Boston Herald files for bankruptcy (then sold)

[PittPatriot]

Only $4.5 million?

Pffft! I could have bought them out of my lottery winnings!

As soon as I win the lottery.

Actually, if you think about it, $4.5M is very little money. How many Boston athletes live in HOMES worth more than $4.5M?

 

[RobertWeathers]

I really like Jeff Howe, he would be a big loss to Patriots coverage if he ends up leaving. Hopefully he stays.

Agree. Maybe he can take over Patriots Pro Football Weekly and Kraft can get rid of those 3 idiots

 

[RobertWeathers]

Serves them right for publishing the Spygate article by that fat piece of trash Tomase the week of Super Bowl XLII. I think people forget the extent to which the national media went crazy after that story came out.

I will go to my grave believing that that article cause a distraction that cost the Pats a perfect season. The Herald has been dead to me since.

It was a distraction. Vrabel said he woke up feeling great and the team had a great breakfast and the story broke and rattled a lot of players. Family and friends were calling. BB had a meeting. An already tense team was beyond a basket case.

 

[BradyFTW!]

While I feel much the same about the Herald in particular, the precarious state of the news industry in general is so chilling to me that I hate news like this.

I definitely agree as an industry-wide thing, frankly media consolidation in general is IMO terrible for society and I think we're already seeing its ill effects. Free flow of information has far more benefits than drawbacks, but I wish there was just a little more value attached to it. I do subscribe to exactly one newspaper pretty much out of principle, but even that almost feels like an act of charity.

But I also make specific exceptions for the few media outlets that I have particular contempt for: it's a very short list and the Herald is definitely on it. First media source I ever consciously boycotted. I still maintain they likely cost us 19-0, and their smear campaign was so effective that its false, retracted claims are still treated as fact a decade later by basically every news outlet in the country.

 

[Lavictoire]

Agree. Maybe he can take over Patriots Pro Football Weekly and Kraft can get rid of those 3 idiots

I thought it was four idiots: Andy Hart, Paul Perillo, Eric Scalavino and Fred Kirsch.

 

[Ring 6]

While I feel much the same about the Herald in particular, the precarious state of the news industry in general is so chilling to me that I hate news like this.

All Newspapers are dead men walking until someone figures out a way to make money at it. I’m sure there is a way but I doubt anyone will figure it out before they are a thing of the past.

 

[RobertWeathers]

I thought it was four idiots: Andy Hart, Paul Perillo, Eric Scalavino and Fred Kirsch.

I didn't include Eric but you are right

 

[Jackson 2]

IS Howe a better read than Volin? For my own eyes, I’d take Howe 6 days a week and 2x on Sunday. I follow both on Twitter. Volin is well.. consistently asking us to read someone else’s column. Howe? Howe I READ. Maybe because he actually has relations with the team n offers something to think about. If there is a way to convey my pro Howe sentiment to Gatehouse, I’ll do that!!

How about Borges? How about Buckley?

 

[Jackson 2]

I really like Jeff Howe, he would be a big loss to Patriots coverage if he ends up leaving. Hopefully he stays.

He's great and he'll survive.

 

[Jackson 2]

Hope they keep Howie Carr. Love it when he exposes the hacks on Beacon Hill.

It takes a hack to know one. Despicable human being. Just editing this. No intention to attack your viewpoint, RW. But, I know this ***hole. Just my take.

 

[RobertWeathers]

It takes a hack to know one. Despicable human being. Just editing this. No intention to attack your viewpoint, RW. But, I know this ***hole. Just my take.

All good.

I know he's an arrogant prick but bad person?

 

[Jackson 2]

All good.

I know he's an arrogant prick but bad person?

From my experience? Yes. But, others who know him may feel differently. We go back awhile. I'll quit now. It was a kneejerk reaction.

 

[Bill Lee]

All Newspapers are dead men walking until someone figures out a way to make money at it. I’m sure there is a way but I doubt anyone will figure it out before they are a thing of the past.

Since Ken got to tell his "back in my day" story, back in the mid 90's I was at DEC and I read a paper ( The Millicent Protocol for Inexpensive Electronic Commerce ) that made perfect sense to me. In today's world, the example would be instead of having media sites with paywalls, you could click on a button and give the web site a penny or so to read an article. It would solve a lot of problems with funding the Internet, wouldn't it? You could pay for content as you consumed it, and in tiny increments so you didn't mind paying. In fact you might feel better about helping to support outlets that provided good information.

Well, from what I was told, the problem was the banks hated it. They owned the credit card companies, and they thought the small transaction model would devalue the credit card business. I never quite got the rationale, but I was told that's why the model never took off.

And keep in mind this proposal was floated around 1995 or so, when the current model had not formed. It still makes me wonder how different the Internet and the media market would be if something like this was enacted.

 

[Deus Irae]

It's a shame that print is dying, especially because that is leading to far too much news media consolidation, fewer reporters and a more easily silenced news corp. I actually still pay for the paper, but I'm becoming more of a minority in that every day.

Arrogant, short-sighted, newspaper people
+
Lazy, short-sighted consumers
=
Disaster for print news and the free press

 

[Jackson 2]

Not a Herald fan, but I hate to see anyone lose employment. I hope Jeff Howe and Karen Guregian, among others, find work elsewhere. Competition makes everyone better. I don't think that any city and its subscribers/citizens are better off with just one newspaper. Dissenting viewpoints are healthy.

 

[jmt57]

It was a distraction. Vrabel said he woke up feeling great and the team had a great breakfast and the story broke and rattled a lot of players. Family and friends were calling. BB had a meeting. An already tense team was beyond a basket case.

As much of a distraction as it was for a players, far worse was with the NFL.

For the league offices to call Belichick into a meeting at that point in time, right before the super bowl, that was egregious.

Besides the fact that it took away from BB making final preparations, how much of a distraction was it for all the other coaches and players who lost varying degrees of focus, knowing that their head coach was meeting with NFL officials about a headline scandalous story?

Every single player said it had no effect on the game after it was played. Credit to every one of them for taking that public stance. In my opinion Tomase's story had a huge impact on the game (along with the injury to Stephen Neal).

 

[TheBostonStraggler]

frankly media consolidation in general is IMO terrible for society

While news media has generally been given a not quite deserved assumption of truth as well as benefit of the doubt 'honorable intentions' for a long, long time (from the days of John Adams to the Lincoln-Douglas primary->election to see media hasn't been close to a bastion of integrity for a long time), once large corporations took over news media it was inevitable that it would slide into an even more tightly controlled and edited narrative that was disconnected from a pursuit of the facts. Where stories no doubt, 100%, would be squelched in favor of the underlying big business.

I'm probably not going to agree on a lot of things with Martin Sheen. however, about 15 years ago he narrated a documentary on the subject of media consolidation into the hands of big corps. One example was Disney taking over ABC and a number of news media outlets. The gist of it was: did anyone really think that these outlets would now report negatively on Disney interests? It doesn't even have to be a verbal/written thing. A corp culture of not running stories contrary to the hand that feeds you would inevitably take hold. And keeping in mind that Disney is interlocked with other big corps/business, and these big corps own a large chunk of other outlets.

Big Business certainly can be and is a good thing (on some things certainly not all). Important products and services, even critical ones, can come out of big business. But Big corps controlling the flow of information should have then as it should be now scary to the average person. Basically it is Roger Goodell and the NFL ownership club having too much control of information. And one need not look any further than deflategate to see how big business effects information flow. Does anyone on PF actually think the media outlets just simply missed some very important truths about deflategate? That posters on PF were just lucky in identifying the inconsistencies of NFl/Goodell? Folks the narrative with deflategate was never questioned by media because of the chilling effect of big business owning media. The NFL is the Mt Everest X 10 of viewership draw for NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox and the NFL themed shows the biggest draw from web to radio to niche cable stations. Big media business is intertwined with the NFL and crossing Goodell/the NFl better have a BFD payoff (ideal gas law, bent needle, game stats weren't it). This was a small but shining example of what Sheen was ultimately getting at.

The good news-bad news side of this is the Internet and the big corp grip of media causing people to question it gave rise to new media that isn't too beholden to big corps. You can read lots of alternate news via the Internet. That's a great thing. The bad news side is that being alternate doesn't make it anymore truthful than Disney's product. But, IMHO, even with the fast and loose nature of the alternate media, it is an important thing that Disney editing is circumvented to provide alternate information. Ultimately it is better that there is more information outlets available even though some of it is suspect.

 

[Ring 6]

It's a shame that print is dying, especially because that is leading to far too much news media consolidation, fewer reporters and a more easily silenced news corp. I actually still pay for the paper, but I'm becoming more of a minority in that every day.

Arrogant, short-sighted, newspaper people
+
Lazy, short-sighted consumers
=
Disaster for print news and the free press

There is also the issue of them being able to make money. To live on the cost of the paper alone they would end up at a laughable price.
The biggest hit the newspapers have taken is the advertising dollars, particularly employment ads. It wasn’t THAT long ago that the only way to search for a job, outside of personal contacts was the Sunday paper. And placing those ads was quite expensive.
Loss of that revenue more than circulation is the deep problem, and they really have come up with no way to replace it.


Edit: it also used to be the primary place to advertise homes for sale and the only way to see what was on the market, and now it’s an afterthought.

 

[XLIX]

It's too bad people lost their jobs, but let's not call this any sort of loss of free press. The reason why newspapers are going out of business is because of the internet, and the internet is the greatest advancement in free speech in the history of mankind. It's just not "press"

 

[ctpatsfan77]

All Newspapers are dead men walking until someone figures out a way to make money at it. I’m sure there is a way but I doubt anyone will figure it out before they are a thing of the past.

Smaller ones, at least.

The big ones (e.g., the New York Times and Washington Post) are actually booming.