My experience isn’t unique. “I learned so much from him about leadership when I was there, and really in a pretty short time,” says Cosmo Macero, the former Herald business columnist who now works for the lobbying firm O’Neill and Associates. “He is a great leader. He’s someone who knows how to motivate people, who knows how to get the most out of you. . . . He respects every department in the newsroom, and knows what each department brings to the overall make-up of the paper.”
Stay the course?
All this should help Convey keep morale high, even amid staffing cuts and possible wage freezes. But the Herald needs more.
Simply put, the Chandler model — a sensational Story of the Day on the cover, lots of gossip, occasional T&A, plus some good hard-news hits delivered by the Herald’s reportorial skeleton crew — doesn’t seem to be working. But Convey, who says he’s been given free rein by Chandler to make his mark on the paper, tells the Phoenix that the Herald’s core identity will remain largely the same. “The paper you’ve seen very much reflects the kind of paper I think we should be putting out,” he says. “Will there be changes? Sure. Will they be radical changes from our tabloid mission? That’s very unlikely. I think we have to be a radical alternative to the Globe in this market. . . . I think being a tabloid is the heart and soul of this paper.”
Maybe Convey is just being diplomatic. If not, he might want to ponder this assessment from one astute Boston observer: “The Herald’s basically irrelevant now. People don’t give a shit what the Herald says anymore; they don’t care whether they’re in it any more. They have bursts where they come out with something good — when they try to set the agenda for the week’s coverage for a couple days — but they can’t sustain it.”
Another Herald watcher is less harsh, but still quite critical. “People can convince themselves the Herald doesn’t matter, but when it comes out with a very critical splash — as only the Herald can do — it still stings.” However, “during the Chandler regime, they certainly did themselves damage with what I would call ersatz or pseudo-stories — stories that are some crusade or quest that they hit on and splash, but you don’t get the sense the rank and file is reading.” (Case in point: the June 2006 package on lumber theft at a Revere Church, which included an embarrassingly bad pun — WHO WOOD BE SO MEAN? — in gargantuan type on the paper’s cover.)
Perhaps the Herald is fighting a doomed fight. After all, the traditional newspaper industry is dying. Fifty years ago, Boston had five dailies. Maybe — thanks to factors ranging from the rise of the Web to middle-class flight — we’re fated to become a one-paper town.
The thing is, if the Herald doesn’t pull out all the stops in an effort to survive, we’ll never know. To use just one example: the paper could embrace the San Francisco Examiner model, which would involve repackaging the paper as a publication for upscale readers and distributing it free in affluent neighborhoods. Or they could make some bold, smaller-scale changes, like getting rid of the Track Girls — whose idea of a scoop is knocking ex-hostage Jill Carroll for alleged snootiness — and replacing them with a couple of gossip columnists a few decades younger.
