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
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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?
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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."