Author: Dan Kennedy

Guardian column nominated for award

My online media column for The Guardian has been nominated for a Syracuse University Mirror Award for the second straight year.

The categories have been changed around a bit since last year. This time I’m in the category of “Best Commentary — Digital,” along with Eric Alterman of the Center for American Progress, Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review, Rachel Sklar of the Huffington Post, Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher and Clive Thompson of Wired.

The awards will be presented in New York City sometime in June.

Globe ad revenues down more than 30 percent

The New York Times Co.’s demand that the Boston Globe’s unions come up with $20 million in concessions may have gotten a boost this morning, as the company reported that advertising revenues at its New England Media Group — the Globe, Boston.com and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette — are down 31.6 percent.

According to the Times Co.’s latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, advertising revenues at the New England group for the first quarter of 2009 were a shade under $55.7 million. Overall, revenues for the group were nearly $104.5 million, a drop of 20.6 percent from the first quarter of 2008.

Though the Times Co. does not break out separate numbers for the Worcester paper, they are thought to be a small proportion of the New England group’s overall income and expenses.

One interesting aspect of the report is that the Globe does not stand out as a particular drag on the company. Ad revenues are down 27.3 percent at the New York Times Media Group (the Times and NYTimes.com) and 29.3 percent at the Regional Media Group, which comprises smaller papers, mainly in the South.

Yes, things are worse in New England, but not by that much. So if folks at the Globe are inclined to feel that New York is picking on them, this may give them some ammunition.

Overall, this is pretty ugly. The Times Co. lost $74.5 million during the first quarter, compared to just $335,000 a year ago. Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson predicts a miserable second quarter as well.

“In time, however, we believe that the economy will grow and the advertising market will improve,” Robinson said in a prepared statement, according to the Associated Press. “While we are looking forward to that day, we are not waiting for it.”

Media Nation goes to Kazakhstan

I’m leaving tomorrow for Almaty, Kazakhstan, where I’ll be taking part in the annual Eurasian Media Forum.

A lot of interesting people are going to be on hand, including former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, gadfly British parliamentarian George Galloway, former congressman Harold Ford, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, former ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and longtime friend of Media Nation Danny Schechter of Globalvision and the Media Channel.

I’ll be running a panel called “Traditional Media in Crisis?” and taking part in another called “The Booming Blogosphere.”

This is a big deal for Kazakhstan. The president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, will open the conference on Thursday morning, and the chairwoman of the event is his daughter, Dr. Dariga Nazarbayeva. On Friday night, we’ll be going to an event hosted by the mayor of Almaty, CNN International and the International Herald Tribune, which, like the Boston Globe, is owned by the New York Times Co. (Does Dan Totten know about this?)

I have no idea what to expect, although I know Schechter and his business partner, Rory O’Connor, have both come back in one piece previous years. I hope to do some blogging while I’m there, but I’m not sure how reliable our Internet connection will be.

Iranian-American journalist gets eight years

Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi has been sentenced to eight years in an Iranian prison, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports. The dispatch begins:

An Iranian court convicted journalist Roxana Saberi of espionage and sentenced her to eight years in prison today following a closed, one-day trial earlier this week, according to international news reports. Her lawyer said he will appeal. “Roxana Saberi’s trial lacked transparency and we are concerned that she may not have been treated fairly,” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “We call on the Iranian authorities to release her on bail pending her appeal.”

You have to wonder if Saberi has been caught up in the byzantine workings of internal Iranian politics. President Obama has attempted to find an opening to the regime. Iranians who don’t want to see any contacts between Iran and the United States obviously stand to benefit from Saberi’s imprisonment.

Obama now pretty much can’t — and shouldn’t — have anything to do with the Iranian government unless it releases Saberi. Which it won’t.

Here is a link to the CPJ’s online petition demanding freedom for Saberi. I’m going to go sign the Facebook version right now.

More: I see that the petition is now closed. But I joined the CPJ’s Facebook group, and urge you to do the same.

Still more: According to Global Voices Online, an Iranian blogger says Saberi is being held so that she can be used as a pawn in a prisoner swap.

Photo of Saberi with former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.

Re-Kindling the Globe

Warning: Fuzzy math ahead.

As we know, the most deadly problem the newspaper business faces is that very little advertising has migrated from the print to the Web. A dollar’s worth of print advertising translates to pennies online. Thus we have initiatives like Steven Brill’s Journalism Online aimed at getting people to pay for Web content. As I argued earlier this week, it probably can’t be done.

But we do need to shift to a model by which consumers will pick up a decent share of the cost. Even after the recession, classified ads are not going to move back from Craigslist to newspapers or their Web sites. And with far fewer local businesses, display ads bring in less revenue than was the case at one time.

What are people willing to pay for? A premium, well-edited news package, portable and easier to use than a typical newspaper Web site. The print edition meets that definition, which is why I think the Boston Globe ought to charge a lot more for it, even though it would, inevitably, drive down paid circulation. The logic: As it stands, circulation revenue barely covers the cost of printing and distribution. If ad revenue is not going to recover, then readers are going to have to pay.

But there’s another possibility. Fifteen years ago folks like Roger Fidler, then of Knight Ridder, suggested that portable digital devices he called “tablets” would one day be so cheap that newspapers would give them away so they could shut down their presses. It’s possible that moment has come in the form of Amazon’s Kindle — not as cheap as Fidler had envisioned, but maybe cheap enough.

The Globe’s Sunday circulation is about 500,000. Let’s say around 400,000 of those are home-delivered. What if you gave every one of those households a free Kindle in return for a three-year, seven-day subscription to the Globe?

Let’s do the math, such as it is. A Kindle costs $359. Assume the Globe could get a price of $300 apiece in return for buying 400,000 of them. That’s $120 million. Spread it over, say, six years, and that’s $20 million a year.

The Globe already charges $10 a month for its Kindle edition. If it extracted that from 400,000 households, it would come to $48 million a year in guaranteed income for three years. (And I’m not so sure you couldn’t charge double that.) After that, subscriptions would renew automatically once a year, which is how the few online news organizations that charge for online access (the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic) handle it.

And here’s where the big savings come in: You shut down the presses. Permanently. No more paper, ink, trucks, fuel and the like. No more jobs for a lot of hard-working people, either, which would be a tragedy, but not as big a tragedy as closing the Globe.

I’ve never gotten my hands on a Kindle, but I have played with a Sony Reader, which is a similar device. The portability and the clarity of the e-ink are both well ahead of even the smallest, sharpest laptop. The Globe’s Kindle edition gets mediocre reviews. But with no more print edition to think about, I’m sure it could be upgraded considerably. And with a large regional customer base, it might prove to be an attractive platform for new kinds of advertising.

Can this work? I have no idea. As a last-ditch effort, though, I definitely think it makes more sense than simply closing the print edition and trying to sell ads on Boston.com. If we come to that point, then I definitely think the Kindle would be a better option.

Credit where it’s due: There are very few original ideas out there. Although I wrote favorably about the Kindle as a newspaper platform way back in November 2007 (here and here), I want to point out that Mike B1 floated a proposal very similar to the one I’m making today just recently.

And Tim Allik points out that Silicon Valley Insider, in January, looked at the numbers behind moving the print edition of the New York Times to the Kindle.

Not the worst idea we’ve heard

The Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam reports that Red Sox principal owner John Henry has broached the idea of taking the Boston Globe off the New York Times Co.’s hands. The Times Co. is attempting to unload its 17.75 percent stake in the Red Sox.

Henry has a proven track record of building value. Any new owner for the Globe is likely to begin with deep cost-cutting. I’d rather see Henry wielding the scalpel than some other prospective owners doing it with a chainsaw.

On second thought: Given the state of the Globe’s finances, maybe I should say I’d rather see Henry do it with a chainsaw than someone else use tactical nuclear weapons.

Globe, Herald target each other

Boston Globe reporter Keith O’Brien today weighs in with a story about the financial problems being faced by the Boston Herald and GateHouse Media, which owns some 100 community papers in Eastern Massachusetts.

GateHouse’s problems are considerable and well-known. The Herald, though, is a bit of a mystery, as publisher Pat Purcell tends to play his cards close to the vest. What we know is that the paper and its reporting staff have gotten tiny, but that Purcell appears to have hit upon a formula for survival.

O’Brien, after chronicling shrinkage in the Herald’s staff and circulation, offers a quote from Sunday editor Tom Mashberg: “How are things now? It’s tough. We once had a newsroom filled with reporters and a commercial department filled with commercial staff. And it has definitely shrunk.”

Mashberg, upset that none of the positive comments he says he made got into O’Brien’s story, has fired back with an e-mail to the Globe, which I offer here in its entirety, with Mashberg’s permission:

To Globe Editors:

Tom Mashberg from the Herald here. I’m pretty disappointed at the way the reporter slanted this story. We spoke at length about how the Herald was performing miracles to survive and turn a profit in a terrible climate. When I asked him what he was going to use from me, he sent me this email:

“Here’s what I will be attributing to you: The total staff figures you sent me yesterday. Is that OK?

“And I will be quoting you regarding how the Herald has dealt with the cuts. And about how the Globe should have seen these changes coming. The quote at the end of our interview yesterday when you said it was puzzling that the Times allowed this to play out like this at the Globe.

“This could change, of course. Still haven’t filed my story. So e-mail or call if you have any questions.”

No one expects a puff piece, especially between competing newspapers. But it looks like the editors got hold of this and turned it into a hatchet job. I guess that explains a lot about where the Globe is headed. Sad.

If O’Brien or anyone else at the Globe would like to respond, I will post it immediately.

Meanwhile, Herald media reporter Jessica Heslam today reports that veteran media-watcher Michael Wolff believes neither Rupert Murdoch (about whom he wrote a book) nor New York Daily News publisher (and former Boston real-estate mogul) Mort Zuckerman has any interest in buying the Globe.

Heslam includes this toxic quote from Wolff: “I don’t think that anybody’s going to buy the Boston Globe. The Boston Globe is now an unbuyable property. It loses too much money and it has too many union obligations. No one will want it now. They might have wanted it. They did want it two years ago. Not now.”

Left unsaid is that (1) Murdoch can’t buy the Globe, since the Federal Communications Commission bans anyone from owning a television station (WFXT-TV, Channel 25) and a daily newspaper in the same market; and (2) Murdoch and Purcell are business partners.

Finally, the second of Herald columnist Howie Carr’s sneering pieces about the Globe’s missteps over the years prompts an observation. Carr actually found a way to poke fun at the 1998 departure of Globe columnist Patricia Smith, who was caught fabricating, without making any mention of the other, far better known Globe columnist who lost his job that summer: Mike Barnicle, caught making things up and plagiarizing by — among others — the Herald.

Anyone who listens to Carr’s talk show on WRKO Radio (AM 680) knows how much he detests Barnicle. But, after all, Purcell hired Barnicle to write a column a few years ago, and though it didn’t work out, Barnicle still pops up occasionally in the Herald. Since Carr can’t write what he’d really like to write, perhaps he should go cover a press conference or something.

Gambling mecca drowning in red ink

Think casino gambling is going to save Massachusetts? Here’s how Lynn Doan begins her story in today’s Hartford Courant, the leading newspaper in Connecticut, home of two resort casinos:

With the state’s three-year budget deficit forecast hovering between $6 billion and $9 billion, Democrats are pushing a tax plan that economists warn will wipe out thousands of jobs both in old-line and emerging Connecticut industries.

The tax package unveiled by the state legislature’s Democratic majority earlier this month includes three main hits to business: a 30 percent surcharge on the corporate earnings tax; an end to sales tax exemptions on some key purchases such as computer services; and stricter limits on tax credits, including the lucrative research and development credits that keep many startup businesses afloat.

As both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald report, expanded gambling is looking increasingly likely as Massachusetts officials scramble to make up for plunging tax revenues. Senate President Therese Murray is pushing for resort casinos, while House Speaker Robert DeLeo wants slot machines at race tracks.

The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe’s plan to build a casino in Middleborough quickly deteriorated into a tragicomedy of corruption and recriminations. But state officials, starting with Gov. Deval Patrick, think they know what’s best. So it’s likely that we’re going to end up with some form of expanded gambling.

Still, the facts are clear, for anyone who’s interested.