Beat the Press

Former State Senator Dianne Wilkerson’s attorney claims the release of undercover photos of her allegedly taking bribes has damaged any chance of her getting a fair trial. What is the media’s role in publishing the allegations in these cases?     

The tragedy in Texas blanketed the airwaves. Reporting the story was made more difficult because the base was in lockdown and there was limited official information.  How did those restrictions impact the coverage?

The big question some people - including myself - were asking after learning 30-something Boston Globe pop culture and television writer Joanna Weiss was moving to the paper's editorial page staff was: Would she be changing the op-ed page, or would it be changing her?

I talked to Weiss by phone yesterday and she said the answer is definitely the former.

"I'll still be writing about pop culture, but from a different direction," she said. "I think it's exciting; it's a different kind of forum. And I'll reach a different kind of reader that didn't necessarily read my TV coverage."

Beginning a week from Monday, Weiss will be writing a weekly column for the editorial page as well as having a seat at the table for editorial meetings and being asked to write some of the Globe's unsigned editorials.

She said she expects her columns to echo recent stories like the one where she wrote about "Balloon Boy" Falcon Heene from the perspective of a mother of a five year old, or one about the David Lettermen sex-with-show-employees scandal as seen through the prism of Roger Sterling, the fictional ne'er-do-well womanizer on AMC's popular series "Mad Men." She says her move isn't so much about making the editorial page hipper or more Gen-X-ey, but more an acknowledgement that the lens through which people see the world is often attached to a television camera.

"There once was a feeling that that stuff had to be relegated to some outer section of the paper," she said. "It's just another lens to deal with the issues. David Letterman gives us an opportunity to talk about sexual exploitation in the workplace. It's all relevant."

Weiss said she's prepared for some pushback and carping from traditionalists who object to a writer who is perhaps best known in recent years for covering ins and outs of "Survivor" and "American Idol" moving to the heady world of the editorial page.

 "I'm sure there will be people who complain about lots of things that the Globe does," she said. "But it's the same answer I give when people ask why a news person would want to cover TV: Because it's connected to bigger themes, it's connected to people."

Globe Op-Ed editor Peter Canellos hinted at Weiss's role on his staff in his e-mail about the move to Globe staffers, calling her: "A close observer of social trends and culture, and a bright, empathetic writer." But Weiss says the plan, which they had talked about for some time, was always to inject a younger and more pop-culture-oriented sensibility to the section.

"Peter knows what I like to write about and the way I write," Weiss said. "I think the things I write about appeal to him. I think he's interested in getting a lot of different voices on the page."

To that end, Weiss will join the Joan Vennochi, Scott Lehigh, Derrick Z. Jackson, conservative voice Jeff Jacoby, and veteran columnists Ellen Goodman and James Carroll, as well as longtime editorial board member Larry Harmon, who is also being given a new weekly op-ed column by Canellos.

"I'll be bringing the perspective of someone who knows about pop culture, and of a working mother with young kids," said Weiss, who juggles a full-time job at the Globe with caring for a kindergartener and a 1-year-old.

Weiss, a Harvard grad who cut her journalistic teeth covering local politics for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, says she knows the Editorial Page is likely to be a much more rough-and-tumble world than her current the clubby "G" section. But she says her skin is tough enough to deal with what might be called the Red Sox paradox. That's where players new to Fenway Park discover that the best thing about playing in Boston is that the fans live and die for the team -  and that the worst thing about playing in Boston is that the fans live and die for the team.

"I think I'll still have it easier than Pedro (Martinez) did or Manny (Ramirez) did," she said.

Stay tuned.

Our friends at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab have an interesting blog post about GlobalPost, the international news startup created by New England Cable News founder and former WCVB executive Phil Balboni and former Boston Globe foreign correspondent Charlie Sennott.

Speaking at a recent conference at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, Balboni said the company should generate $1 million in revenue this year. That's the good news. The bad news: Nieman Lab blogger Zachary Seward estimates that GlobalPost's annual expenses are about $5 million.

But as with any startup, the question isn't so much whether you're profitable right now as whether you can get to profitability before you burn through your seed capital. Balboni said the goal is to achieve profitability by 2012, which would mean reducing the company's operating loss by 50 percent each of the next two years.

Just when you thought things couldn't get worse inside the Washington Post, the paper of record for our nation's capitol has given itself another black eye.

Washingtonian magazine and other inside-the-Beltway media outlets are reporting that Pulizter-Prize-winning feature editor and ex-Marine Henry Allen got into a fistfight with reporter Manuel Roig-Franza. The fracas apparently started after Allen called a story Roig-Franza had co-written with reporter Monica Hesse "the second-worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years."

Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, whose issues with credibility in connection with the Post's recent pay-to-play scandal, was qouted in Politico saying: "We take this incident seriously and will address it appropriately."

The Christian Science Monitor is doing better than many had predicted since ending its daily edition for online (and a weekly print magazine). Could the Monitor’s business model work for other newspapers?

This week, Jack E. Robinson announced he is in the race for the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts. However, media coverage of his announcement was sparse. How does media coverage determine the viability of a candidate? And does it define a candidate’s ability to win an election?