By David Scott
Boston Sports Media Watch

With all but four of the 42 eligible operations and engineering workers at NESN taking part in a vote for union authorization, the proposal was defeated, 20-18 according to nesnunion.org’s Patrick Reilly, a NESN worker who has the website registered in his name.

The move to unionize those departments (about half of NESN’s approximately 100 employees) needed a simple majority to pass, but fell short in Thursday’s voting, conducted throughout the day at NESN headquarters in Watertown. NESN remains a non-union shop with the vote.

“Our fight isn’t over,” said Reilly in an email to Shots late Thursday night. “NESN’s harassment of me during the drive has lead the NLRB to consider filing charges, which could potentially reverse the election results. It isn’t over yet. I received more than one threat from anonymous e-mailers while I ran NESNUnion.org.”

NESN’s spokesman, Gary Roy, contacted earlier in the week by Shots (along with VP of Programming Joel Feld), responded around dinner time on Thursday by emailing, “As is our standard policy, NESN does not comment publicly on internal matters. Thanks for your understanding.”

Understanding is exactly what we’re lacking here, but in a nutshell, NESN (and the Red Sox) have avoided a huge headache with the defeat of the vote to unionize. It ensures that NESN can continue some of its sketchy pay practices, especially as they pertain to the deep-behind-the-scenes techs and operators. There have long been cries of tight purse strings at NESN but Thursday’s vote shows that those cries are not necessarily worthy of things like union dues and union meetings. For now, it will be more of the same at NESN, if you’re to believe the union drive organizers.

It’s especially intriguing at this current time in Boston’s sports broadcast landscape, as the dominoes will be falling shortly in reaction to Comcast’s further push into the market. The dynamics will be worth watching as Comcast has developed a nice stable of on-air talent at both CN8 (John Carchedi, Jeb Fisher, Brian DiBello) and at Comcast-owned NECN (Mike Giardi and Chris Collins, not to mention the recently-dumped-from-full-time-duties Laura Behnke). If the additional programming discussed in the Wednesday Globe story from Keith Reed comes to fruition, there will be a need for all sorts of bodies both in-front-of and behind the cameras.

We’d expect FSNNE to be re-branded as “Comcast Sports North,” in keeping with the Comcast Sports South and othe regional brands.

For the first time in recent memory, Boston will have jobs in Sports TV in relatively large quantities, instead of the sporadic hirings that bring a Dave Briggs, a Larry Ridley or a Behnke. And production people will be in demand as well.

Yep, that’s right. It’s a actually a good time to be in the business of both traditional TV as well as that business of pontification, seeing as how all these new shows are going to need talking heads (you all know where to find us, right?).

And this is all before the Internet avenues are fully considered for what Comcast brings to the table on that end of the equation. If you’re thinking we’re about to see a tidal shift in the Boston sports media landscape, you’re probably reading the tide charts correctly.

. . . One oddity we bumped into during digging on the NESN Union Vote is that the national firm of Greenberg Traurig is the attorney of record on some of the hearing material before the National Labor Relations Board.

GT is the same firm who put together the fabulous document in “defense” of Pacman Jones that pointed out about seven years of NFL indiscretions by various levels of the league’s stars.

We’re all for a “smoking gun” type of document that shows just how deplorable things are at the Red Sox Network. Only then, we fear, will the story get the attention it probably deserves. And only then will the Union have a legit shot of being voted in.

• We’re less than three weeks from the debut, on June 26, of the “Globe 10.0” show which will be hosted by Boston’s newest blogger (and Vlogger, with video), Bob Ryan. Having been delayed a bit for the roll out of a some brand new to NESN technology, “10.0” will, as previously discussed, lean heavily on the “Pardon the Interruption” and “Around the Horn” formulas which have re-shaped talking head TV, especially in sports. Ryan does not run away from the comparisons.

“Just like all indoor arenas are now variations of the Palace of Auburn Hills, so, too, will all bang-bang sports, chatty shows be variations of ‘PTI,’” Ryan said in an email. “‘ATH’ is, of course, a direct ‘PTI’ spin-off, with the gimmick of keeping score as an extra, added attraction. We will be no different. So it will come down to content and personality. Presumably, we will offer some of each.”

And we’d remind Ryan, that he also has the experience of being on the more buttoned-up “Sports Reporters,” which would also be a welcome addition for some portion of the “10.0” thrice-weekly, half-hour. Nothing wrong with raising the bar a bit, even as you duck under it.

Ryan, who as you know is considerably old school, admits to being a bit taken aback by the new “virtual set” that NESN will be employing in heavy doses.

“I got a sneak preview of the set possibilities two weeks ago, and it was
very interesting,” said Ryan. “It did impress me, and I believe the set will be at the very least a co-star of the show.”

Ryan finishes up an almost month-long Friday fill-in role for Tony Kornheiser on today’s PTI and is definitely keeping his options open to do either Monday or Friday ‘PTIs’ or ‘ATHs’. [The NESN show is beginning as a Tuesday thru Thursday, 5:30 p.m. show.] You get the feeling he really digs the PTI stop-ins especially. And who wouldn’t? It’s still the best sports show on TV, bar none.

As for his new, still-sadly-unnamed blog, Ryan is still dipping his toe into the water and learning the new medium in which he finds himself. (Interestingly, Ryan’s longtime buddy, Dick “Hoops” Weiss of the New York Daily News has taken the blog plunge in earnest. If legend Larry Donald could see his boys now!

“I’m writing the same way stylistically,” said Ryan. “So far I’ve only posted three. There’s no schedule. Look, I volunteered this because I’m going from three Globe columns a week to two and I felt guilty. The only way to begin to make that up was to blog.”

It’s going to be a welcome addition to the Ryan repertoire.

• Although the job has yet to be posted (and no editorial jobs are included on that list at all), it is clear that Boston Globe sports editor Joe Sullivan is actively searching for a replacement on the Ron Borges’ football position.

Borges “retired” from the Globe last month after serving a two-month suspension for what the paper’s overall editor, Martin Baron, referred to as “plagiarism.”

The informal search by Sullivan (which should lead to a “formal” and “posted” search in the coming weeks) has included both football and non-football specific writers and at least one minority candidate. It has also delved into both print and web writers, according to two industry insiders with knowledge of the process.

Sully’s search would seem to indicate that the Globe is not ready to promote masterful Mike Reiss into the Borges spot (and with that move, put Christopher L. Gasper full-time on the Pats beat). We can make the argument that if Sullivan went that route instead, he could then spend the Borges salary cap space on a seasoned investigative writer who could be brought in to add some teeth to the gummy chompers of the sports desk’s “investigative unit” (which never existed, but certainly should now in the Internet Age).

. . . Borges, by the way, has adopted the i.d. tag of “Columnist and Commentator” for his CN8 appearances. It appears 40-year-old (impressive) Pro Football Weekly is still using Borges for the written word. No new sightings on the Golden Boy website, but we’re now being told in no uncertain terms that Borges’ writings for Oscar De La Hoya’s website at the tail end of his Globe suspension, were the final nail in Bully Ron’s Globe coffin.

• NESN has added an additional replay of the Curt Schilling near no-no as a special “Sox in Two” broadcast for 6:30 PM on Friday night. The two hour replay will be followed by NESN’s Sox-DBacks pre-game show at 8:30 PM.

• I’m giving my man, Bucci, some big love for actually going to the trouble of live-blogging the Stanley Cup. With so few people watching, you’ve got figure there’s single digits actually following along with the live-blog.

That right there, folks, is above and beyond by a Bristol employee. Brings a tear to my eye.

• Sopranos Finale. That’s all we need to say. What a great run it had.

David Scott writes from a seaside shanty on the shores of Hull, Mass. And can be reached at shotsATbostonsportsmedDOTcom

You can listen to Scott every Saturday morning from 9 to 11 a.m. as he co-hosts the Boston Sports Review Show on ESPN Radio 890 AM with Mike Salk.