By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
I just recorded an interview with Hamilton Kahn of WOMR Radio (92.1 FM) in Provincetown. We talked mainly about GateHouse Media’s lawsuit against the New York Times Co.
If you’re interested, you should be able to listen to it here on Friday at 12:30 p.m., though I get an error message when I try to click on the live stream. Maybe you’ll have better luck than I.
It was the incident that should have defined Jim Rice’s career. On Aug. 7, 1982, a 4-year-old boy from New Hampshire named Jonathan Keane was seriously injured when he was hit in the head by a line drive off the bat of Dave Stapleton. The boy’s skull was fractured, and he was bleeding heavily.
Everyone at Fenway Park paused — except Jim Rice. Rice jumped into the stands, took the boy in his arms and carried him to the clubhouse, where he was examined by the team doctor, Arthur Pappas, before being transported to Children’s Hospital.
Rice played the rest of the game with a blood-stained uniform, according to Boston Globe reporter Dan Shaughnessy’s account of the incident. “If it was your kid, what would you do?” he quoted Rice as saying afterwards. “The baby was crying and there was a lot of blood. I think he was more in shock than anything.”
The following day, the great Peter Gammons wrote in the Globe: “If only every cynic in America could have 1) observed Jim Rice’s reaction to crisis and 2) seen how concerned players from both teams were.”
Rice’s selection to the Hall of Fame was long overdue, though I understand his was a marginal case. He had a great career that didn’t last quite long enough to make his induction an easy call.
But I was a big Rice fan for many years, and that day in Fenway was a major reason why. For a long time we had an illustration of Rice by noted sports artist Dave Olsen in our living room (Dave and I worked together at the Daily Times Chronicle in Woburn during the 1980s). Incongruously enough, Dave chose to portray Rice patrolling left field rather than terrorizing a pitcher.
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find anything on the Jonathan Keane incident this morning. But the Boston Herald’s Web site includes a photo of Rice holding young Jonathan to accompany a Steve Buckley column. It was one of those random things, I guess, as neither the Herald nor the Globe makes any other mention of it.
But given that I didn’t know the boy’s name or what year the incident occurred, the Herald photo, by Ted Gartland, was enough to get me searching. Those old Globe stores are not on the open Web, but I found a wonderful follow-up by Jeff Goldberg of the Hartford Courant published 15 years later. By then, Keane was a healthy 19-year-old. Goldberg wrote:
Tom Keane [Jonathan’s father] said it could have been much worse, and that Rice’s quick thinking may have saved his son’s life.
“Time is very much a factor once you have that kind of a head injury and the subsequent swelling of the brain,” Pappas said. “That’s why it’s so important to get him to care so it can be dealt with. [Rice] certainly helped him very considerably.”
Today, Rice is the Red Sox’s hitting instructor. He was happy to learn that Keane is doing well, and is attending college not far from Rice’s home state, South Carolina. “It’s a good feeling,” Rice said. “At least he knows that we have southern hospitality.”
Congratulations to Jim Rice, a great player and a class act.
Photo (cc) by Paul Keleher and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Having recently regaled us with the flawed tale of a community newspaper that refuses to publish its content online, New York Times media columnist David Carr is back — this time with a suggestion that what we need is “an iTunes for news.”
Carr’s thesis is that news organizations can no longer afford to give away their content. But, as he acknowledges in his lament about the arrested state of online advertising, they’re not giving it away — or, at least, they don’t mean to. Rather, they’re failing to sell enough advertising to pay for their journalism. That’s a problem, but it’s not the same problem.
Carr knows as well as anyone that a good deal of what you pay for when you buy a newspaper doesn’t contribute anything to the bottom line. You’re paying for paper, presses, maintenance to those presses, distribution and — yes — the salaries of some good, hard-working people who won’t be needed if and when we move into a Web-only environment.
Given that, news organizations should theoretically be able to come up with an online version that pays for itself, or even turns a profit, without charging for access. That’s what national and local television newscasts do, and the model worked even better some years ago, when those newscasts were deeper and meatier than they are today. That’s what National Public Radio and its affiliate stations do, raising money directly from listeners in the form of contributions and from corporations in the form of advertising — uh, sorry, “underwriting.”
The problem with online news today is threefold: (1) sites like Craigslist and Monster.com have taken away much of the advertising that news orgs might have been able to sell; (2) the recession has halted the growth of online (and print) advertising; and (3) newspaper companies are staggering under so much debt that they need a rate of return that would be unrealistic even in a more favorable economic environment.
I’ve learned a lot over the past few years from Lisa Williams, who founded H2otown to cover her community of Watertown and now heads up Placeblogger to track community Web sites around the world. One of the most important is this: the future belongs to the small and the swift, and journalists — especially young journalists — ought to think of their careers the way tech workers do. Today’s journalists will probably live a rather nomadic existence, moving from start-up to start-up as we all try to figure out where the news business is going and where there might actually be money to be made.
Two cases in point.
Last week Politicker.com, a promising project whose goal was to expand into a network of 50 state-based sites, more or less went out of business, cutting back to just New York and New Jersey. The Massachusetts site is gone (though still up). Its blogger-journalist, Jeremy Jacobs, has taken a job at The Hill.
Politicker’s national managing editor, James Pindell, who blogged the New Hampshire primary for the Boston Globe’s Boston.com site, and who is himself a pioneering online journalist, is out of a job, although I can’t imagine he won’t get scooped up by someone very soon.
I’m not sure what happened. It could be that Politicker’s business model — getting advocacy groups (i.e., lobbyists) to buy ads in order to reach the intended audience of inside players — was not realistic. It could be that the model was brilliant but the timing was bad. In any case, the cycle of destruction and creation continues.
Because, this week, the long-anticipated GlobalPost.com makes its debut. Headed by New England Cable News founder Phil Balboni and former Boston Globe foreign correspondent Charles Sennott, the site is aimed at covering international news at a time when most traditional news organizations are cutting back.
It’s hard to imagine a more heartening development in journalism. And, yes, David Carr would rightly point out that GlobalPost plans some subscription-based services.
In fact, there may be a place for some pay services in online journalism, although I suspect it will be rare. Carr cites the Wall Street Journal, but people will pay for the specialized financial information to which a Journal online subscription gives them access. Sorry, but the Times, good as it is, doesn’t offer that.
Likewise, some people will pay to have their favorite newspapers downloaded onto a device like the Amazon Kindle, a step up in convenience and readability in comparison to the typical laptop.
As we move rapidly into the post-newspaper era, we’re going to see all kinds of experiments — mostly free, some subscription-based, most of which will fail, a few of which will succeed and serve as models for the industry.
The one thing that won’t work — and I think Carr would acknowledge this if it were put to him directly — is the notion that newspapers as we have come to know them will somehow be able to charge for their everyday content. That horse left the barn 10 years ago, and it’s not coming back.
Photo (cc) by David Muir and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
William Zantzinger, the subject of Bob Dylan’s song “The Lonely Death of Hattie Carroll,” has died at the age of 69. A truly miserable human being, Zantzinger was caught — many years after caning Ms. Carroll to death — collecting rent from black families who lived in shanties he didn’t even own.
The photographer Elsa Dorfman has a terrific column in today’s Boston Globe, pegged to the demise of Polaroid film, on the place that Polaroid instant cameras once held in our culture. She writes:
The Polaroid camera was my generation’s iPod, our BlackBerry, our GPS, our Kindle — that piece of technology that wows and then becomes an extension of the hand. And Dr. [Edwin] Land, always called Dr. although he didn’t have his PhD, was our Steve Jobs. He was a brilliant scientist who got Ansel Adams, Marie Cosindas, and Walker Evans to use his instant cameras with panache.
Check out Dorfman’s Web site.
Jared Molton, a student in my Reinventing the News course at Northeastern this past fall, was on the scene today following that fatal fire-truck crash on Huntington Avenue. He wrote it up for his blog and posted a slideshow to Flickr. His work then got picked up by Universal Hub.
Photo copyright (c) 2009 by Jared Molton.
It looks like GateHouse Media has done something pretty smart: the community newspaper chain has named Kirk Davis (right) as its president and chief operating officer, the number-two position in the company. Davis, who currently runs GateHouse Media New England, will be replaced by his own number-two, Rick Daniels, a former top executive at the Boston Globe.
GateHouse owns some 400 newspapers nationwide, and more than 100 in Eastern Massachusetts. The company is currently involved in a nasty legal dispute with the New York Times Co. over GateHouse’s and the Globe’s competing online strategies.
I’ve interviewed Davis several times over the years, including, most recently, this past fall for a piece I wrote for CommonWealth Magazine. He is smart, passionate and an inveterate optimist.
I’m not sure anyone is up to the task of saving GateHouse — or, for that matter, the newspaper industry in general. But Davis is not someone I’d bet against. (Thanks to Walter Brooks of Cape Cod Today for blasting out the press release.)
Photo of Davis is from a video on the GateHouse New England Web site, which you can see here.
The Boston Globe today reports that Tom Finneran is seeking a pardon from President Bush, and that four former Massachusetts governors are supporting his bid. In 2005, Harvey Silverglate explained in the Boston Phoenix why Bush should grant Finneran’s request.
I’m not sure Finneran deserves to be pardoned for the lame talk show he hosts (now co-hosts) on WRKO Radio (AM 680). But the former Massachusetts House speaker is no criminal.
Something for which the Boston Globe deserves a lot of credit is that it treats local obituaries with the seriousness they deserve. I especially like the way its obits shine a spotlight on the lives of ordinary people, who often turn out to be not ordinary in the least.
Today the Globe’s Bryan Marquard tells us about the life of Stella May Brown Weaco, a lovely soul of dubious sanity who died on Dec. 31 after many years of homelessness, which ended only after she became ill. Marquard writes:
Obituaries usually confer honorifics, but what title could capture Stella? Given occasionally to delusions, she offered no clear explanation of how she acquired the name Weaco, which is not on her birth certificate. Was she married or a mother? Workers at Women’s Lunch Place hope a relative will read this and inquire about Stella.
Born in Coffeeville, a small Mississippi town some 90 miles south of Tennessee, she spoke of having lived in Memphis. She also said she was born in Jerusalem, was a member of the Rockefeller family, “and was part of a very select group,” [Boston Health Care for the Homeless president Jim] O’Connell said. “And I think that last part was true.
“Among the homeless, he said, “she was an aristocrat.”
I tell my students that obituaries are the most important part of a newspaper, at least for friends and family members. But telling isn’t the same as showing, which Marquard does on a regular basis.
More: Mike Stucka rightly notes that Steve Landwehr of the Salem News has been performing similar journalistic artistry with obits.
No one doubts that the New York Times Co. is in financial trouble, or that the Times as we know it will someday cease to exist.
But Rick Edmonds, who analyzes the news business for the Poynter Institute, has done a great job of demonstrating that there’s no there there in an attention-grabbing piece in the Atlantic arguing that the Times Co. is rapidly running out of money — and, in a worst-case scenario, could shut down as early as this May.
The Atlantic article, by Michael Hirschorn, is pegged to the writings of financial analyst Henry Blodget, who has been sounding the alarm about the Times Co.’s cash woes for some time now. Hirschorn says even the drastic measures that the Sulzbergers might consider could fall short of being enough: selling their share of the Red Sox (already under way, supposedly), selling About.com (even though it’s one of the few bright spots in their portfolio), even shutting down the Boston Globe.
But Edmonds carefully walks us through the numbers, demonstrating that the payment-due deadline the Times Co. faces in May is not at all what Hirschorn seems to think it is. Edmonds writes:
Long story short, the company will be able to meet the May deadline. And corporate finance is not like an auto loan, in which the repo man comes if you miss a few payments…. [C]reditors typically renegotiate the terms — as they have done to much sicklier newspaper companies than the New York Times Co.
Edmonds also shows that Hirschorn’s comparison of print and online readers isn’t just “not apples-to-apples,” as Hirschorn himself acknowledges, but more in the nature of apples to cinder blocks. In other words, Hirschorn doesn’t even come close.
There are three problems with the newspaper business right now: (1) the Internet is destroying its business model; (2) too many newspaper companies took on way too much debt in building their empires; and (3) the worst recession since the early 1980s, if not the ’30s, is wiping out the advertising that Craigslist didn’t already grab.
Right now, it’s the recession and the debt that are taking the biggest toll on the business; without those, newspapers might have some hope of making a downsized but successful transition to online.
The Times Co. took a couple of small but important steps this week, unrolling lucrative front-page ads in the Times and announcing that it will soon do the same in the Globe. The future of legacy media is going to look very different from what we’re all accustomed to, as Edmonds himself acknowledges. But the Times Co. should be able to make it through the recession. After that, we’ll see.
Photo (cc) by Steve Rhodes and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.