Double trouble for the Courant

Those in the trenches once again pay for corporate's screwups. Photo from Gerry Brooks' blog.

I’m sure the first book I read cover to cover was See Spot Run or something like that, but the first words I actually remember reading were in The Hartford Courant sports section. Many a weekday morning was spent eating my breakfast with my elbows imbedded in the newspaper. Inevitably, that was followed by me making a mad dash for the bus stop with my mother and a soapy washcloth in hot pursuit. She’d scrub and scrub but my elbows didn’t become clean until about 1994.

Likewise, I imagine the first televised images I ever absorbed were a Tom and Jerry cartoon or an episode of Sesame Street or maybe The Magic Garden on WPIX 11. But as a future unemployed sportswriter, the most pivotal figures in my development as a media observer were local news anchors such as Gerry Brooks, whose hilarious “The Brooks File” essays on WFSB (the local CBS affiliate) were must-see TV every Saturday night. (My favorite, about how men are never satisfied with how they mow the lawn, aired right after mowing the lawn became part of my chores at home)

So you can understand how I felt young and old all at the same time earlier today, when my oldest and best friend from Connecticut sent me a link to a blog by Brooks in which he notes the Courant ran the same Boston Globe story twice on a single page in today’s sports section.

That Brooks, who has been the co-anchor of the nightly news at WVIT, Connecticut’s NBC affiliate for years now, has a blog is cool. That he tackles touchy media issues in it, despite having every reason not to, is even cooler. That he has to write about the Courant running the same Globe story twice on the same page is incredibly disheartening, yet also not all that surprising.

A year ago, the Courant wouldn’t have had to worry about running the same Globe story twice because it would have, you know, actually staffed the Sox game in Washington. And replacing its once outstanding road coverage of the Sox with a Globe story is a kick in the pants to the Courant readership. Apparently, Sam Zell doesn’t think readers are savvy enough to go online to boston.com or head to the local convenience store and buy the Globe. Giving your readership reasons to read and buy the competition: Only in journalism.

Sad, too, is the line from Brooks in which he writes of “…sav[ing] the sports section for last to linger over the box scores and Dom Amore’s fine baseball coverage.” I can appreciate leaving the sports section for last (even though it was always the first thing I read), especially now, as I lament how it’s impossible to savor the Courant sports because it’s so thin.

There was a time when Amore was one of several writers providing the Courant with fine baseball coverage, not the only one. Now we can only wonder what will be axed first as the Courant, the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America, hurtles towards the day when another newspaper inherits that honor: Amore and the baseball beat or the box scores, which are a morning ritual for a newspaper’s core readership but an easily disposable feature for newspapers trying to live up to the execrable mantra of “do more with less.”

Email Jerry at jbeach73@gmail.com.

O Henry, are you going to save the Globe?

Illustration courtesy of this site.

This is almost certainly not a news flash to you: The New York Times Company—which owns The Boston Globe—has a nearly 18 percent stake in the Red Sox, which makes it the second-largest shareholder in the franchise.

This relationship is one of the most polarizing issues among those who work in and follow the Boston sports media. Is the Globe’s investment in the Sox just good business? Or does it come at a heavy price for the Globe? Does the partnership between the Sox and the paper influence the Globe’s coverage and is the paper encouraged, either directly or indirectly, to go easy on the hometown team?

To read what writers and analysts alike have to say about the Globe-Sox relationship, check out Chapter Six of Fighting Words, coming soon to a bookshelf near you. And that’s the first-ever plug for the book here. Awesome. Was it good for you?

Anyway, if you think the current relationship is fraught with potential conflicts of journalistic interest, can you imagine the debate that would ensue if John Henry bought the Globe from the Times?

The Times and the Globe are in the midst of a potentially bloody standoff, with the Times threatening to close the Globe—which it says is hemorrhaging money—within the next few weeks if the Globe’s union doesn’t make concessions. The Boston Herald reported Monday that Henry floated the idea of buying the Times’ piece of the Sox from the company as well as the Globe, but that the negotiations didn’t get far.

Sports teams owning media companies, and vice versa, is nothing new. And Henry wouldn’t even be the first owner of a sports team to buy an endangered newspaper in this terrible market. Last year, Long Island cable giant Cablevision—which owns the New York Rangers and New York Knicks—bought Newsday from the Tribune Company and newspaper killer Sam Zell.

While Henry wrote eloquently of the importance of the newspaper for the baseball fan and New Englanders in general (he wrote an email to the Herald that read “Baseball fans rely heavily on newspapers. No one wants to see a newspaper with a great, long-term history go away. Losing the Globe, the Herald or any New England paper is a big loss for the Red Sox.”), the Cablevision-Newsday transaction was one bereft of romantic verbiage.

Buying Newsday was the last piece in Cablevision’s plot to monopolize Long Island media. Why, wireless service presented by Cablevision makes this it possible to post this blog. And the soundtrack for this blog was late-night television transmitted via a Cablevision box. In the morning, my wife will tune into Cablevision-owned News 12 to see the traffic report before she heads to work. I for one welcome our Cablevision overlords!

Nor did Cablevision have any interest in even paying lip service to journalistic integrity—the Knicks under Cablevision are recognized as the least media-friendly team in sports—or using Newsday as anything other than a vehicle to blow sunshine about the Knicks and Rangers up the derrieres of its readers. Surprisingly, the editors outlasted the Dolan family in that battle.

Coincidentally, it was Cablevision’s multiple media interests—as well as the fact that Larry Dolan, the brother of Cablevision head honcho Charles Dolan, already owns the Indians—that convinced John Harrington to award the Red Sox to Henry’s group in 2001 even though Cablevision made a higher bid.

It would be interesting, on multiple fronts, if Henry bought the Globe. It’d be ironic, and maybe in the real definition of the word and not in the Alanis Morrissette way, if a guy who made his fortune on the futures market ended up investing in a relative relic. Yet the fact he made his fortune in futures leads me to believe he’ll probably stay away from a newspaper industry whose future appears bleak beyond description.

Anyone who used to work in newspapers—or still looks forward to digging into the Sunday paper—has to appreciate Henry’s words Monday, even if the impact of the actual newspaper declines by the day and the true value in buying the Globe lies in Boston.com and not in the print product. The advertising that keeps the newspaper afloat is going and it’s never coming back, but there’s still plenty of value in newsgathering and a website that is updated around the clock.

Of course, how do you reinvent the wheel and make money in selling the product that the Globe and thousands of other newspapers have been giving away free for well over a decade? If Henry buys the Globe and comes up with that answer, he’ll be the man who saved journalism as well as Fenway Park.

Email Jerry at jbeach73@gmail.com.