The Globe, the Phoenix and the pedophile-priest story

Jim Romenesko has posted a letter from my friend Susan Ryan-Vollmar on the Boston Phoenix’s groundbreaking work in exposing the pedophile-priest story, and on the Boston Globe’s ongoing silence about the Phoenix’s coverage, which predated the Globe’s by nearly a year.

I think Susan, a former Phoenix news editor, gets it fundamentally right. The Globe got the documents that led to Cardinal Bernard Law’s departure. The Globe richly deserved the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service that it won in 2003. But I agree with Susan that Kristen Lombardi’s reporting for the Phoenix warrants more public recogntion than it has received.

Susan, Kristen (currently a Nieman Fellow) and I all worked at the Phoenix together and remain friends. I consider Kristen to be the finest reporter I ever worked with. Susan is a first-rate editor who did much to shape and focus Kristen’s stories. Walter Robinson, who was the Globe Spotlight team editor that covered the priest scandal, is now a valued colleague at Northeastern.

But Susan has laid down the gauntlet, and Romenesko has asked Globe editor Marty Baron to respond. This bears watching.

The great newspaper retrenchment of 2012

I’ve got a piece up at the Nieman Journalism Lab predicting that 2012 will be the year of “the great newspaper retrenchment” — an embrace of paywalls and tradition, and a deliberate turning-away from the need to reinvent a business whose long-term prospects remain bleak.

Nieman’s “Predictions for Journalism 2012″ series is well worth checking out. I plan to sit down and read them all when I get a chance.

Kristen Lombardi named a Nieman Fellow

Kristen Lombardi

Congratulations to my friend and former Boston Phoenix colleague Kristen Lombardi, who will be a fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation in 2011-’12. FOKs have known for a few weeks, but today Nieman made it official. It looks like an impressive group.

Kristen is a dogged investigative reporter, the best I worked with. While at the Phoenix, she broke several important parts of the pedophile-priest story months before the Boston Globe began its Pulitzer Prize-winning work. I’m proud to say I worked at the Phoenix during the Kristen Lombardi era.

For the past few years she’s been at the Center for Public Integrity, where she recently won a Dart Award for her reporting on sexual assault on college and university campuses.

Globe publisher Taylor was both lucky and good

William Taylor

William Taylor, the former Boston Globe publisher who died Sunday, was both lucky and good.

Lucky because his time as publisher coincided with an era of enormous prosperity in the newspaper industry. Good because he used that prosperity to transform the Globe into one of the best papers in the country. Under Taylor and the late editor Tom Winship, the Globe grew into a national-class paper with its own correspondents overseas and around the country.

For those who needed reminding, today’s obituary, by Bryan Marquard, explains why Taylor had to sell. With the paper on the verge of devolving to about 120 heirs, the only way Taylor could preserve the Globe’s legacy was to leave it in the hands of a good steward. He chose the New York Times Co., which paid an astounding $1.1 billion — half the Times Co.’s stock-market valuation at the time.

And if the Sulzbergers haven’t been quite the magnanimous owners Bill Taylor might have hoped for (especially when his second cousin Ben Taylor was sacked as publisher in 1999), they still have maintained the Globe’s quality to a far greater degree than a bottom-feeding chain like Gannett or a bankrupt behemoth like Tribune would have.

Bill Taylor’s death comes at a time when Ben Taylor and his cousin Steve, himself a former Globe executive, are seeking to return to some sort of ownership role as part of a group put together by local businessman Aaron Kushner.

The Taylor brand gives Kushner instant credibility — and it was Bill Taylor who was largely responsible for creating that brand.

Also: The Nieman Foundation pays tribute to Taylor.

Ann Marie Lipinski to run Nieman Foundation

Ann Marie Lipinski

Former Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski has been named curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, replacing Bob Giles, who’s retiring this June. Steve Myers has the details and the links at Poynter.org.

Nieman is a leading journalism education and research foundation, as well as a center for mid-career journalists looking to recharge their batteries. (Note: I am an occasional contributor to its journal, Nieman Reports.) Lipinski instantly becomes one of the most important media thinkers in Boston.

From the press release:

Lipinski brings three decades of journalism experience to her new post. Prior to joining the University of Chicago in 2008, where she is credited with major contributions to the discourse around the future of the city, arts programs in the community, and collaborations with local public schools, she served as editor of the Chicago Tribune for more than seven years. Under her stewardship, the Tribune became known as a leader in public service journalism, publishing stories with both investigative depth and literary detail, including a multiyear reporting effort that helped bring about a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois. Under her leadership, the Tribune won Pulitzers for international, explanatory, investigative, feature, and editorial writing. The paper also significantly expanded its portfolio of print and digital offerings.

Lipinski was a Nieman Fellow in 1990, so she knows her way around Harvard Square — although, if she’s like the rest of us, she’ll find it considerably less interesting than it was the last time she was here.

Bob Giles to retire from Nieman Foundation

Best wishes to Nieman Foundation curator Bob Giles, who will retire this June.

Giles arrived at the Harvard-based organization in 2000, and has overseen an impressive expansion. The Nieman Journalism Lab, in particular, has emerged as one of a handful of go-to sites tracking the transformation of journalism. Nieman Reports (to which I have contributed occasionally) remains one of the leading journalism publications, and editor Melissa Ludtke was recently honored with a Yankee Quill Award.

At an age (77) when many journalists are grousing that we never should have moved away from hot type, Giles fully understands the crisis and opportunity presented by technological change. I’m glad he’s sticking around until the end of the academic year, because he’ll have a chance to take a well-deserved victory lap.

An injustice rectified

The U.S. State Department has finally granted Colombian journalist Hollman Morris a visa so that he can study at the Nieman Foundation, the Harvard Crimson reports. (Via Romenesko.)

Earlier story.

Update: Dan Feder discovers that the Crimson has posted a correction, and that Morris doesn’t actually have his visa yet.

Update II: Boston.com is now reporting (late Tuesday morning) that Morris has officially been granted a visa.

A morally repugnant ban against a journalist

Hollman Morris

This past March, Media Nation celebrated when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reversed a Bush-era ban on South African scholar Adam Habib, who had been prevented from traveling to the United States on unproven and undocumented charges that he was somehow tied to terrorism.

Now the Obama administration — and Clinton’s State Department — are doing what appears to be exactly the same thing to Hollman Morris, a Colombian journalist. Morris, the Washington Post reports, was recently denied a visa to enter the United States so that he could spend a year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow.

Morris is not exactly a favorite of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, a right-wing strongman with a miserable human-rights record. The Uribe government has accused Morris of playing nice with the FARC, a left-wing guerrilla movement whose viciousness is beyond question, and which the U.S. government regards as a terrorist organization. By most accounts, though, Morris is guilty of nothing but practicing journalism — which, in Uribe’s eyes, is bad enough.

Not to get all conspiratorial, but it should be noted that the Clintons have longstanding ties to Uribe. In fact, when then-presidential candidate Clinton’s chief political strategist, Mark Penn, was thrown overboard in April 2008, it was over his own unsavory dealings with the Uribe government.

What makes the ban against Morris especially repugnant is that, according to the Spanish news agency EFE, his and his family’s safety has been threatened, and he has been living “under protection” for quite some time. Now the Obama White House has placed him in even greater peril. Fortunately, Morris is currently traveling in Europe, and it sounds like he has no plans to return home anytime soon.

The ban against Habib appeared to be based on nothing more than his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq — hardly a novel view. The exclusion prevented Habib from speaking at an academic conference in Boston, a circumstance that led to a 2008 Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award for Condoleezza Rice and Michael Chertoff, then the secretaries of state and homeland security, respectively.

Likewise, in the absence of any evidence from the Obama administration, it appears that the ban against Morris is motivated by nothing more than a desire not to offend Uribe and the incoming president, Uribe protégé Juan Manuel Santos. Needless to say, Hillary Clinton is an early contender for a 2011 Muzzle.

More coverage: Nieman Foundation curator Robert Giles recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times on Morris’ behalf. The Boston Globe editorialized against the ban. Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab has a good round-up of other coverage. And we discussed the Morris case last Friday on “Beat the Press,” on WGBH-TV (Channel 2).