FreePress to Boston Globe: Drop Coronavirus Paywall

March 19, 2020

According to Free Press, which “was created [in 2003] to give people a voice in the crucial decisions that shape our media,” while the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and other dailies have dropped their paywalls for coronavirus coverage, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times have not.

Thus, this Free Press post (tip o’ the pixel to Nieman Journalism Lab).

 

 

Here’s some of what Boston Globe Customer Service says about retaining its paywall:

Subscriber support enables the Boston Globe to produce vital reporting that informs and strengthens our community.  Our journalists have been working 24/7 with staff across our organization to provide reliable and helpful information to readers as news on the coronavirus pandemic rapidly unfolds. We are currently offering non-subscribers our lowest rate ever – full digital access to BostonGlobe.com at just $1 for 6 months, commitment-free.

 

(To be fair graf goes here)

To be fair, Boston Globe Media does tout its free coverage at Boston.com, which is sort of CliffsNotes to the Globe, as well as access to some content at STAT and a free newsletter. But that’s hardly the full-court press available at the mother ship.

Which, it seems, is exactly the point the Globe is trying to make.

 


Boston Globe Go-bituaries Now a Subsidiary of NYT

February 10, 2019

Three months ago the Boston Business Journal’s Don Seiffert reported (pay wall) that the Boston Globe had offloaded more staff and outsourced more content.

Boston Globe to lay off 15, outsource death notices

The latest round of layoffs at the newspaper includes 10 longtime employees in the classified department, and plans to outsource the “Remembered” business that prints death notices.

 

Then again, by the look of the Globe’s obituary pages nowadays, you’d think that they’ve been outsourced as well.

Start with Friday’s edition, which featured six obits across two pages – five of them from the New York Times, one from the Associated Press.

 

 

(To be sure graf goes here)

To be sure, you’d expect the Globe to pick up Christine Kay, editor on prizewinning Times projects, dies at 54 from the Times. Ditto for John Dingell Jr., a House ‘bull’ who served the longest, dies at 92.

But also a Times obit for Frank Robinson?

Seriously?

It’s true that Globe death beat reporter Bryan Marquard has had his hands full lately with the passing of legendary WBZ-AM anchorman Gary LaPierre and longtime Globe editor John S. Driscoll. But nobody in the Sports department could compose a sendoff to Robinson, Hall of Fame slugger and baseball’s first black manager? Geez.

Next up: yesterday’s edition of the Globe, which featured five obits – four from the Times (including Albert Finney), one from the Washington Post. Again, no one from the Arts squad had an obit prepared for the 82-year-old British stage and film actor? Double geez.

(To be fair graf goes here)

To be fair, Dan Shaughnessy penned a nice tribute to Robinson in his picked-up pieces column today. Don’t hold your breath for something similar on Finney.

Today’s Globituaries run true to form – four from the Times, two from AP.

 

 

(To be clear graf goes here)

To be clear, it’s no surprise that even a major metropolitan daily would pull most of its obits from the wire services. In the case of the Globe, however, it’s yet another symptom of the slow-motion decline of a once-robust newspaper.

Maybe not newsworthy, but certainly noteworthy.


Why Hasn’t the Boston Globe Hired a New Art Critic?

April 5, 2018

As the hardreading staff relentlessly chronicled, the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-Prize winning art critic Sebastian Smee decamped to the Washington Post last fall, finally landing on the job in early January. Right before that, the Globe posted this ad on multiple media outlets, including ZipRecruiter.

The ad doesn’t specify compensation, but according to the website Glassdoor, “the typical The Boston Globe Art Critic salary is $124,353 . . . based upon 4 The Boston Globe Art Critic salary report(s) provided by employees or estimated based upon statistical methods.”

Nice neighborhood.

(To be sure graf goes here)

To be sure, three months isn’t an overlong time when you’re looking for a six-figure art maven, but the Globeniks might want to step on it a bit, given that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts awarded this scoop to the New York Times rather than the stately local broadsheet, as our kissin’ cousins at Campaign Outsider noted yesterday.

Cracking a Cold Case

The F.B.I. extracts DNA from a severed head to help a Boston museum identify a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy.

In 1915, a team of American archaeologists excavating the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Deir el-Bersha blasted into a hidden tomb. Inside the cramped limestone chamber, they were greeted by a gruesome sight: a mummy’s severed head perched on a cedar coffin.

The room, which the researchers labeled Tomb 10A, was the final resting place for a governor named Djehutynakht (pronounced “juh-HOO-tuh-knocked”) and his wife . . .

The archaeologists went on to recover painted coffins and wooden figurines that survived the raid and sent them to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1921. Most of the collection stayed in storage until 2009 when the museum exhibited them. Though the torso remained in Egypt, the decapitated head became the star of the showcase. With its painted-on eyebrows, somber expression and wavy brown hair peeking through its tattered bandages, the mummy’s noggin brought viewers face-to-face with a mystery.

 

Namely, his head or hers?

What’s less of a mystery, of course, is why the MFA would have shipped the story out of town.


Hark! The Herald! (Both Sides No Edition)

November 6, 2017

As the hardreading staff has noted on numerous occasions, the Boston Herald has consistently failed to grasp the distinction between news and promotion.

Exhibit Umpteen: Today’s edition of the selfie local tabloid, which devotes half a page of its ever dwindling newshole to a talk Herald columnist Adriana Cohen gave yesterday at a Harvard student conference.

 

 

Just nuts graf:

“No one has a monopoly on smart,” Cohen said [at the event]. “There are good and smart people on both sides of the aisle and across demographics. When some people only want to hear one side of an argument, or one narrow set of ideas, they’re doing themselves a great disservice. We can all learn from one another.”

 

That’s rich, given that Cohen – a charter member of the Trumpettes – has demonstrably never met a knee she wouldn’t jerk.

Just as the Herald has never met a PR event it wouldn’t dress up as news.

(To be fair graf goes here)

To be fair, the Boston Globe has lately done its share of self-promotion as well. There was all the hubbub in the newshole last month over the paper’s HUBweek festival, and this wet kiss for “Globe Live” in the Names column last week.

 

 

Never say we don’t give you both sides.

Two-Daily Tune bonus track:

 

 


Boston Globe to Readers: You CAN Handle the Truth!

March 29, 2017

As the hardreading staff noted the other day, the Boston Globe has officially joined the Trumped-up Pep Squad for Truth recently launched by the Washington Post via its new banner headline.

 

 

The Globe pom-poms have been running at the top of the paper’s website. Representative samples:

 

 

 

Today the real journalists at the Globe took their campaign to the print edition with this ad at the bottom of A10.

 

 

Next stop: T-shirts. Hey, if it’s good enough for WaPo, it should be good enough for the Globe.


Boston Globe Joins Anti-Trump Banner Wave

March 27, 2017

It all started with Donald Trump’s Dark Knight, Steve Bannon, labeling the news media the opposition party.

Next thing you know, the Washington Post pasted this tagline under its banner.

Not surprisingly, the Post also rolled out DDiD merchandise, which was – not surprisingly – roundly mocked. Exhibit A: The Weekly Standard’s Trumpopleptic Tees piece.

Even WaPo’s arch-rival, New York Times editor Dean Baquet, took a shot at the Post’s darkness mongering.

“I love our competition with The Washington Post. I think it’s great. But I think their slogan — Marty Baron please forgive me for saying this — sounds like the next Batman movie.”

 

Regardless, Marty Baron’s old newspaper, the Boston Globe, has now joined the banner wavers.

While cruising the Globe’s website yesterday, the hardreading staff encountered these headers.

 

 

 

 

You get the idea.

Whether prospective subscribers get it is another question entirely.


Hark! The Herald! (Cohen After WashPost Edition)

May 11, 2016

From our Walt Whitman desk

Call it the fisty local tabloid, ’cause the punches are flyin’ today.

It all started with this Callum Borchers piece in yesterday’s Washington Post.

Pundits achieve cable-news stardom after converting into Donald Trump supporters

Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 12.38.41 PM

Last summer, shortly after Donald Trump launched his angry missile of a campaign with that memorable remark about Mexicans and rapists, Kayleigh McEnany sounded like pretty much every other talking head on cable news.

“I think he said something very unartful, very inappropriate,” she told Don Lemon during a June 29 segment on “CNN Tonight.”

“I’m here to tell you, he’s not going to be anywhere near the top five,” McEnany added. “He’s not a serious contender within the Republican Party. And I think he made that pretty clear when the most important thing he said in his speech was, ‘I am rich, I am rich,’ repeatedly.”

Today, McEnany sounds very different — both from her earlier self and from better-known conservative commentators such as Karl Rove and S.E. Cupp, who remain highly critical of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. McEnany is now a staunch Trump supporter, a turnaround that has helped make the newly minted Harvard Law School graduate a rising star on CNN . . .

 

McEnany, Borchers writes, “is one of a small handful of commentators — including Jeffrey Lord, Scottie Nell Hughes, Adriana Cohen and Carl Higbie — who have made defending the real estate mogul their niche and in the process made themselves hot commodities.”

And hot under the collar, in Cohen’s case. The Boston Herald columnist fired back at Borchers in today’s edition.

D.C. hit job ignores facts

Post piece demeans female pundits who back Trump

If you want to see what the war on women looks like, you need look no further than The Washington Post.Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 1.39.38 PM

To be more specific, the war on conservative women.

Because I have dared to write supportive opinion columns on Donald Trump, I was featured along with two other female commentators in a Post story that stated that I have “achieved cable-news stardom after converting” into a Donald Trump supporter, that I, along with the others, “have made defending the real estate mogul their niche and in the process made themselves hot commodities.”

 

Cohen says despite Borchers’ claim that she was an “occasional guest” on CNN, Fox News Channel, and Fox Business Network “before getting behind Trump,” she actually appeared on national TV and radio shows “at least 100 times over the past few years, long before writing columns backing Trump and his positions this February.”

Cohen does not, however, address this part of Borchers’ piece:

On March 25, during a live segment on CNN, [Cohen] brought up a National Enquirer story that alleged multiple extramarital affairs by Cruz — unsubstantiated rumors that the mainstream media had mostly ignored until then. As anchor Kate Bolduan shook her head, Cohen went a step further, asserting on live TV that fellow guest Amanda Carpenter, Cruz’s former communications director, had been identified as one of five mistresses.

 

Ouch.

One last point: As Cohen points out, some of the comments attached to Borchers’ piece are brutally misogynistic. But during this election season, that’s par for the course. Trump supporters or no.


The Fix Is In? No Love for Boston Herald in WashPost Top Political Reporters List

January 28, 2015

Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza posted this on his political blog The Fix today.  (Tip o’ the pixel to Dan Kennedy at Media Nation.)

The Fix’s 2015 list of best state political reporters

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The most under-appreciated reporters in the political world are the scribes covering state and local politics. They rarely get the attention of their colleagues at the national level but are often covering the very politicians and national trends that come to impact the broad political landscape.

Every two years (or so), I like to honor these reporters with a look at the best of the best from each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. The list below was built almost entirely on recommendations from the Fix community — here on the blog, on Twitter at #fixreporters and on Facebook. A few of my personal favorites are included as well.

 

Skim down about halfway and here’s what you find:

 

Screen Shot 2015-01-28 at 3.05.08 PM

 

Conspicuous by its absence? That’s right – the Herald. Granted, this was a beauty pageant judged by political junkies who gravitate toward the Washington Post, but it’s unlikely ideology was the driving force here. It just might be that people fail to take the flighty local tabloid seriously anymore.

As for us, we don’t know Jim Hand’s work, but there’s no one here we’d pull to plug a Heraldnik into the mix. They just don’t really belong. Then again, that’s pretty much how they like it.


Boston Globe Jumps on Price-Gouging Bandwagon

November 27, 2014

Well the hardreading staff was checking out Politico Playbook (yes, Mike Allen is crazy enough to post on Thanksgiving and, yes, we’re crazy enough to read it on Thanksgiving) when we came across this:

TODAY’S PLEASINGLY PLUMP WashPost has 34 Black Friday circulars in the blue bag (and doubles the usual weekday cover price to $2.50). The Raleigh News & Observer, with 43 inserts, triples the normal price to $3. The garish cover of the Richmond Times-Dispatch promises “up to 900 pages of savings” (and profit for the paper), and raises the price from $1.25 to $3.50 (even gouging subscribers with a surcharge). The Dallas Morning News bills today’s paper as “Biggest issue, biggest deals of the year … SPECIAL PRICE $3” – twice the usual price for a weekday issue.

 

Hmmm, we bethought ourselves – wonder what the locals did on the pricing front. So we went to the front pages.

Today’s Boston Globe:

 

Screen Shot 2014-11-27 at 2.09.56 PM

 

Regular weekday Globe:

 

Screen Shot 2014-11-27 at 2.09.25 PM

 

Notice that the snowbirds get the same price both days, likely because they didn’t get the umpteen Doorbuster! inserts.

Crosstown at today’s Boston Herald:

 

Screen Shot 2014-11-27 at 2.37.31 PM

 

Yesterday’s Herald:

 

 

Screen Shot 2014-11-27 at 2.48.46 PM

 

In case you’re wondering, the catchpenny local tabloid was chockablock with inserts. But it was no Pursebuster! The stately local broadsheet should take notice.


Herald Goes Double ‘Dutch’

August 21, 2013

The Boston Herald devotes two pages today to remembrances of the great Elmore Leonard, who died yesterday at age 87.

Start with the Associated Press obituary, which begins “He was the master of his genre, the Dickens of Detroit, the Chaucer of Crime. Every novel Elmore Leonard wrote from the mid-1980s on was a best-seller . . . ”

 

Picture 2

 

The obit includes Leonard’s legendary writing tip: “Try to leave out the parts that people [tend to] skip.”

In addition to that, the Herald has appreciations by James Verniere and Bill Burke.

 

Picture 1

 

From Verniere’s piece:

In terms of the films based on his work, no one compares to Leonard except perhaps another hard-boiled master, Raymond Chandler (“The Big Sleep,” “Farewell, My Lovely”), and genre masters Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. That’s the company of giants. Leonard was one.

 

Amen.

Crosstown at the Boston Globe there’s an obit picked up from the Washington Post, and an item in Names.

But the feisty local tabloid takes this round.