The Ugly American

THE BODY is twitching. There is new life." The voice over the radio is identified as that of Dave O'Brien, a recently hired columnist for the Boston Herald American. He is doing a radio commercial for the Herald about the reasons that led him away from the weekly Boston Phoenix to the daily, slowly transforming Herald. As Joe Pilati, O'Brien's replacement as the Phoenix's media columnist, wrote in a column this summer, it took guts for the Herald to allow that choice quote to go out over the airwaves. But like it or not, O'Brien's new bosses had to admit that it was true.

The Herald American, for several years now, has had a reputation as Boston's second-class newspaper. It was seen as the more conservative of the city's two papers, the one that played stories more sensationally, and the one whose reporting was generally of a lower quality. The Globe, partly because of its inclusion a few years ago in Time Magazine's list of the ten best newspapers in the country and partly because of its "Spotlight Team" prize-winning investigative series, has been viewed as the city's most influential newspaper.

The Globe was also seen as the more financially secure of the two, and consequently the one that could invest the most money in gathering the news. The Herald American is the product of a merger of the old morning Boston Herald Traveler and the afternoon Record American/Sunday Advertiser. The Hearst Corporation owned the Record American, and had the available capital to salvage the ailing Herald Traveler. At first, the only change from the Herald Traveler was a new banner across the front page and the inclusion of more writers, among them William Randolph Hearst, Jr., who writes a Sunday front-page column. Gradually, however, the Hearst Corporation has made its muscle felt in the newspaper.

WITHIN THE last year, Hearst installed a new editor at the Herald named Robert C. Bergenheim. Bergenheim has started to overhaul the paper, and his first real change was seen on October 18. There had long been reports that the Herald would change over to a new kind of typesetting equipment and printing process, or that it would adopt a new format. The Hearst people had imported a British graphics expert who redesigned the paper's makeup style and chose different typefaces for headlines.

The new approach is supposedly modeled on the London Times, but it looks rather like the Philadelphia Inquirer. The designer introduced a new style logotype for items like the front page News Digest, Weather, and Good News items, as well as for the various columns. They are in the form of thin white lettering on a black capsule shaped background. Despite the new look, the overall appearance of the paper is still somehow darker and bolder than the almostly sedately gray Globe.

Whether the facelift represents anything more than just that is still an open question. The Herald has long been known for its occasionally inaccurate reporting, and that tendency has apparently not yet changed. Earlier this year, the Herald reported that Yale President Kingman Brewster was about to resign and would be replaced by a current dean, who would become the university's first woman president. Although not the result of a Crimson parody of the Yale Daily News, it sounded like it might have been. Last week, in a story billed as an exclusive from its Washington bureau, the Herald reported that Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger '50 was likely to accept the offer of a chair endowed in his name at Columbia University. If he decided against that, the story went on, he reportedly could choose from offers such as the presidency of the Ford Foundation, the chairmanship of CBS, or "the vice-presidency of Harvard University." Although any of those reports may eventually become true, none had been confirmed at that time. One local radio station broadcast the Kissinger-Columbia story briefly, but soon took it off the air, deciding it was too flimsy.

Stories like these end up hurting the Herald's accurate reporting. One Sunday night in early October, the Herald got the story of the departure of Boston Police Commissioner Robert J. DiGrazia to Rockville, Maryland, and quickly made it the lead story in their Monday paper. When the early edition hit the streets around 11 p.m., the reaction was skeptical: "Remember the Yale story, just wait to see what the Globe has," said most local editors. At the Globe, however, editors decided to keep the DiGrazia story out of the first editions--thereby not allowing the Herald enough time to use the story. DiGrazia did resign, and the Herald's reputation began to improve.

STILL THERE are problems with the Herald's news gathering forces. The paper is a member of the Associated Press and United Press International and subscribes to The New York Times News Service, so its national and international coverage is often equal to the Globe's. But in the past, the Herald has shown a reluctance to spend money covering local news, having few local political writers, most of whom seem to get their news from press releases put out by elected officials. During Boston's turmoil over busing to achieve school integration, the Herald put two reporters on education stories full time, and their coverage improved remarkably.

Although its local coverage is considerably better, especially on events at the State House, the Herald is still vulnerable to charges of sensationalism. In its first revamped Sunday edition, the Herald's lead headline read: "15 State Firms May Move Out If Flat Rate Voted." Until then, the Herald's stories about the various state referenda questions had been superficially balanced, but the scare headline destroyed that. The story was based on a prediction from a vice president of the First National Bank of Boston, who declined to name the firms he said told him they would leave the state if a proposition mandating uniform electric rates passed on November 2.

When the Herald switched typefaces and changed its name on Sundays from the Sunday Herald Advertiser to simply the Herald American, it also added a new Sunday magazine section called "Beacon." Its first cover story suggested that Beacon would be governed by the same sort of news judgment that graces the Herald's front page. Entitled "The Girl Next Door is a Stripper," the article details the lifestyle of a woman who lives in North Shore suburban Beverly and works at the Two O'Clock Lounge in Boston's combat zone. Surprisingly--after its play on the cover--the article is fairly sensitive, but certainly did not enhance the newspaper's image in feminists' eyes.

The supposedly all-new Herald American really isn't new at all, at least not yet. Bergenheim and others at the Herald promise more revisions in the paper, and more new writers. In the same issue that endorsed President Ford for re-election, the Herald announced that it had hired Mary Perot Nichols, formerly of The Village Voice. As of yesterday, Nichols was to begin work on a series called "The Power Brokers of Boston."

Now claiming the largest morning circulation in New England, the Herald American is in a race to stop its falling circulation figures before the Globe overtakes it. With its new format and new writers, the Herald would seem to have a chance. But the paper's conservative editorial stance and its sometimes questionable news judgment still keep most of the Globe's readers away. A young Democratic politician recently capsulized most opinions of the Herald. "I love to read it," he said, "but I could never bring myself to buy it."