The Boston Phoenix January 18-25, 2001

[Don't Quote Me]

Tight fit

Pat Purcell struggles to close his $150 million deal with Fidelity. Plus, how a trigger-happy ex-legislator slid by the media, and Charlestown's grievance against the Globe.

by Dan Kennedy

MERGER WORRIES: CNC could give Herald puplisher Pat Purcell the suburban clout he needs to compete with the dominant Boston Globe-but can he close the deal?


Nearly four months after the deal was announced, and two months after it was supposed to have become final, Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell is still hanging fire on his purchase of Fidelity's Community Newspaper Company.

In a brief interview, Purcell told me that the deal -- estimated at $150 million -- was not in trouble, and that he expects the closing will take place sometime later this month.

Most likely it will happen. Fidelity clearly wants to be rid of its more than 100 papers, mainly weeklies, and Purcell just as clearly wants to buy them. In theory, CNC -- whose papers are located in the affluent suburbs of Greater Boston and on Cape Cod -- is the ideal complement to the city-oriented Herald. But the delay in finalizing the sale may be indicative of the difficulties Purcell will have in making it work -- and of the pain that may lie ahead for his employees.

Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey reported on December 13 that, according to internal documents he had obtained, Purcell was having trouble lining up financing for the sale. The documents showed that Purcell planned to cut $4.3 million by eliminating about 50 positions at CNC and squeezing costs at the Herald as well. In his conversation with me, Purcell confirmed that financing has been hard to obtain, noting that the economic climate has changed considerably since last September, when the sale was announced.

Trouble is, the proposed cuts hardly square with the need to rebuild community newspapers that have been slashed to the bone by Fidelity during the past few years. The Herald's managing editor for features, Kevin Convey, told me that he's been looking into possible "synergies" to see whether the Herald and CNC can double up on coverage of such things as high-school sports and the arts. That's fine as far as it goes. But what CNC needs more than anything is an owner committed to bolstering the basic mission of providing competent, comprehensive local coverage. Purcell has certainly done that with the Herald. Will he have the resources to do it with CNC?

One way to ease the financial burden would be for Purcell to work with a well-heeled partner. That's no doubt why there are plenty of rumors floating around concerning W. Dean Singleton, head of the Denver-based MediaNews Group, whose Massachusetts holdings include the Lowell Sun and the Berkshire Eagle, and who summers on Cape Cod. One rumor has Singleton acting as Purcell's financial angel; another suggests that Purcell would sell to Singleton a number of CNC's Lowell-area weeklies.

There's just one problem: Singleton himself says there's nothing to these rumors. "There have been no discussions about that. So obviously that would be pure speculation," he told me, although he added, "Pat's an old friend." Singleton does say that he's bullish on the Herald-CNC combination, explaining that an urban-suburban connection is "a much better way to sell advertisers."

These are interesting times for Purcell. In addition to his efforts to close the CNC deal, he's involved in testy negotiations with the Newspaper Guild, which staged a pre-Christmas demonstration outside the Herald offices to protest what it contends are inadequate health benefits. (Guild president Lesley Phillips declined to discuss the state of contract negotiations, explaining the union and management are currently engaged in off-the-record talks.) More to the point, for the first time since purchasing the Herald from his former employer Rupert Murdoch in 1994 for an estimated $15 million to $20 million, the cash-strapped Purcell is faced with the possibility of a recession.

CNC could give Purcell the suburban clout he needs to compete with the dominant Boston Globe. For that to work, though, Purcell needs to find a way for CNC to add to his bottom line. And that may prove to be a mighty difficult trick to pull off.

New Hampshire cop-killing advocate Tom Alciere has apparently slithered back under the rock whence he came. The remaining question is how the media ever let him get away with running for the legislature without reporting on his views. Candidates for the 400-member, unpaid, part-time House tend to get little journalistic scrutiny. But maybe it's time for that to change.

Alciere, a Nashua Republican who won a House seat last November by defeating an incumbent Democrat by just 55 votes, resigned last week in the midst of a frenzy that was touched off in late December, when he expounded on his support for cop-killers in an interview with the Valley News of Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Alciere had made no secret of his opinions. So why did they remain a secret to the people who elected him? One obvious reason was a breakdown in the normal back-and-forth that takes place between a community newspaper -- in this case, the Nashua Telegraph -- and the local police. Nashua's deputy police chief, Timothy Hefferan, points his finger at the newspaper, saying, "The largest share of culpability goes to the Nashua Telegraph." Yet it turns out that even though Hefferan and other members of the department had been aware of Alciere's views for years, not one of them bothered to pick up the phone and tell the Telegraph.

Then, too, the Telegraph's institutional memory appears to have some pretty significant holes. The result was a newspaper that should have known but didn't, and a police department that knew but didn't say anything. Some examples:

* Seven to 10 years ago, Hefferan says, the Telegraph published several letters from Alciere that police considered troubling, including one in which Alciere allegedly supported the right of a husband to beat his wife. "One guy said he remembered cutting them out at the time, posting them on the bulletin board, and saying, `Hey, be careful,' " Hefferan says. None of those letters can now be found, Hefferan adds; and Telegraph editor Marty Karlon says that letters to the editor have been archived going back only five years.

* Starting in the mid '90s, Hefferan says, the FBI began providing the Nashua Police with copies of posts Alciere made to various Internet discussion groups. Here's Alciere's own account of one of those messages, which he shared in a recent radio-talk-show appearance that was covered by the Telegraph: "There is nothing wrong with slaughtering a cop. Just throw the carcass into the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. Cops are nothing but vicious, brutal thugs anyway." Alciere added, incongruously, that he never actually advocated killing police officers, saying of his Internet posts, "I was doing it to have fun."

* In 1997 Alciere wrote a letter to the Colebrook News & Sentinel after a mass murderer named Carl Drega shot to death two state troopers, a judge, and a newspaper editor. According to published reports, Alciere said in his letter that though he regretted the editor's death, he considered Drega to be an "otherwise innocent cop-killer taking out enemy officers in battle." The letter was never published, but Hefferan says the Nashua Police received a copy from the New Hampshire State Police.

Hefferan's basic point -- that the Telegraph should have been aware of Alciere's views -- seems reasonable. But Marty Karlon notes that it is nearly impossible to keep up to speed on candidates for the New Hampshire House. In a recent postmortem, Karlon wrote that in the past election, 127 House candidates ran for 81 seats just in the Telegraph's coverage area.

"I didn't realize that he [Alciere] was running until I saw that he had won," says Karlon, who's been with the Telegraph for 11 years and became editor last July. And though Karlon recognized Alciere as one of a half-dozen people who write off-the-wall letters, he adds, "There was an anti-police sentiment [in some of his letters], but there certainly wasn't any cop-killing."

Concord Monitor editor Mike Pride, who writes a column for Brill's Content about community newspapering, says he can understand how the Telegraph missed Alciere's cop-killing agenda, commenting, "It's pretty easy for me to see how this would slip under your radar." What's harder for Pride to understand is why the Nashua Police failed to tip off the Telegraph. "I think we have the kind of relationship with the Concord Police where they would say, hey, you might want to look into this," he says.

Karlon and Hefferan both say they're thinking long and hard about what went wrong. "It's certainly caused some soul-searching here as to how we can cover elections and what we might do in the future," Karlon says. Hefferan adds that he's rethinking the "above the fray" stance his department has traditionally taken toward politics. "To be honest, in light of this I think we need to step back and look at it," he says.

Not surprisingly, a Boston Globe story published on Saturday, January 6, in which two Charlestown residents were quoted as making anti-Semitic remarks, continues to throw off sparks. The story -- a person-on-the-street feature by Raphael Lewis -- demonstrated that at least some members of the community objected to naming the new Charles River bridge after the late Lenny Zakim simply because they don't like Jews.

But though Lewis's article performed a valuable service by giving voice to the ethnic hatred that still bubbles just under the surface, the Globe could have done a better job of following up. All week, Charlestown's political leaders were criticized -- including in an editorial by the Boston Phoenix -- for not speaking out (see "Name Game," Editorial, January 12). Yet it seems that several officials did speak out, and no one was listening.

State Representative Eugene O'Flaherty (D-Charlestown) says he e-mailed a letter to the Globe on January 8, two days after the story appeared -- and that the letter was not published. Then, on Wednesday, January 10, O'Flaherty, Boston city councilor Paul Scapicchio, Charlestown Neighborhood Council chairman Peter Looney, and Bunker Hill Monument Association official Don Haska held a meeting at the State House, where they drafted a statement saying they were "shocked and surprised by the comments and the fact that they were published." "There is no place for anti-Semitism, racism, or hatred in our proud community," they added. The statement -- which hailed the compromise that named the structure the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge -- was delivered that afternoon, O'Flaherty says, to the Globe's State House bureau, to the city desk, and to deputy managing editor Michael Larkin. But it never appeared in print. Finally, on January 13, the Globe published a brief, inside-the-paper account by Rick Klein reporting on a news conference held the previous day in which Charlestown officials -- most prominently Massachusetts Senate president Tom Birmingham -- did, indeed, denounce the anti-Semitic comments.

Lewis, who reported the original story, says he interviewed about 15 people; two offered anti-Semitic remarks on their own, and a third said he'd heard from others that they objected to the bridge's being named after a Jew. He notes that the hateful remarks were placed way down in the piece, and says that when he heard rumors that he'd been "sniffing for anti-Semitism, that really, really incensed me." Lewis's piece was followed two days later by a Scott Greenberger story reporting that the Bunker Hill Monument never would have been built were it not for a major contribution by a Jewish philanthropist from New Orleans, Judah Touro.

Peter Canellos, the Globe's assistant managing editor for local news, says that neither Lewis nor his editors ever received a copy of the four leaders' statement. He adds that Larkin told him he turned over the copy he had received for consideration as a letter to the editor, and that Klein used the one delivered to the State House bureau as preparation for the January 12 news conference he covered.

Though it would appear that no one at the Globe deliberately set out to screw Charlestown's leaders, someone should have been more sensitive to the need to get them on the record. The fact that they did go on the record and were ignored for several days only adds to the insult. In an ironic twist, the Globe published a strongly worded editorial on January 12 noting that the Anti-Defamation League, the organization Zakim headed, "is urging Charlestown leaders to repudiate the slurs." Two days earlier, of course, the Globe had received three copies of a statement doing just that.

The editorial was referring to a letter to the editor, published on January 11, by Zakim's successor, Rob Leikind, who wrote that it was "very disappointing" that the Charlestown leadership had not been heard from. In fact, Leikind submitted that letter before the January 10 meeting at the State House, which he attended at O'Flaherty's invitation. And he, too, thinks everyone would have been better off if the Globe had reported on the statement put out that afternoon.

"In light of the controversy, in light of the fact that this story started with the Globe," Leikind says, "it probably would have been very important to let people know how Charlestown leaders felt."


Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.dankennedy.net


Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com


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