On Thursday morning, I posted our latest “What Works” podcast, in which my Northeastern University colleague Mike Beaudet of WCVB-TV (Channel 5) explained to Ellen Clegg and me why the folks running local television news need to transition to a digital-first, mobile-first mentality if they hope to attract a younger generation of viewers.
The pixels were barely dry before I started hearing from The Boston Globe newsroom that the paper was canceling its four-days-a-week 5 p.m. newscast, “Boston Globe Today.” I was able to break that news before anyone else, so thanks as always to my sources. The program, launched in February 2023, appeared Monday through Thursday on New England Sports Network, of which Globe owners John and Linda Henry are part-owners.
Like many observers, I was skeptical when “Boston Globe Today” launched. Although it was also hosted on the Globe’s website and stories were broken out for viewing on YouTube and other platforms, it was positioned as a TV-first, linear product. That just doesn’t work anymore. (And to give Mike an additional plug, here’s some information on the conference he’s leading at Northeastern on March 21 and 22 called “Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit.”)
As Thursday wore on, sources at the Globe started sending me various internal emails, stirring a controversy over how the shutdown was handled and over the temporary silencing of a staff member who was being laid off. I’ll start with a message from Globe Media CEO Linda Henry, who confirmed that four people were losing their jobs. She described “Boston Globe Today” as a “successful two-year BGT collaboration” with NESN and said that the Friday sports program, canceled for now, will be back later this spring with a new format and with Globe columnist Chris Gaspar continuing as host. I have posted her full email here, and here’s an excerpt:
With the thousands of videos we created for BGT, we learned a lot about what our Globe audiences value, and we know they want video in a variety of formats. Accordingly, we are further investing in video by building our multimedia team in the newsroom. We will continue to produce daily video content covering news, sports, and entertainment for distribution across platforms to better serve our audiences. This investment will include additional dedicated multimedia staff, two with complementary experience reassigned from Boston Globe Today, and new equipment.
Now for the controversy. A member of the newscast’s production team, Matthew Nelson, wrote a long missive in the Globe’s internal Slack channel lamenting that he was lured to Boston from New Jersey to take a job at a new podcasting venture only to be told once he got here that it had been canceled. (Jennifer Smith of CommonWealth Beacon wrote about that at the time.) He then was given the opportunity to move to the newscast instead, but that job lasted less than a year. Nelson’s message struck me as personal, meant only to be shared with his colleagues, so I didn’t want to quote from it without his permission — which he has now given me. Again, here’s the whole thing, and here’s an excerpt:
I began to feel like I’d been aboard one doomed vessel, placed onto a life raft, and loaded onto another.
Around this time I found out that I’m going to be a father. I wrote an article about marathon running and fatherhood for the Globe Magazine (a real highlight of my time here), and I started to plan my paternity leave although I now worried that I’d be laid off before getting there. Being a new parent seems hard. Doing that right after losing a job and having no benefits seems even harder.
After a few anxious months of waiting, this morning we were told that Globe Today will not continue. And my (wonderful, talented, kind) colleagues and I will not continue to work at the Globe either.
Nelson’s message was taken down not long after it was posted, and staff members who tried to share it lost access to Slack. That led Globe reporter Danny McDonald to send out an email that said, “We should be able to hear what our colleagues have to say. Matthew Nelson’s Slack message was deleted. And now multiple Slack channels are locked to prevent people from supporting his message. Censoring him, and our other journalists, is wrong.”
Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan reported on the matter as well, writing that “dozens” of employees sent out a message calling those actions “antithetical to the values of a good newsroom.”
Linda Henry addressed that in her email, agreeing that it shouldn’t have happened, saying: “We acknowledge that any changes like this can be challenging. One BGT member who was affected posted on Slack as he was being informed of his termination. That post was deleted without securing the prior necessary approvals. We regret this action, and the Slack message has since been reposted by IT. His email, which expressed the same message, was not impacted.”
As for the lessons that Henry says the Globe learned from its newscast, I’m glad to hear that she remains committed to video. The other day the Globe posted more than 10 minutes of highlights from Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee. I watched it in its entirety — and like the 60-something fossil that I am, I did it by projecting it from my phone onto our large-screen TV.
Nina MacLaughlin’s newsletter
Although the Globe has been profitable for several years (and remains so, according to Ryan’s story on the shutdown of the newscast), it’s been making some cuts here and there recently. One of those cuts was in Sunday book coverage, which claimed a column on the local literary scene by author Nina MacLaughlin, a former Boston Phoenix colleague. Given that we in Boston like to think of ourselves as a literary and intellectual center, that particular cut struck me as ill-considered.
In any case, Nina is starting a newsletter called New England Literary News on Substack, and she’s already off and running. “I’ve decided to continue the column on Substack,” she told me by email. “To keep the conversation going, to keep shining light on the local scene, to keep the community of writers, readers, bookstores, book lovers of all kinds connected and informed. I want to help keep this ecosystem thriving. It feels all the more crucial right now.” A subscription costs $5 a month.
Scott Kirsner moves on
Scott Kirsner, who’s been writing a freelance column on business and innovation for the Globe for the past 25 years, has published his farewell column. What you will not learn is that he’s taking his talents to MassLive, a digital news outlet that is part of the Advance Local chain and is affiliated with The Republican newspaper of Springfield.
Kirsner is also the CEO and co-founder of a media and events business called InnoLead, so it will be interesting to see whether there will be any synergies between that and his work at MassLive. Advance has been putting a lot of resources into expanding MassLive. Last May, Ellen and I hosted MassLive president Joshua Macht and vice president and executive editor Ronnie Ramos on “What Works” and asked them to lay out their business strategy.
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