For much of the 20th century The Boston Herald was the leading newspaper in Boston. A broadsheet rather than a tabloid (as at present), it was the generally Republcian voice of the Brahmin aristocracy. When the Boston Post went out of business in 1958, its two remaining morning rivals were the Boston Globe and The Boston Daily Record — The Record-American after The Boston Evening American closed in 1961.
The Globe was generally Democratic — “timidly liberal” in one famous assessment. The Record was a typical Hearst tabloid of the day, covering sports, crime and working-class Boston, yet publishing the exquisite film critic Elliot Norton. It gave out the illegal daily number — the page where it could be found was thinly hidden in the index.
The Herald-Traveler company also owned WHDH-radio, which broadcast Red Sox games. (The company published the evening Boston Traveler until 1967; at that point the morning paper became The Herald-Traveler.) The radio station stabilized profitability during postwar changes shaking the underpinnings of the newspaper business. Among these: television news; suburban migration and two-handed commutation by car; and the necessity of — and difficulty in implementing — labor-saving technology. The company was seemingly rescued from these challenges for good when it was awarded the license for Boston’s third television station, Channel 5, in 1957.
But astonishingly, the routine relicensure of Channel 5 was successfully challenged before the Federal Communications Commission by a group of local academics and businessmen called Boston Broadcasters. After years of appeals in federal courts, the first WHDH-TV (not the current Channel 7) became WCVB-TV, in 1972.
The loss of Channel 5 exposed the effect of years of bad newspaper management. Whereas the radio- and television-bereft Globe had concentrated on advertising lines and better journalism, the Herald had bet its survival on holding onto the television station. Within a year of losing that bet the newspaper faced extinction.
At the last hour the Hearst Corporation came to the rescue. It bought The Herald-Traveler as much for the modern plant on Harrison Avenue as its other assets. The antiquated Renaissance-revival Record-American building on Winthrop Square was sold. (The building would be beautifully restored.) The two papers were combined into a broadsheet called The Herald American — the Herald name oddly joined with that of the former Evening American.
The Herald American was also an odd journalistic jointure, and therefore an odd marketing one. It, too, was about to fail in 1982, when Rupert Murdoch, the global media tycoon, offered to buy out Hearst. This was the rescue Sen. Edward Kennedy famously blocked for a time on the grounds that it would violate the FCC’s rule against cross-ownership of newspapers and electronic media in the same market. Kennedy was accused of caring more about keeping one of is critics out of Boston than saving The Herald American’s jobs.
The Murdoch paper restored The Herald’s name and The Daily Record’s tabloid form, which Hearst had reintroduced in 1981. With punchy, often corny headlines; a legal numbers game called Wingo; a political mischief-finder without mercy in Howie Carr; a gossp columnist with an array of sources in Norma Nathan; and a delight in ridiculing the Globe (“the boring broadsheet”), the paper captured a niche. Claus von Bulow — on trial in Rhode Island for attempting to murder his wife — was “Claus the Louse.” Other headliners were the “Rape Doc” and the “Pot Cop.”
Rupert Murdoch would sell to his publisher and protege, Patrick Purcell, in 1994. In recent years, particularly under the editorship of Andrew Costello from 1992 to 2004, the paper was a serious product — covering many beats better than the Globe. (I infer that conclusion from the ratio of my own theft of ideas for columns, which over the Costello years favored the Herald’s reporting by about five to one!)
On February 25, Andrew Costello resigned, replaced by Kenneth Chandler, his predecessor from 1986 to 1992. Wingo is back, as are headlines such as “Drunken Surgeon Busted” (March 9). The experienced political columnist Wayne Woodlief has been semi-retired, and Mike Barnicle — the former Globe columnist dismissed for mendacity, whom Costello had called “not up to our standards” — has been hired as a featured columnist.
One shouldn’t begrudge Barnicle a second chance, though the 60-year-old living in Lincoln may have a hard time recapturing the appeal of the brash 30-year-old from Fitchburg. The deeper issue his hiring reveals is that The Herald is going for broke — and that may mean the Costello Herald was going broke.
Under Costello, The Herald was a good newspaper — something I value more than a “great” newpaper. I personally prefer his Herald to Kenneth Chandler’s. But I greatly prefer “Claus the Louse” and Wingo to no Herald at all.
Godspeed over there.
