MEDIA FARM: RAGTIME

The summer is easily the weakest time of the year for newspapers. It’s when advertising revenue aspires to boost itself up to “in the toilet” stature, while the heat roasts the already-mushy brains that a majority of Boston’s working journalists are saddled with.

This means that what was awful reporting in general, only gets worse.

If you can get past the incessant use of headline puns throughout the Herald, you’ll find shallow reporting and a tendency towards unrelentingly harsh attacks on Barack Obama and Warren, while providing an auxiliary campaign platform for Scott Brown and Mitt Romney.

Considering that a majority of local politicians are Democrats, the Herald prefers to wait until they screw up to give them much coverage.

In contrast, the Globe has a habit of being late to the game when it comes to local scrutiny. Take the case of State Rep. Carlos Henriquez who faces assault and kidnapping charges.

The Globe was content with the bare-bones police report/arraignment coverage, while the Herald was clearly drooling over the opportunity to blast another Democrat with coverage of the arrest, the arraignment, preview of testimony, a look into Henriquez having not paid a 2011 excise tax as well as an editorial from Howie Carr.

The Metro continues to be the safe newsprint alternative for people too dim-witted to understand USA Today.

The Metro prides itself on not being the newspaper of record, and always provides local news about three to four days later than any other paper, with about a third of the reporting depth.

To be fair, the news often feels older, when reading from a slightly-torn, and stepped on copy that’s spent a few days on the floor of an MBTA train.

Considering the tendency to lead the front page with either a story that’s already made national news, or whatever they saw on UniversalHub.com, we know the reporters at the Metro have access to the internet in their office, but do they actually know anything about what’s going on outside?

The Boston Phoenix appears to finally be getting over its infatuation with the Occupy movement to focus on more interesting news, which is a good thing, since Reporter Chris Faraone’s talents are much better utilized scrutinizing the Boston Police Department than trying to promote his own book.

That said, it’s a little disappointing that thus far, the best reporting on how screwed up the Boston Patrolman Police Association happens to be, has appeared on Faraone’s blog on ThePhoenix.com rather than in print.

Either way, it beats our own coverage of the affair in Dig Boston. Faraone got a cover story out of what we relegated to the bottom half of this very column last week.

In terms of news coverage, the Dig has gone a long way in writing what we feel like writing about, rather than covering what’s actually newsworthy.

(Here’s hoping the above comment isn’t cut to make room for yet another arbitrary Occupy write up.)

What can we say? We’re of the free Alt-weekly mindset that you get what you pay for.