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The Globe replaces Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle with reporters rather than personalities

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

The message of the day was that the Boston Globe had finally settled on replacements for former metro columnists Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle. The subtext, though, was what really mattered.

The new columnists, Adrian Walker and Brian McGrory, are relatively low-profile staff members known more for their reporting chops than for their ability to turn a felicitous phrase. In choosing them, editor Matt Storin made it clear that the star system that has brought the Globe so much grief is over -- and that, in the future, the paper's columnists will be held to the same journalistic standards as everyone else.

Make no mistake: Walker and McGrory, both 36, are solid choices. Walker, who as an African-American is generally regarded as Smith's replacement, is a veteran of City Hall and the State House, and has written some of the Globe's more intelligent pieces on the 1998 state election campaign. McGrory, currently at the Globe's Washington bureau, is a former roving national correspondent and police reporter who recently sold his first novel, which he describes as a "political thriller."

Still, Storin could have made sexier picks. He could have gone outside (the Boston Herald's Peter Gelzinis is, after all, the city's best pure metro columnist). Or he could have chosen from among a clutch of well-known inside candidates. But European correspondent Kevin Cullen, long thought to be Barnicle's heir apparent, and Mideast correspondent Charlie Sennott were ruled out on the grounds that it would be expensive, and damaging to the paper's coverage, to bring them back from overseas (not to mention the fact that Globe editors want to submit Cullen's Irish coverage for a Pulitzer Prize). Closer to home, Globe Magazine writer John Powers, editorial writer Alyssa Haywoode, foreign editor Sam Allis, State House reporter Scot Lehigh, sports-media columnist Howard Manly, political columnist Brian Mooney, and street-savvy veteran Ric Kahn, to name just some of the other candidates, were passed over for one reason or another.

That left Walker and McGrory -- choices that several newsroom insiders describe as "underwhelming" but that may prove key to restoring the Globe's battered credibility.

"People are relieved that they picked two solid news reporters who came up from the system -- sort of the opposite of the other two," says a staff member who supported Cullen's candidacy. Indeed, as Storin noted in the Globe's official announcement, McGrory, Walker, and Eileen McNamara, winner of a Pulitzer in 1997, give the paper three metro columnists steeped in reporting. Given that the metro section all too often seems out of touch with the city, that has got to be considered a positive step.

"I think what we're going to have six days a week are some really terrific columns on the metro front by three really good people," says assistant managing editor Walter Robinson, designated by Storin, who was away, to field calls from the media. "Neither Brian McGrory nor Adrian Walker will be predictable."

Walker and McGrory will debut the week of December 6, with McGrory's columns appearing on Tuesday and Friday, Walker's on Thursday and Saturday, and McNamara's on Wednesday and Sunday. Monday's Metro/Region front will be column-free, which creates at least an opportunity for some expanded news coverage.

Robinson says that both Walker and McGrory will be reviewed at the end of three years, with a determination to be made at that time whether to let them continue as columnists or to move them to other positions at the paper. In addition, Robinson -- the editor who busted both Smith and Barnicle -- will now supervise all three metro columnists, a significant expansion of his portfolio. Previously, the columnists reported to overworked senior editors: Smith to managing editor Greg Moore, Barnicle to managing editor for news Tom Mulvoy, and McNamara to executive editor Helen Donovan. Moore and Mulvoy obviously didn't do as good a job of fact-checking as they should have. Donovan came under some criticism recently when the American Journalism Review reported that she had failed to tell Storin about concerns expressed by McNamara that Smith was fabricating columns.

Not surprisingly, Walker's and McGrory's current supervisors have nice things to say about them. "One thing Adrian has shown a real talent for is an ability to understand Boston and to develop sources," says State House bureau chief Frank Phillips. Washington bureau chief David Shribman is effusive in describing McGrory, calling him "one of the best natural reporters and writers I've seen anywhere." Such praise, of course, is to be expected; but the minimal off-the-record sniping from within the Globe's notoriously discontented newsroom suggests that Walker and McGrory have earned some measure of respect from their peers.

Walker, who grew up in Miami, began his career at the now-defunct Miami News, joining the Globe in 1989. He's come into his own since moving to the State House, in April 1997. He broke the story of state senator Dianne Wilkerson's tax woes and has been out front on coverage of efforts to turn the house in which Malcolm X once lived into a historic landmark. But he's also demonstrated a range of interests that go beyond the African-American community. Last June he wrote a smart 5000-word profile for the Globe Magazine of House Speaker Tom Finneran. In the gubernatorial campaign, Walker has cut through a lot of the bluster, showing, for instance, that the spending proposals put forth by gubernatorial candidates Paul Cellucci and Scott Harshbarger aren't nearly as different as their rhetoric suggests.

"I think the whole point of the column and the whole fun of it is trying to define it as broadly as possible," says Walker, who lives in Dorchester. "I've never wanted to be defined as a black reporter or a black columnist, but I'll deal with racial issues when it's important."

McGrory, born in Boston and raised in Weymouth, has impressive journalistic bloodlines: he is a second cousin of Mary McGrory, a Pulitzer-winning syndicated columnist based at the Washington Post. Nevertheless, he's paid some dues on the way to his present position, doing grunt work for the Quincy Patriot Ledger and the New Haven Register before coming to the Globe in 1989 as a suburban reporter. As the national reporter in 1995 and '96, he was frequently on page one, writing about subjects such as the final days of the Bethlehem Steel plant, the rise of Jesse Jackson Jr., and the frenzied culture of the Boca Raton, Florida-based national tabloids. In contrast to the soft-spoken Walker, McGrory is said to have a touch of swagger and arrogance -- qualities not universally admired, but hardly a detriment to someone who's about to become one of Boston's most visible journalists.

"I hope to be a voice of common sense, a voice of reason, occasionally a voice of outrage and social conscience," says McGrory, who plans to move to the Back Bay, where he lived before his posting to Washington. Like Walker, McGrory expects to hit the streets. "I don't plan to do a lot of punditry," he says. "It's not my strength, and it's not what the paper needs right now."

With the Globe's Summer from Hell morphing into a crisis-free but desultory Autumn from Heck, the troops at 135 Morrissey Boulevard -- not to mention the folks who read their work every day -- could use some good news. Even if Walker and McGrory can't match the eloquence of a John Powers, the unpredictable quirkiness of a Howard Manly, or the analytical insight of a Scot Lehigh, the prospect of having six well-reported metro columns every week is the best news that's come out of the Globe in quite some time.

It's also an acknowledgment by Storin that the Age of the Heroic Columnist is over. After inheriting one (Barnicle) he was never comfortable with and creating another (Smith) despite serious questions about her integrity, Storin has now taken a much more modern approach, emphasizing journalism over personality, experience over eloquence. The model is no longer Jimmy Breslin or Mike Royko but, rather, the New York Times' "Metro Matters" column, in which Elizabeth Kolbert reports on New York issues with just a touch of attitude.

"There are only so many Roykos and Breslins and Herb Caens and H.L. Menckens and even Mike Barnicles, whatever his sins," says Northeastern University journalism professor Charles Fountain, the author of Another Man's Poison (1984), a biography of legendary Boston columnist George Frazier. "The focus is probably going to be on what it is they're writing rather than on the personalities, and that may have been a conscious decision on Matt's part. This was certainly a conservative approach by the Globe to go this way."

No doubt some will grumble that the Globe, which is sometimes derided for an excess of political correctness, has a quota system, and they will point to Walker's elevation as proof. But in a city that has long been riven by racial strife, and that is nearly half minority today, it would have been a horrendously bad call not to replace Smith with another African-American. After all, it's a paper for black people too; and if there is a quota system, it apparently works both ways: every candidate for the Barnicle slot was a white male.

Following several months of wondering whether the New York Times Company would remove Storin for his mismanagement of the Smith and Barnicle meltdowns, last week's move makes it look as if Storin may, indeed, have a future in the corner office. The institutional paralysis is starting to ease. City editor Sean Murphy, a dogged reporter, is going to the Spotlight Team. Assistant city editor Peter Canellos, an advocate of literary journalism, is moving up to take Murphy's place, and he is thought to be a better fit with assistant managing editor for local news Teresa Hanafin. Anne Kornblut, a highly regarded metro reporter still in her 20s, will be moving to Washington. DC veteran Chris Black is reportedly taking a job at CNN.

Journalistically, too, the battleship seems to be chugging hesitantly forward again. Steve Fainaru's recent three-parter on an Alaskan high-school killer was terrific, and last Sunday's 40-page, ad-free magazine on the future of the waterfront and the harbor was an expensive but worthwhile use of the paper's resources. Irene Sege's seven-part series on the travails of a young single woman at least shows a willingness to think creatively, though the pieces have been insipid, overlong, and far better suited to Living/Arts than to page one.

But it's going to be a long time before the Globe is once again an energized, forward-looking place. Few believe Storin is out of the woods ("It's hard to tell, because they'll be giving him guarantees and reassurances right up until five minutes before they fire him," says one insider), and a sizable contingent continues to hope for new leadership.

The Globe, having been reduced to a national punch line, isn't going to win back its credibility overnight, with Storin or without him. Instead, it's something the paper will have to earn incrementally. The Walker and McGrory appointments were a step in the right direction.

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

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

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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