By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 28, 2008

BOSTON -- Kevin Convey is proud of that morning's screaming front-page headline.

"HONEY, I DUCT-TAPED THE KIDS!" blares the Boston Herald, describing a local mother accused of mistreating her young children and posting the photos on MySpace.

"Tabloids in some cases say what other papers only think," says Convey, the Herald's editor, whose office faces a freeway separating the paper's unfashionable neighborhood from the blue-collar enclave of Southie. "If you don't have fun putting out a tabloid, you're brain-dead."

Convey may be having a grand time, but his paper is hurting, its daily circulation having shrunk to 203,000 (compared with 384,000 for the Boston Globe), and just 113,000 on Sunday. He is down to a scrappy band of 10 city reporters, beyond those in the features, business and sports sections.

As a severe advertising downturn continues to squeeze even the country's elite newspapers -- the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have all been cutting staff -- it could decimate the No. 2 papers in the handful of cities still fortunate enough to have them. And that has sparked a debate here about whether an increasingly upscale Boston still wants, or needs, a tabloid.

Putting aside markets where two papers either have the same owner (Philadelphia, Atlanta) or share business operations with federal approval (Detroit, Seattle, Denver), the only remaining major cities with head-to-head competition are New York, Washington, Chicago and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles (where the Daily News editor quit this month after 22 of his 122 staffers were cut). The parent company of the Chicago Sun-Times is looking for a buyer after former owner Conrad Black's conviction for fraud and obstruction of justice. The Washington Times is a money-losing operation subsidized by members of the Unification Church. And the New York Post, awash in red ink, thrives only because of the deep pockets of owner Rupert Murdoch.

It was Murdoch who rescued what had been the Herald-American in 1982, buying the paper from Hearst hours after the building was shut down, leaving some staffers in tears. "It was like Fleet Street around here," Convey recalls. "The place was flooded with Englishmen." Twelve years later, to regain the local Fox TV station that federal regulators had forced him to unload, Murdoch sold the paper to his publisher, Patrick Purcell.

But as this city becomes more of a technology, banking and medical center, who exactly is the Herald's audience?

"It's almost as if Boston doesn't have a place for its second daily anymore," Boston magazine columnist Joe Keohane wrote recently, particularly one that features a constant parade of "pervs, solons, swindlers, bums and punks."

Convey, who keeps a poster of Che Guevara in his office, says the problems facing his guerrilla operation are not directly linked to the shrinking of the city's working class. Still, he says, "a lot of people find tabloids to be beneath them. In Boston, where the air is a bit more rarefied and you're closer to Harvard, some people have a problem with tabloids. I think there's a certain nobility in tabloids."

Says Herald columnist Howie Carr: "I don't think it's that Massachusetts has become snootier. The old Herald readers are just leaving the state. The blue-collar exodus has affected the paper."

An increasingly crowded media marketplace has been strangling also-ran newspapers since the Washington Star, Philadelphia Bulletin and Chicago Daily News vanished into history a quarter-century ago. The Cincinnati Post, which closed at year's end, is the latest second-place paper to bite the dust.

Just about every newspaper is struggling with reinvention. When Marcus Brauchli resigned under pressure as the Wall Street Journal's top editor last week, it was because Murdoch was impatient about the pace of change as he tries to transform his newest property into a more general-interest paper.

Tabloids are a special animal: snappier, snarkier, filled with triumph and tragedy. The tabs obsess on boldfaced names, the quick and the dirty, not seven-part series aimed at winning prizes. But now there are untold thousands of bloggers serving up short bursts of infotainment without having to worry about the cost of newsprint.

A second paper usually keeps the dominant daily on its toes, sniffing out (or pumping up) overlooked scandals and often proving more popular in poorer neighborhoods. But with shoestring budgets, there is little margin for error.

The Herald's content may be thin, but it is a feisty paper that relies on street sales for three-quarters of its circulation (hence, lots of celebrity photos and Red Sox items). A typical Page 1 banner: "GROPE PATROL: We go undercover with T cops on the lookout for rail sickos." "Hilton Heats Up Harvard" was simply a gossip item about Paris Hilton on a local promotion tour. Former governor Romney's withdrawal from the presidential race was rendered as "MITT HAPPENS."

"We crusade against the bad guys," says Jessica Van Sack, the police bureau chief, who joined the subway patrol. "We didn't catch any pervs, unfortunately."

Van Sack, who also tries to cover the mayor's office -- the Herald has no full-time reporter there -- recalls hearing a siren and racing outside City Hall last month. While a Globe reporter stayed in his office, Van Sack says, she came upon the aftermath of a machete attack. "I can't tell you how many times our little band of pirates just outfoxed them," she says. "We have to go after every ounce of news we see." Of course, the Globe covers a wide swath of important news that the Herald simply ignores.

In February, the Globe reported that a federal bankruptcy judge, Robert Somma, had resigned after pleading no contest to driving while intoxicated. But the Herald's account said Somma had been arrested "while reportedly wearing a woman's dress, heels and stockings, and carrying a purse." "The Herald is still needed to keep the Globe honest," Carr says.

Convey's comparison: "The Globe is more likely to write a story about how some government program is going to assist the poor and downtrodden. We're more likely to suggest it's a boondoggle that ought to be bounced off the face of the Earth."

The Globe, which won a Pulitzer for arts criticism this month, is not what it used to be. The paper, owned by the New York Times Co., cut 65 jobs out of roughly 440 in the last two years and last week another 23 accepted buyouts. It has dropped all its foreign and domestic correspondents, except for those in Washington. Both papers have lost about 20 percent of their circulation since 2000.

"We're facing the same challenges everyone else is, trying to figure out what the future of the newspaper is going to look like," says Globe Editor Martin Baron. "We have become more local. We have significantly scaled back what we do outside the Boston area. We're realists here. We realize the business is changing."

But the Herald, which has shuttered its Washington bureau, is hardly positioned to take advantage. Its aging presses frequently break down. The 125-person staff -- one-third the size of the Globe's -- makes little effort to cover the suburbs. Every out-of-town reporting trip has to be weighed against the meager budget.

And a depleted staff is more prone to slip-ups. The Herald recently picked up a rewrite of a Huffington Post blog by humorist Andy Borowitz, headlined "Cheney Challenges Hillary to Hunting Contest." The paper had to admit that its story was "based on a blogger's satire."

In a move freighted with symbolism, the Herald plans to abandon its headquarters, outsource its printing and move to rented quarters. For now, though, the underdog paper is still chasing the sickos and pervs.

"I don't think it's time to give up the ghost," Convey says.