I spent some time Saturday night and early Sunday morning at The Boston Globe‘s distribution center in Newton, where employees—including many journalists—were assembling papers and getting ready to go out on routes. The Globe covers the story here. What follows is my live-tweeting.
In addition, I’ve posted audio of an interview I conducted with tech columnist Hiawatha Bray and reporter Todd Wallack as they were juggling inserts. (Bray is the first speaker.) After the tweets you’ll find a statement from Peter Doucette, the paper’s vice president for consumer sales and marketing.
By the way: We got our Globe here in West Medford this morning as well as the Sunday New York Times. But they used to be delivered by one carrier, who told us recently she was sticking with the Globe. Now there are two different vendors.
What follows is Doucette’s statement, which I received a little before 2 a.m.
This is a statement from Peter Doucette, Boston Globe Vice President, Consumer Sales & Marketing regarding Boston Globe staff volunteering to deliver newspapers:
Over this last week, The Boston Globe has received thousands of calls from customers reporting they had not received their daily newspaper as the Globe transitions its home delivery service to a new distribution partner ACI Media.
Establishing a new home delivery network with a new partner is a complex and major undertaking. Please know that we launched this transition because we firmly believed, and still do, that it was necessary to assure a higher level of delivery and customer service over the long term. In the short term, frustrating service disruptions have occurred as our new home delivery partner ACI Media deploys a new staff of 600 carriers who must learn new delivery routes and the addresses of the homes and apartments for every Globe home delivery subscribers.
With the Sunday paper about to hit – the Globe is doing everything possible to mitigate these short term delivery issues. More than two hundred Boston Globe journalists, business and operations staff, from general reporters in the newsroom up to the highest levels of leadership, are volunteering their time this holiday weekend to help deliver tomorrow’s Boston Globe or assist fielding phones calls from readers in Globe’s customer service call center.
This weekend’s effort is one small gesture to show our Globe customers that we are working hard with ACI to address these issues. We expect the process to improve not instantly, but steadily with each passing day and thank our customers for their patience.
Here is the email that went out earlier today to Boston Globe employees from Scott Steeves, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild. I have removed contact information.
Dear Members –
We are in crisis mode. I’m sure you’ve all heard about the papers not getting delivered this past week. We are looking for people to work tonight delivering papers in the Newton area. Anyone from the editorial side who is able to work tonight delivering papers, please email Beth Healy. Anyone from the business side who is able to work tonight delivering papers, please contact Scott Steeves.
We will be meeting at 15 Riverdale Ave. in Newton at midnight. Globe employees will need to be two per car. Please have proof of driver’s license and registration. You will get a route with a list of households with delivery instructions. Make sure you have a flashlight and a GPS.
Appreciate everybody who can help out. Thanks in advance.
Scott
More from Craig Douglas of the Boston Business Journal.
Update, 5:05 p.m. Confirming a rumor I picked up earlier today, Globe tech columnist Hiawatha Bray reports on Facebook that “dozens” of Globe reporters, responding to the “fiasco” of the past week, will deliver the Sunday paper.
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Today’s must-read post on The Boston Globe‘s ongoing home-delivery meltdown is by Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub. Among other things, he notes that when the Orange County Register switched to the Globe‘s new carrier, ACI Media Group, in 2014, mayhem ensued.
But I’m confused. According to the Times‘ story, the Register switched from the Los Angeles Times‘ service to ACI, based in Long Beach, California, after it fell behind on its payments to the Times. Yet when the Globe published a story on its own problems earlier this week, it identified ACI as the company that delivers the Los Angeles Times.
Googling ACI Media Group leads to dead ends and 404s (not a good sign). But I did find a cached press release from September 2010 in which ACI reported that it had at least some of the L.A. Times‘ home-delivery business:
American Circulation Innovations (ACI) is now delivering a weekly volume of 250,000 of the subscription-paid daily and Sunday Los Angeles Times. This represents a more than 100% increase of ACI’s delivery of the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
ACI’s Chief Executive, Keith Somers said: “We’ve been able to leverage our management team’s circulation background and our highly innovative and efficient delivery model to provide the Los Angeles Times with quality home delivery at reduced rates. We’re proud that our performance and service have earned increased business from such a valued and marquee partner.”
So the Orange County Register switched from the Los Angeles Times‘ home-delivery service to ACI Media Group, which also had at least some of the Times‘ business. And now the Globe is reporting that ACI has all of the Times‘ business. I guess.
The company’s new name appears to be the ACI Last Mile Network. And for what it’s worth, I haven’t been able to find any stories about problems with its service similar to what the Globe is going through. The Register‘s problems were essentially self-inflicted—though that may turn out to be the case with the Globe as well.
The standalone blog has become something of a dinosaur. I’ve been writing Media Nation since 2005. Increasingly, though, the online conversation is driven by social media. And I find that I’ve been using my blog more and more as an archive for posts that I wrote for other sites.
As a paid weekly columnist for WGBHNews.org and an occasional contributor to the Nieman Journalism Lab, I find that most of my best work is published there before it makes its way onto Media Nation. So I’m going to break with my past practice of writing an end-of-the-year round-up of my top 10 most-trafficked blog posts. Instead, I’m going to go with my top five, along with five pieces that were published elsewhere that, at least in my mind, stand out as my best work.
I no longer think it makes sense to post page views for each blog post since I imagine the page views for non-Media Nation pieces were much greater. But in the interests of full disclosure, I will tell you that my total number of visitors to Media Nation has been dropping, from 142,000 in 2013 to just under 120,000 in 2014 and about 102,000 in 2015 (which, after all, still has a few hours to go!).
My personal top five
The 2015 Muzzle Awards(WGBHNews.org, July 4).Since 1998 I’ve been writing the New England Muzzle Awards—an annual round-up of outrages against free speech. Until 2012 the Muzzles were published in the late, great Boston Phoenix. Now they are hosted by WGBHNews.org. As I noted in the introduction, the 2015 edition came amid “a crisis in transparency on Beacon Hill and throughout Massachusetts” as the state’s extraordinarily weak public records law finally started to garner public attention and outrage. Unfortunately, promised reforms have not yet materialized. The House passed an inadequate reform bill that is now awaiting action in the Senate, where—let’s hope—it may be strengthened.
How A Connecticut Journalist Broke A Key Part Of The Bizarre Las Vegas Newspaper Story (WGBHNews.org, December 29). In which I tell the tale of Christine Stuart, the editor and co-owner of CT News Junkie, who used social media to unmask the identity of “Edward Clarkin.” Clarkin’s byline appeared atop a plagiarism-filled article in Connecticut’s New Britain Herald about county judges in Nevada, one of whom had run afoul of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. The story is way too weird and complicated to explain here, but Clarkin is apparently a pseudonym for Herald owner Michael Schroeder, who is involved in Adelson’s purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
In New Haven, a low-power FM experiment seeks local conversation—and financial sustainability (Nieman Journalism Lab, August 4). The New Haven Independent, a 10-year-old nonprofit news site, launched WNHH Radio, a low-power FM community station (it also streams at the Independent). The project represented a considerable ramping-up of ambitions on the part of Independent founder and editor Paul Bass. More than four months after its debut, WNHH appears to be going strong. Note: The Independent is the main subject of my 2013 book, The Wired City, for which I also interviewed Christine Stuart of CT News Junkie.
What The New York Times‘ Screw-Up Tells Us About The Liberal Media’s Anti-Liberal Bias(WGBHNews.org, December 21). The Times recently reported that San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik had posted openly on social media about her terrorist inclinations. The Times turned out to be wrong—and two of the reporters who were involved also wrote a drastically wrong story earlier in the year about Hillary Clinton’s email activities that left readers with the impression that she was on the verge of being indicted. The problem is that members of the so-called liberal media like nothing better than to go after liberal politicians, both because they hope it will silence their conservative critics and because it plays into their self-image of even-handedness.
The Worcester Sun wants to bootstrap paywalled hyperlocal digital into a Sunday print product(Nieman Journalism Lab, September 29). A look at the Worcester Sun, an online-only news site founded by Mark Henderson, a former top digital executive with the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, and Fred Hurlbrink Jr., formerly of GateHouse Media. Henderson and Hurlbrink’s secret sauce is to leverage their website into a Sunday print edition—a move that could come sometime in 2016.
My top five Media Nation posts
Unlike my personal top five, I’ve ranked these strictly by online traffic.
1. Shaughnessy defends Globe over deleted sentence(September 1). Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, in a tough column over the non-renewal of popular Red Sox announcer Don Orsillo, asserted that two Fenway Park employees had told him they were ordered to confiscate pro-Orsillo signs from fans as they came into the ballpark. That reference was removed from later editions, which led speculators to speculate given that Globe publisher John Henry is also the principal owner of the Red Sox. Globe managing editor for digital David Skok took to Twitter to say that Shaughnessy’s sourcing was “weak.” Shaughnessy himself told me that he considered the deletion to be “part of the editing process that is always ongoing.”
2. McGrory tells Globe staffers they need to think digital (April 6). I published a longish memo that Globe editor Brian McGrory sent to the staff urging renewed efforts on the digital front. McGrory wrote that “we’re moving the morning and afternoon meetings up by 30 minutes, to 10 and 3 respectively—a small change that is part of a larger effort to make us quicker and more nimble on the web. The goal is, as mentioned before, to get everyone to think as much about our site as we do the paper.”
3. Berkshire Eagle publishes, defends a racist column(June 29). A local Republican activist wrote a column in the wake of unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, that could fairly be described as racist. “After the burning and looting in Baltimore and Ferguson we are seeing endless media hand-wringing that somehow ‘we’ must all do something more to help black America,” wrote Steven Nikitas. “And ‘we’ means white people, taxpayers, businesses, the criminal justice system, the universities and the government.” The Eagle defended the column on the grounds of free speech. I argued that Nikitas has no free-speech right of access to a daily newspaper’s op-ed page, and that if he wanted to write racist diatribes he should start a blog.
4. Henry Santoro to join WGBH Radio as a news anchor(April 17). Henry is an old friend from my Boston Phoenix days; he was a major part of the Phoenix‘s radio station, WFNX, and occasionally contributed to the paper as well. He joined a burgeoning number of former Phoenicians at WGBH, including Peter Kadzis, Adam Reilly, David Bernstein and me. (And another personal note: Later in the year, Barbara Howard, who’s married to the new director of Northeastern’s School of Journalism, Jonathan Kaufman, also joined WGBH as a news anchor.)
The situation with home delivery for Boston Globe customers doesn’t seem to be much better today. Judging from Twitter and other online comments, the only good news for the Globe is that people really miss their paper.
I’ve seen a few conspiratorial-minded commenters suggest that this is a deliberate attempt to get people to switch to digital. In fact, newspapers still make most of their money from print, especially on Sunday. Which makes the meltdown all the more inexplicable.
A few data points. A website called Customer Service Scoreboard reports that the Globe has received 193 negative comments and just one positive. The oldest comment goes back to 2010, and it’s certainly true that people aren’t going to check in to report that their paper arrived on time. Still, the top of the thread is loaded with comments from folks who haven’t received their paper this week and can’t get a response from the Globe.
In a “Note to Subscribers,” the Globe says in part, “This disruption is not unexpected, as the transition involves the hiring and deployment of approximately 600 drivers.” I find that statement surprising. Given the importance of getting it right, you’d think there would have been multiple meetings over many months beginning and ending with: “We can’t screw this up.”
The Globe‘s Beth Healy quotes chief executive Mike Sheehan as saying that, on Wednesday, only 5 percent of customers did not receive their paper in a timely manner. But look at all the zip codes where the new delivery service is still having problems.
Over at WBZ-TV (Channel 4), Boston University’s John Carroll tells Jon Keller that he has a message for Globe publisher John Henry: “Get in your car and start delivering some newspapers.”
It has come to my attention that there’s still an edition of The Boston Globe that’s printed on paper. I learned about this strange fact on Twitter this morning, where there is an outcry from home-delivery customers whose paper is nowhere to be found after the Globe switched to a new delivery system this week. Here’s Jason Tuohey, editor of BostonGlobe.com:
Well, yes, you can always do that. We’ve been unaffected because we’re Sunday-only print subscribers who read the Globe online the rest of the week. But people who pay a premium for home delivery of the print edition are not happy, and rightly so.
The Globe is changing to a new home delivery partner affecting service for many subscribers. We appreciate your patience during this time.
We recently received a notice from our excellent delivery person that she’ll continue to deliver the Globe on Sundays, but not The New York Times; she had been handling both. So now there’s twice the opportunity for a screw-up as well as double the tip. After all, it’s as much work to deliver two papers as one, and now we’ll have two carriers.
I know it’s the holidays. I’m certainly not going to do any heavy lifting this week. But I hope the Boston Business Journal, Boston magazine, the Boston Herald and even the Globe itself are gearing up to report on what went wrong with the transition. Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub has compiled some angry and amusing tweets from Globe home-delivery customers who sound like they might soon be former customers. And here’s one of my favorites, which didn’t make Adam’s cut:
Day 3: no @BostonGlobe. This new home delivery system sure saves John Henry money! Hope he uses it for better pitching!
The recent sale of the Las Vegas Review-Journal is such a strange and complicated morass that it’s hard to know where to begin. There was the shroud of secrecy that was pierced when we learned that the buyer was casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. The threads connecting the transaction to Russel Pergament, a former top executive with The Real Paper, the Tabnewspapers, and the short-lived commuter tabloid BostonNOW. And, above all, the role of Michael Schroeder, a former BostonNOW executive who’s emerged as a principal player in all of this.
If you haven’t been following the epic tale, The New York Times has a decent overview, though it lacks the sense of drama and just plain weirdness that have already made it one for the ages.
Since I have to begin somewhere, I’ll begin with Christine Stuart. She’s the Connecticut journalist who appears to have solved at least part of the mystery involving an article that was published by the New Britain Herald criticizing a Nevada county judge who had tangled with Adelson.
Last week the media world was astir over one of the more bizarre aspects of the Adelson saga. The Review-Journal, which has been fearless in covering the sale and its aftermath, reported that in the weeks before staff members knew their paper was for sale, they were ordered to “Drop everything and spend two weeks monitoring all activity of three Clark County judges.”
Their work appeared to be for naught. Later, though, their notes were apparently used in a plagiarism-riddled story published more than 2,600 miles away in the New Britain Herald under the byline of someone named Edward Clarkin—a reporter who, according to the Hartford Courant, could not be located and might not exist.
Here’s where Stuart comes in. She and her husband, Doug Hardy, run an online news service called CT News Junkie that covers politics and public policy in Connecticut. Last Wednesday, while waiting in an airline terminal, she posted screenshots on Facebook and Twitter showing that New Britain Herald owner Michael Schroeder’s middle name is Edward and that his mother’s maiden name is Clarkin.
“I got a tip that Edward Clarkin first appeared in 2008 when Schroeder was the head of BostonNOW,” Stuart told me by email. “I found it in the Wayback Machine and tweeted that, which got me thinking about pen names. I searched the obits and it led to Schroeder’s Facebook page, which listed his mother’s maiden name: Clarkin. Mystery solved. All during a delay at Bradley on Dec. 23 when the airport ran out of fuel. I helped other reporters put together that story too by contributing info from the terminal. It was a busy day.”
Why Schroeder? As it turns out, he was originally the only person listed as an officer with News + Media Capital Group, the Delaware corporation set up by Adelson to purchase the Review-Journal from New Media, an arm of GateHouse Media. It was GateHouse, according to the Review-Journal, that gave the order to monitor the three Nevada judges. Based in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, GateHouse owns more than 100 community newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, including such notable titles as The Providence Journal, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, and The Patriot Ledger of Quincy. (But not, I should note, the New Britain Herald.)
And GateHouse will continue to operate the Las Vegas paper. So of all the myriad questions that still need to be answered, more than a few of them should be directed to GateHouse chief executive Michael Reed, whose answers to reporters thus far have ranged from the noncommittal to the patronizing. For instance, when the Review-Journal contacted him about the matter of the judge-monitoring, he reportedly replied: “I don’t know why you’re trying to create a story where there isn’t one. I would be focusing on the positive, not the negative.”
Stranger and stranger: In March 2010 I attended the premiere of a documentary titled On Deadline: Is Time Running Out on the Press? Held at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, the film told the story of the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press, which nearly went out of business after their corporate owner, Journal Register Company, declared bankruptcy. Their savior: Michael Schroeder.
Among those taking part in the post-screening panel discussion were Stuart and Schroeder. Unfortunately, I no longer have my notes from that evening. But I wrote about it in The Wired City, my 2013 book on hyperlocal and regional online journalism, as well as for my blog. (You can still watch the trailer, too.) I remember talking with Schroeder afterward, and he struck me as amiable and civic-minded, but by no means wildly optimistic about the future of the papers he had just rescued.
And by the way: One of the stars of On Deadline was Steve Collins, a Bristol Press reporter who resigned last week, tellingWashington Post media blogger Erik Wemple in part:
I have watched in recent days as Mr. Schroeder has emerged as a spokesman for a billionaire with a penchant for politics who secretly purchased a Las Vegas newspaper and is already moving to gut it. I have learned with horror that my boss shoveled a story into my newspaper—a terrible, plagiarized piece of garbage about the court system—and then stuck his own fake byline on it. He handed it to a page designer who doesn’t know anything about journalism late one night and told him to shovel it into the pages of the paper. I admit I never saw the piece until recently, but when I did, I knew it had Mr. Schroeder’s fingerprints all over it.
Christine Stuart was literally the first person I interviewed for The Wired City. I met her in March 2009, when she was running a one-person operation at the Statehouse in Hartford. When I caught up with her again a few years later, her husband, Doug Hardy, had quit his job at the Journal Inquirer of Manchester, Connecticut, to manage CT News Junkie’s business side, and they had assembled a small staff.
Stuart is fiercely competitive. She bought CT News Junkie in 2006 because she wanted to cover the Statehouse and knew it would take too long to get there if she stayed at her newspaper job. When I pointed out that she might have had to wait five or 10 years, she replied, “Right. Or kill off another reporter.”
She laughed, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be standing in her way.
As for the fate of the Review-Journal, it is likely to be grim. The editor, Mike Hengel, has resigned. No doubt the staff will soon be ordered to stop poking into Sheldon Adelson’s affairs. But what does Adelson intend to do with his newspaper? Promote his casino interests? Advance his support for Israel’s Netanyahu government? Both?
Michael Schroeder, meanwhile, has added to his holdings by purchasing Rhode Island’s Block Island Times. “It’s close enough and a beautiful place and they do a really good job,” Schroeder told the GateHouse-owned Providence Journal. No doubt Schroeder—like his business associate Michael Reed—will be keeping his focus on the positive, not the negative.
Still from a video produced by Northeastern journalism students. Click on the Globe version of the story to view it.
Our journalism students at Northeastern made a big splash over the weekend. Professor Mike Beaudet’s investigative reporting class partnered with The Boston Globe and WCVB-TV (Channel 5) to produce a story showing that the majority of the state’s 351 cities and towns failed to respond to public records requests.
Here is the Globe version of the story, written by staff reporter Todd Wallack. Here is the WCVB version, helmed by Beaudet, who was recently hired as an investigative reporter at the station.
Despite an intense focus on the state’s extraordinarily weak public records law (here is a letter written earlier this year by the Northeastern School of Journalism faculty and published by the Globe, the Boston Herald, and GateHouse Media community newspapers), 2015 is drawing to a close with the Massachusetts House having passed an inadequate reform bill and the Senate not having acted at all.
Let’s hope that in early 2016 the Senate fixes what the House got wrong. And congratulations to our students on a great job.
Carly Carioli is leaving as editor of Boston magazine, a surprising development that broke late afternoon on Wednesday. I do not know what happened. I do know that as recently as earlier this week we exchanged a few emails and he sounded very much in charge of the monthly.
The Boston Business Journal covers the story here; The Boston Globehere; and Boston magazine here.
I worked with Carly at The Boston Phoenix, where he started out as the kid who compiled the listings. He rose to editor of the alt-weekly toward the end of its run, presiding over its final incarnation as a glossy magazine. I had long since left the staff by then, but I was still a contributor; Carly struck me as a smart editor with wide-ranging interests, brimming with good ideas.
So there’s one disclosure. A couple more: After the Phoenix closed in 2013, he and publisher Stephen Mindich began working on how to save the paper’s archives, both in print and online. Eventually Carly and I started talking, and that led to the Phoenix‘s archives coming to Northeastern. He and I have been approached about serving on an advisory board. Also, my son, Tim, a freelance photographer, has done some work for Boston.
David Bernstein, yet another former Phoenix colleague of mine and now a Boston writer, took to Facebook Wednesday and wrote this:
So it seems the great Carly Carioli will be moving along from Boston Magazine, where he has been Editor In Chief. There and at the Boston Phoenix I have never had a bigger booster than Carly, who has believed in my abilities and my ideas, often far more than I have myself. (He even let me talk him into some ridiculous idea I had about ranking the Best Bostonians of all time.) I also think he’s done great work pushing BoMag in the right direction, and it’s done some great work under his watch. I don’t know what he’s off to next, but I will follow in any way I can. He is the best. THE BEST.
Carly did not respond to an email I sent Wednesday, but I’m sure he’s been deluged. Best wishes to him. I hope this leads to something bigger and better.
The editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the paper that was recently purchased in secret by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, has resigned, The New York Times reports. Michael Hengel “described his decision to leave as ‘mutual’ and said he did not believe he was forced out,” according to a brief item in the Review-Journal.
In an editorial posted Tuesday night, the “new owners”—Adelson is not mentioned by name—pledge to invest in the paper and “to publish a newspaper that is fair, unbiased and accurate.” The paper’s archive of recent tough articles and editorials about the new ownership appears to be intact, including this blockbuster about a judge who had angered Adelson.
According to the story, Review-Journal reporters were ordered to scrutinize Nevada county judge Elizabeth Gonzalez during the weeks leading up to the sale of the paper, a period when Adelson’s interest was not known. Later, a lengthy story that was critical of the judge appeared in Connecticut’s New Britain Herald, a tiny daily owned by Michael Schroeder, a business associate of Adelson’s and a former top executive at BostonNOW, a now-defunct free tabloid.
If you just can’t get enough, Matthew Kauffman has a fascinating story in today’s Hartford Courant. Among other things, several people quoted in the New Britain Herald article say they were never contacted, and the reporter whose byline appears on the article may or may not actually exist.
Timothy Pratt has a good overview of the whole situation at the Columbia Journalism Review. He quotes me, and yes, we did talk.
Frankly, I think a lot of us have been expecting either mass firings or mass resignations. We’ll have to see what kind of newspaper owner Adelson proves to be—although, as I told Pratt, he is not off to a good start. The Review-Journal staff, on the other hand, has proven itself to be enterprising and courageous in the face of a serious threat to the paper’s independence and integrity.
Update: Josh Nathan-Kazis of the Forwardreports that “Adelson’s family foundation is the largest single funder behind JNS.org, a Jewish news service that serves a growing number of American Jewish news organizations.”
JNS’s publisher is Russel Pergament, a former Real Paper advertising and circulation executive and the founder of BostonNOW.
