With big-city American newspapers at a critical juncture, two-newspaper towns increasingly seem to be an anachronism. Denver’s two competing papers have been bleeding readers at an extraordinary rate. In Cincinnati, the Post, like many afternoon papers before it, seems set on an inexorably downward course.
But as we read the Boston papers’ strikingly different stories about the same subject, we were reminded just how valuable two competing voices can be. Longstanding rivals the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald focused on sharply different angles in their coverage of Logan Airport’s financial condition, but their stories on Thursday proved complimentary, unintentionally filling in each other’s gaps.
“Logan International Airport is facing a $17 million cash crunch as it copes with the fallout from the airline industry’s financial woes,” reported the Herald, focusing on the short term. “Massachusetts Port Authority officials are working to get much of the money back, but for now, they’re slashing expenses and looking to beef up concessions, which has been one of the few bright spots this year.”
Logan’s $486 million fiscal year operating budget “took a hit,” when Delta Airlines, which owed the airport $3.8 million, and Northwest, which owed about $1 million, both went bankrupt before settling their accounts, the Herald reported. What’s more, the airport has 14 empty gates, leaving Massport officials with “a short-term headache” and a little too much “growth potential.”
In the Globe, meanwhile, there was nary a mention of Logan’s immediate cash problems, or the fact that two airlines had skipped out on their bills. The broadsheet did, however, provide the long-term perspective its tabloid rival was sorely lacking.
While the Herald noted that a five-year capital budget had been approved on Wednesday but did not elaborate, the Globe led off its story thus:
Logan International Airport officials are pushing off $1.1 billion worth of proposed projects, blaming tough airline industry economics.
Directors of the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan, approved plans yesterday for more than $4.4 billion in upgrades to the airport during the next five years. At the same time, the board said it has not identified funding for over $1 billion of projects and may delay them indefinitely.
One of the many projects with an uncertain fate is “a planned $360 million central rental-car facility,” as Massport plans to redirect funds toward smaller maintenance projects, said the Globe. The paper added that there are plans to build a long-discussed sixth runway and a new center-field taxiway whose construction is being accelerated following a disturbing “recent spate of incidents in which planes came too close to each other.”
In the end, the Globe went a little farther and deeper in its reporting than did the Herald, leading us to anoint the broadsheet the winner of this particular face-off. Yet however inadvertently, the two papers’ combined efforts presented a fuller picture of the airport’s economic outlook than either could manage on its own.
If Boston’s newspaper readers are lucky, the Herald — which is struggling, financially and morale-wise — will stick around to fight a few more battles.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.