Boston's Scrappy Herald, Screaming for Readers

Boston's Scrappy Herald, Screaming for Readers
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 28, 2008; C01

BOSTON -- Kevin Convey is proud of that morning's screaming front-page headline.

"HONEY, I DUCT-TAPED THE KIDS!" blares the Boston Herald, describing a local mother accused of mistreating her young children and posting the photos on MySpace.

"Tabloids in some cases say what other papers only think," says Convey, the Herald's editor, whose office faces a freeway separating the paper's unfashionable neighborhood from the blue-collar enclave of Southie. "If you don't have fun putting out a tabloid, you're brain-dead."

Convey may be having a grand time, but his paper is hurting, its daily circulation having shrunk to 203,000 (compared with 384,000 for the Boston Globe), and just 113,000 on Sunday. He is down to a scrappy band of 10 city reporters, beyond those in the features, business and sports sections.

As a severe advertising downturn continues to squeeze even the country's elite newspapers -- the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have all been cutting staff -- it could decimate the No. 2 papers in the handful of cities still fortunate enough to have them. And that has sparked a debate here about whether an increasingly upscale Boston still wants, or needs, a tabloid.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/27/AR2008042702290_pf.html

I love the NY Post, almost never read the Boston Herald since you can buy the Post in Boston, and the Sun-Times doesn't have enough in it to keep me interested through a haircut (which is the only place I read it).

Oh, and Kevin, can you find someone more appropriate than Che for inspiration? That’s an embarrassment. If my boss had his picture on the wall I’d be on the phone with HR and/or out the door.

 

The Boston Herald needs to pump up the volume and be a real tabloid. It's really just a sassy mediocre broadsheet in tabloid form.

 

What's wrong with being a sassy mediocre broadsheet?
--The Los Angeles Daily News

 

The fundamental problem with being a tabloid in Boston is that not nearly enough weird and/or awful shit happens here to justify the format. So you wind up shrieking about stories no one thinks are important or entertaining, and wind up looking silly.
Also, in a city that's increasingly full of either affluent white people or people of color, the Herald aims for old white Irish folks. Every Friday night, every funeral home in West Roxbury has a full slate of wakes for former Herald subscribers.