Author: Dan Kennedy

Globe to close foreign bureaus

The Boston Globe announced some sad news today: The paper is closing its foreign bureaus. Media Nation received word a little while ago, but Romenesko has already posted both this Globe item and a memo to the staff by editor Marty Baron, the text of which appears below:

To the staff:

As you know, this is a period of hard choices for us. Today I am advising you of one of them: We will no longer maintain a network of foreign bureaus.

We currently have four superb, supremely dedicated colleagues in three bureaus overseas. They will be given the opportunity to return here for other positions, and the bureaus will be closed.

Continuing to bear the expense of our foreign bureaus would have required us to reduce staffing by a dozen or so positions beyond those already announced. We concluded that it would be unwise to meet the newsroom’s financial targets by making additional staff reductions.

We will continue to send reporters and photographers abroad on special projects and selected major events. Our budget for this year sets aside money for that purpose.

Foreign coverage has been a point of special pride in our newsroom, ever since the Globe established its first overseas bureau in the mid-1970s. Since then, the Globe has asked its foreign correspondents to provide stories of distinction, and they have always delivered. Often, our colleagues have put their own lives at risk in the important, noble task of bringing the world closer to our readers. They are fiercely committed to their work, and they have been brave beyond measure.

Many other regional newspapers, some larger than ours, have taken similar steps in recent years. Our decision came only after a careful review by the publisher of various options that would allow us to stay within budget. All along, a guiding principle was to secure the resources required for local coverage and for journalism that has the most direct impact on our readers.

We remain positioned for another year of outstanding journalism, with robust local coverage, ambitious plans for the presidential campaign, and continued strength in sports, arts, business, features, Washington coverage, and many other areas. You can also expect even more aggressive initiatives online.

In coming weeks, I will be talking with you more about all of this.

Marty

Affected are Thannasis Cambanis and Anne Bernard, who cover the Middle East from the Jerusalem bureau; Indira Lakshmanan, based in Bogotá, Colombia; and Colin Nickerson, based in Berlin.

That this was inevitable makes it no less depressing. As many media observers, including me, have been writing for some time, it no longer makes sense for regional papers like the Globe to cover international news in any sort of comprehensive way — not when the New York Times, the BBC et al. are just a click away.

The Globe’s foreign coverage has been distinguished. Retired editor Matt Storin once told me that his philosophy was for the Globe to be like the New Yorker — to cover the news, but also to seek out the offbeat stories that the Times and the Washington Post weren’t covering. In recent years you could see that in John Donnelly’s outstanding reportage from Africa (Donnelly moved to back to Washington last year). And only yesterday, the Globe fronted a fine Lakshmanan piece on Panama City’s old quarter.

The Globe’s Elizabeth Neuffer — best known for her work in the former Yugoslavia — was one of the first reporters to die covering the war in Iraq. In 2002, Baron flew to Israel after Anthony Shadid — then with the Globe, now with the Post — was shot in Ramallah.

Not too many years ago, folks at regional papers like the Globe wanted to compete with the national media by having their own people in Washington, across the country and overseas. Unfortunately, the new media landscape puts a premium on local, local, local.

But that doesn’t mean something hasn’t been lost. Take a look at these special reports on the Globe’s Web site. Baron says the Globe’s foreign coverage won’t disappear entirely. But it’s not going to be the same. Not even close.

Update: Michael Gee disagrees with my assessment, and backs it up with some sharp observations about his years at the Herald. Unfortunately, he lumps Media Nation in with … Jack Welch!

Out of bounds

If only I’d been taking notes. I post this in the hope that some sharp-eared Media Nation reader will be able to expand on what I heard yesterday while parking at Target to run a few errands.

Howie Carr was hosting his WRKO Radio (AM 680) show, and the topic was the killing at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. Some of Carr’s observations were sensible. You do have to wonder what the parents of suspect John Odgren were thinking as he went off to school wearing a Columbine-style trench coat.

But then a caller opined that Odgren ought to be executed. I’m not making this up. Odgren is 16 years old and living with Asperger’s syndrome, a serious mental disorder, and some know-nothing know-it-all was ready to strap him into an electric chair as an example to others. I believe the caller also described Odgren as “an animal,” and “not a human being.”

And Carr agreed.

Then, within moments, Carr sounded like he was ready to change his tune. Those of us who’ve been reading and listening to Carr for years know there’s a good Howie and a bad Howie, and that occasionally he’ll remember that he’s supposed to be the adult in these exchanges. Or perhaps the producer was screaming in his ear, relaying orders from Entercom to inject a little sanity into the proceedings.

But alas. All Carr did was point out that you can’t reinstate the death penalty and use it on someone after the fact — a state of affairs he lamented. He further observed, bitterly, that Odgren would probably serve just 11 years or so, unless someone kills him in prison.

Maria Cramer reports in the Globe today that Odgren has a troubled history — so troubled that you have to wonder why he was allowed such freedom of movement at Lincoln-Sudbury. If he had been more closely supervised, James Alenson might be alive today.

There are plenty of questions about the way Odgren’s disability was managed. But for some mouth-breathing talk-radio caller to demand his execution — and for the host actually to agree — is so reprehensible and irresponsible that Carr, on reflection, would be deeply ashamed if he were capable of such an emotion.

She’s in

Hillary Rodham Clinton is running for president. Since I think I was the last person in America who thought she might not run, I just wanted to acknowledge that.

So now it’s Hillary versus Barack Obama versus John Edwards, with Bill Richardson, Tom Vilsack, Chris Dodd (!) and who knows who else in the mix. Not that this is a prediction, but this would be a fine moment for John Kerry to pull out, don’t you think?

Although Jon Keller, hardly a Kerry fan, won’t rule him out. Nor should I, given how far off I was here.

Jack Welch’s local vision

Retired GE chairman Jack Welch has glimpsed the future of metropolitan newspapers like the Globe, even if he’s not the guy I want to see implementing that vision.

“You’ve got to make the newsroom not control the world,” Welch said on CNBC, according to this account in the Herald by Jesse Noyes. “I’m not sure local papers need to cover Iraq, need to cover local events. They can be real local papers. And franchise, purchase from people very willing to sell to you their wire services that will give you coverage.”

That still sounds horrifying to my aging, nostalgia-attuned ears. But he’s right. Now that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC and the like are just a click away, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald et al. have little stake in covering national and international news except when there’s a local angle.

The Pentagon’s spies

For some time now, the ACLU has been trying to determine the extent to which the Pentagon has spied on antiwar groups. For instance, in my annual Muzzle Awards roundup for the Phoenix last Fourth of July, I noted that ACLU chapters in Maine and Rhode Island had joined efforts to force the Defense Department to turn over records under the Freedom of Information Act.

Well, yesterday we learned a whole lot more. Bloomberg reports that 2,821 organizations or events involving Americans were logged into a database of terrorist threats, known as TALON, as of December 2005 — and that 186 of those involved antiwar protests organized by the Quakers and other groups.

The ACLU observes:

The Pentagon’s misuse of the TALON database must be viewed in the wider context of increased government surveillance of U.S. citizens. With the help of phone companies, the National Security Agency has been tapping phones and reading email without a warrant. The FBI has gathered information about peace activists, and recruited confidential informants inside groups like Greenpeace and PETA. All of these actions are part of a broad pattern of the executive branch using “national security” as an excuse for encroaching on the privacy and free speech rights of Americans without adequate oversight.

You can read the ACLU press release here, and the full report (in PDF) here.

Ironically, the ACLU news comes at the same time that we learn the Bush administration has worked out a deal with the FISA court over the NSA’s wiretapping program. Don’t you feel better?

It depends on what “devout” means

David Kravitz of Blue Mass Group thinks the media may be wrong in describing Mitt Romney as a “devout” Mormon. In a commentary on Jacob Weisberg’s recent Mormon-bashing piece in Slate, Kravitz writes:

Although Romney is routinely described by others as a “devout Mormon,” I could not find (via a couple of Google searches) an instance where he has described himself that way. So, is that description of him truth, or truthiness? Like everything else about what Mitt Romney actually believes, it’s hard to tell.

Oh, David. Try a Google search for “Mitt Romney” and “bishop.” Here are a few examples for you:

  • The Boston Phoenix: “A former venture capitalist and Mormon bishop, Romney unsuccessfully challenged Ted Kennedy in a 1994 Senate campaign and then rescued the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah — the Vatican of Mormonism — from certain disaster before being elected governor here.”
  • Associated Press: “Romney was a bishop — the Mormon equivalent of a pastor — in the early 1980s and served as president of a collection of Boston area churches in the late 80s and early 90s.”
  • Reuters: “A devout Mormon and former bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Romney — the son of former Michigan Gov. George Romney — has several advantages, political analysts say.“

Question: Is it possible be a non-devout bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Answer: It’s hard to imagine.

I’m not saying I agree with Weisberg that Romney’s religion should disqualify him from the presidency. But Kravitz shouldn’t kid himself about Romney’s beliefs, any more than he should have kidded himself about the trustworthiness of the Massachusetts Legislature in the recent same-sex-marriage debate.

Conversation versus competition

One of the more interesting news-of-the-future experiments taking place right now is at the Gannett newspaper chain. As Wired reported last November, Gannett’s 90-plus papers, which include the ubiquitous but unloved USA Today, have embraced the conversational model of news, encouraging readers to become citizen journalists by contributing stories and by lending a hand in certain types of investigations.

Trouble is, Gannett, with its lust for high profit margins, is not necessarily the ideal avatar of journalistic innovation. A recent Washington Post article portrayed online mobile journalists — “mojos” — at Gannett’s News-Press of Fort Myers, Fla., as little more than cheap content providers working for an editor who gets antsy if no one has posted anything in the last 15 minutes.

Now comes Lisa Williams of Placeblogger, who reports that, in Muncie, Ind., Gannett wants to play the game but is refusing to abide by the rules.

Let me back up for a moment. Within the news media, as in many businesses, there are two ways of dealing with competition: you ignore it or you denigrate it. Thus the Herald does not recommend stories in the Globe, Channel 5 does not tell you to turn to Channel 4 for more details and WRKO Radio (AM 680) does not suggest that you switch to Paul Sullivan on WBZ (AM 1030) in order to get away from the loathsome Michael Savage.

In the news-is-a-conversation model, though, you’re supposed to link to anyone and everyone. The idea is that competition is an outmoded concept, and the more content you can bring together, the better it is for everyone: bigger audience, richer conversation and maybe, someday, more money. (Someone, after all, has to pay for all this stuff, even if finances are usually left out of the equation.)

Gannett, according to Williams, is trying to have it both ways — embracing the new conversational model while sticking with the old competition model. The citizen-journalism site of Gannett’s Star Press of Muncie does not allow linking to the Muncie Free Press, an independent Web site. The guy who runs the Free Press says he’s been told the only way his site will get a mention in the Star-Press is if he buys an ad.

Williams writes:

Refusing to link to local blogs that aren’t hosted by the paper cuts off a newspaper-based community from valuable sources of new readers — and it means that while the paper may stay the paper of record for their community, they’ll never be the website of record for their community.

One of the fundamental things to understand about the net is that it’s possible to grow the pie — linking to people doesn’t mean you have fewer readers; in the long run it may mean that you have more.

Now, I’m not going to pull a Jeff Jarvis and start ranting that the Star Press folks are a bunch of clueless slugs who don’t get it. I understand the instinct. To the Star Press, the Free Press is competition. Why help it out?

Still, I think that if Gannett is going to try the news-is-a-conversation model, it ought to go all the way. As it stands, Gannett is trying to open itself up and wall itself off at the same time. Company officials want readers to contribute content, yet they won’t allow anyone to call attention to other content. They want to take, but they won’t give back. That’s repugnant, in my view.

Granted, Gannett officials can’t lose sight of its dual missions, which are to report the news and to make money. But given that they’ve made a bet-the-company gamble on experimentation, they might as well see it through. If it’s not working, they can always adjust later on.

Correction confusion

A correction uncorrected — or technically accurate? You make the call. Check out these excerpts from the New York Times concerning Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s reaction to President Bush’s plan to send more American troops to Iraq.

News story, Jan. 12:

The Iraqi leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, failed to appear at a news conference and avoided any public comment. He left the government’s response to an official spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, who gave what amounted to a backhanded approval of the troop increase and emphasized that Iraqis, not Americans, would set the future course in the war.

Correction, Jan. 13:

An article yesterday about the Iraqi government’s response to plans by President Bush to deploy additional troops referred incorrectly to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s absence from the government’s news conference. Mr. Maliki was never scheduled to speak; it was not that he “failed to appear.”

Editorial, Jan. 14:

Now, with Mr. Bush unwilling or unable to persuade Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to take the minimum steps necessary to justify any deeper American commitment, we recognize that even that has become unrealistic. Mr. Maliki gave the latest White House plan an even chillier reception than it received in the United States Congress, boycotting a Thursday news conference in Baghdad announcing it. He apparently would have preferred to see American forces sent to fight Sunni insurgents in western Anbar Province, leaving Baghdad as a free-fire zone for his Shiite militia partners.

It looks to me as though the Times editorial backs off the previous day’s correction and re-embraces the first account, in which it was reported that Maliki “failed to appear.” I don’t think you can “boycott” an event at which you were never scheduled to appear. So no, I’d say the editorial is not technically accurate, at least if the correction is, you know, correct.

Which raises a question: Does the Sunday editorial page go to bed so early that a correction published in Saturday’s paper can’t be taken into account? And even if that’s true, shouldn’t the Web version of the editorial have been updated?

More: Media Nation has been reliably informed that (1) the Sunday editorial page ships on Friday afternoon and (2) corrections generally don’t appear on the Web before they’ve been published in the print edition. So there you go.