Robert David Sullivan 2

Boston Globe goes hunting for bad comments about Goodwill

Today's Boston Globe story on a Goodwill second-hand store opening in one of Boston's trendier neighborhoods promises more than it can deliver. Here are the headlines:

With thrift store coming, a bit of a rift

Some in Jamaica Plain hoped new arrival would be more upscale

And here is the only statement in the article could be construed as remotely critical of Goodwill:

“I’m disappointed,’’ said Bluma Stoller, a 10-year Jamaica Plain resident and one of a number of people interviewed who had the same sentiment. “While I’m not against a Goodwill or having another thrift store here, it really doesn’t meet the needs of the neighborhood.’’

Still, the article can be judged a success for generating (so far) 79 reader comments, the most insightful of which came from "ghamann":

In the article there is only one person who said she was "disappointed" and about 5-6 others who supported the Goodwill, including it's main competitor!!! I think the title mischaracterizes the article, and based on the comments posted here it appears that most people only read the title and then start spewing opinions like they have a clue.

All in all, not the best evidence for the superiority of a daily newspaper over Web journalism.

MassINC is proud to be your "pure voice of gloom"

"Urban Writer" Jim Miara thinks I may be trying too hard to put a bad spin on the news that fewer people are moving out of Massachusetts: 

Sometimes the glass is half full. Yes, Mass. population gains could be attributable to a sinking economy, including a poor housing market and rising gas prices, but there could be another reason: It's a good, progressive, tolerant place to live. It's just a thought. 

MassINC for years has been the pure voice of gloom and sometimes doom. You are going to make yourself ill. Cheer up.

Miara is being somewhat tongue-in-cheek (he assures us that he has "the greatest respect" for MassINC research), but he's right that reflexive pessimism can be an occupational hazard among journalists and think-tank people. Few of us aspire to write a report headlined "Don't worry, everything's OK" -- in part because things never stay OK for very long. (Everyone agrees with that, right?)

By the way, Miara has noted our Eeyore-like tendencies before. In a 2006 column for Banker & Tradesman, he wrote, "By far the most prolific identifier of impending calamities is the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, better known as MassINC."

Would Massachusetts become more conservative without the Globe?

The New York Times Co. is threatening to shut down the Boston Globe if it doesn't get concessions from the newspaper's unions -- which is causing media observers to speculate anew about what life would be like without a major newspaper in the region. Coincidentally, Globe editor Marty Baron gave a speech on Thursday about the future of journalism (hat tip to Media Nation). Among other things, he talked about the kind of reporting that is rarely done outside of well-funded print newspapers, using the example of a 13-year-old fire victim who had already suffered from neglect and abuse. As Baron said: 

The story elicited an outpouring of sympathy, but fortunately there was more than that. There was action.

The child welfare agency instituted reforms that would affect the placement and monitoring of about 500 children a year. Shortly, the governor asked the state’s child advocate to launch an investigation. The advocate issued a report in December describing fundamental failures by the state and calling for better training for social workers, improved information-sharing with law enforcement, and more comprehensive documentation of neglect and abuse. The governor pledged to follow through.

Not surprisingly, I'm a big fan of web-based journalism, but I also worry about whether this kind of story will disappear along with "dinosaur" newspapers. I also wonder whether the disappearance of the Globe would, to some degree, nudge the state's political attitudes toward the right -- or at least toward the kind of anti-government anger associated with talk radio.

Figuring out how to save the Boston Globe

Media Nation's Dan Kennedy (a regular contributor to CommonWealth) has a typically thoughtful post describing five ways to save the "shrinking" Boston Globe. For example, he suggests a better integration between the Boston.com site (aka The Tom and Gisele Show) and the print edition. Right now, Boston.com seems to treat the newspaper not as a resource but as a burden, shunted off to the site's equivalent of a mother-in-law apartment (or "granny flat," if you're from Britain).

The most counter-intuitive of Dan's suggestions is a steep increase in the price of the print edition, up to $2 on weekdays and $5 on Sunday. The idea is that "Customers willing to pay such a price would be an elite audience especially attractive to advertisers." I see some merit in that, speaking as someone who now spends $5 on the Sunday New York Times. But if I'm going to pay for the Globe (rather than read it for free online, as I now do), I want to be sure that my "attractive" money is going to pay for some in-depth reporting and analysis, and not for more stale, suburban-oriented stories like this and this.

And I have to disagree with one of Dan's ideas to make the print edition more attractive to serious readers:

How about a really well-edited, analytical daily briefing on world, national and local news that would take up all of an ad-free pages two and three? It would have to be sufficiently meaty that it would take 10 or 15 minutes to get through it, and leave readers feeling as though they didn't absolutely have to read the rest of the paper. That would be a real service to time-starved folks who are serious about news.

The Boston Globe massacres statistical science

Crime in Massachusetts may possibly be going up, and if it is, the "swooning economy" could be an explanation, the Boston Globe reports today.

The evidence: "Police departments say they have noticed not only a startling increase in some statistics, but more unusual crimes coming across the scanner." Alas, the story does not include any data from the Unusual Crime Index, but we can assume that a paragraph like this would have been impossible to write a few years ago: 

In Ludlow, the same bank was robbed twice in 13 months, an aberration for a small town that had not had a bank robbery in two decades. In New Bedford, detectives are dealing with dozens of complaints from people who lost of thousands of dollars in scams that promised cash prizes. In Quincy, thieves stole three snowplow blades in one weekend last December, most likely, detectives say, because they needed to replace their own blade or wanted sell the piece to other drivers.

There are about a dozen story ideas in today's crime round-up (a surge in reported child abuse appears near the end of the piece, and poor Ludlow gets another mention as the alleged epicenter of an eBay scam), but the Globe probably doesn't have the resources to cover them all, so instead they get bundled together as a trend piece. And it's hard to refute logic like this:

"I've been a police officer for 25 years and I've never seen a snowplow stolen," Quincy police Captain John Dougan said. "My best educated guess is the economy has something to do with it."

Politicker dies, "iTunes" for news looms

Politicker MA, a website that covered state politics at a time when Beacon Hill coverage is steadily being reduced in both the broadcast and print media, apparently expired this weekend. (The website has stories from as late as Friday.) CommonWealth contributing writer Dan Kennedy blogs on the failed experiment over at Media Nation:

I'm not sure what happened. It could be that Politicker's business model — getting advocacy groups (i.e., lobbyists) to buy ads in order to reach the intended audience of inside players — was not realistic. It could be that the model was brilliant but the timing was bad. In any case, the cycle of destruction and creation continues.

But Kennedy is not impressed by an alternative model for web-based news-gathering -- namely New York Times columnist David Carr's suggestion that an "iTunes for news" could convince the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up. Kennedy notes:

The one thing that won't work — and I think Carr would acknowledge this if it were put to him directly — is the notion that newspapers as we have come to know them will somehow be able to charge for their everyday content. That horse left the barn 10 years ago, and it's not coming back.

I think Kennedy is right when it comes to breaking news, though I would be willing to pay 99 cents for the longer and more analytical stories (essentially, magazine pieces) that used to be more common in major newspapers. (I've got more money to spend now that I've let so many magazine subscriptions lapse.) The Metro-type news could be a loss leader for a newspaper site, kind of like the Cheez-Its near the front door at a supermarket, with the more satisfying (and pricier) stuff in the back.

Bob Woodward warns North Adams audience about "secret government"

Bob Woodward was in North Adams last night, and MassINC executive vice president John Schneider has an analysis:

It’s a long way from Boston to the campus of the Mass. College of Liberal Arts, in North Adams (157.13 miles, according to Mapquest), but that’s where best-selling author and Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward was on Tuesday night. I was invited by Mary Grant, the president of MCLA, to hear him speak. (Remember, MassINC bills itself as a statewide organization, and the last time I checked, North Adams was still very much a part of Massachusetts.)

The headline for Woodward’s talk was "Trust the public with the truth." (See the Berkshire Eagle's account here.) And he should know. As a chronicler of presidents since Nixon, Woodward has seen how hiding the truth has affected the fates of seven presidential administrations so far. By his estimation, we know about 60 to 70 percent of the “truth,” and he worries that there is too much power in the White House -- leading to “a secret government,” if you will, that is eroding our democracy.

He was tough on himself and his press colleagues for the coverage to the lead-in of the Iraq war, assigning a grade of D-, to be exact.

Photo of Woodward from earlier days, and from Woodward's own "about the author" webpage.

Red ink at publisher of community newspapers

From the Boston Business Journal:

GateHouse Media Inc., publisher of a number of Bay State newspapers, said Friday it lost $18.5 million in the third quarter, bringing its year to date net loss to nearly $500 million.

Dan Kennedy reports on the implications for local journalism in the current issue of CommonWealth. GateHouse owns more than 100 newpapers in eastern Massachusetts, including the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the MetroWest Daily News of Framingham, and the Enterprise of Brockton.