Year: 2009

Talking about the Globe at the Mirror Awards

Alas, my work in the Guardian came up short for the second year in a row in the Syracuse University Mirror Awards, as I lost out yesterday to Clive Thompson of Wired.com in the category of online media commentary.

There was plenty of buzz about the Boston Globe at the luncheon, held in the not-very-spacious confines of New York’s Harmonie Club. Several New York Times people I spoke with, including media columnist David Carr, were speculating about why the Newspaper Guild voted “no” and what might happen next.

We also heard from Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, whose receipt of a lifetime achievement award was controversial given her perceived role in harming the news business.

She got off the best line of the day, saying (this is a close paraphrase; I should have taken notes, but I couldn’t extend my elbows sufficiently), It’s not true that I single-handedly destroyed the newspaper business. I had help from Craigslist. Ho, ho.

Buy high, sell low

There’s an ugly symmetry to the news that the New York Times Co. is soliciting bids for the Boston Globe.

Having paid $1.1 billion for the Globe in 1993, half the market capitalization of the entire Times Co., the Sulzberger family may now find there is virtually no interest in what once once its second-most-prized asset after the Times itself.

After the Boston Newspaper Guild narrowly rejected a proposal to cut salaries by about 10 percent and eliminate about 190 lifetime job guarantees, the Times Co., as expected, imposed a 23 percent pay cut. And the Guild, as expected, has appealed to the National Labor Relations Board.

What’s unclear today is the status of the lifetime job guarantees, widely thought to be a major stumbling block to any effort to sell the paper. Today’s Globe story, by Keith O’Brien, isn’t quite as explicit as I’d like it to be, but the gist seems to be that the guarantees remain in effect at the Guild — at least for the time being — and the paper’s other unions have given them up.

In the Boston Herald, Jay Fitzgerald and O’Ryan Johnson interview Poynter Institute business analyst Rick Edmonds, who wrote an excellent post the other day suggesting that the Globe was closer to break-even than is generally assumed.

Edmonds tells the Herald that the lifetime guarantees and the ongoing labor crisis remain major stumbling blocks to a sale: “Having these different things going on makes it considerably harder, if not impossible, to sell this newspaper.”

The Globe is not losing $85 million

So says Poynter Institute business analyst Rick Edmonds.

In a revealing post — made all the more interesting following the Boston Newspaper Guild’s narrow defeat of a package designed to save the New York Times Co. about $10 million — Edmonds reports that Times Co. spokeswoman Catherine Mathis has clarified some of the murk. (Via David Folkenflik.)

Edmonds writes that the $85 million operating loss the Globe is said to be ringing up in 2009 actually “includes depreciation, amortization and special charges.” His best guess: the Globe is on track to lose about $20 million this year, and the concessions demanded by the Times Co. would roughly cover that.

Of course, following today’s Guild vote (the deal lost by a heart-stopping margin of 277-265) management only has $10 million in hand, in the form of concessions agreed to by unions other than the Guild. Management has threatened to impose a 23 percent pay cut, which the Guild, in turn, says it will appeal to the National Labor Relations Board.

It’s impossible to know what’s going to happen next, at least not tonight. But one thing that ought to be acknowledged is that the folks at 135 Morrissey Blvd. have continued to put out a very good newspaper despite months of uncertainty, even chaos, with respect to the Globe’s future. I’m sure that will continue.

Update: The Globe itself made some of the same points on April 24, though Edmonds’ main argument — that the paper’s true operating loss this year is likely to be $20 million — doesn’t quite emerge.

Differing takes on today’s Globe vote

Interesting difference in emphasis in the New York Times’ and the Boston Globe’s coverage of today’s vote by the Boston Newspaper Guild.

The Times story, by Richard Pérez-Peña, quotes three Globe employees, all reporters, all of whom say they’re voting “no” — Scott Allen, Brian Mooney and Beth Daley. The story also notes that Guild president Dan Totten’s less-than-enthusiastic public comments have been “widely interpreted as urging rejection.”

The Globe story, by Rob Gavin, works into the lede the news that the paper’s delivery-truck drivers approved $2.5 million in concessions on Sunday. Gavin, like Pérez-Peña, also quotes three reporters, but with a different emphasis — Mooney (no), Erin Ailworth (yes) and Scott Helman (maybe).

The picture you come away from in reading the Times is that the deal — which would cut pay by about 10 percent and eliminate 190 lifetime job guarantees — is all but certain to be rejected. The Globe, by contrast, makes you think things are truly up in the air.

The Guild concessions, if approved, would add up to about $10 million, half the $20 million that the New York Times Co. is demanding. If the Guild votes “no,” management has said it would impose a 23 percent pay cut, which the Guild, in turn, says it would appeal to the National Labor Relations Board.

Management has not ruled out shutting down the paper, although that threat seems to have diminished since it was first leveled more than a month ago.

We’ll know tonight.

Guilding tomorrow’s vote

On the eve of Monday’s vote by members of the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Guild has posted a press release on its “Save the Boston Globe” campaign.

In keeping with Guild president Dan Totten’s past comments, the union is not explicitly urging its members to vote one way or the other on the pact, which calls for a pay cut of roughly 10 percent and an end to lifetime job guarantees for about 190 Globe employees.

Twenty-four hours from now, we’ll know a lot more than we do today.

Kazakh government admits to blockage

The official Kazakh communications agency has admitted to blocking the blogging platform LiveJournal, according to the International Foundation of Speech Freedom Protection.

In a recent interview with the newspaper Express K, Batyr Makhanbetazhiev, executive secretary of Kazakhstan’s Agency of Information and Communication, said LiveJournal had been blocked to stop the “distribution of illegal information.”

The translation is hazy, so it’s a little hard to follow. But free-speech activists in Kazakhstan have been campaigning against a proposed law that would crack down on the country’s relatively free-wheeling online culture. For background, see this and also this.

Counting blogs: One, two, many

Four years ago, Jay Rosen dropped in on a media-criticism class I was teaching at Northeastern University for a discussion about blogging.

One point he made I thought was particularly salient: the 97 bazillion blogs Technorati claims to be tracking are often used by critics as a way to discredit blogging. After all, how could anything so common be of much value?

Still, it’s hard to quantify the number of blogs that matter to news folks — that is, blogs doing some type of journalism, even if it’s just commenting intelligently on the news. When asked, I generally respond that it’s certainly in the hundreds, or even the thousands, but definitely not the millions.

So I was interested to see more useful Technorati numbers appear in a New York Times story today about bloggers who quit because they quickly learn that it’s hard work, or that it’s no way to make money, or that they decide revealing personal details about themselves isn’t such a good idea. (Not that that has anything inherently to do with blogging.) To wit:

  • Of the 133 million blogs that Technorati was following in 2008, only 7.4 million had been updated in the past four months.
  • The vast majority of traffic is generated by 50,000 to 100,000 blogs.

Those numbers make far more sense, and show that blogging is something that a small subset of dedicated amateurs (and a few professionals) take seriously. As Rosen suggested, the Golden Arches approach is a way of marginalizing rather than elucidating.