Copyright © 1997 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.
By Dan Kennedy
Ethan Bronner, the Boston Globe's Middle East correspondent and one of the paper's best reporters, departs for the Mother Ship this summer. Bronner, 39, will become a national reporter for the New York Times, most likely covering higher education or religion.
"I've been writing for a great but regional paper for 12 years," Bronner said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. "The idea of writing for a paper that's read by an educated audience across the country is exciting to me."
A graduate of Wesleyan University and of the Columbia School of Journalism, Bronner came to the Globe in 1985 after working for Reuters in Madrid, Brussels, and Jerusalem. As a Washington correspondent for the Globe, he covered the Supreme Court; his 1989 book, Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America, won awards from Washingtonian magazine, the New York Public Library, and the American Bar Association.
Though Globe foreign editor Phil Bennett won't discuss possible replacements, one rumor is that Charles Sennott will be a candidate. Sennott has traveled in the Middle East in the course of reporting on international arms-dealing. And he occasionally reported from the region before coming to the Globe, when he worked for the New York Daily News.
It certainly doesn't hurt Sennott's chances that he's a favorite of Globe editor Matt Storin, a former News managing editor who lured Sennott to 135 Morrissey Boulevard.
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A Globe program to recruit minority journalists that dates back to the 1970s has been ended after running afoul of federal rules against reverse discrimination. As recounted in Howard Kurtz's column in the Washington Post on Monday, David Wilson, a 23-year-old white man who was a student at the University of Kansas, complained to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after being told by the Globe that the internship for which he had applied was reserved for minorities. The Globe settled with the EEOC and then invited Wilson to reapply; at that point, though, he had accepted a two-year internship with the Philadelphia Inquirer. Unaffected are co-op (work-study) students and the Globe's summer internship program, which accepts 20 to 30 students each year.
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Two months after a well-publicized poll of the Web's best news sites showed the Boston Globe's Boston.com (http://www.boston.com) falling from fourth to 51st in just one year ("The Globe's Sheer Drop," TJI, January 10), a new survey puts it solidly back in the top 10. According to a study conducted recently by PC Meter (http://www.pcmeter.com), Boston.com ranks seventh nationally among newspaper sites. And unlike the earlier poll, by the American Journalism Review's NewsLink (http://www.newslink.org), PC Meter's rankings are reportedly based on measurements of actual home-computer use, rather than on Net surfers' simply casting votes for their favorites. PC Meter's top three: USA Today, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.