Tag Results for New York Daily News

The Boston Herald has named Joe Sciacca as its next editor. Sciacca succeeds Kevin Convey who is taking over the editor’s job at the NY Daily News. What will Joe Sciacca’s leadership mean to the paper?

Big news today at One Herald Square: Kevin Convey, a longtime Herald veteran who's been editor-in-chief for the past three-plus years, is leaving to become editor of New York's Daily News. He replaces Martin Dunn, whose departure was reportedly prompted by his wife's battle with cancer.

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, but Dunn was editor of the Herald for a very brief period in the early 1990s.

Convey's new job entails a switch of tabloid loyalties. In Boston, the Herald is allied with its former owner, Rupert Murdoch. Herald publisher Pat Purcell, who bought the paper from his old boss in 1994, helps Murdoch run regional properties such as the Standard-Times of New Bedford and the Cape Cod Times.

In New York, the Daily News — owned by real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, who also has significant Boston ties — has been entangled for years in a steel-cage death match with the New York Post, whose owner, of course, is Murdoch. Here is the Daily News' press release, along with Convey's reaction:

I am looking forward to the challenge of editing the Daily News, which has some of the most talented people in the newspaper business and the web anywhere in the world. It is a great privilege.

Convey's a smart guy who took over the Herald at a time when the paper, and the news business in general, was shrinking drastically. During the 1990s, he was part of the triumvirate that ran the paper, serving as managing editor for features along with editor Andy Costello and managing editor for news Andrew Gully.

Convey became editor-in-chief of Community Newspaper Co., which published about 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts, when Purcell added it to his holdings in the early 2000s. After Purcell sold CNC to GateHouse Media a few years later, Convey returned to the Herald, serving as the paper's number-two while editorial director Ken Chandler, tarted it up and made it more gossipy — more of a tabloid, if you like. After Chander moved on, Convey took over.

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote about Convey's Herald in 2008.

Best of luck to Convey, who's a good guy, and whom I generally found to be helpful and accessible back when I was covering the local media for the Boston Phoenix.

Needless to say, it will be fascinating to see who ends up succeeding Convey at the Herald.

Update: Well, that didn't take long.

Correction: Ken Chandler's name now fixed, thanks to an alert reader.

The legend of little Jimmy O'Keefe, undercover journalist and conservative provocateur wonder-boy, just continues to unravel.

First there was his ill-conceived stunt trying to get into the Louisiana offices of US Senator Mary Landrieu, supposedly to document how Landrieu wasn't being responsive to constituents angered by her stance on universal health care. That got O'Keefe arrested.

Now prosecutors in Brooklyn have cleared ACORN workers of supposedly advising O'Keefe and a cohort posing as a prostitute, Hannah Giles, how to hide the proceeds of her illegal business. The New York Daily News, quoting a law enforcement source, said the decision was based on unedited versions of O'Keefe's ACORN tapes, and that the footage widely seen in the media was edited "to meet their agenda."

It's also become clear in recent days that O'Keefe was not - as many media outlets including the New York Times and, yes, we here at Beat the Press, reported - dressed as a pimp when he went into ACORN's offices. Instead, footage of him garbed in a cartoonish pimp costume was taken outside, and then edited into the final product.

Of course the video of O'Keefe dressed as a pimp does serve at least one useful purpose: It will forever remind us of the distiction between actual investigative journalists and clowns pretending to be ...

Exhibit 1 for the argument that newspapers are doomed: Dinosaur thinking and Supersaurus-sized egos.

New York magazine had this item recently on why the New York Post and the New York Daily News couldn't come together on cost-sharing measures that would have helped the bottom line of both struggling Gotham tabloids. According to New York, Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman and the Post's Rupert Murdoch couldn't put their old emnities aside, even if it meant possibly saving their resective papers.

Incidentally, the issue has a local angle too. A year ago Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell told Beat the Press he tried for years to convince the Boston Globe to share costs like delivery trucks, savings that could have made last year's financial crisis at the Globe a little less painful.

I guess, we'll see in the coming year whether Boston's newspaper war is any more enlightened than New York's.