Adam Reilly
My friend and former (and future!) colleague Adam Reilly is leaving the Boston Phoenix to become an associate producer for “Greater Boston,” at WGBH-TV (Channels 2 and 44).
Adam has ably handled the media beat since 2006, writing the “Don’t Quote Me” column and the media blog. Before that, he’d served as the paper’s political columnist.
Since the late 1980s, just three people have covered the media for the Phoenix — Mark Jurkowitz, now associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington; yours truly; Mark again; and then Adam. For a press critic, it’s one of just a handful of jobs in the country where you really get a chance to make a difference. No doubt a long line of applicants will form outside the Phoenix’s door.
Good luck and best wishes to Adam, a transplant from Minnesota who’s managed the difficult trick of establishing himself as a true Bostonian.
Glenn Beck
It strikes me as overly cynical whenever I hear someone argue that Glenn Beck’s just an entertainer who doesn’t mean half the things he says. I find it hard to believe anyone could spew that much toxic rhetoric just for laughs (and money).
Now the Boston Phoenix’s Adam Reilly has advanced an alternative explanation, based on some pretty extensive research. According to Reilly, what animates Beck may be an out-there, retro strain of Mormonism he has embraced with a convert’s zeal.
Unlike mainstream Mormon public figures like Mitt Romney, Orrin Hatch and Harry Reid, Beck, Reilly argues, harks back to the virulent 1950s anti-communism of Ezra Taft Benson, a member of President Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinet who later became head of the LDS Church.
And when Beck says the Constitution is “hanging by a thread,” he’s not just indulging in a cliché — he’s invoking the very specific language of a particular type of religious paranoia.
Reilly’s piece is well worth your time.
Alan Mutter, one of the best newspaper analysts in the blogosphere, shares Adam Reilly’s and my skepticism about Douglas McIntyre’s list of doomed newspapers. Mutter calls McIntyre “a friend,” but adds that there is “no hard data or deep analysis to support his findings.” He continues:
Although some of the papers one day may succumb to anemic readership and revenues, there is not enough information or analysis underlying the scary list to support the proposition that the publications are more or less doomed than any of 10, 20 or 30 other papers that might have been named, instead.
What Mutter’s got to say about Boston is especially interesting:
Even though weak economies are hardest on the No. 2 papers in two-newspaper towns, Doug predicts the demise of the print edition of the Boston Globe while saying nothing of the apparently fragile financial status of the far smaller Boston Herald.
Over at the Phoenix, Reilly responds to the Inside Track’s criticism.
Update: Paul McMorrow nails it.
Is this what the Boston Herald calls a correction?
The Herald’s Inside Track chides the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly and Media Nation today for questioning a blog post by financial analyst Douglas McIntyre placing the Boston Globe on a list of 10 newspapers that may go out of business or go online-only by the end of the year.
What’s really amusing, though, is the way the Track quietly corrects an error made earlier this week on Jessica Heslam’s Messenger Blog. The error — which had Time magazine predicting the Globe’s demise — remains uncorrected.
As Media Nation was the first to report, Time, like several other media outlets, was merely running the feed from McIntyre’s 24/7 Wall St. blog on its Web site. Naturally, the Track takes Reilly and me to task for not doing any “reporting,” which it conveniently defines as not calling the Globe in order to get a “no comment.”
Finally, the Track manages the neat trick of lampooning Reilly’s and my skepticism over McIntyre’s claim that the Globe is worth only $20 million while simultaneously acknowledging that the paper’s real estate and other assets are probably worth more than $100 million.
The plain fact is that the most recent analysis anyone has seen is one put out by Barclays Capital analyst Craig Huber, who estimates the paper’s value at $192.8 million.
The newspaper business is in unimaginably bad shape, and the Globe is as vulnerable as any paper. If being cautiously optimistic about the future of the Globe makes me hopelessly naive, then I offer my deepest apologies.
Then again, I’m also one of the few media-watchers I know who predicts that the Herald will also survive. I suppose I could be wrong about that, too.
More: WBZ Radio (AM 1030) still has a Tuesday report up on its Web site wrongly attributing McIntyre’s item to Time magazine. Come on, folks. This isn’t that hard.
Media | Dan Kennedy | 
February 27, 2010 9:14 am | 
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