Ink On Pulp
You may have noticed a Boston Globe ad pop up on one of the GoogleAd slots. I have no control over that. I strongly advise everyone to subscribe to a daily newspaper, or buy one or more regularly at newstands. However …
There is a lot of useful information in all of them, even if you sometimes have to slog through or bypass some dreck, bias, etc., to find it. Most of what we discuss on the political blogosphere comes out of them. Newspapers, for all their faults, remain our most intensive news organizations. TV doesn’t come close, and non-mainstream media Internet alternatives, while there have been some boutique successes, are a long way from replacing the dinosaur media.
That said, I cannot in good conscience encourage anyone to buy the Boston Globe. Its one accomplish of the past decade, as it has crawled back from the prevarication and fabrication scandals of the 1990s, was the big priest sex scandal series in 2001 that kicked off the ouster and prosecution of literally hundreds of dirty priests, and led to compensation for thousands of victims. Elements of this story had previously been reported in the Boston Phoenix and Boston Herald, but the Globe took it, ran with it, made it a national story and got the Pulitzer. The Globe actually deserves some credit for the effort it put into this. Since then the newspaper has done nothing of note, with the possible exception of its jihad for gay marriage, transgenderism, etc. It has in fact done an abysmal job of covering local news and issues and typically lags behind its sordid competition on major local stories. That would be us.
To quote my former boss, the great Anglo-American tabloidist Ken Chandler, in Boston Magazine:
“The Globe isn’t the first paper I read. And I can tell you it ain’t the second or third, either. I regard reading it as one big chore.”
“You get the feeling that if they cover a local story and they have to go into the neighborhoods, they’re holding their noses.”
Here’s Chandler in the New Yorker re the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston:
“The Globe is a Times wannabe, but it can’t quite pull it off. We are just trying to extract some news from an event where there isn’t any. We knew that the Globe was going to give it a big blow job. If I produced a newspaper as boring as the Globe, I’d kill myself.”
There’s not much more that needs to be said.
If you want to read an agenda-setting, hard-hitting Boston newspaper that fights hard every day with a small but focused staff to get the news and take on the powers that be, then buy the Boston Herald or read it online.
Topics: media
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:57 am Comments (5) on Friday, December 7, 2007
5 Responses to “Ink On Pulp”
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December 7th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Just as well that I am thinking of starting a newspaper. Move over Murdoch, Theo Spark is coming!!
December 7th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
We get a twice-weekly county newspaper that details the local news and is paid for strictly with advertisement. One of the reason we dropped our daily newspaper (The Dayton Daily News), aside from its obvious editorial slant and incomplete details, is that we could no longer have any confidence in a newspaper that was so riddled with misspellings and grammatical mistakes. It’s as if young journalists no longer know how to spell or use proper English, and their proofreaders don’t either.
I do miss the Michaels Arts & Crafts Supply coupons.
December 7th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
What great quotes!! Where is Chandler now, and how can we get more of him?
I guess I’ll consider the Herald, since I am such a Crittenden fan (and live in the Boston area). Maybe they’ll have coupons for Michael’s–that does sound like a big plus!
The only newspaper I get now is the really, really local one, the Carlisle Mosquito. It’s actually very good. On Valentine’s Day one year they had interviews with local couples who have been married for 50 years. I thought that was great. They have stories about local wildlife (the Carlisle bear was big for a while, but has apparently moved on), plant identification, rare salamander sightings, turtle-migration alerts, etc. The Police Blotter section mostly has things like “a wallet was found and turned in to the police” and “assistance was provided removing a bat from a residence.”
December 7th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Great post, especially your introduction:
“Newspapers, for all their faults, remain our most intensive news organizations.”
I love the papers. Thanks for the reminder why!
December 8th, 2007 at 1:33 am
I was never a news junkie until I discovered the blogs. Since then I’m better informed than I ever was before. The only paper I get is the Wall Street Journal.
Theo, Rupert got his boost by having hot tottie on page three of every issue. Given the nature of your blog, I assume your plunge into pulp news will feature tottie on every page. Now that might be worth subscribing to.