By Dan Kennedy • Tracking the future of local news and other passions since 2005
From today’s New York Times story on BostonNOW, whose editor, John Wilpers, is soliciting contributions from local bloggers:
Mr. Wilpers said he wanted to compensate bloggers but was still considering the best way to do so.
And I love this line: “Also appealing to bloggers is that they retain ownership of their submissions even after printing. They have not, however, received money from the paper for their work.” Such a deal!
I’m not a Roger Clemens-basher. I wish he’d never left the Red Sox. But now that he’s signed with the Yankees, I’ve got to hope that he’s trying to push his incredible career one season too far. Here are his stats from last year. Pretty good for an old man, but he averaged just a hair under six innings per start. Think that’s going to work out with the Yankees’ bullpen?
Did you catch this, from the New York Times coverage of Condoleezza Rice’s meeting with Syria’s foreign minister?
… Ms. Rice took the time to telephone [Nancy] Pelosi before heading to Egypt this week, though Bush administration officials did not say whether Ms. Rice told Ms. Pelosi beforehand that she planned to follow her footsteps.
“She wanted to hear from Speaker Pelosi about her discussions with the Syrian president,” a senior State Department official said, adding that that the call centered on gathering information about Ms. Pelosi’s trip, not further condemnation for making it. Ms. Rice, he said, “didn’t want to poke her finger in her eye or anything.”
No, indeed. And in a rational world, Dick Cheney would now apologize for trashing Pelosi, whose visit may turn out to be very useful to the White House. Then again, we don’t live in a rational world, do we?
One of the great myths of journalism is that the Wall Street Journal is a conservative paper. To be sure, its editorial page is the most relentlessly right-wing and conspiracy-obsessed in the country. Its editors’ indifference to the truth was memorably cited in the suicide note of Vincent Foster, an associate of Hillary Clinton’s who’d become caught up in the non-existent “Clinton scandals.”
But the Journal’s news pages are run completely independently from the opinion operation, and are widely regarded as the pinnacle of careful reporting and graceful writing. Barney Kilgore, who virtually created the modern Journal, is even credited with inventing the “news feature,” a form that we take for granted today.
As for politics, a 2005 UCLA study found the Journal’s news operation to be more liberal than that of any major U.S. media outlet, including the New York Times. Now, I don’t know about that. But, clearly, when you hear someone say that it doesn’t matter if Rupert Murdoch wins control of the Journal because it’s already a right-wing rag, you can be sure that person doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
But why would Murdoch interfere with the Journal if he’s successful in his bid to purchase the paper and its parent company, Dow Jones, for $5 billion? Doesn’t he know that the Journal represents the gold standard in American journalism, and that he’d be crazy to mess with it?
Uh, get real. No, he might not be drag its news coverage to the right, or turn it into a screaming tabloid like his New York Post. But the reason he’s willing to pay so much for it is that he thinks he’s smarter than its current owners, the Bancroft family. And, in fact, he probably is smarter than the Bancrofts, if by “smarter” you mean better at maximizing its economic potential. Why should he spend $5 billion just to leave it alone, especially if he is firmly convinced that he can make it better?
In an interview with the Times today, Murdoch makes it clear that he can’t wait to start interfering with the Journal. He thinks the stories are too long. He thinks the news section should feature more political coverage. He would consider starting a Journal-branded weekend glossy magazine. He insists that he’s not planning deep cuts, but adds, “I’m not saying it’s going to be a holiday camp for everybody.” Oh, no. You can be sure of that.
If Murdoch is successful, it would be a disaster. And, at this point, it looks like he stands a good chance of pulling this off.
It was nearly six years ago that the Phoenix slapped the Massachusetts Department of Education with a Muzzle Award for canceling a speech by standardized-testing critic Alfie Kohn. Today, the Globe reports that the department must pay more than $155,000 to cover Kohn’s legal fees, the cost of defending his First Amendment rights.
Here (PDF) is the ACLU of Massachusetts’ press release.
I’ll be a guest on New England Cable News’ “NewsNight with Jim Braude” today at 7 p.m. to talk about Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy Dow Jones and Don Imus’ lawsuit threat against CBS Radio.
Update: The video is now online in two parts, here and here.
So Rupert Murdoch wants to buy the Wall Street Journal. This might prove to be as futile as Jack Welch’s bid to buy the Boston Globe from the New York Times Co.: the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, is reportedly opposed. But this certainly raises some questions, doesn’t it? Here are a few:
And here’s some completely unfounded speculation. Dow Jones stock has underperformed for years, and at least some factions of the Bancroft family have reportedly pushed for a sale from time to time.
It’s possible that the moment for that sale has arrived, and that previous talks involving the Times Co. and the Washington Post Co. will be revived. Murdoch may have offered such a huge premium in order to get something done quickly and pre-empt other buyers. But given the Bancrofts’ initial reaction, he may already have failed.
Update: From the New York Observer: “‘It’s out of the frying pan and into a thermonuclear blast,’ said one Journal staffer. ‘This was the worst-case scenario — other than being sold to Vladimir Putin.'”
I’ve been seriously under the weather the past couple of days, and I’m wary about trying to post when I’m feeling as woolly-headed as I am right now. But I do want to call your attention to Robert Gavin’s story in today’s Globe about efforts by people in the newspaper business to convince advertisers that print and online readers need to be considered together.
Yes, print readership is dropping like a rock, but Web readership continues to rise. A reader’s a reader, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the way the advertising business has looked at it. Even aside from the fact that there still aren’t nearly as many online readers as print readers, ad executives have continued to insist that a Web reader isn’t as valuable as a print reader. That’s got to change.
My Northeastern colleague Steve Burgard, director our School of Journalism, tells Gavin:
The challenge is to get advertisers to buy into this new model of counting readers. This is a transition period. The question is, “Will revenues recover?”
Meanwhile, Sean McCarthy, late of the Herald, presents some figures from Scarborough Research showing, again, that you just can’t measure circulation without considering the online component.
As you’ll see, what’s especially valuable about the Scarborough numbers is that they purport to take into account people who use both the print and the Web editions, thus eliminating some overlap. On a weekly basis, Scarborough found that the Globe’s print edition reaches 42 percent of the local market, and 47 percent when the Web is factored in. Comparable numbers for the Herald are 25 percent and 26 percent.
One big problem, as I’ve noted before, is that Web readership is infinitely measurable — too measurable for the good of the news business, perhaps. If you have a busy week at work and pitch your stack of unopened Globes at the end of the week, no advertiser will be the wiser. By contrast, an online advertiser will know exactly how many readers saw her ad, how many clicked on it and how many used it to buy something.
There’s no going back, but right now the formula completely favors the advertiser. There’s got to be some way of restoring the balance.