The Phoenix Network:
 
 
About  |  Advertise
Adult  |  Moonsigns  |  Band Guide  |  Blogs  |  In Pictures
 
Media -- Dont Quote Me  |  News Features  |  Talking Politics  |  This Just In

When Rupert came to Boston

By ADAM REILLY  |  August 8, 2007

Step Three was staffing Murdoch’s new baby — a process which, in the end, made quite an impact on Boston’s journalistic landscape. Frank Phillips and Brian Mooney came from the Lowell Sun; Joe Sciacca came from the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune; Kevin Cullen came from the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram. The list goes on: Shelley Murphy, Andrea Estes, Andrew Costello, Andrew Gully.

If you live in Boston and pay any attention to the local media scene, these names should be familiar. Phillips, Mooney, Estes, Murphy, and Cullen were eventually hired away by the Globe and have been some of that paper’s best-known reporters for years (Cullen recently became a metro columnist). Along with Kevin Convey, who’d joined the paper under Hearst, Gully and Costello comprised the trio known as the “Micks with Dicks” that ran the Herald for most of the ’90s. Sciacca currently runs the Herald’s local-news operation.

Talk to any member of this crew today, and they’re likely to wax rhapsodic about the heady atmosphere of the early Murdoch era. “It was terrific,” Phillips recalls. “We were a bunch of hotshot young reporters, and we thought we were running circles around the Globe. I was the one person the Herald had at the State House; the Globe had five people. They were perfectly nice and very smart — they’d gone to Ivy League schools — but they couldn’t understand Massachusetts politics because they’d never covered it.”

“We really did think we were keeping Boston a two-newspaper town, and there really was an almost missionary zeal about us,” adds Cullen. “Every night, we’d meet at J.J. Foley’s” — the South End bar and Herald watering hole — “and wait for the first edition of the Herald and the Globe, to see what they’d have and what we’d have that they didn’t. And we felt like we beat them every day with something. It was a battle with them every fucking night.”

All this energy had a human cost: the Herald’s young imports were frequently trained by the same men they ended up replacing. But according to Eddie Corsetti — a Hearst veteran who was jettisoned three months into the Murdoch era — the outcome validated Murdoch’s approach. Compared with the Herald during the end of the Hearst era, Corsetti remembers, Murdoch’s paper “was much better. They were following up on stories, which they didn’t do under Hearst at the end. And the Murdoch crew would flood a story with reporters and cover every angle of it.”

Readers noticed, too. According to Murdoch biographer William Shawcross, the Herald’s circulation surged by 100,000 in one year.

The out-of-towners
That was the upside: Murdoch kept Boston a two-newspaper town, packed the Herald with sharp young talent, and got more people reading the paper. But other aspects of his tenure were more problematic.

Start with the Herald’s famously incorrect report — in a story written by political columnist Peter Lucas and published on May 26, 1983 — that Mayor Kevin White would seek re-election that fall. Lucas had been a nemesis of White’s for years — among other things, he coined the phrase “Mayor Deluxe” to highlight the mayor’s expensive tastes — and some argue that he fell victim to a perfect set-up by a crafty politician eager to exact his revenge before leaving City Hall. (As the Herald presses printed Lucas’s hand-fed erroneous report, headlined HERALD EXCLUSIVE: WHITE WILL RUN, Boston’s TV stations ran a taped announcement in which White said he wouldn’t.)

< prev  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |   next >
Related: Liberty or Death, High noon at the Herald, Leftward ho!, More more >
  Topics: Media -- Dont Quote Me , Frank Phillips, Peter Lucas, David Kennedy,  More more >
  • Share:
  • Share this entry with Facebook
  • Share this entry with Digg
  • Share this entry with Delicious
  • RSS feed
  • Email this article to a friend
  • Print this article
Comments
When Rupert came to Boston
Not to make a big deal about COPYING A LEDE, which wasn't a piece of genius anyway, but have a look: STRAIGHT UP Over the Cliff With Rupe http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/2007/08/over_the_cliff.html August 1, 2007 Lede: Is Rupert Murdoch good or bad for The Wall Street Journal? That's the burning question. (PS: The story focused on Murdoch in Chicago and was referred on Romensko's widely read site. Also crossposted on The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-herman/over-the-cliff-with-rupe_b_58751.html) THE PHOENIX When Rupert came to Boston http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid45226.aspx August 8, 2007 Lede: Just how badly will Rupert Murdoch screw up the Wall Street Journal? Ever since Murdoch's just-accepted $5 billion offer for Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, became public this past May, this has been journalism's great burning question.
By JanH on 08/09/2007 at 10:13:05
When Rupert came to Boston
JanH, two things. 1) Thanks for linking to your story, which I'd missed until now. 2) Since Murdoch's impact on the Journal is, in fact, journalism's hot topic du jour, is it really surprising that we both called it a "burning question"?
By Adam on 08/09/2007 at 10:50:44
When Rupert came to Boston
No surprise. What I am surprised by, however, is that you say you missed my story. i'll take your word for it, but i don't think one of my correspondents would. he messaged me: "Seems like he ripped off the entire premise -- what did Rupert do at the Bos Herald, just like you did Rupert at the S-T."
By JanH on 08/09/2007 at 2:23:07
When Rupert came to Boston
PS: Don't get me wrong. Yours story is excellent -- exhaustive and well reported. Gracias for that.
By JanH on 08/09/2007 at 2:46:35
When Rupert came to Boston
That Mr. Rosenbaum no longer works for a newspaper is not a surprise. A bit awkward to write the obit for something that didn't actually die, huh? Back when Globe was less agenda-driven, institutional memory could be found at Morrissey Blvd.; now, not so much. I have yet to hear anyone postulate about what the WSJ would have been like if the absurd dividends paid to the sainted Bancrofts had instead been plowed back into the company. CEO Peter Kann hires his wife at >$1mil/yr, not a peep. In the same way that politicians say that their good intentions are moot if they don't get elected, journalists are academic if their journal can't stay in business. I have yet to hear of a viable option to Murdoch, just "Conservatives- Threat or Menace?"
By rickinduxbury on 08/09/2007 at 11:55:15

ARTICLES BY ADAM REILLY
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   HOLY TERROR?  |  November 16, 2009
    On the afternoon of November 5, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan walked into a building at Fort Hood, the sprawling military base in central Texas; sat briefly in solitary silence; and then opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol, shooting roughly a hundred rounds and killing 12 soldiers and one civilian.
  •   DIFFERENCE OF OPINION  |  November 09, 2009
    It’s been three months since Peter Canellos replaced Renée Loth as editor of the Boston Globe ’s editorial page.
  •   THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNIE  |  October 19, 2009
    Media feuds don’t come any nastier than the metastasizing spat between Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr and one “Ernie Boch III,” the pseudonymous blogger at the liberal Web site Blue Mass. Group. (Note: the blogger is no relation to the car dealer.)
  •   LATTER DAY TAINT  |  October 10, 2009
    Fifteen years ago, Glenn Beck was a small-market DJ with a drinking problem, no friends, and bleak professional prospects. Today, he’s a Fox News superstar averaging 2.4 million viewers, an inexorably successful author, and the leader of a popular movement that condemns government in general and President Barack Obama in particular.
  •   PHILADELPHIA STORY  |  October 01, 2009
    The local-media story line of the moment is the push by Stephen Taylor — Milton resident, Yale media lecturer, and former Boston Globe executive VP — to recapture the paper his family ran for more than a century, a goal he's pursuing with the backing of (among others) his cousin Benjamin Taylor, the former Globe publisher.

 See all articles by: ADAM REILLY

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed 
HOT TOPICS
 More Topics . . .



  |  Sign In  |  Register
 
thePhoenix.com:
Phoenix Media/Communications Group:
TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
Copyright © 2009 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group