Month: February 2009

Counting the days for Globe regional sections

Media Nation has obtained a memo sent to the staff by Boston Globe metro editor Brian McGrory and regional editor David Dahl. The full text follows.

All,

We just wanted to bring you up to date on the proposed changes that we went over last week. The publisher and his senior management team approved the recommendations late yesterday involving Metro. This means that City Weekly will shut down, and Globe North West will disband as a freestanding zone, its geographic areas split between North and West. The final issue of City Weekly will be published on March 22; the final issue of Globe North West on March 26. The three suburban zones will continue to be published two days a week, Thursdays and Sundays, as they are now.

On City Weekly, we wish there was an upbeat spin to put on this. There’s not. It’s been a singular section since its launch in 1992 — vibrant, filled with voice, often with an edge that the rest of the paper would do well to replicate. Lately, under Veronica [Chao]’s leadership, it’s only grown stronger. The sad reality, though, is that advertising revenues simply don’t sustain it, so we’re losing a strong section put out by a group of talented and committed people.

Where we can sound more upbeat is in the suburbs. For the second year in a row, a group from across the paper studied the viability of the suburban zones and decided that they are too important to readers to dramatically reduce. It’s testament to everyone who works hard on those sections, and we expect that the hard work, the high quality, and the reader popularity to continue. And our suburban coverage will be greatly enhanced as we continue to roll out more Your Town sites — as many as 15 by year’s end.

As far as the zones copy desk, there will be substantial changes made, along the lines of what we said last week — the four day week becomes a five day week, with editors playing a stronger role in the Your Town sites. We’ll brief you on that when we have more, which should be soon.

Thanks for your cooperation and all your strong work through these really frustrating times.

Brian and David

No surprises — the City Weekly and Globe NorthWest cuts were already all but certain. Depressing nevertheless.

Harvey Silverglate’s latest free-speech campaign

Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh writes about friend of Media Nation Harvey Silverglate‘s bid to be elected to Harvard’s Board of Overseers.

Silverglate, a celebrated civil-rights lawyer, and an ally, Philadelphia lawyer Robert Freedman, are pushing a free-speech, anti-PC agenda that would, among other things, bring ROTC back to the Harvard campus.

Best of luck to Silverglate, a staunch and principled defender of free speech.

Pessimistic Weisberg criticizes paid content

Like most people thinking about the ailing news business these days, Jacob Weisberg is better at describing the problem than at prescribing solutions.

“I do think people approach it in the wrong way when they think about it as a business problem,” Weisberg, editor-in-chief and chairman of the Slate Group, said earlier today. “It is more fundamentally a problem of democracy. And it is a problem of democracy because our system of government is predicated on a free press and an independent media, which allow us to have an informed public and a check on government.”

Weisberg spoke at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A former editor of the politics-and-culture webzine Slate, Weisberg is now in charge of developing new products affiliated with Slate, such as The Root, aimed at African-American readers, and The Big Money, a financial Web site.

Weisberg expressed pessimism that anything like the newspaper as we have come to know it can survive in the digital age — especially papers smaller than the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. (Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.) Still, he refused to join the likes of Walter Isaacson, Steven Brill and Gordon Krovitz, all of whom have argued in recent weeks that newspapers should charge for their online content.

Asked by Shorenstein’s director, Alex Jones, how many subscribers he thought the New York Times would lose if it started charging $20 a year for online access, Weisberg replied, “90 percent.” He added he’d rather donate $100 a year to the Times than pay a $20 subscription fee, since a paid-subscription model would necessitate walling off content from the larger Internet, and especially from bloggers.

“The political debate exists online, and if you’re behind a pay wall, you’re not part of it,” Weisberg said, adding that Slate’s own 1997 experiment in charging for content is widely seen as having failed.

Though Weisberg would not rule out a role for non-profit, endowment supported projects such as the investigative Web site ProPublica, he said he prefers profit-driven ventures because they are not dependent on the whims and agendas of philanthropies.

“America’s contribution to the news media isn’t the free press, it’s the independent press,” he said. “Countries are better off with an independent media. That’s what we’re at risk of losing.”

The audio of Weisberg’s presentation is online here.

Photo of Weisberg (cc) by Dan Kennedy. For details, see Creative Commons license elsewhere on this blog.

Obama’s bankrupt opponents

In recent days I’ve been struck by the overwhelming nature of the problems that face us, and the utterly bankrupt nature of the conservative response. Because the more mindless of those responses drives me crazy, I will instead present the rational but wrong David Brooks, who writes today:

Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.

I think Brooks is fundamentally mistaken in his assessment of what the Obama administration would like to do. Everything we know about President Obama tells us that he is an exceedingly cautious politician — a mainstream liberal, not a creature of the far left, who, given his choice, would have liked to proceed deliberately.

He can’t. Not with the economy falling apart, the auto industry careening toward bankruptcy, the financial system in meltdown and housing as dead as it’s been in decades. (Let’s not forget, too, he’s also dealing with war and terrorism on multiple fronts.) Finally, as Obama argued during the campaign, a lot of what ails us economically can’t be fixed without finally doing something about health care.

In the midst of all this, it is striking that the Republicans have nothing to say. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who will deliver the Republican response to Obama’s address to Congress tonight, is getting a weird amount of attention for rejecting about $90 million in federal unemployment assistance — while eagerly grabbing $4 billion in stimulus money.

I don’t know if you caught Jindal on “Meet the Press” Sunday, but he came across as Sarah Palin with better syntax: plenty of pre-rehearsed soundbites, but little or no ability to answer moderator David Gregory’s simple questions.

It’s no wonder that Obama’s job-approval rating is so much higher than that of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at a similar early stage of their presidencies.

Calling all academics (II)

I got some great responses last month when I asked for ideas on how to organize my research for a book project I’m working on. For the time being, I’ve decided to use ugly old Excel. It works, I’ve already got it, and if I find something better, I will almost certainly be able to import my Excel database into it.

It’s a shame that Apple let HyperCard die, because, with the right export capabilities, it would be ideal. I did discover that its commercial successor, SuperCard, is still with us — but it doesn’t strike me that it could possibly be worth $180.

I also took a test drive of FileMaker’s newish personal database program, Bento, and was underwhelmed. It didn’t seem to me that it provided much more than an attractive front end for an Excel database. Worse, unlike Excel, Bento doesn’t seem to support hyperlinks to my documents.

A few people suggested that I use FileMaker itself. I may — it’s freely available to faculty members, and I assume I could learn a few low-end skills fairly quickly. So if my Excel data get to be too cumbersome to work with, that would seem to be a reasonable option.

Further thoughts on the Ted Kennedy series

Last week I wrote about why I wasn’t reading the Boston Globe’s series on the life and career of Ted Kennedy. Today I want to explain why I think the Globe was smart to take on such a project.

One of the major challenges facing newspapers these days is figuring out how to draw traffic over a long period of time. Readers do not spend as much time with an online paper as they do with a print edition. When a news organization puts a lot of effort into a project, it makes sense to present it in such a way that readers will come back to it several times, and that other readers will discover it long after it’s been published.

With its skillfully done multimedia presentation, the Globe has ensured that the series will draw people in for some time to come. Though we might wish it were otherwise, Sen. Kennedy has come to the end of his life, even if he is able to enjoy some productive weeks and months ahead. When he passes on, the Globe series will stand as an important resource.

And it’s not just the text. Through historical front pages, political cartoons and video, the Globe has fleshed out its series in ways that words alone would not be able to accomplish. I’ve had a chance to watch a few of the videos. The video that accompanies Chapter 2 (produced by Ann Silvio), on the death of Robert Kennedy, is particularly moving. There’s a sequence in which Walter Mondale tries to recall Ted Kennedy’s words at the funeral, spliced with the actual eulogy, that will send shivers up your spine.

The Globe also deserves credit, at this delicate moment, for serving readers rather than the Kennedys. Last week the Boston Herald’s “Inside Track” reported, “Word on the Hill is that some Kennedy staffers are quite unhappy with the series, finding it far too critical of Ted.”

Indeed, in reading bits and pieces of the series, I was struck by how unsparing it was with respect to Kennedy’s behavior in the Chappaquiddick affair, and with his drinking and womanizing — problems he has long since put behind him, but which remain an important part of his story.

So when Kennedy agreed to talk with my former Boston Phoenix colleague Mark Leibovich of the New York Times over the weekend, I took it as a bit of puckish revenge on Kennedy’s part. After all, Kennedy had refused to speak to the Globe.

My friend the Outraged Liberal suggests that there must be some long faces at 135 Morrissey Blvd. over being bigfooted by their larger corporate cousin. Mr. O.L. may be right. But I’d say the Globe ought to take Kennedy’s interview with the Times as a signal that it had been appropriately tough.