The Globe‘s new iPad app. Click on image for larger view.
Thursday update: Significant second-day glitches. Shortly after 7 a.m., the most recent edition I could get was Wednesday’s. Then the app started telling me I needed an Internet connection, even though WiFi was working fine. Finally, a few minutes before 9, the problems seemed to be fixed.
Change isn’t always a disaster for The Boston Globe. This morning I clicked on the Globe‘s iPad app, which is based on a replica of the print edition. And the app was automatically overwritten by an entirely new version that looks much more like the ePaper available on BostonGlobe.com. It also seems to be a welcome improvement.
With the new app you can download the entire day’s paper (the only option with the previous version) or read it online. You can share articles on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks, which represents a substantial upgrade. Tap on a story and it loads in a computer-friendly reading format. One refinement I’d like to see: when you click to make the type bigger, it should stay that way so that you don’t have to do it with each story.
The improvements aren’t dramatic, but overall the app feels more solid and complete.
The new version is also available for iPhone and, I suppose, those Android things as well. The previous version carried the miLibris brand; the new one is unbranded, though I see the company is still touting its relationship with the Globe. So maybe this is an improved miLibris product. (Or not; see update.)
The replica edition is not my favorite way of reading a newspaper. But BostonGlobe.com loads slowly on my iPad, and every so often I like to see what the paper looks like in print. Given the Globe‘s ongoing problems with home delivery, if you like print and have an iPad, you might want to give the new app a try.
Update: Former Globe digital guy Damon Kiesow reports that the new vendor is PageSuite:
There are few story lines the media love more than “Clinton is in trouble.” Just saying it out loud brings back warm, gauzy memories of Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky, and Whitewater, of Benghazi and private email servers.
So I suspect there was almost nothing that could have happened at Sunday night’s Democratic debate to change the narrative that Bernie Sanders is surging and Hillary Clinton is hanging on for dear life.
None responded to the moment more predictably than Glenn Thrush of Politico, who opens by writing that Clinton’s attacks on Sanders “reinforced his characterization of her as an establishment politician so desperate she’d say anything to win,” and that the Vermont senator represents “an existential threat” to her candidacy.
The Washington Post’s lead story on the debate, by Anne Gearan and Philip Rucker, offers a calmer version of the same idea, with phrases such as “she sought to puncture Sanders’s insurgent appeal and regain her footing after a difficult stretch” and a reference to “the newly potent threat Sanders poses to Clinton in her second White House run.” For good measure, the Post’s Chris Cillizza pronounces Bernie a winner and Hillary a loser.
In fact, those of us who watched—and it’s not likely there were many of us given that it took place in the middle of a holiday weekend—saw nothing all that dramatic.
Sanders, as usual, shouted and did a decent job of getting his points across. Clinton, as usual, was in command of the issues, though there’s no doubt she went after Sanders far more than in the previous three debates. Martin O’Malley, as usual, was there.
My own sense was that this was Clinton’s weakest performance, but still generally fine. I thought her worst moment was her closing remarks about sending a campaign aide to Flint, Michigan, to look into the drinking-water crisis. Why didn’t she go there herself? But I’ve seen plenty of commentary to the contrary. For instance, Paul Volpe and Quynhanh Do of The New York Timescall it “her best moment of the night.”
But because the prospective voters who did not watch are going to depend on the media to tell them what happened, the takeaway is going to be that Clinton failed to stop Sanders’s momentum. That’s not wrong, just simplistic.
On the issues, I thought Clinton bested Sanders on guns, health care, and foreign policy, whereas Sanders was better on Wall Street and campaign-finance reform.
Clinton’s argument against Sanders’s newly released health-care proposal, which calls for a single-payer system that would eliminate private insurance (see Jonathan Cohn at The Huffington Post for details), isn’t really fair.
No, Sanders would not scrap the Affordable Care Act. But even liberal Democrats inclined to support single-payer are sure to recall what a horrendous slog it was to get the ACA passed. My guess is they’re disinclined to go back for another round.
“If Democrats couldn’t pass single-payer with a Senate supermajority, how would Sanders do it with a Republican House and, at best, a narrow Senate edge?” asks David A. Graham at The Atlantic. “She [Clinton] knows the limitations of health-care politics better than almost anyone.”
Though it might not have been immediately evident, Sanders may have seriously wounded himself with his answers on foreign policy. Despite offering some unconvincing caveats, he sounded like he’s all but ready to emulate Ronald Reagan and send a cake to the Iranian mullahs. Twice Sanders said the United States should work with Iran, to remove Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from power and to defeat ISIS. Let’s roll the tape:
But I think in terms of our priorities in the region, our first priority must be the destruction of ISIS. Our second priority must be getting rid of Assad, through some political settlement, working with Iran, working with Russia.
But the immediate task is to bring all interests together who want to destroy ISIS, including Russia, including Iran, including our Muslim allies to make that the major priority.
I have to agree with Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen, who says of Sanders that “it’s blindingly apparent that not only does he not understand foreign policy and national security, he simply doesn’t care to know more.”
NBC News moderators Lester Holt and Andrea Mitchell did a good job of keeping things on track and covering a wide range of issues. But when Mitchell pressed Sanders on whether he would support tax increases, I would have liked to see a disclosure that she’s married to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.
And, finally, some counterintuitive polling wisdom from Five Thirty Eight’s Nate Silver. His analysis of multiple polls shows that Clinton has an 81 percent chance of winning the Iowa caucuses on February 1 and a 57 percent chance of winning the New Hampshire primary (where, as this Real Clear Politics compilation shows, Sanders is widely believed to be ahead) on February 9.
If Clinton takes both Iowa and New Hampshire, the race for the Democratic nomination will be over.
Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post‘s fact-checker, gives Bernie Sanders a rating of “Three Pinocchios” for claiming that partial repeal of the Glass-Steagall law helped cause the 2008 financial collapse. It’s complicated, as you’ll see. But my conclusion is that Kessler wrote a pretty good analysis and then undermined it by calling Sanders a liar when we’re really only talking about a difference of opinion.
Several years ago I wrote a commentary for The Huffington Post on the limits of fact-checking. As I said at the time:
The problem is that there are only a finite number of statements that can be subjected to thumbs-up/thumbs-down fact-checking…. The fact-checkers are shifting from judging facts to indulging in opinion, but they’re not necessarily doing it because they want to. They’re doing it because politicians don’t flat-out lie as frequently as we might suppose.
Sanders believes the erosion of Glass-Steagall protections helped create an environment that made the 2008 financial collapse more likely. Kessler disagrees, and he’s found several experts to support his viewpoint. That doesn’t make Sanders a liar. I suspect Kessler knows better, but he’s got Pinocchios to bestow, and today Bernie’s number came up.
No, not the debut of a new feature. But there’s a lot going on today. So let’s get to it.
• Jason Rezaian is coming home. Rezaian, who’s a Washington Post reporter, is being released by Iran along with three other prisoners as part of a swap. Meanwhile, Iran is moving closer to compliance with the nuclear deal, and, as we know, it returned without incident a group of American sailors who had drifted into its territorial waters even as the Republican presidential candidates were calling for war or something.
What President Obama’s critics refuse to acknowledge is that Iran is complicated, factionalized, and slowly lurching toward better (not good) behavior. Obama has invested a considerable amount of his moral authority into trying to nudge along a less dangerous Iran, and his efforts are paying off.
And kudos to Post executive editor Marty Baron, who has kept the spotlight on Rezaian’s unjust imprisonment for the past year and a half.
• The routes are at the root.Boston Globe reporter Mark Arsenault today has the most thorough examination yet of what went wrong with the Globe‘s home-delivery system when it switched vendors at the end of December. Arsenault takes a tough look at the decisions made by the paper’s business executives, who clearly did not do enough vetting of the plans put together by the new vendor, ACI Media Group. And he opens with Globe publisher John Henry amid thousands of undelivered papers at the Newton distribution center, sending a message that, yes, the owner is engaged.
As has been reported previously, but not in as much detail as Arsenault offers, ACI’s routes just didn’t make sense. And what looked like a mere glitch at the end of day one turned into a catastrophe as drivers walked off the job once they realized there was no way they could make their appointed rounds.
It’s the Globe itself that has to take primary responsibility, of course. But based on Arsenault’s report, ACI officials—who did not speak to him—clearly sold the Globe a bill of goods. If ACI has a different perspective on what happened, we’d like to hear it soon.
• Digital First workers revolt. Employees at Digital First Media are fighting for their first raise in seven to 10 years, according to an announcement by workers represented by the Newspaper Guild. These folks have been abused for years by bad ownership as hedge funds have sought to cash in.
The effort covers some 1,000 Guild members. It’s unclear whether employees at non-Guild papers—including the Lowell Sun and the New Haven Register—would be helped.
The Boston Newspaper Guild, the union that represents Boston Globe employees in the newsroom, advertising, and other areas, has filed a grievance with management over the status of Stat as a non-union shop.
Stat, a standalone website covering health and life sciences, was launched last fall by Boston Globe Media Partners. The Boston Business Journal recently reported on some of the union rumblings emanating from 135 Morrissey Boulevard.
I obtained a copy of the union’s message to members a little while ago:
Dear members,
We are writing to let you know that the Boston Newspaper Guild has filed a grievance challenging STAT’s status as a new initiative.
We are concerned about the loss of Guild work and we are trying to bring these jobs into the Guild.
We will keep you informed when there are updates to share.
I’m not going to watch tonight’s Republican presidential debate. I think it’s the first one I’ll have missed. But I do want to offer a quick comment on the use of polls to determine who gets to participate, who gets to stand where, and even—informally—how much time gets allotted to each candidate.
It is, frankly, a scandal. To use national polls to determine who gets heard months before ordinary voters are paying all that much attention is an affront to democracy. OK, now we’re into the final weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire. But this has been going on since last summer.
Moving to the kids’ table tonight are Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina. Paul has been the only candidate to deviate from the belligerent stance on foreign policy favored by the rest of the field. His grasp of the issues had Marco Rubio sputtering like the well-prepped empty shell he is at the last debate. Personally I don’t think Fiorina adds anything, butno one has voted yet.
Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, Bobby Jindal, and Rick Santorum—every one a current or former senator or governor—never made it onto the main stage.
At one time I believe there were 18 Republican candidates. If I were running one of the cable stations, I’d have gone with three debates on three consecutive nights, each one featuring six different candidates chosen at random. And why not? The cable nets literally have nothing better to do.
The devolution of presidential politics into infotainment is complete.
Today is the first day that The Boston Globe‘s previous home-delivery vendor, Publishers Circulation Fulfillment (PCF), is supposed to be fully back on the job. I figured things would be more or less back to normal this week.
Instead, the Globe‘s Dan Adams, in the midst of reporting on the weekend’s chaos and labor strife, drops this gem: “Although Globe executives expect rapid improvement beginning Monday, they cautioned it could take as long as six weeks for service to return to normal everywhere.”
Six weeks.
Is there any way that the Globe could return to the pre-December 28 status quo? Decide that the new vendor, ACI Media Group, didn’t live up to the contract and simply re-engage with PCF? I mean, you have to wonder if it’s ever going to work having one company deliver the Globe and another the Boston Herald, The New York Times, etc. Competition is great except when it isn’t.
Six weeks is obviously better than the four- to six-month prediction that prompted Globe executives to bring back PCF in the first place. But you have to figure there are going to be a whole lot of cancellations if the situation can’t be resolved sooner than that.
The Boston Globe‘s previous home-delivery vendor, Publishers Circulation Fulfillment, was not supposed to be back on the job until today or Monday. So there was not much reason to expect a dramatic improvement—and there wasn’t. I received a copy of this email from editor Brian McGrory to the staff earlier this evening. It was sent out a few minutes after 5 a.m.
Subject:Help needed ASAP
Just got a call that there are thousands of undelivered papers sitting in the Newton distribution center. We need help. Anyone who wants to show up between now and, say, 9 — the earlier the better for obvious reasons — will be very welcomed.
It’s 15 Riverdale Avenue in Newton.
Am told there’s help also needed in Peabody, but not as much. Probably about 8 routes.
That’s 200 Corporate Place, Peabody.
If you’re going, hit reply all. Partners can be found and paired up on site. Sorry and thanks.
Brian
I’m guessing that things will be a lot better around mid-week. That’s when PCF is supposed to be fully geared up, splitting the delivery territory with the new vendor, ACI Media Group.
I’ve been preoccupied with The Boston Globe‘s problems, but I didn’t want to let Tuesday’s bloodletting at Boston magazine pass without comment. Three people were let go, including senior editor S.I. Rosenbaum.
Like editor Carly Carioli, whose departure was announced last month, Rosenbaum is a Boston Phoenix alumnus. They are both quality journalists, and it’s unimaginable that Boston will be better without them. Also let go were associate digital editor Olivia Rassow and Erick Trickey, whom I don’t know.
As David Harris reports at the Boston Business Journal, the cuts extend to the Mother Ship in Philadelphia as well, and are part of an effort to turn at least part of the enterprise into some sort of advertorial machine, complete with a “content studio.”
These are desperate times, and I’m sure the top management, like everyone, is trying to figure out how to survive. I hope there’s still a place for good journalism.
The Globe‘s Jon Chesto covers the story here. And here is the official announcement, which is, shall we say, a model of such things.
First came the news that The Boston Globe’s previous distributor has re-entered the picture. Next came an apology by Globe publisher John Henry. And with those two steps, the Globe seems to have essentially brought its week-and-a-half-old home-delivery crisis to an end, even though problems will likely linger into next week. Here are five takeaways.
1. Management is convinced that the problem has been solved. Henry’s apology is proof of that. It’s a basic principle of public relations that you don’t bring out the Big Dog until you believe the crisis is under control. Henry’s statement wasn’t risk-free—the previous vendor, Publishers Circulation Fulfillment, won’t be back on the job until Sunday or Monday, and it’s still unclear how quickly delivery service can be fully restored. The new vendor, ACI Media Group, will share the work, and needless to say it has yet to prove itself. But there’s no longer any talk of having to wait four to six months.
2. John Henry is really, really sorry. Yes, his apology is a little bit defensive (blaming previous ownership for getting rid of the in-house delivery system) and a little bit geeky (no, we don’t care if the paper is “6 inches to the right of the first step”). But he struck me as genuinely, truly contrite that he had let down his customers. “I want to personally apologize to every Boston Globe subscriber who has been inconvenienced,” he wrote. “We recognize that you depend on us, and that we’ve let you down.”
3. There could be negative repercussions for the newsroom. Both Henry and chief executive Mike Sheehan have said that though the main impetus for switching carriers was to improve service, they were looking to save money as well. Sheehan has said Henry intended to reinvest those savings in the Globe. If that money fails to materialize, it could mean further cuts in a newsroom that was shrunk by some 45 positions just a few months ago.
4. Print still matters. During the past week and a half I’ve heard numerous suggestions that the Globe switch to online-only distribution—and even a few conspiracy theories suggesting that Henry and company had deliberately botched home delivery in order to smooth the way for such a move. (But couldn’t they switch to home delivery via black helicopter?) In fact, the Globe and nearly all other newspapers still make most of their money from print. “Subscription revenue is going to be the primary source of revenue in the future for newspapers,” Henry wrote. And though the Globe has had some success in persuading people to pay for digital subscriptions, print remains a lot more lucrative.
5. People really care about their newspaper. In an era when you often hear about how irrelevant newspapers as standalone products have become, it’s got to be heartening to see how much people care about their daily newspaper and how upset they are when it doesn’t arrive. It’s not so much print-versus-digital; it’s the continued viability of newspapers, whether in print or online, as living, breathing voices of the community. The future—and even the present—may be articles disaggregated from their sources and repackaged by Facebook, Apple News, and the like. For now, though, newspapers still matter.
