Boston Herald
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 The February 27, 2008 front page of the Boston Herald |
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| Type | Daily newspaper |
| Format | Tabloid |
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| Owner | Herald Media Inc. |
| Publisher | Patrick J. Purcell |
| Editor | Kevin Convey |
| Founded | 1846 |
| Price | US$0.50 daily |
| Headquarters | One Herald Square, Boston, Massachusetts 02205  United States |
| Circulation | 185,832 daily, 108,816 Sunday in 2007[1] |
| ISSN | 0738-5854 |
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| Website: BostonHerald.com | |
The Boston Herald is a tabloid-format daily newspaper, the smaller of the two big dailies in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. In comparison with its rival, The Boston Globe, the Herald is noted for aggressive coverage of state and local politics, focus on the city of Boston (rather than the metropolitan region) and its conservative editorial page and news columnists.
Owned since 1994 by Patrick J. Purcell, a former News Corporation executive, the Herald is the largest independently owned newspaper in New England.
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[edit] History
The Herald's history can be traced back through two lineages, the Daily Advertiser and the old Boston Herald, and two media moguls, William Randolph Hearst and Rupert Murdoch.
[edit] Beginnings
The Daily Advertiser was established in 1813 in Boston by Nathan Hale. The paper grew to prominence through the 19th century, taking over other Boston area papers. In 1904, William Randolph Hearst began publishing his own newspaper in Boston called The American. Hearst ultimately ended up purchasing the Daily Advertiser in 1917. By 1938, the Daily Advertiser had changed to the Daily Record, and The American had become the Sunday Advertiser. A third paper owned by Hearst, called the Afternoon Record, which had been renamed the Evening American, merged in 1961 with the Daily Record to form the Record American. The Sunday Advertiser and Record American would ultimately be merged in 1972 into a line of newspapers that stretched back to the old Boston Herald.
The old Boston Herald was founded in 1846 by a group of Boston printers jointly under the name of John A. French & Company. The paper was published as a single two-sided sheet, selling for one cent. Its first editor, William O. Eaton, just 22 years old, said "The Herald will be independent in politics and religion; liberal, industrious, enterprising, critically concerned with literacy and dramatic matters, and diligent in its mission to report and analyze the news, local and global."
Even earlier than the Herald, the Daily Evening Traveler was founded in 1825 as a bulletin for stagecoach listings. In 1912, the Herald acquired the Traveler, continuing to publish both under their own names. After a newspaper strike in 1967, Herald-Traveler Corp. suspended the afternoon Traveler and absorbed the evening edition into the Herald to create the Boston Herald Traveler.
[edit] The Herald-Traveler
In 1946, Herald-Traveler Corporation acquired Boston radio station WHDH. Two years later, WHDH-FM was licensed, and on November 26, 1957, WHDH-TV made its début as an ABC affiliate on channel 5. In 1961, WHDH-TV's affiliation switched to CBS. Herald-Traveler Corp. operated for years under temporary authority from the Federal Communications Commission stemming from controversy over luncheon meetings the newspaper's chief executive had with an FCC commissioner during the original licensing process (Some Boston broadcast historians accuse the Boston Globe of being covertly behind the proceeding. The Herald Traveler was Republican in sympathies, and the Globe then had a firm policy of not endorsing political candidates. The FCC ordered comparative hearings, and in 1969 a competing applicant, Boston Broadcasters, Inc. was granted a construction permit to replace WHDH-TV on channel 5. Herald-Traveler Corp. fought the decision in court -- by this time, revenues from channel 5 were all but keeping the newspaper afloat -- but its final appeal ran out in 1972, and on March 19 WHDH-TV was forced to surrender channel 5 to the new WCVB-TV.
Without a television station to subsidize the newspaper, the Herald Traveler was no longer able to remain in business, and the newspaper was sold to Hearst Corporation, which published the rival all-day newspaper, the Record American. The two papers were merged to become an all-day paper called the Boston Herald-Traveler and Record American in the morning and Record-American and Boston Herald Traveler in the afternoon. The afternoon edition was soon dropped and the unwieldy name shortened to Boston Herald American, with the Sunday edition called the Sunday Herald Advertiser. The Herald American was printed in broadsheet format, and failed to target a particular readership; where the Record-American had been a typical city tabloid, the Herald-Traveler was a Republican paper.
[edit] Murdoch purchase
The Herald American converted to tabloid format in September 1981, but Hearst faced steep declines in circulation and advertising. The company announced it would close the Herald American -- making Boston a one-newspaper town -- on December 3, 1982. When the deadline came, Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch was negotiating to buy the paper and save it. He closed on the deal after 30 hours of talks with Hearst and newspaper unions -- and five hours after Hearst had sent out notices to newsroom employees telling them they were terminated. The newspaper announced its own survival the next day with a full-page headline: "You Bet We're Alive!"[2]
Murdoch changed the paper's name back to the Boston Herald. The Herald continued to grow over the ensuing decades, expanding its coverage and increasing its circulation until the early 21st century, when circulation and advertising revenue dropped -- part of a phenomenon affecting almost all American newspapers in an expanding age of free media.
[edit] Independent owner
In February 1994, Murdoch's News Corporation was forced to sell the paper, in order that its subsidiary Fox Television Network could legally consummate its purchase of Fox affiliate WFXT (Channel 25). Patrick Purcell, who was the publisher of the Boston Herald and a News Corporation executive, purchased the Herald and established it as an independent newspaper. Several years later, Purcell would give the Herald a suburban presence it never had by purchasing the money-losing Community Newspaper Company from Fidelity Investments. Although the companies merged under the banner of Herald Media, Inc., the suburban papers maintained their distinct editorial and marketing identity.
After years of operating profits at Community Newspaper and losses at the Herald, Purcell in 2006 sold the suburban chain to newspaper conglomerate Liberty Group Publishing of Illinois, which soon after changed its name to GateHouse Media. The deal, which also saw GateHouse acquiring The Patriot Ledger and The Enterprise in south suburban Quincy and Brockton, netted $225 million for Purcell, who vowed to use the funds to clear the Herald's debt and reinvest in the tabloid.[3]
The Herald is conservative in its editorial stances, in contrast to the competitor Globe's generally liberal editorial page.
[edit] Andy Borowitz Joke Article Reprinting
On April 13, 2008, satirist Andy Borowitz wrote a joke article at the Huffington Post about Dick Cheney offering to take Hillary Clinton hunting. The Herald ran it as verified fact on April 14, 2008.
[edit] Awards
The Herald's four Pulitzer Prizes for editorial writing, in 1924, 1927, 1949 and 1954, are among the most awarded to a single newspaper in the category. In 1957 Harry Trask was a young staff photographer at the Traveler when he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his photo sequence of the sinking of the SS Andrea Doria in July of 1956. Herald photographer Stanley Forman received two Pulitzer Prizes consecutively in 1976 and 1977, the first being a dramatic shot of a young child falling in mid-air from her mother's arms on the upper stories of a burning apartment building to the waiting arms of firefighters below, and the latter being of Ted Landsmark, an African American city official, being beaten with an American flag during Boston's school busing crisis. In 2006 the Herald won two SABEW awards from The Society of American Business Editors and Writers for its breaking news coverage of the takeover of local company Gillette Co. and for overall excellence.[citation needed]
[edit] Columnists
- Howie Carr writes extensively on local politics and is a frequent TV commentator.
- Margery Eagan and Peter Gelzinis are longtime metro columnists, as is Joe Fitzgerald, who was formerly a sports columnist.
- Gerry Callahan is a sports columnist and talk show host for WEEI.
- Steve Buckley is a longtime sports columnist and frequent co-host on WEEI.
- Tony Massarotti is a baseball columnist and frequent co-host on WEEI.
- Dave Wedge is a political columnist, longtime reporter and frequent TV and radio commentator.
- Michele McPhee is a former metro columnist and crime reporter who is also the author of the best-selling book "Mob Over Miami." She is now a talk show host on WTKK.
- Jessica Heslam is an award-winning reporter who covers the media.
- Joe Sciacca is the paper's deputy managing editor. Sciacca is a former political reporter and columnist who is a regular panelist on "Beat the Press" on the WGBH TV show Greater Boston, which is hosted by Emily Rooney.
- Kevin Convey is the tabloid's new editor-in-chief, taking over in December 2006 for Ken Chandler, the former editor of the New York Post, who left the Herald to form his own media consulting firm.
- Laurel Sweet is an award-winning reporter who covers courts and crime.
- Howard Bryant (sports), Robin Washington (consumer and transportation), Leonard Greene (metro) and Howard Manly (metro, op-ed) were African American columnists at the newspaper in the 1990s and 2000s. All have since left the paper. Bryant is now at the Washington Post, Greene writes for the New York Post and Manly is the managing editor of the Bay State Banner.
- Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Arends is a former Herald Business and Op-Ed columnist.
- David Exum covers NASCAR for the Herald and works as an online news editor.
- Michael Felger is a columnist who covers the New England Patriots. He's also a host on ESPN radio.
- F. Mark Modzelewski is a Herald blogger and occasional columnist who covers the region's technology scene. He's also the Managing Director of Bang Ventures.
[edit] References
- Sterling Quinlan, The Hundred Million Dollar Lunch (Chicago, J.P. O'Hara, 1974), ISBN 0-87955-310-3.
- ^ Audit Bureau of Circulations "e-Circ" data for six months ending 30 September 2007.
- ^ "Purcell Toasts 25th Anniversary of Herald's Survival". NEPA Bulletin (Boston, Mass.), December 2007, page 11.
- ^ Bailey, Steve, and Robert Gavin. m/ "Herald's Owner to Sell Suburban Papers". The Boston Globe, May 6, 2006.
