Righting the Globe

Hanafin is stunned when told that the subject of Armstrong's series has leaked out. "Stupid and disloyal," she mutters, looking down and shaking her head. "Jesus Christ. I can't talk about something that's proprietary Globe information. God almighty." Moore is only slightly more forthcoming. "I think there were some issues around how the series was constructed," he says. "It is true that it sort of disappeared off the screen. But nobody is sitting on a blockbuster, I can assure you."

And no doubt the series will run -- someday. But the lengthy delay speaks to something both emblematic and disturbing about the Globe, a very good paper whose fractious, turf-conscious internal culture has held it back from becoming even better. Along with its nationally recognized sports section, local news is the Globe's franchise, the reason nearly half a million people (and three-quarters of a million on Sundays) get the paper. But it is a franchise built upon a shaky foundation.

Simply put, the Globe's local coverage isn't nearly as good as it should be -- an assessment virtually no one inside or outside the building disputes. It's not that there isn't some excellent work produced by its metro reporters. But the paper is inconsistent from story to story, from page to page, and from day to day. The local report is suffused with the random, almost chaotic feel of television news. Crime stories, one-dimensional features, and squishy-soft photos are thrown together with seemingly no logic. Precious few of its writers offer anything in the way of intellectual heft.

It's not entirely fair to dump on the Metro/Region section in isolation, since the best metro stories -- such as those produced by the Spotlight Team, by specialists in areas such as health and science, and by the paper's excellent State House bureau -- are run on page one. Still, on many days the section feels like a jumbled collection of leftovers that didn't fit anywhere else -- minor breaking stories and forgettable features, with writing so uninspired that merely dragging oneself through it all is a chore.

The three metro columnists -- Mike Barnicle, Patricia Smith, and Eileen McNamara -- are among the biggest draws, but their penchant for personal essays and thumb-sucking "think" pieces means that they too often stand apart from the news of the day, draining energy from the section as a whole (see "The Un-Metro Columnists," right). The paper has virtually abandoned city government; with Mayor Tom Menino's power unchallenged, the city council quiescent, and the elected school committee passed into history, the Globe treats City Hall as if it were a regulatory agency rather than a vibrant, organic part of the body politic -- a far cry from, say, a decade ago, when battles between the council and the mayor, and the antics of the school committee, were a regular staple of local coverage. Yes, there's a lot more to the city than political infighting; yet the neighborhood-oriented stories that have replaced the old-style institutional coverage are uneven and tend toward the superficial. Indeed, at a time when Boston's low crime rate and rising prosperity have sparked renewed interest in city life, the Globe fails to offer a consistent, coherent, ongoing picture.

Advertising and circulation considerations aside, it's ironic that the "Boston" Globe has to publish a separate Sunday section -- CityWeekly -- to squeeze in its less important city and neighborhood news. Although CityWeekly, supervised by assistant managing editor for metropolitan news Ellen Clegg (who also oversees the five zoned suburban sections), suffers from a gravity deficit, it often sets a street-savvy urban tone that Metro/Region captures only sporadically. Too bad suburbanites who really care about the city never get to see the stories.

To be sure, all of these problems predate Teresa Hanafin, and some of them -- the columnists, in particular -- are beyond her control. Nevertheless, Hanafin has become the object of considerable controversy since her appointment in late 1996 (see "Mother Teresa," below left). Her critics say she's in over her head, overwhelmed by the pressures of the job and unable to get a handle on the news or motivate her troops. It got so bad last fall that there were rumors she'd be moved to another position. Those passed, but among the rank and file, Hanafin's performance remains the subject of ongoing gossip and sniping.

That said, Hanafin is almost universally viewed as a genuinely nice person who's worked hard to transform a macho, testosterone-driven newsroom into a more humane environment. Her supporters say that, despite her low-key manner, she's one of the best pure story editors ever to occupy the seat. But they add that she must constantly fight an internal culture in which many of the most talented reporters want to leave metro, others are prima donnas, and many of the rest don't work as hard as they should. "This place isn't as tough on people as it should be," says a former staffer. "The Globe comes out kind of spoiling people. The irony is that people still complain."

Readers don't need the Globe to emulate the Boston Herald, the feisty tabloid it competes with. But many editors at the Globe dismiss the Herald as increasingly irrelevant, which is both unfair and wrong. In fact, the Herald's narrowly conceived mission -- aggressive coverage of local breaking news and politics -- gives it a much clearer focus than the Globe's metro coverage has. Most of the Globe's readers live in the suburbs, which is reflected in the stories the paper chooses to publish -- and which is why the much-smaller Herald actually outsells the Globe in Boston.

"I came here in 1990, and I wanted to find out how Boston ticks. And the metro section of the Globe hasn't done that for me," says Michael Berlin, a journalism professor at Boston University. "The Herald has done a better job in the sense of capturing the pulse of the city."

Chaos theory

It's the day after Ray Flynn whispered to the Herald that he was going to drop out of the governor's race and run for Congress instead. Not that Hanafin expected the Globe to get that story -- not after the Globe's demolition job last September, when the paper reported that Flynn had a drinking problem and was a bust as ambassador to the Vatican. But she thought she had it covered anyway. Her political editor, Doug Bailey, had learned at 10:30 the night before that the Herald was going to have the story, and he quickly cobbled something together. Then one of the presses broke, and it didn't get into the early editions. Even worse, in at least one edition the story was teased on the front but never appeared inside. "That's frustrating," she says. "Doug was very annoyed."

That particular snafu may be atypical, but the sense of barely controlled chaos that it speaks to is not. The metro editor (as the assistant managing editor for local news is called), perhaps more than anyone at 135 Morrissey Boulevard, occupies the hot seat. Globe editor Matt Storin, who did a stint as metro editor in the early 1970s, calls it the hardest job at the paper. The bitching from below and the second-guessing from above are just part of the job description.

Talk to Globe veterans, and many snicker at the very notion of a metro-section-in-crisis story -- not because there's no truth to it, but rather, because it's always, perpetually true. Indeed, there's rarely been a time when the Globe's local coverage hasn't been struggling with a crisis or a transition of one sort or another.

Of course, the buck stops not with the metro editor, but with the editor, and there's no question that Storin is the most important force in shaping the Globe's local coverage. Following a seven-year absence, Storin was brought back to the Globe from the New York Daily News in 1992; the following year, editor Jack Driscoll moved to a front-office position and Storin was named to the top newsroom job. Storin moved quickly on two fronts: competing with the Herald on breaking news (the importance of which he reinforced with some memorable tirades) and ending the perception that the Globe was a patsy for Democratic politicians and liberal policy positions. More vaguely, he began pushing for what he calls non-institutional, bottom-up stories -- covering education rather than school officials, for instance. It's an important goal, and it's one that a number of serious dailies are trying to pursue. But the Globe, like most papers, has succeeded at this only sporadically.

Even so, an editor's most important task, after setting a tone and direction, is to delegate -- and there are some serious questions as to whether Hanafin is up to her job. Unlike her immediate predecessors, Walter Robinson (1993-96) and Ben Bradlee Jr. (1991-93), she lacks bigfoot reporting credentials. That can be an enormous asset in motivating -- and, perhaps more important, establishing authority over -- the troops. (She covered Cape Cod, real estate, and the State House for several years before moving into the editing ranks.) Hanafin wins points for being nicer -- a lot nicer -- than Robinson and Bradlee, but that doesn't necessarily translate into great journalism. "She didn't ever prove herself as a reporter, and reporters are a tough lot. We're really judgmental," says one newsroom insider.

Given the slippery and evolving concepts of what constitutes local news, the Globe has traditionally relied upon strong personalities with clear goals and visions to put their own stamp on the product. On this score, too, Hanafin suffers by contrast with her recent predecessors. Such as the late Kirk Scharfenberg, who in the 1980s transformed metro into a cheering section for then-Boston mayor Ray Flynn, to the delight of some and to the consternation of many. Or Bradlee, who emphasized aggressive coverage of politics at the State House and City Hall. Or Robinson, whose Storin-driven goals of less institutional coverage and more grassroots reporting and soft features were sometimes hard to define, but who nevertheless pursued them in a pugnacious, hard-nosed manner.

Where Hanafin thrived, observers say, was in the number-two position. As city editor under Robinson, Hanafin was a workhorse, but she was also the kindly counterpart to her curmudgeonly boss. She had been slated for a broadening experience after the November 1996 election: she was assigned to spend a year in the Washington bureau as news editor under bureau chief David Shribman, filling in for Mary Leonard while Leonard spent a year as the Sunday Focus writer. A year in Washington dealing with national issues might have provided Hanafin with some of the gravitas that her critics say she lacks, which would have served her in good stead during a future turn as metro editor.

In the course of one afternoon, though, that plan fell through. Robinson was out as metro editor, off to work on projects of his own choosing, and Hanafin had been named as his replacement. "Robby had reached the end of his rope," Matt Storin says. "It was a miscalculation of planning. I readily say that." Hanafin, though the ultimate Globe loyalist, is willing to concede that she was disappointed. "Of course I was," she says. "I was looking forward to it as being a great adventure and a great learning experience. But I would never complain about being made a department head."

Thus it should have been no surprise to anyone that Hanafin had a rough time of it as metro editor, especially in the early going.

Members of Hanafin's staff say she was -- and is -- preoccupied with administrivia, rarely showing the involvement and excitement that Robinson did. Hanafin paints an entirely positive picture of her tenure, but Storin himself says it took her quite a while to settle in; he attributes her problems in part to the death of her mother two years ago. "You have to be in an optimal frame of mind to do the job, and I think there may have been times when she was down," says Storin.

Hanafin's critics -- and even some who are mainly supportive of her -- complain that she has put agendas such as boosting morale and mentoring younger women ahead of her laudable journalistic goal of pushing for a more narrative style of journalism. "She's a people person," says one. "I think she likes and is best at managing the troops. Are we putting out the best possible product that we could? I don't know, but she's wonderful to work for." Others allude to a newsroom culture in which too many do as little as it takes to get by -- a long-standing Globe tradition that Hanafin has reportedly tolerated more than Robinson and Bradlee did. It's almost unheard-of, says one staffer, for a reporter to go ring a source's doorbell if he can't reach that person by phone. "People do not want to leave the office," says another. "They're too lazy to get off their butts."

By last fall, there was a sense that matters had come to a head. The newsroom was rife with gossip, much of it revolving around the possibility that Hanafin would move on and someone -- possibly her political editor, Mark Morrow -- would take her place. Instead, Morrow became national editor. And a concerted effort was made to beef up the metro editing ranks while leaving Hanafin in place.

Ande Zellman, the associate editor in charge of new media and a former editor of the Boston Globe Magazine, was brought in to work on think pieces and was given her own quartet of reporters: Peter Canellos, Francie Latour, Charlie Radin, and Judith Gaines. And the effort continues. Last week, op-ed columnist Derrick Jackson, a former metro columnist, began a three-month stint on the metro desk, mainly to act as an adviser on longer, issues-oriented features. Next month, Canellos joins the desk as deputy city editor, with a portfolio of upping the section's smartness quotient and improving the frequently lackluster writing. Keeping an extremely close eye on things is managing editor Greg Moore, a former metro editor who, according to a number of sources, has told people that he's unhappy with the section, although he and Hanafin flatly deny there's any serious friction between them.

However, the moves have created at least the perception of a problem: some view Zellman as the engine that drives metro's more intelligent, polished pieces, a perception that could extend to Canellos as well -- although as an editor Canellos is untested. Some even go so far as to joke darkly that Moore has thrown the section into "receivership."

That seems a stretch. But if Hanafin and her team want to overcome such perceptions, there's a simple way to do that: put out a better product.

City limits

Nearly two weeks ago, 60 Minutes stole this story right out from under the Boston Globe. And it did so without breaking a single piece of news. Because even though the Globe (and the Herald) have been all over the story, it took an out-of-town news organization to explain what had happened, and why it was important, in clear, chronological, understandable terms. Produced by former Herald reporter Jonathan Wells, the 60 Minutes feature defined the type of local piece the Globe needs to do more often: the perspective piece that steps back, the well-timed look at an individual or institution that places an ongoing story in context.

At a time when newspaper circulation is shrinking nationally (a recent small uptick notwithstanding), when the news media's popularity ratings are lower than those of politicians, and when a new style of Internet-driven journalism -- jittery, opinionated, semi-factual -- is touted as the Next Big Thing, there is no more important function for the old media than to sift through the onrushing data stream, and to explain what's important and why.

The problem isn't that the Herald often scoops the Globe. In fact, it's rare that the Globe is beaten on a story of real significance. But the fear that it might be drives much of the agenda and stymies attempts to do the kinds of smart pieces that would most benefit its readers. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who's spoken at Globe seminars, thinks the Globe's metro coverage would be better if the paper simply forgot about the Herald and pursued its own vision. It's an interesting point, though unrealistic. "It's not necessarily rational, but it's the way the press culture works," Rosen says of the competitive relationship.

To be sure, the Globe's better reporters excel at providing context and keeping the big picture in sight. Recently, for instance, Scot Lehigh analyzed gubernatorial candidate Joe Malone's pledge to hold state spending to the inflation rate and revealed a simple, previously unnoted truth: Malone's reasonable-sounding promise is actually a radical proposal to shrink the size of government in relation to the rest of the economy. In a Focus piece a day earlier, Kate Zernike explained how the new, much-criticized public-school tests relate to the goals set forth in the state's education reform law -- a perspective that was informed by her own frequent forays into the classroom.

Yet even though a few individual reporters attempt to provide context and explanation, the metro section as a whole falls short. Stepping back and giving the big picture should be a consistent, ongoing mission. Instead, far too many reporters are content to write up that day's news and let the reader try to figure out what it means and whether it's important.

Take religious coverage, for example: the Catholic Church is an institution woven into the fabric of life in Greater Boston, but religion reporter Diego Ribadeneira has not put together a thoroughgoing look at the demographic and social changes that are driving the unprecedented church closings announced by Cardinal Bernard Law. Globe insiders often point to Ribadeneira as an exemplar of the kind of grassroots, non-institutional coverage that Storin wants; but there are times when one longs for the sense of authority his predecessor, Jim Franklin, brought to the beat.

Transportation reporter Tom Palmer does a good job of chronicling the Big Dig and even, in his reader-participation "Starts & Stops" column, of serving as ombudsman for commuter complaints. But he pays insufficient attention to how it's all going to come out -- to whether, as some critics predict, the new, $10 billion-plus Central Artery will quickly become as clogged and inefficient as the old one.

City Hall reporter Anthony Flint has broken a lot of development stories. Yet he rarely steps back and examines the impact of proposed developments on residents of the surrounding neighborhoods. "For the guy who rides the MBTA and goes to the coffee shop for a doughnut, those stories are not interesting," says a well-known elected official. "It's like they're writing the business section, for businessmen. There's no human element to these development stories."

Media reporter Mark Jurkowitz and others thoroughly covered the controversy over the "Head Negro in Charge" cover line that Boston magazine published last month to tease a profile of Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr. But the metro desk failed to take it another step, from a media to a cultural story. Janis Pryor, an adviser to the Ten Point Coalition, is still waiting for the Globe to explain that the battle reflected a struggle for power within the African-American community -- between older, civil rights-oriented liberals such as the Reverend Charles Stith, who tried to organize an advertiser boycott, and younger, more pragmatic, anti-ideological leaders such as the Reverend Eugene Rivers, who defended Boston. "I just wish from time to time we could get the story behind the story," says Pryor, a Rivers ally. "If those kinds of layers exist for this piece, then they exist for other pieces as well."

Police news is a special source of aggravation. The Globe publishes three basic types: breaking-news pieces on individual crimes; good-news stories on falling crime rates and on the city's reform-minded police commissioner, Paul Evans; and Spotlight Team investigations into corruption within the police department. Police coverage is always a tricky business, and it's important for the beat reporters to maintain access. But so far, no one has assembled the pieces that would provide an overall view of the Boston Police and of public safety.

One obvious way of providing coherence on a regular basis is by better organizing the coverage -- by imposing coherence on events that, in isolation, tend to look incoherent. Consider the example of the Norfolk area's Virginian-Pilot and the Portland Oregonian. Each paper runs a full, ad-free page in its metro section almost every day that's devoted to a different topic, such as civic life, public safety, or education -- kind of an expanded version of the religion, transportation, and consumer-affairs columns the Globe already runs. (To her credit, Hanafin plans to add an education column this fall).

A weekly "Civic Life" page would, in effect, force the Globe to come up with imaginative ways of talking about city political issues. It's certainly needed. The paper's coverage of last year's city elections was putrid -- or, to be more clinical, virtually nonexistent. The editors' excuse -- that Mayor Menino's rule was unchallenged and the city council is powerless and irrelevant -- is defensive and reactive. The local political culture is the ideal lens through which to view neighborhood issues, from concerns about crime to the inability to get a streetlight fixed or a pothole filled. Several of the councilors and their challengers were talking about some interesting ideas, including proposals to improve and expand early-childhood education. Then, too, the political arena is where the city's dramatic population changes are least reflected: Boston today is increasingly minority, immigrant, and young, but these new Bostonians don't vote in nearly the same proportions as the white, native, and middle-aged or older. This self-disenfranchisement is worthy of repeated examination. A few quickie pieces during the election campaign's final weeks don't make it -- and to run a post-election editorial lamenting the low turnout, as the Globe did, was, under the circumstances, too preachy.

Consider what the Globe could have done with a weekly "Civic Life" page during the campaign. Reporters could have examined ways to make the council more relevant. A retrospective on the bright, idea-generating council of the 1980s -- a body technically just as powerless as today's -- could have proved a useful counterpoint. With Menino unopposed, an enterprising reporter might even have explored whether the time had come to do away with the elected mayoralty, and instead to follow Cambridge's lead by having the city councilors hire a professional manager and elect a ceremonial mayor from among themselves.

Such enterprise needn't stop post-election, either. Several weeks ago the Herald ran an imaginative front-page story on whether people are successful when they fight City Hall by appealing parking tickets. Along those lines, BU's Mike Berlin notes that the Globe could regularly run stories that look into how well city departments are (and aren't) being run -- a middle ground between the full-scale Spotlight Team investigation and the simplistic feature. These could be bolstered with some modest public (a/k/a civic) journalism projects: attempts to find out what issues weigh most heavily on the minds of city residents and to hold public officials accountable.

Globe editors bristle at the suggestion that they've abandoned the kind of routine reportage that a city's leading daily should provide. "You've got to be kidding me," says Teresa Hanafin. "Development is the biggest story, and Tony Flint is on it full-time. My decision. Does that mean he's going to miss it when Peggy Davis-Mullen sneezes? Maybe. Do I care? No." Well, of course. But rather than invoke the irritation level of a city councilor's nasal passages, why not follow up the rather cryptic story by Geeta Anand that ran last June 24 on a federal subpoena into the real-estate and legal dealings of the councilor's husband, William Mullen? Readers came away from that piece not knowing whether Mullen was a wrongdoer or himself a victim -- yet not one word about the probe has been written in the past 11 months.

City council president Jim Kelly concedes that he's a bit miffed at the Globe's lack of coverage. "I think city government would run better if there were more attention given to the events in City Hall," he says. Menino, too, is known to be irritated by this. No doubt Globe editors tell themselves that it's not their job to keep Kelly and Menino happy, and they're right. What they can't explain away so easily, though, is the delight recently expressed by a top Menino adviser at the Globe's (and the Herald's) dearth of tough scrutiny.

Many of these and other shortcomings can be explained in a simple phrase: the Globe's local coverage is boring. Not all the time, of course, but often enough to be a real issue. The more energetic reporters move out of metro, either to new assignments at the Globe (Charlie Sennott to the Middle East, Kevin Cullen to Ireland, and Sally Jacobs to Living/Arts) or to national papers (Michael Grunwald to the Washington Post and Shirley Leung to the Wall Street Journal). Tragically, one of the section's best young reporters, Karen Avenoso, died of cancer earlier this year. Too many of the remaining reporters come across as disengaged from the region and its people.

This helps explain the paper's inability to plug into the city's and the region's ongoing conversation with itself. Consider, for instance, the recent call by religious conservatives for Jane Swift to drop out of the lieutenant governor's race and take care of her baby-to-be, picked up on the front page of the Herald but skipped by the Globe. A boneheaded story? Well, sure. But it was the talk of the region, prompting intelligent discussion on WBZ Radio's David Brudnoy Show, New England Cable News's NewsNight, and WBUR Radio's The Connection, which is syndicated nationally. "The Globe has unbelievably bad instincts for what people want to talk about and don't want to talk about," says a respected former Globe staffer who still lives in Boston.

Nothing would go further toward banishing the boredom than improving the writing, something that Hanafin and Storin say is already their top priority. The paper has made some strides in that area. Three recent examples: Peter Canellos's piece on an affordable-housing dispute in affluent Weston, in which he deftly explored the various players' complex motivations; Francie Latour's feature on a Boston couple who retired to their native Haiti, only to fall prey to murderers, possibly from their own family; and Tasha Robertson's nuanced profile of a controversial white lawyer who's built an enormous personal-injury practice in the black community.

The challenge is to build consistency. "For me, the Globe on certain days just excels. And on other days, you just feel like, `Where was that energy I felt the other day?' You just never quite feel like it's there all the time," says an editor at a competing news organization.

Who's next?

At this point, the smart money is probably on her staying. For one thing, there are no obvious candidates to take over. Mark Morrow would have been a natural, but with the 2000 presidential election coming up, it's highly unlikely he'll be pulled off the national desk. Peter Mancusi is a possibility. He was city editor before leaving to practice law in the early '90s and returned recently as deputy business editor. Some newsroom sources, though, say Mancusi is too valuable where he is. Hanafin's deputy, city editor Sean Murphy (son of retired Globe columnist Jeremiah Murphy), is certainly tough enough. But though he gets credit for passion and organization, he lacks diplomatic skills and in some circles is not considered the kind of conceptual thinker who should be running the show. Besides, Murphy has been on the metro desk nearly as long as Hanafin, and friends of his say he may well want to do something else.

Still, others see no real obstacles to Murphy's following Hanafin. And that could eventually pave the way for Peter Canellos, who, by all appearances, is being looked at as a leading candidate for metro editor once he has enough editing experience. One possible scenario could see Murphy as metro editor and Canellos as city editor. Murphy and Canellos are said to be close, and their different styles could complement each other. Murphy is a fiery, breaking-news kind of guy; a top-notch police and court reporter with a Suffolk law degree, he has alienated some with his temper, although others say he has worked hard to control it. "It's not a friggin' insurance office where we work. If every so often somebody has to blow off steam, so be it," says Hanafin of Murphy.

Canellos, like Murphy, is a thirtysomething with a law degree (from Columbia). Unlike Murphy, he is widely considered to be one of the newsroom intellectuals, a "great creative thinker," as Hanafin puts it. He served as Ben Bradlee's City Hall bureau chief, covered the presidential campaigns in '92 and '96, and writes often about legal affairs and urban issues; he was bound for the Washington bureau until Storin and Hanafin persuaded him to stay. But even though Canellos is getting the golden-boy treatment at the moment, not everyone is thrilled with his ascendance. "I think Canellos is a dangerous choice," says a staffer. "He gets high marks from a lot of people, but I find him condescending. He's one of these `the world would be perfect if I ran it' types."

Hanafin is tough to read. She says she wants to stay and talks about what a "kick" she still gets from taking charge of a big news story. She laughs at herself, recalling how she blew up at an intern in 1994 when he abandoned a stakeout at Nancy Kerrigan's house in Stoneham to relieve himself -- and missed Kerrigan and her family when they left the scene. "I screamed at him, `Why didn't you pee in the bushes?' He said, `Teresa, get a grip.' " She talks about the adrenaline rush she felt when she and veteran editor Steve Kurkjian were handling the news of Michael Kennedy's death last New Year's Eve.

Yet she makes no secret of how weary she gets of the 10-a.m.-to-8:30-p.m. Monday-to-Friday grind, the weekends spent editing stories she couldn't get to during the work week, always being on call. Ask her what she does for fun and she replies, "Log off. Go to bed." She allows that she's thinking of taking piano lessons. Of getting a master's degree in English. It's hard to see how she can do those things if she stays in her current position.

Hanafin has had her triumphs. In March 1997 the paper ran a series on rural poverty along Route 2 that may well have been the single best piece of work to appear in the Globe all year (the paper nominated it for a Pulitzer). Insiders say the stories' strong narrative style was largely the result of Hanafin's efforts.

But there have also been some notable lapses. In January, the Globe missed it completely when the Boston Housing Court ordered the eviction of several families from South Boston housing projects because teenage family members had committed hate crimes. Perhaps the biggest lapse took place on the night of the Louise Woodward verdict, last October 31. Sources say the desk had been left short-staffed even though Judge Hiller Zobel had signaled that the jury's decision might be imminent. Hanafin denies there were any problems, but Greg Moore doesn't. "We were not happy with our performance on that story," he says. "We did okay because we're big and we can scramble, but that was not up to our standards. We just did not anticipate as well, we did not plan as well, we did not execute as well as we should have."

Still, Walter Robinson, Ben Bradlee, Kirk Scharfenberg, and other metro editors had plenty of critics, too. If metro has slipped since Hanafin took over, it's not especially noticeable. "Has she done a great job? I don't see that," says a supporter. "But I don't see that the others were any better than she. The one thing I'd be wary of is crapping on the metro editor du jour. Because the same people who are shitting on Teresa -- and they've been doing it since day one -- also shat on all her predecessors."

Hanafin has heard the things her detractors are saying. The speculation about when she'll step aside. The sniping about her work habits. She brings up and denies an oft-repeated story about her missing a day during a key time in the Woodward trial because her dog was sick, and seems genuinely incredulous that anyone would question her dedication -- or her need to take an occasional day off. "It makes me puzzled," she says. "It really makes me feel like I've got to give people more to do. I am not unhappy. I am not dissatisfied. It's not at the point where I'm looking around. Not at all."

Teresa Hanafin is saying the right things -- about improving the writing, about getting more smart, sophisticated, issue-oriented pieces into the paper, about addressing real people's real concerns. But can she deliver? So far, her grade has to be considered an incomplete. Yes, most of her reporters like her. Yes, she's doing better than she was a year ago. Yes, she finally has long-needed help in the persons of Ande Zellman and Peter Canellos. But it remains to be seen whether she can transform liking into respect. Whether she can, as one reporter puts it, inspire people to follow her into battle.

"I don't think there is a mission," says a respected former staffer who still reads the Globe. "I don't think there is a clear sense that we're going to sail this ship in a particular direction. And I think it shows every day."

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