Boston
magazine lays off six, seventh resigns as a result
Six employees, including
top editors, have been laid off at Boston magazine, and another resigned
in response.
All remaining employees
will have to take a five-day unpaid furlough.
The Boston Herald reported
that those laid off are Boston’s editor, James Burnett; its
creative director, Patrick Mitchell; its online editor, Paul Flannery;
its executive director of marketing, Dawn Curtis Hanley; its food
editor, Amy Traverso; and its marketing specialist, Kate Brier. Boston’s
features editor, Jolyon Helterman, resigned in response to the layoffs.
The departures bring Boston
magazine’s total staff to 41, according to the Philadelphia
Inquirer.
Andrew Putz, editor of
Minnesota Monthly of Minneapolis, will take Burnett’s job, effective
July 22, according to a Boston magazine press release. A new creative
director will be hired at the same time.
The acting editor until
Putz arrives will be Larry Platt, editor of Philadelphia magazine.
It and Boston magazine are owned by Philadelphia-based Metrocorp Marketing.
Platt has been supervising Burnett as editorial director since February,
spending time away from Philadelphia magazine and working with Boston
magazine, in an effort to improve Boston’s editorial content,
according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The moves at Boston magazine
were attributed to an effort to reorganize to counteract the diminished
economy and decreased circulation, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The final step of reorganization
includes Paul Reulbach, former publisher of Boston magazine, who will
resume that post, which he held from 2003 to 2007.
Putz has been at Minnesota
Monthly since March 2007, overseeing newsstand sale increases in both
2008 and so far in 2009, according to the Boston magazine press release.
He previously worked for Philadelphia magazine, under Platt, and edited
Indianapolis Monthly. He has won two Clarion Awards for feature writing.
Reulbach, who
has been general manager and vice president of Media Sales and Consulting
Group of the Pohly Company, based in Boston, returns to a job where
he established Boston magazine’s “Design Home” and
spearheaded some of its “best revenue-generating years,”
according to the magazine’s press release.
Hartford
(Conn.) Courant dumps redesign
The Hartford (Conn.) Courant
has scrapped its redesign, returning its masthead to the top of its
front page for the first time since September.
At the time of the redesign,
the Courant said the change was meant to put a larger emphasis on
Connecticut news and make the paper more coordinated with its Web
site, according to The Associated Press. The masthead under the redesign
was stripped down the left side of the Courant’s front page.
Ex-Courant
reporter gets 12 years for manslaughter
James
Robertson, a former reporter and editor for The Hartford (Conn.) Courant,
was sentenced June 25 to 12 years in prison on a manslaughter conviction
in Connecticut Superior Court.
Robertson, 66, who had
also worked as a mayoral aide in Hartford, shot and fatally wounded
Ralph Colon, 56, on August 9, 2007.
Robertson told Judge Michael
Sheldon that he was afraid when Colon and a friend came to his apartment
door on the night of the shooting, WTIC 1080 News/Talk Radio of Farmington,
Conn., reported.
Sheldon found Robertson’s
fear to be out of proportion with the threat and said the use of force
was excessive. In sentencing Robertson, Sheldon called his action
an “obsessive overreaction,” the Courant reported.
The conviction resulted
from Robertson’s second trial. The Courant reported that the
first ended with a hung jury. The maximum sentence Robertson could
have received for manslaughter was 40 years.
The Courant reported that
Robertson was a reporter, rock reviewer and editor at the paper for
18 years before he went to work for former Hartford Mayor Carrie Saxon
Perry.
Boston
Herald reporter charged with kicking elderly man
A Boston Herald crime reporter
who recently wrote a story for the Herald about the trials of amateur
boxing has been charged with kicking in the chest a 74-year-old man
with emphysema, the Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, Mass., reported.
O’Ryan Johnson, 33,
of South Boston, Mass., was at a Laundromat in Groveland, Mass., June
16 when he allegedly attacked the victim, Kent White. Johnson has
been charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon –
his foot – on a person over 65, a charge that could lead to
a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, according to the Eagle-Tribune.
Johnson, who is 5-foot-10
and 160 pounds, had asked those in the Laundromat for help with a
washing machine, then swore at and kicked the 5-foot-6, 130-pound
White after exchanging words with him when White approached Johnson
to help him, witnesses told the Eagle-Tribune.
“The victim doesn’t
remember what he said, and then Johnson started swearing at him,”
Jeff Gillen, Groveland, Mass.’s deputy police chief, told the
Eagle-Tribune. “The victim backed away and Johnson ran at him,
kicking him in the chest.”
Johnson then ran out the
back door with a 3- to 5-year-old girl he had with him at the time,
witnesses reportedly said. White reported the incident to the police
and later identified Johnson, who turned himself in after the police
located him based on license plate tips from witnesses who saw him
when he returned to get his laundry, the Eagle-Tribune reported.
Johnson’s case has
been continued until July 23, and he was released on personal recognizance.
The Eagle-Tribune, where
Johnson once worked as a reporter, said he was working at the Herald
the evening of June 18, but declined to comment on the advice of his
lawyer.
Johnson’s
Facebook profile picture showed him in boxing gear, striking another
man’s face, on the afternoon of June 18, but had been changed
to him giving a young girl a piggyback ride later that day, the Eagle-Tribune
reported.
Ex-Globe
Spotlight reporter publishes book on cop cover-up
In
his new book, “The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston’s
Racial Divide,” published in June, Dick Lehr, a former investigative
reporter for The Boston Globe, details violence, racial injustice
and betrayal in the ranks of the Boston Police Department.
The book reports that,
on an especially cold night in January 1995, a group of Boston police
officers made a terrible mistake: Instead of brutally beating the
murder suspect they had chased, they realized that the bloody, unconscious
heap before them was a cop, plain-clothed and in pursuit of the same
suspect.
The attacked officer, Michael
Cox, shared one thing in common with the murder suspect: he was black.
The book also reports that,
instead of an apology, the Boston Police Department responded with
a cover-up that climbed all the way up the chain of command to the
then-Commissioner Paul Evans. The apology
came years later, only after Cox was awarded nearly $1 million in
a Boston civil court.
Lehr, now a professor of
journalism at Boston University and staff member with the New England
Center for Investigative Reporting based at BU, was a reporter for
nearly two decades for the Boston Globe, where he was a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize. He is the coauthor of the Edgar Award-winning
“Black Mass,” an Edgar Award finalist, “Judgment
Ridge,” and “The Underboss.”
While completing
“The Fence”, he was a visiting journalist at the Schuster
Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University in Waltham,
Mass.
Not
all teens giving up on newspapers
The assumption that teens
are too busy texting and Tweeting to read the newspaper is false,
according to a new research report by The Nielsen Co. of New York
City.
More than a quarter –
29 percent -- of 18- to 20-year-olds polled in the United States say
they read a daily newspaper on an average day and about a third –
34 percent -- say they read a paper on an average Sunday.
The media universe is expanding
for teens, though. About half of U.S. teens use Facebook and 37 percent
of teens access the Web through their telephones. But teens only spend
11 hours and 32 minutes per month online, far below the average of
29 hours and 15 minutes.
The Nielsen study
concludes that teens embrace new media not at the cost of traditional
media, but as a supplement to it.
Escaped
N.Y. Times reporter has New England roots, ties
David
Rohde, The New York Times reporter who recently escaped after seven
months of captivity with the Taliban, is a Pulitzer-Prize winning
former reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, based in Boston.
Rohde was born in West
Hartford, Conn., and moved to Maine as a teenager. He attended Brown
University in Providence, R.I., where he received a bachelor’s
degree in history.
Rohde lived in Boston during
the 1990s. His reporting for the Monitor on the massacre of Bosnian
Muslims won the 1996 Pulitzer for international reporting.
On Nov. 10, 2008, while
reporting in Afghanistan, Rohde and an Afghan reporter were captured.
The two escaped by climbing over their compound’s wall June
19 and hitching a ride with a Pakistani army scout to a nearby base.
Rohde was part of the 2009
New York Times team that won a Pulitzer for its coverage of Pakistan
and Afghanistan.
While reporting for the
Monitor, Rohde was also taken captive for 10 days by Serbian officials.
Ex-Mass.
public safety secretary caught in affair with reporter
Edward Flynn, former secretary
of public safety in Massachusetts, has admitted to an extramarital
affair with a Milwaukee reporter who profiled him in Milwaukee Magazine
earlier this year.
Milwaukee journalist Jessica
McBride, 39, who has taught journalism ethics courses as a lecturer
at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, confirmed in mid-June that
she and Flynn, 61, had an affair. Flynn acknowledged the affair about
the same time. Both are married.
Flynn first began working
in Massachusetts as police chief in Braintree and then in Chelsea.
He was Massachusetts’ secretary of public safety from 2003 to
2006, under then-Gov. Mitt Romney, and was police commissioner in
Springfield, Mass. from 2006 to 2008, when he became police chief
in Milwaukee.
McBride has denied being
involved with Flynn while she was writing the magazine article, saying
she turned in her story in January and did not meet again with Flynn
or begin their relationship until May.
The items
above were written from published reports by Aaron Lester, Jennifer
Skala and Jen Slothower, graduate students at the Northeastern University
School of Journalism and news staff coordinators for the Bulletin.
