy local tabloid.

 

 

(To be clear graf goes here)

To be clear, transparency is the responsibility of the media outlet, not the advertiser. Here’s how the aditorial dance works: The less it appears to be an ad, the better it is for the advertiser, since the content can bypass the consumer’s factory-installed skepticism about advertising. As the hardreading staff has previously noted, the trend at the Herald is definitely toward minimal transparency.

Crosstown at the Boston Globe, the $tately local broadsheet has allowed a marketer to get to second base with Love Letters columnist Meredith Goldstein. As we previously noted, ever since April the column has been leased out to – sorry, presented by – the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. Today, the relationship got even chummier.

 

 

(To be clear graf #2 goes here)

To be clear, there’s no stealth involved in this pairing – it’s all entirely transparent. But there’s a growing monetization of editorial content occurring at the Globe (see here and here) that brings to mind the term “slippery slope.”

Watch this space.

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Boston Globe Leases Out Even More Editorial Content

April 20, 2018

The Boston Globe is selling itself for parts.

For three years now the hardreading staff has chronicled the $tately local broadsheet’s slapping corporate logos on a series of editorial material – from lending Capital to Suffolk University to mortgaging part of its Business section to Rockland Trust to double-dipping on the Prouty Garden dustup at Boston Children’s Hospital  to ensuring that Cross Insurance could “present” part of the Globe’s Arts section.

Now comes the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health‘s mash note to Meredith Goldstein in today’s Love Letters column.

Close-up for the presenter-impaired:

Just last week we noted how relentlessly the Globe’s print edition was flogging the Love Letters podcast in quarter-page ads that are also Kripaluscious.

Stay tuned – we’re guessing the Globe next sells The Metro Minute to Swatch.

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Lauren Bacall Killed by Boston Herald

February 13, 2014

(Tip o’ the pixel to the Missus)

Yesterday’s Inside Track in the feisty local tabloid featured an interesting, if out-of-nowhere, profile of local photographer Sid Limitz.

Photographer captures heyday of Theatre District

Forty years ago, when he was just 17, Sid Limitz began working as a ticket taker in Boston’s Theatre District. He was walking past Screen Shot 2014-02-13 at 12.02.58 AMthe old Music Hall one night when Bette Midler came waltzing out the front door.

“I happened to be in the right place at the right time and there she was,” Limitz said. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a moment where someone should have a camera.’”

And so Sid asked for — and got — a camera for Christmas and he’s been taking pictures in the 
Theatre District ever since.

Limitz estimates that he has more than 800,000 shots he snapped in the area around the intersection of Tremont and Stuart streets. In the district’s theaters, comedy clubs, gay bars, concert venues and movie houses, Limitz encountered and photographed legends including Liza Minnelli, Lauren Bacall, Elaine Stritch, David Bowie, Frank Zappa and more.

 

And then there was this:

 

Screen Shot 2014-02-12 at 11.44.58 PM

 

Amazingly, in the online edition of Wednesday’s Herald, Bacall is no longer dead.

As a member of the theatrical employees union, Sid worked with Bacall in the Theatre District twice — in 1999 for “Waiting in the Screen Shot 2014-02-12 at 11.45.50 PMWings” at the Colonial and in the ’80s when she did “Love Letters” at The Wilbur with Richard 
Kiley. But his favorite pic of the great actress was snapped outside the Harvard Club in 1980, when 
Bacall came to celebrate the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 50th birthday with the clan.

 

Tell you what – if Bogie were alive now, there’d be hell to pay for this.

P.S. Raise your hand if you thought today’s Herald would run a Correction.

Us neither.

 

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