Joe Sciacca speaks

Gabrielle Gurley of CommonWealth Magazine interviews Boston Herald editor Joe Sciacca, my former “Beat the Press” colleague. Sciacca moved up to the Herald’s top job in August, after Kevin Convey left for the Daily News of New York.

It’s a good read, beginning with Sciacca’s take on his paper’s feud with U.S. Rep. Barney Frank. “It’s not unusual for a politician who has been a subject of tough reporting to lash out at the messenger and I think that’s what happened in this case,” Sciacca tells Gurley. “But I think we’ve been fair in our coverage of Congressman Frank and I think we will continue to be so.”

Sciacca also says that “anybody is hipper than me,” which is a relief, as it makes me no worse than number two in the local least-hip sweepstakes.

The primitive art of measuring online audience

Lucas Graves reports in the Columbia Journalism Review that the state of the art in counting online audiences remains abysmal.

Graves notes that statistics compiled by two of the leading services that rely on user surveys — Nielsen and comScore — can differ wildly. And, as every website operator knows, those numbers are often far lower than the numbers they get from Google Analytics and other internal measurements.

Why is it so hard? User reports are notoriously unreliable, and website operators have been complaining for years that the Nielsens are useless for measuring what people do when they’re at work. But the seemingly greater accuracy afforded by simply counting incoming traffic raises other problems: users who clear their cookies are counted every time they return; search engines that robotically visit sites are counted as users; and people who use more than one computer are counted multiple times.

My first encounter with the difficulties of counting came in 2007, when I was reporting this story for CommonWealth Magazine. I learned that the internal statistics at both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald showed their Web audiences were three times larger than what Nielsen was reporting.

It hasn’t gotten much better since then. For instance, the New Haven Independent, a non-profit online news organization that I follow closely, was attracting some 70,000 unique visitors a month in 2009, according to founder and editor Paul Bass. That grew to 197,000 in September 2009, the month that Yale University graduate student Annie Le was murdered.

Yet according to Compete.com, the Independent was attracting just 25,000 to 30,000 uniques a month, a number that grew to 70,000 in September 2009. In other words, Bass’ internals placed the Independent’s traffic at about two and a half times what Compete.com was reporting, similar to what I had found with the Globe and the Herald two years earlier.

Then there’s the whole matter of “unique visitors per month” somehow becoming the most important measure of Web traffic. Wouldn’t you rather know how many people visit every day?

I’ve settled on Compete.com as being the easiest, most reliable free service available. It is supposedly based on surveying the behavior of some 2 million people. One thing I like is that its numbers seem reasonable. For instance, it regularly places the Globe’s Boston.com at roughly (very roughly) 5 million uniques per month, which is very close to the Nielsen figure.

Then again, maybe counting isn’t much better in other forms of media. As Graves’ CJR article points out, it’s easy to count how many newspapers are sold, but impossible to tell how many people read them. And television and radio audience measurements have been controversial for years.

So what is the solution? There may not be one, at least if “solution” is defined as something that is mathematically accurate. If people are reading and talking about you, you’ll know.

Before the Globe, there was CommonWealth

The Boston Globe Spotlight series on the state Patronage Department — ah, I mean Probation Department — is public-interest journalism at its best.

Commissioner Jack O’Brien has been suspended. There’s a chance for genuine reform. And the absurd gubernatorial candidacy of hacked-up state treasurer Tim Cahill has been brought to a merciful end, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

But credit should also go to CommonWealth Magazine and its blog, CW Unbound, which has been beating the drums about the Probation Department for months. CommonWealth, published by the nonpartisan Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassINC), has put together a compilation of stories it’s posted on the Probation Department mess. (Disclosure: I used to be a regular contributor to CommonWealth, and I’m still listed on the masthead.)

On May 3, for example, CommonWealth reporter Jack Sullivan wrote about a court case involving Stephen Anzalone, who was challenging his rejection as a probation officer even though he would have been the seventh member of his family to draw a paycheck from the agency.

And on April 14, editor Bruce Mohl interviewed House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Murphy on why he opposed a plan by Gov. Deval Patrick to bring the out-of-control agency under the executive branch’s wing.

The Globe, as the region’s largest and most influential news organization, is doing what it does best: driving the agenda and forcing public officials to do what they should have done a long time ago. And CommonWealth, like other smaller players, is performing its role admirably as well: by keeping the story simmering until it was ready to come to a boil.

Palmer’s method: Comment early and often

Former Boston Globe reporter Tom Palmer, who covered development for many years before switching sides and becoming a communications consultant, is urging his clients to bombard the Globe’s online-comments system.

Another former Globe reporter, CommonWealth Magazine editor Bruce Mohl, has obtained an e-mail from Palmer in which he urges residents of Harbor Towers to comment early and often in their opposition to plans by developer Don Chiofaro to build a skyscraper next to the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. Palmer writes:

[Newspapers] don’t like it, and some of them are even considering getting rid of the “comment” feature because it clearly weakens their power. But for now we may comment and comment and comment — just as Don’s supporters do.

Mohl posts the full text of Palmer’s e-mail (pdf), and it’s a hoot. Among other things, Palmer includes step-by-step instructions for how to register and post comments, writing, “It is COMPLETELY ANONYMOUS.”

Maybe Palmer doesn’t find this embarrassing, but it seems to me that he has forgotten both the Lomasney rule and the Spitzer corollary: “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink”; and “never put it in e-mail.”

Monday-morning media morsels

A few media odds and ends for your Monday morning:

• Marjorie Arons-Barron, a communications executive who was previously the longtime editorial director of WCVB-TV (Channel 5), recently started a blog. Arons-Barron is as sharp an observer of state and local politics as we have, and you should definitely plug her into your RSS aggregator. It is no slam on the city’s newspapers to point out that she is easily a match for anyone opining at the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix or the Boston Herald.

• During the special-election campaign for the U.S. Senate, a mystery blogger started a site called kennedyseat.com and became a respected source of links and information. After revealing himself to be Conor Yunits, the son of a former Brockton mayor and something of an aspiring politico in his own right, he has begun what looks to be a more permanent project called MassBeacon.com. Worth watching.

• CommonWealth Magazine, the quarterly public-policy journal published by the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, has a new online look and a new URL. Not only is it a lot slicker and easier to read, but it is more closely tied to its blog, CommonWealth Unbound. Of particular interest is a section called Civic Journalism, with blog posts by and interviews with the likes of Globe editor Marty Baron, former Globe editor Matt Storin, former Globe columnist Eileen McNamara (do I detect a trend?) and Phoenix reporter-turned-media consultant Dorie Clark.

• Richard Adams, who has been editing my weekly commentaries for the Guardian since I started writing them in mid-2007, has been promoted, and is now writing a blog for the paper’s Web site. I especially like his item on President Obama’s summit with House Republicans, which begins: “When the Republicans invited President Obama to address their congressional House delegation in Baltimore today, they had no idea how badly it would turn out for them.” Definitely RSS-worthy.

Pension scandals are forever with us

The Boston Globe’s Sean Murphy has been doing some terrific work recently on the scandal that is the Massachusetts public pension system. As Michael Jonas notes at CommonWealth Unbound, similar stories were published in CommonWealth Magazine five and seven years ago.

Unfortunately, the only thing we seem to have learned is that, eventually, the public forgets.

Business as usual in the governor’s office

There’s been plenty of outrage over Gov. Deval Patrick’s appointment of state Sen. Marian Walsh to a transparently unnecessary $175,000-a-year job. Both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald have editorialized against it.

But I’m especially struck by mild-mannered CommonWealth magazine pundit Michael Jonas’ post on CW Unbound, which ties together a number of loose threads in order to demonstrate precisely what a business-as-usual governor Patrick has become. Jonas frankly describes the Walsh appointment as an “outrage” and writes:

It’s hard not to see that as the trajectory Gov. Deval Patrick is on after the latest slap in the face to those expecting more from an administration that pledged to sweep out the culture of patronage and cronyism on Beacon Hill.

Jonas connects the Walsh appointment to Patrick’s high-handed, Big Dig-tainted transportation secretary, Jim Aloisi, and his pension-abusing stimulus czar, Jeffrey Simon, as well as to the goodies Sal DiMasi handed out as he was leaving Beacon Hill.

Well, DiMasi’s gone. Patrick is still here, and he’s got to persuade the public that it should put up with some pretty draconian budget cuts and tax hikes in the months ahead. Good luck with that, Governor.

The future of the Christian Science Monitor

Sometime this April the Christian Science Monitor, one of our most venerable daily newspapers, will cease to be a daily newspaper. Instead, the Monitor will embrace a Web-first strategy, providing news and analysis online on a round-the-clock basis and unveiling a weekly print magazine.

In my latest media feature for CommonWealth Magazine, I interview Monitor editor John Yemma about the transition, what it means for the future of Monitor journalism and how we all might learn from this experiment.

GateHouse story in new CommonWealth

If you live in a suburb or exurb of Boston, or on Cape Cod, there’s a pretty good chance that you read a community newspaper published by GateHouse Media New England — maybe even two.

GateHouse, a national chain based in suburban Rochester, N.Y., owns more than 100 newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts, including such well-known dailies as the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the Enterprise of Brockton and the MetroWest Daily News of Framingham.

I’ve got a story on GateHouse in the new edition of CommonWealth Magazine in which I find that though the financial condition of the company is dire, its top executives make a decent case that they’ve got the time and the resources to grow their way out of the current mess. And its online initiatives are interesting and worth keeping an eye on.

The question: Can the company’s chief executive in New England, Kirk Davis, eventually begin rebuilding his staff after two decades’ worth of cuts under three and in some cases four different owners, including Fidelity and Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell? Or is GateHouse, and the rest of the newspaper industry, doomed to keep shrinking?

One problem is that the economic outlook is considerably worse than it was in early September, when I was wrapping up my reporting and writing the story. Last Friday, the Boston Herald ran a report that seven editorial employees had lost their jobs at MetroWest and the Milford Daily News. Well-informed buzz within the company suggests that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In addition, the New York Stock Exchange this week, in a long-anticipated step, announced that it will delist GateHouse’s stock, which is essentially worthless. And a major investor is getting out.

Still, the principal on GateHouse’s enormous debt is not due until 2014, and its cash flow has been decent. Whether that will continue as we move into what may be a deep recession remains to be seen.

Checking in with ethnic news

I’ve got a feature on the New England Ethnic Newswire in the new issue of CommonWealth Magazine. The NEWz, a Web site that aggregates the best of the local ethnic press, is expanding into original journalism focused on health care.

“The thing that I think is really intriguing about it is this idea of connecting different communities,” says former Boston Globe editorialist Robert Turner, an adviser to the NEWz. “You see over and over again various communities building their own strength as their numbers increase. But how much of an effort around town is there to make cross-connections among them?”

The NEWz is a work in progress, as is the case with most new-media ventures. But it’s got the potential to grow into something truly important. Ethnic communities are already speaking for themselves. Now there’s a way for all of us to hear them.