Community press
When the Banner emphasized original, locally focused content, it could be a satisfying read. (Disclosure: the Phoenix Media/Communications Group was handling the Banner's distribution when it stopped publishing.) The July 2 issue, for example, included a write-up of a recent forum for Boston's mayoral and city-council candidates in Roxbury. At that event, according to the Banner, mayoral challenger Kevin McCrea hammered Mayor Tom Menino (who was characteristically absent) for the sluggish renovation of Dudley Square's Ferdinand Building and the dearth of city residents hired for the project. This sort of stuff is manna for Boston political junkies, particularly during a mayoral campaign where the incumbent is hell-bent on avoiding any kind of public reckoning with his record. But it's unlikely to be reported by Boston's major media outlets, given their need to appeal to a vast suburban audience as well as residents of Boston proper.
That said, the overall quality of the Banner's local coverage is uneven. A recent piece on the opening of the new cultural center at the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) failed to seriously engage the concerns that have been raised by the society's critics; it read, instead, like a glorified press release. And the ISB story wasn't an anomaly. Plenty of the Banner's component parts on any given week — e.g., the In the News section, which gives a pat on the back to local individuals who've been fêted for their achievements — seem, at first glance, better suited to a small-town community newspaper than a big-city weekly.
But is that really so problematic? After all, other Boston news outlets don't lack for service-y coverage of local people doing interesting (or allegedly interesting) things. Just last week the Globe's g section was fronted, on consecutive days, by stories about a bunch of guys who meet at the Newton Jewish Community Center for bike rides and a bunch of women from Boston's culinary scene who went on a zany fishing trip. (Seriously.)
The difference is, these frothy puff pieces don't usually feature black people. It's not that the Boston media ignores African-Americans, exactly: they cover crime in black neighborhoods, and the convictions of those responsible, and other depressing urban social ills, and uplifting tales of those who triumph over the ills in question. And, of course, they cover black entertainers and black athletes, from Boston and elsewhere. What they don't do, as a rule, is give us lightweight, general-interest features that just happen to star African-Americans. (Nor do they feed us a steady diet of fawning party pics starring Boston's black bourgeoisie and upper class, at least not in numbers comparable to their white counterparts.)
These omissions might seem small, but they have big cultural ramifications, both for how Boston's whites view Boston's blacks and how Boston's blacks view themselves. The Banner wasn't going to solve the former problem: since the paper's distributed in primarily minority neighborhoods, it couldn't convince white readers that "the community" was more than the unwieldy mass of social pathologies it's often portrayed to be. But it could — and did — remind black readers of that fact. With all due respect to the Banner's hard-news and op-ed achievements, this is where the Banner's demise could have the biggest effect.
