Boston Sports Media Watch

Today we’re going to rate Celtics TV announcer Mike Gorman.

Gorman has been calling Celtics games since 1981, and during that time has seen it all with regards to the NBA, from the great days of the Bird era, to the lows of the M.L. Carr and Rick Pitino eras. Through it all, Gorman has been there, steady as always, be it with SportsChannel, FSN New England or now Comcast SportsNet.

He and Tom Heinsohn make up TV’s longest lasting sports broadcasting duo.

For many years Gorman also did quite a bit of college basketball, and has been a regular guest on sports radio WEEI. He was won five Emmy awards and was inducted into the New England Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004.

(Stepping outside of the neutral “narrative” voice here, Gorman is also one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet in your life.)

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Popularity: 30% [?]

Today is your chance to vote on Jackie MacMullan of the (for now) Boston Globe.

This is another vote while you can, as MacMullan is among the latest round of buyouts at the Globe. It is also rumored that ESPN has been courting her aggressively - but what her role would be is unknown, as she was said to be agreeable to the Globe buyout because she wanted to spend more time with her family.

MacMullan is a UNH graduate, and played four years of basketball at the school. She joined the Globe in 1982, and remained there until 1995 as a general sports reporter with a focus on the Celtics and the NBA. She moved on to Sports Illustrated from  1996 to 2000 before rejoining the Globe as a sports columnist.

She is very visible on various NESN and ESPN programs. She is author of several books, such as Bird Watching : On Playing and Coaching the Game I Love with Larry Bird, Geno: In Pursuit of Perfection with Geno Auriemma and Magic & Bird: Basketball’s Awed Couple.

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Popularity: 31% [?]

WEEI’s John Dennis is today’s feature.

Dennis has a long history in the Boston sports media market, having joined WHDH-TV in 1977 and remaining there until 1997, where he went from weekend sports anchor to sports director during his tenure.

Dennis left WHDH in 1997 and began hosting the Dennis and Callahan show on WEEI alongside Gerry Callahan. The show was originally a two hour program starting at 10:00am, but in 1999, the show moved to 6:00 to 10:00am and became a morning drive fixture on the Boston radio airwaves.

Dennis is very good at keeping the program moving, and guiding it in and out of the many commercial breaks. However, his voicemail run-in with Ryen Russillo, and participation in the infamous Metco incident are not among his high points at the station.

Thanks to the Farrelly brothers, Dennis and Callahan have made cameos in a number of movies as well.

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Popularity: 28% [?]

Last Friday we rated outgoing WBZ-TV sports director Bob Lobel. Today we’re rating his successor, Steve Burton.

Burton has been at WBZ since 1994, serving as sports reporter and anchor on both WBZ and TV38. He has been a fixture on the Patriots pregame shows, as well as on Patriots Fifth Quarter, where he is usually stationed inside the press conference room at Gillette getting reaction to the game.

Prior to joining WBZ, Burton worked for NESN between 1988 and 1994, hosting pre and post game shows for the Red Sox broadcasts. He has been a regular on WEEI’s Big Show recently as well.

Burton was raised in Framingham, and attended Northwestern University, where he was on the football team. He is the son of former Patriots player Ron Burton, and his brother Phil Burton works as a sports reporter/anchor for CN8. His brother Ron Jr works in the community relations department for the Red Sox, and brother Paul Burton works for WBZ as a general assignment reporter.

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Popularity: 37% [?]

With the Celtics in the midst of their playoff run, today we take a look at Boston Herald Celtics writer Mark Murphy.

Murphy has been with the Herald since 1988. He has spent most of his tenure at the paper on the Celtics beat, though he moved over to the UMass and college basketball beat at the height of the Marcus Camby/John Calipari era. He returned to the Celtics beat in 2002. He has also covered Olympic games, including the 1992 US Basketball Dream Team.

Murphy is another guy you don’t see making a whole lot of outside media appearances. I couldn’t find a photo online of him, but he is a pretty easily recognizable guy, sporting a full beard.

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Popularity: 30% [?]

Today we’ll focus on Jack Edwards, who just finished up his first full-time season doing play-by-play game for the Bruins on NESN.

Edward has had a long and varied career, working at places like WMUR-TV in Manchester, NH, WRKO radio, WCVB-TV and WHDH-TV in Boston, as well as doing work for ABC’s Wide World of Sports in the late 1980’s.

In 1991 he joined ESPN and remained there until 2003, where he was a SportsCenter anchor, and did play-by-play for the Little League World Series, NHL games and soccer.

He joined NESN in 2005 and primarily did the Bruins road games for the network. Last summer the network pushed Dale Arnold out and made Edwards the full time announcer for all the games.

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Popularity: 33% [?]

Where’s he been the last two days?

(Edit: Fluto Shinzawa reports that Dupont is dealing with a family illness. We’d certainly like to send best wishes to he and his family.) 

His absence in the paper yesterday and today around the Bruins/Canadiens game 7 seems a bit curious was missed, given his credentials and history as the top hockey writer at the Boston Globe.

Dupont started his writing career with the Boston Herald-American back in 1975 1977. He covered the Red Sox to start out with, and did more Bruins coverage as time went by. In 1983 he joined The New York Times and stayed there for a couple of years before coming on board with the Globe in 1985.

He was honored by the Hockey Hall of Fame as a recipient of the 2002 Elmer Ferguson & Foster Hewitt Award. He has also covered 10 Olympic games for the Globe during his career at the paper.

He makes frequent appearances on NESN and has written for ESPN and MSNBC in his career as well.

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Popularity: 23% [?]

Today we’ll get a chance to opine on someone who isn’t actually a sports media member, but who has a huge influence on the sports media scene here in Boston.

We’re talking about the VP of Programming & Operations for Entercom Boston, Jason Wolfe. He also serves as Vice President AM Programming at SportsRadio 850 WEEI. (That’s all according to his LinkedIn profile.)

As I mentioned, Wolfe isn’t on the air on WEEI, but he determines who is. He took over programming duties of WEEI from Glenn Ordway a few years back. His goals for the WEEI programming as stated to Boston Magazine are as follows:

“Our goal across the board is to push the envelope,” he says. “If we didn’t do it that way, we would be going back to what we used to be, which was reading the box scores.” The station is long past needing the credibility that came with having reporters from New England’s most prestigious newspaper take part in its shows. “We’re much more successful than we were when we had them on,” Wolfe says. It’s also long past needing to say it’s sorry; being number one means not having to even care who you offend.

Wolfe now oversees talk station WRKO as well, which hasn’t yet enjoyed the phenomenal ratings success that sister station WEEI has seen.

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Popularity: 24% [?]

I figured we’d better get this one out of the way while we still can…

Today’s your chance to weigh in on the career and impact of legendary WBZ sports anchor and director Bob Lobel, who as we’ve recently learned is leaving the station as part of a round of cutbacks at the TV station.

Lobel had been with WBZ since 1979 and has been sports director since 1981. During the mid-1980’s he was courted by the national networks to host College Football Today, a job he turned down. He hosted Sports Final, which had many memorable moments, none more so than the night that Larry Bird, Bobby Orr and Ted Williams were in the studio at the same time. In recent years he also hosted Patriots Fifth Quarter following Patriots games.

Recent years held a few personal and health related problems, and he had clearly slowed down a step, but he was still a force in the local sports media. It’s unclear what the future holds for Lobel, but in my opinion it will be a shame if we don’t see or hear from him on a regular basis going forward.

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Popularity: 29% [?]

On Herald Thursday, we check in today on hockey writer Stephen Harris.

Perhaps one of the lesser known Herald writers, Harris has nonetheless been around for a long time. He’s covered the Bruins for Herald since the 1979-80 season, though he also served as the Red Sox beat writer for five seasons during the 1980’s. Harris’ doesn’t usually do the game stories for the paper, instead doing more “overview” and analytical type articles.

Harris is also the closest thing that the paper has to an Olympic writer, having covered six Olympic games during his career with the paper. You don’t see or hear him much on the local airwaves, and I couldn’t even find a photo to use with his profile here.

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Popularity: 28% [?]