Author: Dan Kennedy

Meeting my match

At the summit of Mt. Monadnock

Two years ago, following a six-day, 50-mile backpacking trip with our Boy Scout troop along the Appalachian Trail in the Berkshires, I suggested something different for 2009: the Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway, a 48-mile trail in western New Hampshire that connects those two mountains.

The AT in New England tends to be choked with thru-hikers in August, some of them on the dubious side. And the Greenway between Monadnock and Sunapee was relatively flat, or so I’d been told. So on the clear, sunny morning of Saturday, Aug. 8, four scouts and four adult leaders headed for Jaffrey, N.H., to begin a five-day trip. And ran into trouble almost immediately.

At 3,165 feet, Monadnock is a modest mountain. Now that a tramway has been built to the summit of Mt. Fuji, Monadnock has actually overtaken it as the most-climbed in the world. Yet Monadnock is always harder than it looks, and I say that as someone who’d hiked it six times before, most recently last fall.

We took a path none of us had hiked — the Birchtoft Trail, up Monadnock’s eastern slope — and then the Red Spot Trail. That turned out to be exceptionally steep, with lots of hand-to-hand climbing up rock faces while wearing full backpacks. The adults were pretty much blasted by the time we reached the summit.

But our day was far from over. At the top we picked up the Dublin Trail (which is co-terminus with the Greenway), which we took to the northern base of the mountain. And from there we hiked to Spiltoir Shelter — one of a series of adirondacks with adjacent tent sites.

Somewhere along the way it began to dawn on me that, at 53, I wasn’t the hiker I’d been even two years ago, though I’d been running and my weight was reasonably good. To go backpacking during a hot week in the summer is to suffer, and I’d known that going in. But, somehow, the suffering-to-enjoyment ratio had shifted into the negative.

As it turned out, the next three days were not flat but, rather, consisted of one sharp, heart-pounding hill after another. We took a few shortcuts, and on one, along a paved road into the tiny village of Washington, I took a hard fall, splitting my knee open and bruising my right hand and wrist badly enough that I thought I might have broken it. That would have made me the second adult to leave the group. Fortunately, by the next morning it felt much better.

It wasn’t until we hit camp the fourth night, at Moose Lookout, that I was confident I would make it to the end. It poured that night. And though my new REI tent performed quite well, the trail on Wednesday was a muddy, sloppy mess. We struggled to the top of Mt. Sunapee (elevation: 2,743 feet) by noon, then took the Summit Trail down to the parking lot. Our week was over. (View in photo at right is from the Sunapee summit.)

The scouts had no problems, and we adults spent the week trying (and failing) to keep up with them. Three had participated in the 50-miler two years ago. The fourth had climbed Monadnock with a Cub Scout group I’d helped lead when he was barely 5 years old.

As for me, my sixth 50-miler was probably my last. I’d gone on three in the 1970s, two as a scout and one as a 21-year-old, helping my old troop. And I’ve gone on three as a scout leader in recent years, starting in 2005, with my son as one of the scouts. It was hard in ’05 and ’07, but it’s harder now.

Sure, I could run more. I could lose another 10 pounds. Realistically, though, that’s not going to happen. Right now, shorter, easier trips in cooler weather sound like the way to go. I’m back in one piece, and there were times last week when I wondered if that would be possible.

Photos of Kennedy and trail sign by John Kuconis.

Where it all went wrong

I’m no advertising expert, but Steve Buttry’s post on newspapers’ original sin strikes me as being exactly right:

The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers. Helping businesses connect with customers was always our business. We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers.

We just offered businesses the same old solutions that we offered in print, but pop-up ads and web banners somehow didn’t work as well as display ads. Which was just as well, because we told our business customers the ads weren’t worth much by the way we treated them.

Having blown the online-advertising business, newspaper executives are now going to make up for it by charging for online content — likely with miserable results. (Via Steve Yelvington.)

The high cost of Cambridge police records

The Cambridge Police Department has adopted a restrictive policy that would force the Cambridge Chronicle to pay more than $1,200 to obtain public records of police activity for most of July, according to a story by Chronicle reporter Erin Smith. What’s more, the policy may be in violation of the Massachusetts public-records law.

Like all Massachusetts police departments, Cambridge’s makes a bare-bones incident log freely available to members of the public; it is, in fact, online. But state law exempts police departments from having to release detailed information about incidents that are under investigation.

What is and isn’t public information, and when it must be made public, are complicated matters that I’m not going to get into here. But the law does require that the public log — also known as the police blotter — contain the “names and addresses of persons arrested and charges against such persons.”

According to the Chronicle, though:

The Cambridge Police Department already keeps a daily police log online maintained by a student intern, but over the past several months, the Chronicle noticed that previously available information — such as the ages and addresses of arrested people, the addresses where crimes occurred and the description of suspects — was being withheld from the public.

In quickly scanning through a few days’ worth of the Cambridge log, I found several examples of arrestees whose addresses (and ages) were listed. I couldn’t find any whose address was not listed. I have no reason to doubt the Chronicle’s reporting, but it’s important to point that out.

The fees are another matter. Charging $1,215 for public records is an outrageous breach of the public’s right to know. The police department’s lawyer, Kelly Downes, cites the cost of compiling and copying those records. But the standard practice with many police departments is to allow reporters to view the originals at the police station, at no cost to anyone.

Given the embarrassment over the department’s recent arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates in his own home, you’d think that everyone would be on his or her best behavior these days. Well, think again.

And by the way — we’re still waiting to hear how Sgt. James Crowley, who arrested Gates, managed to incorporate information into his report from a woman who insists she never talked with Crowley. Maybe Downes hasn’t had a chance to work out a price for that particular piece of information.

Monetizing the link economy (not)

PaidContent.org has posted an important analysis by media consultant Arnon Mishkin showing that aggregator sites derive far more value by compiling headlines, ledes and links than do the news organizations that actually produce the journalism.

This isn’t exactly counterintuitive, but it does run counter to what a lot of us had hoped was true. Jeff Jarvis, more than anyone, has popularized the idea of the “link economy.” Trouble is, it may not exist. At the very least, it’s likely a lot more complicated than simply a matter of posting links and assuming the linkee will benefit at least as much as the linker.

Here is Mishkin’s key insight:

Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s thought about how people have historically read a newspaper: They’ve scanned the headlines and then turned to the sports, movie listings or recipe pages, depending on their real interest. As the saying goes, “People don’t check the news to read about the fire, they check it to learn that there wasn’t a fire.”

Historically, the value of those casual browsers was captured by the newspaper because the readers would have to buy a copy. Now all the value gets captured by the aggregator that scrapes the copy and creates a front page that a set of readers choose to scan. And because creating content costs much more scraping it, there is little rational economic reason to create content.

Mishkin’s post comes at a time when news organizations from the Associated Press to News Corp. to the Boston Globe are dipping their toes in the water with respect to charging for their content. That’s fraught with difficulties, too, although I’m slightly more bullish about the idea of per-click micropayments than I was even a few months ago.

In the long run, we’re going to have to differentiate between good and bad linking. Blogging is the classic example of good linking, since the blogger adds value through analysis and reinterpretation.

But aggregating in a way that removes nearly all incentives to click through to the original news site defines bad linking. The Huffington Post is one example. Newser is an even more egregious example: when you first access the site, you get photos with headlines; click on one and you get a Newser-supplied summary (with more ads); and, finally, with a second click, you jump to the original. Link economy? More like piracy.

No one really knows what the answer is. Mishkin offers some unsatisfying ideas at the end of his post. My own sense is that newspapers need to try a variety of strategies:

  • Charging as much as the market will bear for the print edition.
  • Developing paid online editions for e-readers, cell phones and laptops (i.e., Times Reader and GlobeReader).
  • Removing the “today’s paper” feature from their free Web sites. (I would continue to offer all or most of the content for free, but not in the form of an exact substitute.)

The search for a business model continues. Mishkin has punched one more hole in a fantasy a lot of people, including me, had believed in for as long as we could.

(Via Howard Owens’ Twitter feed. Owens, you may recall, was a top official at GateHouse Media during that company’s legal battle with the New York Times Co. over the Boston Globe’s aggregation practices.)

Media Nation on hiatus

I’m writing this from the newsroom of “Beat the Press,” and will be running around for the rest of the day. Tomorrow I leave for a five-day backpacking trip. So don’t look for any new posts until late next week.

I’ve turned on comment moderation, but I won’t be here to moderate. In other words, you won’t be able to post a new comment until I get back. So get outside, folks.

Sulzberger speaks

Even as a third prospective buyer has emerged for the Boston Globe — and even as the New York Times Co. has finally acknowledged that the Globe is for sale, something that’s been clear for months — the company’s top two executives have broken their silence to say, well, not so fast.

In a story and interview in today’s Globe, chief executive Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (photo) and president Janet Robinson express the hope that the paper is back on the road to health, adding that they won’t sell unless they can find the right deal — both financially and with regard to “the impact of a potential sale on the community,” as Sulzberger puts it.

They also defend their record as stewards of the Globe since 1993, when the Times Co. purchased the paper for $1.1 billion. (The paper is thought to be worth barely a fraction of that today, though that’s also true of the newspaper business in general.) “I think this company has supported the Globe during a very, very difficult financial period. It has supported its journalism, it has supported its business-side operations,” Robinson says.

Sulzberger gets off the best line. Asked whether company officials regret having bought the Globe, he replies, “How far back should we go? Maybe we regret in 1896 that we bought the New York Times.”

My nickel’s worth: I think the Times Co. was a reasonably good steward until about a year ago, when the company’s own troubles, and fears about the fate of its flagship, the Times, led it to start treating the Globe — and Boston — with contempt.

There have, of course, been deep cuts, including the first layoffs in the Globe’s history earlier this year. But the Globe is hardly alone among large regional newspapers in losing its foreign bureaus and in scaling back most of its national ambitions. It remains just about the only paper in its weight class to have a fully functioning Washington bureau.

Still, the lack of communication on the part of the company — most definitely including Sulzberger and Robinson — during the months-long crisis over union concessions led to a sense that management was not willing to share in the sacrifices being asked of its employees. The $20 million in concessions, including $10 million by the Newspaper Guild, the paper’s largest union, were truly draconian, even if they were necessary.

The question, at this point, is how much credibility the Times Co. has left with the community. The best answer is to put out a good paper every day, and the Globe has risen to that challenge. Still, I have to believe that a new start under a new owner would be the best outcome, provided the owner wants to get into the business for the right reasons.

Like everyone else, I’m intrigued by the notion that Partners HealthCare chairman Jack Connors and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca might lead the Globe into some sort of non-profit ownership arrangement, which Jay Fitzgerald explained in the Boston Herald earlier this week. But Connors is a walking conflict of interest. No one knows if he could separate his own interests from those of the Globe’s journalistic mission.

In other news, the Boston Phoenix’s Adam Reilly has obtained a memo from the Guild reporting that publisher Steve Ainsley has told union official that the paper is heading in the right direction.

And the Herald’s Christine McConville reports that Ainsley told the Guild that the paper will soon start charging for access to the paper’s Web site, Boston.com, confirming earlier remarks editor Marty Baron made in an appearance on “Greater Boston.”