Author: Dan Kennedy

More cuts coming at the Globe

Boston Globe editor Marty Baron tells his staff that as many as 50 newsroom positions will be eliminated soon — via buyout if possible, or layoffs if necessary. Baron concludes his memo with this:

All of us appreciate what a supremely dedicated and talented staff we have here, and we know the ache of seeing admired colleagues leave our newsroom. We also know the challenges of producing a high-quality newspaper and website when there are fewer of us to do the work.

Once again, we will have to assess everything we do. And so we will move promptly to evaluate a wide range of options. Not every option we review will come to pass, but reductions of this magnitude obviously will require us to make fundamental changes. Your ideas are welcome.

We have demonstrated repeatedly that we are a resilient bunch, capable of superb journalism even as we rethink our operations, reinvent our product, and refine our mission. We are being tested again, and a resourceful newsroom like ours can meet the test.

This is shockingly ugly stuff. I can’t imagine how the Globe can move forward without a dramatically redefined mission. Just focusing on local news isn’t going to do it, because that’s fundamentally about throwing bodies at stories.

Not exactly a novel observation that the newspaper business as we know it is rapidly coming to an end. (Via Romenesko.)

More: Adam Reilly of the Phoenix reports that Boston Newspaper Guild president Dan Totten wants any cuts to come exclusively from Globe management.

Good jobs at good wages

Context is everything. Yesterday, I wrote about the compensation packages of GateHouse Media’s top two officials, chief executive Michael Reed and the just-promoted president and chief operating officer, Kirk Davis.

What I wrote was accurate, but I failed to consider what top executives might be making at other newspaper companies. As it turns out, there’s nothing special about Reed’s salary ($925,000 in 2007) or Davis’ (about $461,000). Reed’s 2006 compensation, $6.4 million, included a lot of stock, the value of which has presumably all but disappeared.

With 2007 revenues of $589 million, GateHouse is on the smaller end of the publicly traded newspaper companies I looked at this morning. But its challenges are as great or greater than those of much larger companies — it’s staggering under a debt load of $1.2 billion, and its stock price has fallen so much that it was delisted this fall by the New York Stock Exchange.

Anyway, here’s a quick cruise around a few other newspaper companies and what they paid their top managers in 2007, ranked by 2007 revenues.

Gannett Co. ($7.4 billion)

  • Craig Dubow, chairman, president and chief executive officer: salary, $1.2 million; total compensation, $7,546,710
  • Gracia Martore, chief financial officer, executive vice president: salary, $700,000; total compensation, $3,026,985
  • Susan Clark-Johnson, chairwoman of U.S. community publishing: salary, $735,000; total compensation, $3,145,339
  • Not-so-fun fact: Employees have been told to take a one-week unpaid furlough during the first quarter of 2009
  • Financials from WSJ.com

New York Times Co. ($3.2 billion)

  • Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman: salary, $1,087,000; total compensation, $3,439,280
  • Janet Robinson, chief executive officer: salary, $1 million; total compensation, $4,142,410
  • Michael Golden, vice chairman: salary, $1 million; total compensation, $1,706,579
  • James Follo, chief financial officer and senior vice president: salary, $480,000; total compensation, $859,273
  • Not-so-fun fact: A recent, widely disputed essay in the Atlantic speculates that the flagshap New York Times could cease publishing as early as this May
  • Financials from WSJ.com

McClatchy Co. ($2.3 billion)

  • Gary Pruitt, chairman and CEO: salary, $1.1 million; total compensation, $4,635,355
  • Patrick Talamantes, chief financial officer and vice president for finance: salary, $500,000; total compensation, $938,970
  • Three vice presidents of operations are paid salaries in the range of $500,000 to $600,000; total compensation is around $1.1 million apiece
  • Not-so-fun fact: The debt-burdened chain is trying to sell the Miami Herald, but can’t find any takers
  • Financials from WSJ.com

Journal Register Co. ($463 million)

  • James Hall, chairman and chief executive officer: salary, $394,750; total compensation, 411,233
  • Scott Wright, president and chief operating officer: salary, $201,923; total compensation, $231,040
  • Julie Beck, executive vice president and chief financial officer: salary, $337,500; total compensation, $431,510
  • Robert Jelenic, former chairman and chief executive officer: salary, $945,396; total compensation, $6,318,394 (Jelenic died last month)
  • Not-so-fun fact: The deeply troubled company is closing some of its papers and selling off others
  • Financials from the company’s 2008 proxy statement (PDF)

What’s the takeaway? Top executives at newspaper companies, like top executives everywhere, make a lot of money. We tend not to notice when times are good. But with the newspaper business under siege, such lavish compensation packages seem out of sync, both symbolically and substantively.

On the other hand, if any of these well-paid folks can find a way out of the current morass, they will be worth every cent.

The well-compensated Kirk Davis

Randy Turner looks at GateHouse Media’s latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and discovers that Kirk Davis, the just-promoted president and chief operating officer, will be extremely well paid.

According to a Form 8-K filed with the SEC last week, Davis is now earning “a base salary of $461,260.80.” He’s eligible for performance bonuses as well, which sounds a little like a baseball team that signs a free agent for $12 million and then includes an incentive clause for making the All-Star team. Why? Shouldn’t the All-Star team be a given for that kind of money? [Note: I should make it clear that I don’t know what Davis was making as head of GateHouse Media New England. It’s possible that this isn’t actually a raise.]

Turner writes that Davis is making more than double what his predecessor earned as GateHouse’s number-two executive, although considerably less than what’s paid to GateHouse chief executive Mike Reed — $925,000 in 2007 and $6.4 million the year before.

Turner, a journalist-turned-schoolteacher, is witheringly sarcastic in observing that the financially ailing GateHouse is paying its top executives so well at a time when it has eliminated contributions to its employees’ 401(k) plans.

I think Davis is fundamentally a good guy, and that GateHouse can only benefit from having him run its day-to-day operations. But this is terrible symbolism.

Media Nation on the air

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.

The day Jim Rice made my Hall of Fame

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.

Another round in the paid-content debate

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.

Hattie Carroll’s killer finally dies

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.

John Donne was wrong.

The iPod of her generation

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.

Northeastern student on the scene

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.