Media notes

Slick Willie returns; the Atlantic's expats; rating Jay Carr

by Dan Kennedy

No exact quotes, unfortunately, but an eyewitness swears this is true: several years ago, Boston Globe sports columnist Will McDonough was MCing the annual dinner of the Boston Boys and Girls Club when he saw Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell in the audience. Oh, there's my good friend Pat Purcell, McDonough said, or words to that effect. He's the guy who got me my last three raises.

Now it looks as though the possibility of McDonough's setting up shop at One Herald Square may be at least partly responsible for his sudden unretirement. This past Saturday, McDonough's column returned to the Globe's sports pages for the first time in several months. At the end was an "editor's note" stating that McDonough, upon reaching the age of 65 this summer, was asked to retire "because of a misunderstanding of Globe policy." It continued: "Happily, our error was discovered, and Will returns today to the Globe staff as a full-time sports columnist and associate editor."

So what happened? McDonough says he was told the Globe had a mandatory-retirement policy for anyone in management, so he cleared out his desk and vacationed in Africa with his wife for a good part of the summer. When he got back, he says sports editor Don Skwar told him a Globe lawyer had researched the matter -- and had concluded that mandatory retirement applies only to managers with supervisory duties, which McDonough does not have.

But there may have been another factor as well. The airwaves of WEEI Radio (AM 850), the all-sports station, have been rife with talk that McDonough might take his column to the Herald. McDonough denies he was toying with the idea of moving across town, but concedes that he and Purcell have been friends for years, and that Purcell -- both personally and through intermediaries -- has talked to him on several occasions about switching allegiances. He also says he and Purcell spoke last May, when the possibility that he might have to retire was first broached. Asked about whether he made the remarks at the Boys and Girls Club dinner several years ago, McDonough replies, "I probably did."

Says the Herald's managing editor for news, Andrew Gully, whose purview includes the sports department: "I think old Will was playing games to get his job back."

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Two longtime fixtures at the Atlantic Monthly are leaving town. Editor emeritus William Whitworth, who was removed from the top post to make way for Michael Kelly after the monthly was sold to National Journal owner David Bradley last year, is returning this month to his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, where he will continue to edit articles for the Atlantic and books for Public Affairs. Senior editor and Boston native Jack Beatty, best known for his 1992 biography of James Michael Curley, The Rascal King, is moving to the Hudson Valley so that he and his wife, Lois, can be closer to their only child, Aaron, a freshman at Vassar this fall. Beatty will continue to work part-time for the Atlantic and its Web site, Atlantic Unbound, and will pursue several book projects as well.

Whitworth says he decided to return home rather than move to New York, where he could have accepted an offer from the Atlantic's previous owner, Mortimer Zuckerman. Zuckerman wanted Whitworth to be the editorial director of his other media properties, which include the New York Daily News, U.S. News & World Report, and Fast Company. "I like New York. I have a lot of friends there. But I just frankly didn't think I had anything to contribute to the other publications," says Whitworth, who edited the Atlantic for 20 years. He was at the helm when it won a National Magazine Award in 1993.

An alumnus of the Arkansas Gazette, the New York Herald Tribune (where, according to his official bio, he shared feature-writing duties with Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Charles Portis), and the New Yorker (where he was once thought to be a possible successor to the late editor William Shawn), Whitworth says he's looking forward to returning to the South, which he left as a young man. "I still have a lot of friends from my newspaper days there," Whitworth says. "It just seems like a congenial place to be."

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Four Globe writers were named to the 63-member "All-Star Newspaper" unveiled last week by the Brill's Content Web site. Three make sense: national reporter Mitchell Zuckoff, sports columnist Bob Ryan, and media reporter Mark Jurkowitz.

But what is the deal with movie critic Jay Carr, singled out along with the New York Press's Godfrey Cheshire as one of the two best in the country?

I have no personal bone to pick with Carr; my own exposure to his work is limited to his interminable weekend pieces for New England Cable News. Rather, I was perplexed because it was only last year that Brill's Content mocked Carr for his sunny take on just about anything committed to celluloid.

In an April 1999 piece titled "The Fawning Five" (the other Hollywood suck-ups being NBC's Gene Shalit, ABC's Joel Siegel, Time's Richard Corliss, and Rolling Stone's Peter Travers), Content's Kimberly Conniff called Carr "the unconditional lover" and wrote, "When Carr falls head over heels for a movie, he has a hard time getting back up."

At least in the eyes of Content's editors, it looks as if Carr has managed to struggle to his feet.

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Visit Dan Kennedy online at www.dankennedy.net.

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