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Ace baseball scribe McAdam joins the Herald

 

In a big blow to the staggering ProJo, Sean McAdam, the paper's nationally respected baseball writer, is joining the Boston Herald.

While ProJo sports editor Art Martone is also an ace when it comes to baseball and the Red Sox, McAdam's departure will leave a big hole, just because his game stories and analysis are quite a bit better than the sportswriting norm. His writing is must-read stuff for Sox fans in Rhode Island and beyond.

The move is particularly galling, because McAdam -- a skilled practitioner of the kind of multi-platform media that will help newspapers to survive -- was reportedly precluded from pursuing this approach at the ProJo.

David Scott has the gruesome details.

Sources have confirmed to Shots that McAdam has been looking for new employment after the ProJo squashed McAdam’s outside work at WEEI 850 AM and ESPN.com over the summer. At least one upper management ProJoer, Shots is told by industry sources, found fault in McAdam being on-air at WEEI during the afternoon drive on baseball’s trade deadline day. That person - not directly associated with the sports department - evidently had a problem with where McAdam’s allegiance lied and subsequently put the kibosh on McAdam’s outside gigs (the very same gigs that provided exposure for the buzzless, sagging Belo Corp. property).

(McAdam’s last ESPN.com column appeared in early August and that coincided with his last WEEI appearance. There has also been a dearth of McAdam at other outside media outlets in the area, although he did remain a guest at Comcast SportsNet.)

In fact, the day after the trade deadline, an ESPN ticker item was giving credit to the ProJo (thanks to McAdam) for information about veteran players meeting with Sox management over the Manny situation. The amount of traffic that kind of mention (and others) can generate for a website is substantial. It’s the ProJo’s fault for not maximizing McAdam - not McAdam’s fault for earning some extra income the same way most of his competitors do.

McAdam, a father of two, who turns 49 in November, has been with the ProJo company since the early 1980s (first, in a radio role) after he graduated from Providence College (Class of 1981). (Scroll down here for a good bio on McAdam from his off-off-Broadway gig of a couple of summers back.) He’s been on the Sox beat since 1989 and is one of the most-respected (and connected) baseball men on the East Coast.

If the reason for his pending departure from the ProJo is because some tyrannical, Stuffed Suit doesn’t understand the inherent benefits of multi-media-platform guys like McAdam, then it’s probably time to start digging the grave for that paper’s sports section - if not the entire operation.

. . . The Herald, Shots has been informed, has no problem with McAdam’s WEEI work or his contributions to ESPN.com. “They’re fine with it as long as he keeps his first allegiance to the Herald,” said one source with direct knowledge, “the way he did all those years for the ProJo.” . . . .

. . . The “McBrothers”, Joe McDonald of the ProJo and Kevin McNamara will probably be leaned on a bit more to make up for the missing McAdam coverage by ProJo sports editor, Art Martone. Martone has now lost Tom Curran and McAdam - two of his stalwarts - in the course of 24 months. It’s quite possible there won’t be a McAdam replacement made until late Winter, Shots is told.

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3 Comments

  • Rhody1 said:

      As if the ProJo staff needed another kick in the teeth...

      Does this upper management person Scott speaks of have any bloody clue about how the sports media works? Was or she jealous that Sean was able to build presence in the Boston market (thus making him much more effective on his beat)? Did this person resent Sean's living around Boston, isolating him from the cold winds of office politics?

      This is what I feared happening after the layoffs, and has implications beyond the "toy department." Think the survivors aren't planning their own exit strategies? Who wants to be part of a company with management that thinks in such a shortsighted, vengeful way?

    September 26, 2008 12:01 PM
  • tedinri said:

    Gee, is the upper-level management guy named Tom Heslin? He seems to be taking this pompous holier-than-thou attitude about allegiance even as he's ready to lay off people with families to feed. Sounds like Heslin being Heslin - as Johnnie Carson said of the Ti-Dee Bowl Mans' autobiography: Looking Out For Number One.

    Tom seems not to understand that Sean's being on WEEI created enormous prestige for the ProJo, by creatng the illusion the ProJo was equal to the Globe and Herlad, as Sean's incisive knowledge of the Sox and baseball acquitted  the Journal extraordinarily well. Tom may find himself being The Last Emperor if he keeps making bonehead moves like this... Sean was the real star of that place - not Bakst, not Kerr, not Patinkin - and now he's walked...

    September 26, 2008 9:49 PM

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