Year: 2009

What $10 million will buy

It wouldn’t be fair to call this a direct connection. But follow the bouncing money.

The New York Times today runs a profile of Lisa Maria Falcone, a socialite who just gave $10 million to the High Line, an elevated railway in New York that’s been turned into a garden. Falcone’s husband, Philip Falcone, is the founder of Harbinger Capital, which owns 20 percent of the New York Times Co. The Times Co. is demanding that the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Boston Globe’s largest union, deliver $10 million in concessions.

To be clear, the Falcones are not legally, fiscally or ethically responsible for either the Globe or the problems the Times Co. is having in running it. But there’s a parallel here that’s too striking to let go unmentioned.

National news, local impact

Several weeks ago I spend half a Monday hanging out with Paul Bass (left), a veteran journalist who is the founder and editor of the New Haven Independent, a non-profit community news site.

Decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court come down on Mondays, and Bass was on tenterhooks waiting to see if the court would rule on Ricci v. DeStefano, the affirmative-action case involving New Haven firefighters.

It didn’t happen then, but it did today, and the Independent has a meaty, link-rich post on what the five-to-four decision in favor of white firefighters means both to the city and to the nomination of Judge Sonya Sotomayor, whose opinion was overruled.

The established daily, the New Haven Register, offers an extensive package of coverage as well.

Ironically, I’m writing this post from the office of the Batavian, an online-only newspaper in Batavia, N.Y., which, like the Independent, I’m reporting on for my book-in-progress.

Photo (cc) 2009 by Dan Kennedy.

On the road again

I just arrived in Batavia, N.Y., where I’ll be for the next few days. I’m doing some reporting for my book project on the Batavian, an online-only newspaper published by Howard Owens, the former director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media.

Owens and I are meeting tomorrow morning at the Pok-A-Dot. I’m also meeting with Tom Turnbull, publisher of Batavia’s Daily News, as well as a few community folks before heading back on Wednesday.

Internet access at the Holiday Inn where I’m staying seems pretty slow, so I’m not sure how that’s going to work out. In any case, expect blogging to be light.

GlobeReader makes a quiet debut

With little fanfare, the Boston Globe has unveiled a “preview” edition of GlobeReader, an attempt to produce an online newspaper that offers a better experience than the Web version. GlobeReader is slick and highly readable. Save for subtle differences in the fonts that are used, it looks exactly like Times Reader 2.0, which the New York Times unveiled last month. Both are built on the Adobe Air platform, which allows developers to build applications outside the context of the Web.

Unlike Times Reader, which you can subscribe to as a standalone product for $14.95 a month, GlobeReader is free but available only to print subscribers. You do not, however, have to be a seven-day subscriber — a Thursday-through-Sunday or Sunday-only subscription is sufficient.

That’s probably a smart move. Knowledgeable people have told me that more than half of the Globe’s advertising revenue comes from the Sunday paper. Still, Globe spokesman Bob Powers says that could change.

As for what we can expect once GlobeReader has moved beyond the “preview” stage, Powers writes:

We’ve chosen the term preview edition to reflect that GlobeReader is a brand new product for us, and to a large degree the industry, which we will continually improve based upon reader feedback. We want to make sure the customers help shape future editions. We are also opening GlobeReader Preview Edition only to subscribers because we do want to hear from our most loyal readers.

We also expect to add features such as crosswords, ‘news in video’, a ‘latest news’ update, and ’email to a friend’ in the upcoming weeks/months, as they become available.

[F]or formatting reasons we are not including features such as comics, TV grids, weather, and sports box scores. We will look to add these features to a large degree based on reader’s priorities.

A friend who works at the Globe told me recently that GlobeReader is actually a bigger technical challenge than Times Reader because of some peculiarities in the way the Globe is assembled. So I’d give it some settling-down time.

So what’s the business strategy? It seems to me that it’s a hedge against people canceling home delivery of the Globe altogether, especially now that prices have gone up quite a bit. The Globe benefits if people at least hold on to Sunday delivery; it may also benefit from not having to pay the printing and distribution costs of the considerably less lucrative Monday-through-Saturday editions.

It’s an interesting strategy and, combined with other delivery platforms, such as the $9.99-a-month Kindle edition, may help chart a path out of the current mess in which the newspaper business finds itself. Such projects are not going to be nearly enough, but they could help.

Credit where it isn’t due

An odd assessment by the Chicago Tribune:

Gossip site TMZ.com, owned by Time Warner, was out in front with Jackson news and digital-era pipelines spread the word, as has happened before with other major celebrity news stories. But it was old media stalwarts that did the heavy lifting, with giants such as The Associated Press and the Web site of the L.A. Times, sister paper of the Chicago Tribune, reporting the fastest, most credible information on the emergency call for paramedics and ultimately his death.

In other words, TMZ broke the story. Got it? (Channeling Chris Krewson.)

Michael Jackson

Here’s a piece I wrote for the Boston Phoenix during Michael Jackson’s 2005 trial for child molestation. His death, at 50, was hardly unexpected — I think he’s probably been on the Next to Die list longer than Keith Richards, since Keef managed to crawl off of it at some point.

Jackson may be the greatest wasted talent since Elvis Presley, who could have packed it in after his Sun recordings in the early to mid-1950s. Jackson recorded his finest album, “Off the Wall,” 30 years ago. His audience-pleasing triumph, “Thriller,” came in 1982.

It has literally been all downhill since then — a sickening amalgam of molestation charges, plastic surgery, fake (or at least very weird) marriages and financial setbacks.

His was a sad life. But given the likelihood that he did enormous harm to some of the kids who worshipped him, my sympathy is limited. He was a terrific artist, washed up before his 25th birthday.