Why can't NESN get a show like this?

Loving "Globe 10.0" with Bob Ryan.

Gov. Patrick targets legal notices

Gov. Deval Patrick is repeating a threat he's made in the past: to take legal notices out of newspapers and run them online instead, thus saving taxpayers some money.

Hillary Chabot reports in today's Boston Herald that Patrick has included a provision in his transportation bill that "would allow public transportation projects to advertise on the Internet instead of newspapers."

From the earliest days of American newspapers, legal notices have been an important source of revenue. During Colonial times, it wasn't uncommon for newspapers to curry favor with the royal governor in order to get lucrative official advertising.

Has the moment come to rethink legal ads? Probably. But given the horrendous state of the newspaper business, the timing couldn't be any worse.

What Patrick proposes isn't unique to Massachusetts. Le Templar of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz., recently spoke with NPR's "On the Media" about this very subject. Among other things, he said:

[A] variety of research shows that despite the current plight of the newspaper industry, people are still reading newspapers and their companion websites far more than they're reading individual government websites. We're talking at magnitudes of 10 to 100 times more.

Also, newspapers serve as sort of a central repository. If you’re a person who likes to know what different governments are up to around you, you can go to your local newspaper and read them all at once instead to having to go sit in a library all day and look through different minutes or, in the modern electronic era, hit individual websites.

Templar also argued that it's far easier for the government to prove that it published a legal notice, as required by law, with a newspaper clip than with an online notice on a government site. (Thanks to O-Fish-L for calling my attention to the Herald story.)

Herald to shed 20 jobs

While everyone is focused on the looming 50-person cut in the Boston Globe's newsroom, the Boston Herald yesterday quietly announced that it would soon shed 20 jobs.

Lisa van der Pool reports in the Boston Business Journal that the cuts won't come exclusively from the Herald's newsroom: publisher Pat Purcell says the reductions will involve "editorial and commercial" employees at both the paper and its Web site.

As at the Globe, the Herald will look for volunteers first.

Weld misquotes Carter

There's a howler near the top of former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld's op-ed in today's Boston Globe that any sharp-eyed editor should have caught. Weld and John Stimpson write:

In 1981, the United States was in the midst of what President Jimmy Carter had labeled a "national malaise" and a "crisis in confidence."

Trouble is, as this PBS article explains, "Though he never used the word — [political adviser Pat] Caddell had in his memo — it became known as Carter's 'malaise' speech."

Howard Owens takes over the Batavian

Big news out of little Batavia, N.Y. As I was expecting he would, Howard Owens has announced that he's taking over the Batavian, the online-only "paper" he launched last fall when he was still working for GateHouse Media. He's going all-in, selling his house and getting ready to start covering the news and selling ads next week. He writes:

My wife and I are listing our house in Pittsford for sale and as soon as it sells, we will rent a place in Batavia (or maybe elsewhere in Genesee County). I expect we'll see my wife's byline in The Batavian before too long.

Best of luck to Howard. If he can make this work, it will be a model for a business desperately in need of some good news.

A push to save City Weekly

Local media and political activist Ron Newman has written an open letter to the Boston Globe asking that it save the City Weekly section, currently targeted for elimination on March 22. Newman writes:

Dear Boston Globe folks,

As a resident of Somerville, I am distressed to read that you plan to discontinue the only section of the Globe that consistently covers news about our city (and our neighbor, Cambridge).

Your internal memo, published at Dan Kennedy's Media Nation blog, says that "the suburban zones ... are too important to readers to dramatically reduce." Does this mean that the Globe no longer cares about readers who live in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline? How do you expect to keep readers and advertisers if you keep slashing away at the content that makes the Globe unique?

For over 50 years, I've lived in houses that received home delivery of at least one daily newspaper. But I'm seeing less and less reason to keep my Globe subscription.

To see the reaction that this decision is getting, I recommend you read the comments on these blog entries:

http://community.livejournal.com/davis_square/1665644.html
http://community.livejournal.com/b0st0n/6482970.html
http://www.universalhub.com/node/23506
http://www.universalhub.com/node/23389

You still have several weeks to reconsider this bad decision. Please do so.

My own take? Probably unrealistic. But I'd certainly like to see the Globe take some steps to pump up its city coverage online.

Fish in a barrel, Michelle Malkin edition

Michelle Malkin fails to do her homework on Joe Biden and his accurate assertion that Louisiana is losing 400 jobs a day.

The end of the Rocky Mountain News

A sad day in Colorado. And yes, I see the place where you can click to subscribe. I guess no one had the heart to take it down.

Joe Biden's so-called lie

I'm posting some incomplete findings in the hopes that someone else might be able to fill in the blanks.

The right-wing blogosphere is on fire right now with claims that Joe Biden "lied" when he said that Louisiana is losing 400 jobs a day. Biden made his remarks in the course of criticizing Gov. Bobby Jindal's refusal of more than $90 million in additional unemployment funds. A local newscast in Louisiana, citing the state employment agency, claims that the state actually added jobs in December, the last month for which numbers are available.

Well, now. If you take a visit to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, you will see that Louisiana's unemployment rate rose from 3.8 percent in June to 5.9 percent in December. During that time, 45,065 people in Louisiana lost their jobs. That adds up to approximately 250 per day — not 400, I'll grant you, but a damned high number, and certainly one that contradicts the notion that the state was actually adding jobs. [Actually, yes. Biden was right. See update, below.]

Now it's nearly March. We know that the recession and unemployment have accelerated over the past two months. I don't have January and February numbers of Louisiana, but I may just be looking in the wrong places. But I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if an average of 400 people a day have been losing their jobs in Louisiana since the first of the year.

Yes, I realize that the local report I'm linking to claims that Louisiana's unemployment filings actually declined through mid-January. But remember, that same report says Louisiana gained jobs in December, which is directly contradicted by the federal numbers.

Anybody know where I can get credible preliminary unemployment estimates for January and February?

Update: The answer was staring me right in the face. Steve points out that Louisiana lost an average of 430 jobs a day in December.

Did Jindal fake his anecdote?

This is too funny. It's amusing enough that Bobby Jindal's anecdote about the sheriff and the boats the other night was, when you think about it, the story of a heroic Democrat standing up to heartless Republican bureaucrats. (Did no one vet his remarks?)

Even better, it seems that Jindal may have made it all up.

Howard Owens is back online

Turns out the former GateHouse new-media guy was converting his blog from WordPress to Drupal. Don't ask me why — that's well beyond my meager technical knowledge.

Counting the days for Globe regional sections

Media Nation has obtained a memo sent to the staff by Boston Globe metro editor Brian McGrory and regional editor David Dahl. The full text follows.

All,

We just wanted to bring you up to date on the proposed changes that we went over last week. The publisher and his senior management team approved the recommendations late yesterday involving Metro. This means that City Weekly will shut down, and Globe North West will disband as a freestanding zone, its geographic areas split between North and West. The final issue of City Weekly will be published on March 22; the final issue of Globe North West on March 26. The three suburban zones will continue to be published two days a week, Thursdays and Sundays, as they are now.

On City Weekly, we wish there was an upbeat spin to put on this. There's not. It's been a singular section since its launch in 1992 — vibrant, filled with voice, often with an edge that the rest of the paper would do well to replicate. Lately, under Veronica [Chao]'s leadership, it's only grown stronger. The sad reality, though, is that advertising revenues simply don't sustain it, so we're losing a strong section put out by a group of talented and committed people.

Where we can sound more upbeat is in the suburbs. For the second year in a row, a group from across the paper studied the viability of the suburban zones and decided that they are too important to readers to dramatically reduce. It's testament to everyone who works hard on those sections, and we expect that the hard work, the high quality, and the reader popularity to continue. And our suburban coverage will be greatly enhanced as we continue to roll out more Your Town sites — as many as 15 by year's end.

As far as the zones copy desk, there will be substantial changes made, along the lines of what we said last week — the four day week becomes a five day week, with editors playing a stronger role in the Your Town sites. We'll brief you on that when we have more, which should be soon.

Thanks for your cooperation and all your strong work through these really frustrating times.

Brian and David

No surprises — the City Weekly and Globe NorthWest cuts were already all but certain. Depressing nevertheless.

Harvey Silverglate's latest free-speech campaign

Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh writes about friend of Media Nation Harvey Silverglate's bid to be elected to Harvard's Board of Overseers.

Silverglate, a celebrated civil-rights lawyer, and an ally, Philadelphia lawyer Robert Freedman, are pushing a free-speech, anti-PC agenda that would, among other things, bring ROTC back to the Harvard campus.

Best of luck to Silverglate, a staunch and principled defender of free speech.

A liberal president

In my latest for the Guardian, I round up the morning commentary on President Obama's speech to Congress. The consensus view: we have our first liberal president since Lyndon Johnson.

Not quite live-blogging

But I am posting a few lines on President Obama's speech at Twitter, if you care.

Pessimistic Weisberg criticizes paid content

Like most people thinking about the ailing news business these days, Jacob Weisberg is better at describing the problem than at prescribing solutions.

"I do think people approach it in the wrong way when they think about it as a business problem," Weisberg, editor-in-chief and chairman of the Slate Group, said earlier today. "It is more fundamentally a problem of democracy. And it is a problem of democracy because our system of government is predicated on a free press and an independent media, which allow us to have an informed public and a check on government."

Weisberg spoke at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, part of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. A former editor of the politics-and-culture webzine Slate, Weisberg is now in charge of developing new products affiliated with Slate, such as The Root, aimed at African-American readers, and The Big Money, a financial Web site.

Weisberg expressed pessimism that anything like the newspaper as we have come to know it can survive in the digital age — especially papers smaller than the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. (Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.) Still, he refused to join the likes of Walter Isaacson, Steven Brill and Gordon Krovitz, all of whom have argued in recent weeks that newspapers should charge for their online content.

Asked by Shorenstein's director, Alex Jones, how many subscribers he thought the New York Times would lose if it started charging $20 a year for online access, Weisberg replied, "90 percent." He added he'd rather donate $100 a year to the Times than pay a $20 subscription fee, since a paid-subscription model would necessitate walling off content from the larger Internet, and especially from bloggers.

"The political debate exists online, and if you're behind a pay wall, you're not part of it," Weisberg said, adding that Slate's own 1997 experiment in charging for content is widely seen as having failed.

Though Weisberg would not rule out a role for non-profit, endowment supported projects such as the investigative Web site ProPublica, he said he prefers profit-driven ventures because they are not dependent on the whims and agendas of philanthropies.

"America's contribution to the news media isn't the free press, it's the independent press," he said. "Countries are better off with an independent media. That's what we’re at risk of losing."

The audio of Weisberg's presentation is online here.

Photo of Weisberg (cc) by Dan Kennedy. For details, see Creative Commons license elsewhere on this blog.

Obama's bankrupt opponents

In recent days I've been struck by the overwhelming nature of the problems that face us, and the utterly bankrupt nature of the conservative response. Because the more mindless of those responses drives me crazy, I will instead present the rational but wrong David Brooks, who writes today:

Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.

I think Brooks is fundamentally mistaken in his assessment of what the Obama administration would like to do. Everything we know about President Obama tells us that he is an exceedingly cautious politician — a mainstream liberal, not a creature of the far left, who, given his choice, would have liked to proceed deliberately.

He can't. Not with the economy falling apart, the auto industry careening toward bankruptcy, the financial system in meltdown and housing as dead as it's been in decades. (Let's not forget, too, he's also dealing with war and terrorism on multiple fronts.) Finally, as Obama argued during the campaign, a lot of what ails us economically can't be fixed without finally doing something about health care.

In the midst of all this, it is striking that the Republicans have nothing to say. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who will deliver the Republican response to Obama's address to Congress tonight, is getting a weird amount of attention for rejecting about $90 million in federal unemployment assistance — while eagerly grabbing $4 billion in stimulus money.

I don't know if you caught Jindal on "Meet the Press" Sunday, but he came across as Sarah Palin with better syntax: plenty of pre-rehearsed soundbites, but little or no ability to answer moderator David Gregory's simple questions.

It's no wonder that Obama's job-approval rating is so much higher than that of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at a similar early stage of their presidencies.

Calling all academics (II)

I got some great responses last month when I asked for ideas on how to organize my research for a book project I'm working on. For the time being, I've decided to use ugly old Excel. It works, I've already got it, and if I find something better, I will almost certainly be able to import my Excel database into it.

It's a shame that Apple let HyperCard die, because, with the right export capabilities, it would be ideal. I did discover that its commercial successor, SuperCard, is still with us — but it doesn't strike me that it could possibly be worth $180.

I also took a test drive of FileMaker's newish personal database program, Bento, and was underwhelmed. It didn't seem to me that it provided much more than an attractive front end for an Excel database. Worse, unlike Excel, Bento doesn't seem to support hyperlinks to my documents.

A few people suggested that I use FileMaker itself. I may — it's freely available to faculty members, and I assume I could learn a few low-end skills fairly quickly. So if my Excel data get to be too cumbersome to work with, that would seem to be a reasonable option.

Further thoughts on the Ted Kennedy series

Last week I wrote about why I wasn't reading the Boston Globe's series on the life and career of Ted Kennedy. Today I want to explain why I think the Globe was smart to take on such a project.

One of the major challenges facing newspapers these days is figuring out how to draw traffic over a long period of time. Readers do not spend as much time with an online paper as they do with a print edition. When a news organization puts a lot of effort into a project, it makes sense to present it in such a way that readers will come back to it several times, and that other readers will discover it long after it's been published.

With its skillfully done multimedia presentation, the Globe has ensured that the series will draw people in for some time to come. Though we might wish it were otherwise, Sen. Kennedy has come to the end of his life, even if he is able to enjoy some productive weeks and months ahead. When he passes on, the Globe series will stand as an important resource.

And it's not just the text. Through historical front pages, political cartoons and video, the Globe has fleshed out its series in ways that words alone would not be able to accomplish. I've had a chance to watch a few of the videos. The video that accompanies Chapter 2 (produced by Ann Silvio), on the death of Robert Kennedy, is particularly moving. There's a sequence in which Walter Mondale tries to recall Ted Kennedy's words at the funeral, spliced with the actual eulogy, that will send shivers up your spine.

The Globe also deserves credit, at this delicate moment, for serving readers rather than the Kennedys. Last week the Boston Herald's "Inside Track" reported, "Word on the Hill is that some Kennedy staffers are quite unhappy with the series, finding it far too critical of Ted."

Indeed, in reading bits and pieces of the series, I was struck by how unsparing it was with respect to Kennedy's behavior in the Chappaquiddick affair, and with his drinking and womanizing — problems he has long since put behind him, but which remain an important part of his story.

So when Kennedy agreed to talk with my former Boston Phoenix colleague Mark Leibovich of the New York Times over the weekend, I took it as a bit of puckish revenge on Kennedy's part. After all, Kennedy had refused to speak to the Globe.

My friend the Outraged Liberal suggests that there must be some long faces at 135 Morrissey Blvd. over being bigfooted by their larger corporate cousin. Mr. O.L. may be right. But I'd say the Globe ought to take Kennedy's interview with the Times as a signal that it had been appropriately tough.

Good jobs at good wages

I guess Pete Carroll doesn't miss the Patriots.

Howard Owens has left the building

Howard Owens, GateHouse Media's director of digital publishing, has left the company, according to an internal memo by GateHouse president Kirk Davis that was obtained by Media Nation.

"Beginning today, Brad Dennison, VP News, will assume the additional responsibilities inherent in overseeing our online news operations and support," Davis wrote in the memo, dated Friday. "Brad will be incorporating Howard Owens' duties, as Howard has left the company. Howard did volumes to advance our digital strategy and leaves GateHouse with our deep appreciation."

As you will see, I am missing point #2 of Davis' memo. [Not anymore. Added at 11:46 a.m.] If anyone would like to pass it along, I will give you a free lifetime subscription to Media Nation.

GateHouse Media is a national chain that owns nearly 400 community newspapers, including 125 in Eastern Massachusetts. Though most of those papers are weeklies, some are among the best-known dailies in the state, including the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the Enterprise of Brockton and the Framingham-based MetroWest Daily News.

Within journalism new-media circles, Owens is a highly respected thinker. Before joining GateHouse in September 2006, he helped launch pioneering new-media ventures at the Bakersfield Californian and, before that, the Ventura County Star, according to his LinkedIn profile.

At GateHouse, Owens pushed a strategy of Web-first journalism, exhorting reporters and editors to post breaking news stories on the company's Wicked Local sites before running them in their print editions. He was also a strong advocate of quick-and-dirty video for the Wicked Local sites. In addition, he's a co-founder of the Wired Journalists social network.

Owens' blog, HowardOwens.com, appears to have gone dark, although a "whois" search reveals that he's still the owner. Worth keeping an eye on, I'd say. He continues posting to Twitter.

Owens possesses one of the more interesting minds I know in new-media journalism, combining vision and practical experience. Yet his blunt, occasionally caustic manner has not played well with many of GateHouse's reporters and editors, who work long hours for short money.

I interviewed Owens for a feature on GateHouse Media last fall for CommonWealth Magazine, a time when finances for GateHouse were perilous, but before the economy had gone off a cliff. Owens was particularly proud of the Batavian, a Web-only "paper" he had launched for GateHouse in Batavia, N.Y. (not far from GateHouse's corporate headquarters, in Fairport), which he hoped could serve as something of a model.

"The overall revenue would be less than what you would get from a print newspaper," he said, but added that by eliminating the cost of printing and distribution, he hoped the project could break even relatively quickly.

But Owens put his foot in his mouth when I asked him about complaints within the company that people didn't have time to devote much energy to executing the company's online strategy while also putting out quality print editions.

"There are some incredibly talented hardworking people in New England who are asked to do an incredible amount of work," he said. "There are also slackers, and at some point you have to hold them accountable." The "slackers" comment reportedly got him in some hot water with his superiors.

More recently, an internal e-mail Owens wrote became an issue in the legal dispute between GateHouse and the New York Times Co. GateHouse sued over Boston.com's Your Town sites, charging that Boston.com's practice of automatically "scraping" Wicked Local sites for headlines and ledes violated its copyright. (The suit was settled before it could go to trial.)

But though it might look as though Owens was endorsing the sort of copying and linking practices that Boston.com was engaged in on its Your Town sites, the issues were different in subtle and important ways. If you're interested in learning more, here's an overview I wrote for the Guardian.

What could be motivating Owens' departure? Perhaps he left entirely on his own. If not, my guess is that Davis and chief executive Michael Reed have decided to run as lean an operation as possible in order to get through the recession.

In any case, Media Nation extends its best wishes to Owens, one of the good guys in the ongoing struggle to reinvent journalism. Davis' memo follows.

DATE: February 20, 2009
TO: GateHouse Media Publishers
Regional Managers
GateHouse Media News Employees
Online Operations Employees
Fairport Employees

FROM: Kirk Davis
RE: GateHouse News Division

As we adjust to the challenges confronting us, it is critically important that we remain positive and determined to emerge from this economic turmoil stronger than ever. As you know, the decisions we make must balance many needs ranging from controlling costs, maximizing our resources, evolving our print and online strategies and demonstrating to our employees that we'll move swiftly and communicate often as we navigate this recession.

Today, I'd like to outline some important changes with the aforementioned context in mind.

I'm pleased to announce an expansion of the services provided to you and our employees through the GateHouse News Division. Beginning today, Brad Dennison, VP News, will assume the additional responsibilities inherent in overseeing our online news operations and support. Brad will be incorporating Howard Owens' duties, as Howard has left the company. Howard did volumes to advance our digital strategy and leaves GateHouse with our deep appreciation.

In his expanded role, Brad will oversee and foster a stronger alignment of our print and online strategy, organizational structure, training and support. In turn, this will enable Bill Blevins to focus more on accelerating our online revenue performance, but more importantly, devote more time to strategic planning, identifying new digital opportunities and developing business models to support them. While there are many other benefits we’ll realize, I'm particularly excited due to:

1) The confidence I have in Brad and Bill, working closely with me, to bring greater clarity, responsiveness, support and service from a "field" perspective.

2) The opportunity we have to bring greater continuity to our overall content strategy and product development on all platforms, with a premium on scalability. This will allow us to make big plays when we want, where we want. In other words, we'll benefit from simplified implementation of next-generation products en masse.

3) Our company's ability to step back and appreciate what we've all accomplished together, but to welcome a fresh approach by bringing our vast corporate talent in online development and support together with our premiere news division and its contagious enthusiasm and culture.

4) Our company's increased capacity as a result of these changes to make a greater commitment to long-term and strategic planning so that we can all feel increasingly inspired about where our hard work can lead us. The possibilities are endless.

As Brad and Bill meet with staff and focus on this transition, I've asked them to be prepared to share their plans with us within the next month, which will no doubt allow them to take into consideration any suggestions they receive from you, our digital staff and our outside consulting firm (FTI).

Thank you!

Update: Owens writes on Twitter, "For those who asked: It's not quite true that I'm out of a job. I'm just no longer employed by GHM. Details in a week or two."

Will Hoyt write about the "Note to Readers"?

Here's part of what New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt wrote about the paper's report on John McCain's non-affair last Feb. 24:

A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.

Given that this is a libel settlement we're talking about, Hoyt is unlikely to call the Times' "A Note to Readers" for what it is. But unless he's changed his mind, we know what he's thinking.

George Will's uncorrected error

The Washington Post's refusal to correct George Will's error on global-warming data is starting to rise to the level of a scandal. This account at the Washington Monthly shows why.

The Times' unromantic "Note to Readers"

From the New York Times' "A Note to Readers," published today as part of its libel-suit settlement with lobbyist Vicki Iseman:

The article did not state, and The Times did not intend to conclude, that Ms. Iseman had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain ...

From the Feb. 21 story at issue:

Convinced the relationship [with Iseman] had become romantic, some of his [McCain's] top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

Help me out here.

The difference between Wilkerson and Turner

No-longer-cooperating witness Ron Wilburn tells the Boston Globe's Adrian Walker: "Dianne is a thief. Chuck isn't. Dianne knew better. Chuck is a victim of circumstance." Which is kind of the way this has looked from the beginning.

A great line

Michael Miner, writing in the Chicago Reader: "The Internet pelts us with news; a good newspaper arranges it in our heads."

More possible cuts at the Globe

The Boston Globe may get rid of City Weekly and the twice-weekly Northwest section, according to Michelle Hillman of the Boston Business Journal. She writes that the Globe would "absorb the coverage into other sections of the paper" if managers decide to go ahead with the move.

What does that mean? A fair reading of it is that the Globe is telling us it's only trying to save on paper and production costs, and that there will be no loss of coverage if the two sections are folded. I guess we'll find out. (Via Universal Hub.)

Girl talk

Lisa Williams takes issue with the notion that pandering to women is responsible for the decline of hard news on local television.

The two most successful papers in the U.S. Really.

Let's take a time-out from the news apocalypse to acknowledge the two most successful newspapers in the United States: the New York Times and the Boston Globe.

What? Isn't the financially ailing Times selling part of itself off to a shady Mexican billionaire? Isn't the Globe, owned by the Times Co., losing a reported $1 million a week and eliminating 50 editorial positions?

Yes and yes. This week, though, the Nieman Journalism Lab pulled together a year's worth of Web site figures — compiled by Nielsen and reported monthly by Editor & Publisher — and found that the Times' and the Globe's Web sites are far and away the most successful in their respective weight classes.

Among national papers, the Times has built such a huge lead over its rivals that there's really no comparison. Look at the chart. With nearly 19.5 million unique visitors every month, the Times' online readership is nearly double that of its closest competitor, USA Today.

The Globe's Web site, Boston.com, ranked number six in the country, with 5.2 million unique visitors a month. If you consider the Los Angeles Times to be a national paper, then the Globe is by far the largest regional online newspaper.

One other thing. In December, visitors to the New York Times Web site spent an average of 33 minutes poking around. At the Globe, it was nearly 17 minutes. In other words, a substantial number of people are actually reading the paper on line, not just dipping in quickly from a search engine.

To be sure, there are some extenuating circumstances. According to the Nieman analysis, the Times' average monthly uniques were driven up by the resignation of Eliot Spitzer as New York's governor last March. The Globe benefited from Red Sox coverage during their September playoff drive. In fact, the Globe benefits from the Red Sox year-round, as Sox fans from around the country check in on a daily basis.

Still, this is further proof that what ails the newspaper business right now isn't a lack of readers — it's the collapse of the old business model, compounded by recession and debt.

If there's any good news here, it's that there are enough people who want what newspapers are giving them that there may be some way of figuring out the revenue dilemma.

Taking a pass on the Ted Kennedy series

No, I'm not reading the Boston Globe's Ted Kennedy series, either. As a 50-something political junkie, I don't need yet another overview of Kennedy's life and career, no matter how comprehensive and well-executed it is. And I'll assume it's quite good.

For me, the more interesting question is this: Who's the intended audience? Clearly the timing is based on Kennedy's terminal illness. Kennedy has been much in the news, and there are probably a lot of younger people out there who don't know that much about him.

Can the Globe lure the under-30s in with an effort like this? I suspect it's a tough sell, although anyone who doesn't know much about Kennedy ought to spend some time with the Globe series.

Not to be morbid, but the Globe has also positioned itself well for Kennedy's death, both with its online multimedia package and an accompanying book, "Last Lion," edited by Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos.

But I agree with Mr. Outraged Liberal: Right now, the series isn't generating any buzz at all.

Another assault on free speech

Is there a trend afoot to enforce archaic anti-free speech laws and to ignore a century's worth of court decisions expanding the meaning of the First Amendment?

You've got to wonder. First we have last week's ruling by a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Boston undermining truth as an absolute defense in a libel suit. The ruling was based on a 1902 Massachusetts law that one would have thought would be ruled unconstitutional on its face.

Now, in Pennsylvania, state authorities have told a filmmaker that he can't call his business I Choose Hell Productions because of a state law banning names that "constitute blasphemy, profane cursing or swearing or that profane the Lord's name." The filmmaker, with the help of the ACLU, has filed suit in federal district court.

It is well-established constitutional law that the 14th Amendment bars states from restricting rights more severely than the U.S. Constitution allows. I tell my students that Massachusetts laws against blasphemy were rendered unenforceable after the U.S. Supreme Court, in Gitlow v. New York (1925), made it clear that the First Amendment applied to the states. (All hail Wikipedia, which nicely explains the significance of Gitlow.)

We'll see if the federal court in Pennsylvania agrees.

Racist stupidity at the New York Post

Sean Delonas' cartoon in today's New York Post may not be racist in intent, but it is racist in effect. How anyone — Delonas and his editors — could be unaware of the way African-Americans have historically been compared to apes in order to diminish them is beyond me.

Eric Deggans offers some insights for the St. Petersburg Times, and was especially good earlier today on NPR's "All Things Considered." And Romenesko rounds up coverage.

Update: Jon Keller agrees.

A question about Michael Graham's arrest

I am determined not to get caught up in WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) talk-show host Michael Graham's loud, high-pitched crusade against the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Graham, as you may have heard, was arrested last week and charged with running a red light and driving after the revocation of his license.

But let me ask a question. Graham says the issue is the Registry's policy of not notifying drivers when their licenses have been revoked. Everything I've seen, though, including Jessica Heslam's latest in the Boston Herald, suggests that Graham was notified. Graham himself comes off as ambivalent, writing on his blog this past Saturday:

--According to my insurance company, I was contacted by the RMV in October 2008--almost three years after leaving VA--about Virginia threatening to cancel my drivers license in 2008 (huh?) unless I proved I had insurance on my car in 2006 (huh?), and MA was going to suspend my license here, too. (Huh what huh?)

--According to my insurance company, I gave them the VA DMV's fax number, contact information and my VA drivers license number in October of 2008, and they forwarded my information to Virginia.

--I never heard another word about any of this until I was handcuffed and read my rights yesterday morning.

By Graham's own account, it sounds like he was notified, took some steps to clear up the matter and then failed to follow up and make sure everything was all right.

Or maybe: Graham also writes, "What you didn't read in the Herald, however, were the notes from my insurance company showing that they had responded to that letter in October and giving the Virginia DMV the information requested. You also didn't see the portion of my personal RMV file showing that more than a week AFTER that supposed revocation notice, the RMV gave me a brand-new driver's license."

So Graham presented a new driver's license to the Framingham police, who ran a check on it and found it had been revoked? I guess.

Soon to be ex-senator Burris (III)

I ought to get some props for calling this as early as I did. As Zachary Roth notes, Roland Burris is now under investigation on multiple fronts (including whether he perjured himself), and both the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post have demanded that he resign.

Soon to be ex-senator Burris (II)

Check out this statement from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office, as reported by Talking Points Memo: "Senator Reid supports Senator Burris' decision to cooperate with all appropriate officials who may review this matter, including state agencies and the Senate Ethics Committee." Whoa.

Here's why Roland Burris is a goner. Shortly after Rod Blagojevich appointed him, Reid adamantly insisted that Burris would never be seated. On Jan. 4, for instance, Reid appeared on "Meet the Press" and essentially said the Senate would not accept anyone appointed by Blagojevich, whom he called "obviously a corrupt individual."

Reid backed down because he had to, and because Burris appeared to be ethical. It wasn't pretty. And now Burris has made Reid look like a fool for a second time.

If Burris won't resign, I say the Senate will expel him, with Reid leading the charge. Good riddance.

A chilling decision about libel

In my latest for the Guardian, I analyze one of the most dangerous First Amendment decisions in many years — an opinion handed down by a three-judge federal appeals court panel in Boston last Friday holding that truth may no longer be an absolute defense against a libel suit.

The decision, written by Judge Juan Torruella of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, allows Alan Noonan, a sales director fired by Staples, to pursue his libel claim against the company. Staples's executive vice president, Jay Baitler, had sent an e-mail to some 1,500 employees stating that Noonan had been terminated for violating the company's travel and expense policies.

Torruella found that the contents of the e-mail were true, but added that, because Noonan is a private figure, the e-mail may have crossed the line into "actual malice." In reaching that conclusion, Torruella relied on a 1902 Massachusetts law and said that "actual malice" should be defined as "ill will" or "malevolent intent." Never mind that, in the 1964 case of Times v. Sullivan, the U.S. Supreme Court redefined "actual malice" so that it now pertains solely to statements made with deliberate falsity, or with "reckless disregard" for the truth.

Robert Ambrogi, executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, calls the ruling "the most dangerous libel decision in decades." Longtime Massachusetts newspaper editor William Ketter, now a top executive with the CNHI chain, writes that the decision "could chill aggressive reporting of tough stories for fear that a private individual might end up suing the media even when the published facts are true."

In an e-mail to Media Nation, Robert Bertsche, a prominent First Amendment lawyer with the Boston firm Prince Lobel Glovsky & Tye, says:

A panel of the First Circuit Court of Appeals has decreed that truth is no longer an absolute defense to a libel charge in Massachusetts. The ruling is troubling on so many levels that it beggars the imagination. Begin with the court's ruling that one can be found liable in damages for making a statement that is indisputably true — that is a notion that flies in the face of everyone's most basic understanding of what libel is.

With this decision, the First Amendment has been replaced by the maxim, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it." Consider the irony: The Supreme Court has said that there is constitutional protection for false statements on matters of public concern, but now the First Circuit says there is no constitutional protection for true statements on matters of private concern. What's worse, the court offers no guidance about how to distinguish what is of "public concern" from what is of "private concern." (You can be sure that among the 1,500 employees of Staples who received the company's statement about Noonan's firing, this was a matter of quite public concern.)

It is mind-boggling that the Court of Appeals offered so little analysis, and gave so little explanation, for a decision that arguably makes Massachusetts the least speech-protective state in the nation. Why didn't this federal court (in a diversity case, no less) ask the Massachusetts SJC [the state's Supreme Judicial Court] to opine on the validity and interpretation of this statute passed in the days of the buggy whip? It's a bit like the state police descending on Fenway Park to handcuff Terry Francona for violating state law against public spitting.

Talk about a chilling effect on speech! Lawyers across the state should advise their clients simply not to say negative comments about people. Even if what you say is true, you will be made to pay damages if a judge decides that what you said is not of "public concern" and a jury decides you were motivated by ill will.

This is a bad decision for employers and employees, because it will reduce the flow of information in the workplace. It's a disastrous decision for the media, and in particular for the new media: bloggers, people who post on Facebook, indeed anyone who has a website but lacks press credentials. That's because the mainstream media may be protected, at least haphazardly, by an assumption that if The Boston Globe writes about a topic, then by definition the topic is one of public concern. But no such presumption is likely to protect an outspoken blogger's critical remarks.

This is an aberrational ruling from a well-respected court. I remain hopeful that the three-judge panel will reconsider the ruling, or that the full Court of Appeals will agree to rehear it and correct this misjudgment. But until that happens, everyone who cares about free speech should lobby his or her legislator to remove this archaic statute from the law books.

As it stands, Torruella's decision applies only to Massachusetts. But what if the federal courts were to discover similar laws on the books in other states?

You might have thought that the court would find the 1902 law to be unconstitutionally restrictive in light of Times v. Sullivan and its progeny. Instead, Torruella chose to drag freedom of speech back into the pre-1964 dark ages. Amazing. And frightening.

Soon to be ex-senator Burris

I can't imagine Sen. Roland Burris will (or should) survive his latest admission — that he actually tried to raise money for then-Illinois govenor Rod Blagojevich at the same time that he was asking him for the Senate appointment. (Via TPMMuckraker.)

Back to NewsFire

Since last summer, I've been using Google Reader as my RSS aggregator. It's attractive, and I like the community features that it offers. Last night, though, I decided to switch back to NewsFire. Why?

• NewsFire, installed on my desktop, is instantaneous. Sometimes that matters. All I have to do is hit "refresh." With Google Reader, which is out there in the cloud, you have to wait.
• Google Reader is superfically more attractive. But NewsFire is easier to set up with a nice, big, readable font.
• Skimming is faster with NewsFire.

So what have I given up? Mainly the ability to access my feeds from any computer. Since I'm rarely without my MacBook, that's generally not a problem. Still, my thinking continues to evolve.

The cooling of George Will's brain

Syndicated columnist George Will presents only one piece of evidence in his Sunday piece denying global warming — and he gets it wrong. Will writes:

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

To which the research center replies:

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

Much more from Climate Progress.

Final thought: What does it take for Will and/or the Washington Post to append a correction? As of 6:30 p.m., there was still nothing. Is it because his entire commentary looks ridiculous if he retracts the sole relevant factual nugget he included in his diatribe?

OK, not quite so final: David Bernstein stands at the intersection of Will and Jeff Jacoby.

Blowing the whistle on handicapped parking

Miss Media Nation and I visited Harvard Square yesterday. I dropped her off at a bookstore, then went look for a handicapped parking space. I found one not far from Brattle Square.

As I was backing in, it occurred to me that I might be causing myself some hassle. Our handicapped placard obviously wasn't for me. My daughter was a couple of blocks away. If a police officer questioned me, I'd have to ask him to walk back to the bookstore with me so he could see that my daughter was, in fact, there.

I did it anyway — no problems. But it would have been a whole lot easier if I were one of the chosen few who use the handicapped parking spaces in front of Boston police headquarters, wouldn't it? Another great job by students in Walter Robinson's investigative-reporting class at Northeastern University.

Four months later, InstaPundit checks in

Last October, I wrote an item chastising the InstaPundit, Glenn Reynolds, for writing that opponents of a ballot measure to eliminate the Massachusetts state income tax were "pledging a campaign of 'massive resistance.'"

The problem was that Reynolds had put massive resistance in quotation marks, yet appeared to be quoting no one other than himself.

On Saturday, believe it or not, Reynolds responded — and it appears that he still doesn't understand how to use quotation marks. He points to a statement by then-House Speaker Sal DiMasi vowing not to implement Question One if it were to pass (it didn't). But DiMasi never used the phrase "massive resistance."

I would say that Reynolds concocted a quote, except that he doesn't even seem to realize that's what he did. For good measure, he tells me that the reason he appears to post constantly throughout the day is that he's set up some sort timing mechanism that posts automatically. In other words, many of his time-stamps are faked. Ethical? I don't know. I'll have to get back to you on that.

By the way, if the Glenn (or "Glenn") who posted a comment to Media Nation isn't really Reynolds, my apologies. I'm making an assumption that it is, mainly because there's nothing particularly weird or over-the-top about his comment.

And these people really know how to mangle quotation marks.

Not as retro as I had feared

Interesting to note that Joel Kramer, editor of the community Web site MinnPost, is also thinking about premium pricing for the print editions of newspapers. Here's what he writes at the New York Times' blog Room for Debate:

I do think there is a strategy that might keep a high-quality regional newspaper modestly profitable in the future: Rely much more on revenue from readers. Publish a newspaper worth $2 a day, the price of a cup of coffee, and $5 on Sunday. Raise the quality. Make it more in-depth, more analytical, to complement the immediacy of your free Web site, and do not make that deeper, more insightful coverage available for free on the web. Perhaps make the printed product a tailored mix of sections that appeal to different readers: For $2, you get to pick, say, four sections out of six.

Obviously, circulation would drop. A newspaper that sold 400,000 copies at 50 cents daily and $1.25 on Sunday might sell only 100,000 at four times the price. But there would be a business incentive to keep quality high, because each extra copy sold should increase profit, not subtract from it.

He adds: "I think it has a better chance than going Web-only and charging for the content." I agree. On Thursday, I floated a similar idea.

Question: If the Boston Globe (or any major metro) raised its prices to $2 on weekdays and $5 on Sundays, what sorts of print-only content would induce you to pay for it rather than simply reading it online? What other services should it make available to paying subscribers?

Health journalist Tinker Ready launches blog

Longtime health journalist (and Northeastern colleague) Tinker Ready announces that she's started a health-care blog, Boston Health News. She writes:

I hope to write and link on topics including research, personal health, business and international news. I'm especially looking forward to following the latest attempt at health reform. I've covered at least two runs at it — the Medicare reforms of the late 80s and the Clinton proposal. A lot needs to be explained and a million good stories wait to be told.

Ready will be a welcome addition to the local blogging scene.

A well-told story in black and white

If you didn't get a chance to see the Boston Globe video that accompanied Maria Cramer's story on the white firefighter who was reunited with the black infant he rescued 40 years ago, you owe it to yourself to have a look. Good stuff.

The trouble with Brill's not-so-secret memo

My apologies for not being right on top of this earlier in the week. I just had a chance to read Steven Brill's no-longer-confidential memo, "Turning Around the Times — and Journalism," posted on Romenesko, and I've got a few observations.

First, a bit of praise for Brill, who, near the beginning of his career, wrote one of the bravest books I've ever read — "The Teamsters," about an organization that, at the time of publication (1979), was more a criminal enterprise than it was a union. I don't know how Brill found the courage to start his car in the morning.

And though I've weighed in several times (here and here) on why it doesn't make sense to think that newspapers will be able to charge a fee to their online customers, I understand the problem. Even though what you pay for a print edition doesn't even cover the cost of manufacturing and distributing it, the fact — and the problem — is that print advertising is far more lucrative than online advertising. Never is a long time, but it's beginning to look like Web advertising may never support the public-interest journalism on which a healthy, self-governing society depends.

So I'm sympathetic to, though not supportive of, Brill's ideas for charging online customers. It's possible that it might even work for the Times because of its unique appeal. There are probably quite a few people who'd pay for access to the Times, but not for anything else. And therein lies one of problems with his plan, though by no means the only one.

Here's the biggest drawback I see in Brill's proposal: it would end blogging, as valuable a journalistic form as has been developed since the inverted pyramid. A really good blog post might link to three, four or five news stories — maybe more. A really good blogger might skim through 10, 15 or 20 stories in the course of synthesizing them into that post. Finally, that blogger might look at many dozens of news sources on a regular or semi-regular basis.

Obviously, bloggers — most of whom are doing it for no money — cannot afford to subscribe to dozens of online newspapers and magazines. Even if they could, they want to know that when they link to particular stories, their readers will be able to follow the links and read those stories as well. How many online news sources is a typical blog reader supposed to subscribe to?

Micropayments, which Brill also mentions, get around this. Properly implemented, they're deducted automatically. But though 10 cents an article might seem reasonable, do you really want to pay $1 to read a well-constructed blog post and follow all the links? Of course you don't. No one is going to do such a thing.

Brill says that if the Times charges $1 per month to each of its 20 million unique monthly visitor, that would generate $240 million a year. I'll withhold my sarcasm, because this is math, and experience tells me that I could be wrong. But it strikes me that Brill has convinced himself that the Times could get a buck out of every person who, at some point during the course of a month, clicks on a link to a Times story that he found via a search engine. Intuitively, it seems to me that they're not going to do that, and I'm pretty sure Brill would concede the point if he'd think about it.

The only folks who are going to pay $1 a month are the journalism geeks like me, who actually prop open their laptops at breakfast and read a good chunk of the Times online. And I suspect the number of people who actually read the paper that way is far, far smaller than 20 million.

Case in point: Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma told me last fall that 84 percent of visitors to the paper's Web site come in via search engines, aggregators and blogs. Let's say it's the same for the Times. Let's say you could get every one of the 16 percent who come in through the front door to pay $1 a month. That's $38.4 million for the year, not $240 million.

I realize that my critique would appear to leave no way out of the dilemma in which the Times and other newspapers find themselves. I happen to think there may be more life left in the print edition than we all imagined a couple of years ago. I'd raise the price by quite a bit, maybe offer some premium, print-only features (heresy, I know, but worth thinking about) and perhaps offer those well-heeled customers access to some special services.

A solution? No. But it might work as a holding action until we can figure out what's next.

Media Nation on citizen journalism

Christian Avard of iBrattleboro and the Deerfield Valley News interviewed me at the New England Press Association convention last week. The topic: the role of citizen journalism in the changing news-media landscape.

Heavy metal for the Phoenix's Bernstein

I am going to start demanding more respect now that I can truthfully claim to have once worked with the New England Press Association's "Journalist of the Year."

Congratulations to Boston Phoenix reporter David Bernstein, who also picked up first-place awards in investigative reporting and for his political column, the Phoenix's venerable "Talking Politics" feature. In particular, Bernstein was singled out for his in-depth investigation into the wrongful conviction of Stephan Cowans, published almost exactly one year ago.

Plenty of other friends from the Phoenix were honored at NEPA last weekend as well. Here is the announcement.

Gitell moves on, suspends Gitell.com

Gitell.com (left) and Media Nation at

Seth's 40th birthday party, November 2008

I've been holding off until it became official, but now it can be told. House Speaker Robert DeLeo has named friend of Media Nation Seth Gitell as his director of communications. DeLeo's gain is our loss — Seth explains why he's giving up his widely read blog, in which he expertly covered everything from politics to food.

Seth may be best known as Mayor Tom Menino's former spokesman, but before that we were colleagues at the Boston Phoenix. Here's my account of our last road trip — a Rudy Giuliani event in Durham, N.H., in December 2007, which Seth covered for the now-defunct New York Sun and I covered for the Guardian.

Good luck, Seth. And here's an excellent Web site you can bookmark for your new boss.

The Herald-Ottaway connection

Rupert Murdoch's decision to put Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell in charge of his Ottaway community-newspaper division is paying some dividends for the Herald.

Today the Herald collaborates with Ottaway's Cape Cod Times on a story about six Falmouth students who face child-pornography charges for allegedly text-messaging a nude photograph of a 13-year-old girl.

Interestingly, the Cape Cod Times version appears to have no Herald involvement. But the Times is running some Herald content, including the "Inside Track."

For the Herald, this isn't nearly as good as it was back when Purcell owned Community Newspaper Co., which is now part of GateHouse Media. For a few years, the Herald could draw on more than 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts covering nearly all of Boston's suburbs.

The only Massachusetts papers Ottaway owns, by contrast, are well south of Boston: the Cape Cod Times, the New Bedford Standard-Times and a handful of weeklies that cover the same territory.

Still, the Ottaway connection gives the understaffed Herald a bit more reach than it had before.

The trouble with micropayments for news

I said pretty much all that I have to say about paying for online news last month, when I criticized David Carr's suggestion of "an iTunes for news." But the notion of micropayments — click and, say, a penny or a nickel or a dime is automatically deducted from your bank account — has suddenly gotten a boost. Unfortunately, the idea is a non-starter.

Walter Isaacson, the former editor of Time magazine, and Alan Mutter, a respected news-industry blogger, have both come out in favor of micropayments. Isaacson even made it on to "The Daily Show" last night, trading quips with Jon Stewart. All this comes amid an ongoing meltdown in the newspaper business. It's gotten so serious that a number of publishers have started a rah-rah PR campaign called the Newspaper Project, the purpose of which is to — well, it's hard to say.

So rather than repeat what I said a month ago, I'll simply call your attention to a splendid op-ed in today's New York Times by Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate, who points out that the news in newspapers has always been free:

Newspaper readers have never paid for the content (words and photos). What they have paid for is the paper that content is printed on. A week of The Washington Post weighs about eight pounds and costs $1.81 for new subscribers, home-delivered. With newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink) costing around $750 a metric ton, or 34 cents a pound, Post subscribers are getting almost a dollar’s worth of paper free every week — not to mention the ink, the delivery, etc.

And by the way, I once owned one of the Slate umbrellas to which Kinsley refers. If it hadn't fallen apart at the first gust of wind, I might have it still.

I'm as concerned about how to pay for the news as anyone, but I think it's pretty clear what doesn't work.

Photo (cc) by Bill Ballantyne and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

The hypocritical Shepard Fairey

As one of my students, Marc Larocque, puts it, "Shepard Fairey is a hypocritical scumbag." That's really the only proper reaction you can have upon learning that Fairey, who's fighting a copyright complaint lodged by the Associated Press, has himself charged an Austin artist with copyright violation for doing exactly the same thing.

The artist, Baxter Orr, took Fairey's iconic image of Andre the Giant and put a respiratory mask on it — precisely the sort of "transformative" use that Fairey is relying on in his own repurposing of the AP's Barack Obama photo to make his Obama "Hope" poster. Boston Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman has all the details.

Fairey is up to his neck in it at the moment, filing a pre-emptive lawsuit against the AP and defending himself against vandalism charges brought by the Boston police. I still think his Obama poster is protected under the fair-use exception, as I wrote last week. But so is Orr's Andre the Giant image. These are nearly identical cases, and it's amazing that Fairey doesn't see it that way.

Update: Gee, Fairey's problem with Orr couldn't have anything to do with the fact that Orr seems less enamored of Obama than Fairey does. Could it?

Obama's surprisingly chilly news conference

In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at President Obama's first prime-time presidential news conference — and find that despite his impressive command of facts and policies, his performance was surprisingly defensive, even chilly.

The last time the Huskies won the Beanpot

I've been meaning to give a plug to Outta the Pahk, a new sports blog by Jeff Goldberg, the former Hartford Courant sportswriter who wrote the terrific Jim Rice story I mentioned on Jan. 13, the day Rice made the Hall of Fame.

Today Goldberg offers a bit of Northeastern trivia: he was the last reporter for the Northeastern News to cover a Beanpot championship. Goldberg writes:

Led by Kevin Heffernan and goalie Bruce Racine, who later had a cup of coffee with the St. Louis Blues, the Huskies not only won the Beanpot by beating BU, they also took the Hockey East title at the Boston Garden, knocking off New England powerhouse Maine. Those three games proved the only three I ever got to cover at the old Garden, a thrill for a sportswriter of any age, let alone an 18-year-old.

The Huskies can do it again tonight. And, just as it was 21 years ago, it's Boston University that's standing in their way. Huntington News sports editor Nate Owen will be live-blogging the game here.

Heck of a job, Arthur

No offense to New York Times media reporter Richard Pérez-Peña, but his story today on the New York Times Co. should be seen as the Times Co.'s best case for itself rather than as a tough-minded forensic overview. So in that respect it offers some interesting insights into how Arthur Sulzberger Jr. assesses his reign as chairman of the company and publisher of its flagship newspaper.

And yes, for the most part, Sulzberger thinks he's doing a hell of a job. Pérez-Peña writes:

Newspaper industry analysts say that despite some published alarms to the contrary, the company has positioned itself well to ride out another year of recession, maybe two. The company still operates at a profit, and analysts say it might have gotten by without the [Carlos] Slim loan, but could not afford to take the risk because borrowing could be even harder in six months or a year.

"But," said Edward Atorino, an analyst at Benchmark, a research firm, "I think they've put The New York Times out of danger."

And did you know that Times Topics is now a competitor to Wikipedia? No, me either. And Jimmy Wales makes three.

There is no mention of whether the Times Co. would like to peddle the Boston Globe, the subject of near-constant speculation around here.

Pérez-Peña does point to some shortcomings. And the most eye-opening is this: between 1997 and 2004, the company bought back $2.7 billion in stock, a number that is now nearly four times the company's entire market capitalization of about $726 million.

"[I]t outweighs the prices of all the other second-guessed moves combined," Pérez-Peña writes, "and it would be more than enough to ensure the company’s security for years to come."

All that aside, I suspect that Pérez-Peña's fundamentally sunny take on his newspaper's future is more accurate than the doomsday scenarios put forth in recent months by Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley and Michael Hirschorn of the Atlantic.

At least I hope so.

See you at the NEPA convention

Social Media for Journalists

View more presentations from Dan Kennedy. (tags: northeasternuniversity nepa)

I'll be at the annual New England Press Association convention this afternoon, leading a workshop on blogging and social media for journalists. Thanks for the help many of you gave me, and I hope to see some of you there.

Above is the slideshow I'll be using. My goal is to move through it quickly and get into idea-sharing, since I expect many of the participants will have at least as much to offer as I do.

Change we can believe in

Dexter Kennedy

AP's copyright complaint a likely loser

You can't judge a copyright case ahead of time. But based on the facts, I'd say the Associated Press's copyright complaint regarding the Barack Obama "Hope" poster is a loser. The AP is seeking compensation because the artist, Shepard Fairey, used a photo taken by the AP's Mannie Garcia.

"Fair use" — the doctrine under which you can use a copyright-holder's work without permission and without paying for it — specifically allows for works that are "transformative." That is, if you build upon someone else's work rather than simply passing it along unaltered, there's a good chance the copyright police aren't going to bust you.

That was the principle in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc., a 1994 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that 2 Live Crew were in the clear with its parody version of Roy Orbison's "Oh Pretty Woman."

In 2001, the California Supreme Court ruled that an artist who made "Three Stooges" T-shirts was not protected by fair use specifically because they were not transformative — they simply used images of Moe, Larry and Curly without any alteration. It seemed clear from the court's ruling that if the artist had had, say, printed "Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld" (or "Clinton, Gore and Rubin") on the T-shirts below Moe, Larry and Curly's pictures, then he'd have been covered by fair use.

In the recent dust-up between GateHouse Media and the New York Times Co., GateHouse officials said they wouldn't have minded if the Boston Globe's Your Town hyperlocal sites included blogs that linked to GateHouse content. What GateHouse objected to was the Globe's automated lifting of verbatim headlines and ledes — again, no transformative element.

The AP says it hopes its case Fairey can be settled without a lawsuit. I'm sure that's true. The AP's lawyers may be counting on Fairey's paying money to make this go away rather than be subjected to negative publicity.

But if this goes to court, my money's on Fairey.

Dennis, Callahan* and homophobia

People regularly tell me about the homophobic rants on "Dennis & Callahan," on WEEI Radio (AM 850), but I rarely catch them in the act during the two- or three-minute increments in which I listen to them. I only stay when they're actually talking about sports.

So let me pass along the BC Heights' account of their loathsome shtick from earlier this week. As Adam Gaffin puts it: "I'd almost think Dennis and Callahan are closeted but ... That would be an insult to gay men."

*Update and correction: WEEI is so proud of the segment that it put the audio online. As it turns out, Gerry Callahan was out sick that day.

Yet another reason casinos are a bad idea

Take note, Gov. Patrick: The state of Rhode Island may have to bail out its ailing casino.

Wall Street Journal blew Madoff story

Financial journalist and blogger Gary Weiss has been paying close attention to the congressional testimony of thwarted whistleblower Harry Markopolos — and finds that Markopolos says he tried to interest the Wall Street Journal in the Bernie Madoff story three years ago to no avail.

According to Markopolos, Journal reporter John Wilke was ready to leap in, but could never get clearance from his superiors.

Sickening. (Via Romenesko.)

Universal Hub on the air

Adam Gaffin talks with Left Ahead! (The exclamation point is theirs.)

Seeking advice on social media for journalists

This Friday I'm leading a workshop on blogging and social media for journalists at the annual New England Press Association convention. I'm expecting a fairly savvy group — not likely to be too many outright novices. Any advice?

Stop taxing free speech

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that a recent proposal for tax-exempt, endowment-supported newspapers, though flawed, might be intriguing — but only if Lyndon Johnson's 55-year-old ban on political speech is repealed.

Bye, bye Daschle? Yes, indeed.

Tom Daschle withdraws.

I've tended to see President Obama's reliance on old hands as an attempt to leapfrog over his lack of experience. Understandable. But he went too far in choosing a hack like Daschle, and now it's time for some new blood, as opposed to blood on the floor.

Why the Globe should acquire Universal Hub

The Boston Globe may be getting smaller, but it was just handed an opportunity to do something very intelligent. Let's see if it can rise to the occasion.

Adam Gaffin, the chief impresario and co-founder of Universal Hub, just lost his day job as an online editor for the trade publication Network World. UH, if you don't already know, is a "best of the blogs" site — an essential guide to nearly 1,000 local blogs in Greater Boston, all informed by Adam's love of his adopted hometown and his puckish wit.

The Globe should hire Gaffin. I've been saying it to anyone who'd listen for quite a while now. Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix said it just last week. Yes, yes, the financially ailing Globe is in the midst of downsizing its newsroom by 50 people. But with fewer reporters, the paper is in more need than ever of someone who can intelligently aggregate content from a wide variety of sources. No one is better at it than Gaffin.

Recently, as you know, the Globe tried its hand at automated aggregation. It didn't work out.

Gaffin's ability to find what's interesting, entertaining and important while holding down a demanding day job has always been awe-inspiring. If he were able to devote his full attention to it, Universal Hub would only become better. (In most respects, anyway. No doubt he would no longer offer his acidic observations about certain Globe columnists.)

Gaffin has been affiliated with the Globe in the past — for a while he wrote a roundup for the Sunday paper's City Weekly supplement.

Do I have a conflict of interest? Yes, and thank you for asking, though it cuts the other way. Adam also runs the Boston Blogs ad network, which automatically places advertising on Media Nation and many other local blogs. Lately it's been doing well enough to cover my Internet access fees. Were Adam to go to the Globe, I imagine we'd be left high and dry.

If the Globe is to reinvent itself, it's going to have to act as a trusted guide to the best content out there. It should start with Gaffin.