Brookline Newcomer 

Heralding a change 

Note: This column remains unpublished. The TAB's editor declined to run it.

I know that too many newspapers these days are just businesses like any other, owned by people more interested in monopolizing advertising dollars than enhancing news coverage. That's why it was no surprise over the past decade when, in community after community, CNC's TABs and Journals and Chronicles became the only local papers in town. Fidelity's proven even better at homogenizing the American landscape than other corporate chains like Starbucks and McDonald's.

With the competition gone, Fidelity could underfund its acquisitions despite widespread complaints, which escalated a couple of years ago with increased cost-cutting measures. The chain merged papers and eliminated local offices. It paid editors and reporters so little that turnover surged. And the people at the top fretted a whole lot more over page size and other doodads designed to bring in more advertising than they did over bringing readers a better paper.

Now don't get me wrong. I've had only positive experiences working with my three Brookline editors (in just 14 months!) and the TAB's new and newer reporters. I'm glad our paper has more substance to it than many others I've seen. But frequent turnover requires repeated time-consuming efforts by new staff to familiarize themselves with local history and issues. The lack of a physical presence in town, not enough reporters to uncover all the ever-present dirt, and too many decision making layers take their toll.

Will things improve under the new regime? The cynic in me says no. All the excitement in Herald publisher Patrick Purcell's early statements revolved around money: the prospect of selling more ads to companies trying to reach both the Herald's urban readers and CNC's higher-income suburbanites. That will help the Herald's bottom line, but it would have been comforting to read that Purcell also aims to improve quality.

Purcell might close down some CNC papers. That's not necessarily a bad thing in communities with two CNC papers like Cambridge (the TAB and Chronicle). But the last thing we should want in Brookline is to merge our only remaining newspaper with Newton's. We have different issues. We need our own editor and reporters.

On the bright side, although the Herald's a business, at least it's a news business, not an investment portfolio. Its audience and style differ from the Boston Globe's, but it does some things pretty well. Sometimes it even does a better job than the Globe, as in covering opposition to MCAS.

There's always a danger the Herald could make things worse. For example, it could dissolve the CNC papers into a weekly Herald "suburban supplement" that competes directly with the similar approach of the Globe (itself owned by the New York Times). Without any remaining community-based papers, we'd be worse off than we are now.

But if enough readers demand that the new owners bring back true community newspapering, and if Purcell commits himself to reversing recent trends, the switch from Fidelity may turn out to be a blessing. Renaming us the Brookline Herald or the like is less important than making sure we have the resources to do a better job.

More resources won't resolve the broader problem: increased domination of public discourse by corporate-owned media, from television and radio to major Internet sites to our own community news. Regardless of what happens to the Brookline TAB, town residents should develop more avenues for unmediated discussion and debate. We need more neighborhood newsletters, more email discussion lists, more resident-initiated websites.

We could even use another newspaper, especially if the Herald keeps its eye on the ads rather than on the news. 

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