Way too busy with other work to do any more than take note of these developments regarding the Boston Herald, but here you go:
• WBUR.org reports that the paper is offering buyouts to employees who agree to leave. Curt Nickisch writes that the company has not said how many buyouts it’s looking for, and layoffs are a possibility.
More on the buyouts from the Boston Globe and from the Herald.
• Paul McMorrow of CommonWealth Magazine has an interesting column in the Boston Globe on the Herald’s plans to redevelop its South End property. The Herald no longer does its own printing, so it’s planning to move to a smaller plant.
According to McMorrow, neighbors and city officials are unhappy with Herald owner Pat Purcell’s proposal to build a suburban-style apartments-and-retail complex, and are urging him to come back with something more ambitious. Says McMorrow of Purcell and his partners: “They’re rushing to build any building, at the expense of building up a neighborhood.”
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Howie Carr: please, please, please take the buyout offer! I promise I’ll become a home delivery subscriber if you do!
Come now. Without Howie, the Herald wouldn’t be entertaining.
I suppose they could all telecommute, and all Purcell would have to do is rent a file server to manage it all. Or, they could go with Apple’s iCloud, and keep everything “out there”.
How many times has Howie Carr referred to the Globe as a sinking ship and their employess as trust-fund babies? It’s time for HIM to take a buyout and let some computer robot submit the columns ascribed to him.
DK – why, exactly, does the Herald have an obligation to ‘improve’ the neighborhood? Their obligation is to their shareholders and employees, to produce the most profitable – not most ‘ambitious’ or ‘imaginative’ – use of the property in order to safeguard the business and the jobs it produces.
I suppose it’s fun to spend other people’s money, but they’ve done their duty paying property taxes over the years to support the neighborhood, for schools and services that the building per se does not consume (save public safety). Now they need to improve themselves.
(Think McMorrow even buys, much less subscribes, to the Herald?)
At least we are still a two newspaper town and neither paper is bankrupt, in a failing JOA, or funded by a wealthy ideologue. How many other cities can make that statement?