In addition to the Geoff Edgers move that I mentioned earlier, I understand that Boston Globe business reporter Erin Ailworth is leaving for The Wall Street Journal. Ailworth has been a stalwart on the Market Basket story.
Apologies for not having much in the way of details. But the fact that papers like the Journal and The Washington Post are hiring suggests that the journalism-jobs logjam of recent years is starting to break free — at least at a few of our largest news organizations.
A big loss for The Boston Globe: Geoff Edgers, the paper’s arts and culture reporter since 2002, is leaving for The Washington Post. Edgers is a talented and versatile journalist — a filmmaker as well as a traditional reporter — and he will be hard to replace. The move will reunite Edgers with Post executive editor Marty Baron, who hired Edgers when he was editor of the Globe.
Geoff was a colleague at The Boston Phoenix in the mid-1990s, and his wife, Carlene Hempel, is now a colleague at Northeastern. Yes, Boston is a small town.
The following is a memo to the Globe staff from arts editor Rebecca Ostriker and Janice Page, deputy managing editor for features. As always, Globies, keep those memos coming.
When Geoff Edgers arrived at the Globe in 2002, he carved out a new beat: covering the region’s key arts institutions and individuals with the drive and focus of a hard-news reporter. Smart, enterprising, energetic, and resourceful, Geoff has simply excelled. He’s written nearly 200 page 1 stories on everything from Boston Symphony Orchestra maestro James Levine’s health woes to the Institute of Contemporary Art’s gleaming new waterfront home, plus scores of other pieces that brim with life and make even the most complex subjects accessible. One of our favorites was when Geoff captured the debacle of a Mass MoCA exhibition that involved installing a 35-foot oil tanker, a two-story house, a carousel of bombs, and an old movie theater — all of which never opened to the public. Then there was Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video “The Clock’’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, which our department covered tag-team-style. Of course Geoff signed up for the toughest, most yawn-inducing stretch — midnight to 4 a.m. — and came up swinging, with some sharp insights on video licensing and a filmmaking crew “big enough to work the Indy 500.”
On the subject of film, Geoff knew what he was talking about: In his spare time, he’s produced a full-length documentary, “Do It Again,” which captured his quixotic quest to reunite the rock band the Kinks (and gave him a chance to duet with Sting), and hosted the Travel Channel series “Edge of America,” crossing the country to try such stunts as tackling alligators and competing in a haggis-eating contest. And Geoff has brought his impressive filmmaking knowhow to the Globe, teaming with the talented Darren Durlach to earn a New England Emmy Award for a video about the soprano Barbara Quintiliani, and to create the Boston Marathon documentary “5 Runners,” which recently premiered at the JFK Library and aired on NESN.
When there’s a story, Geoff wants to be — and almost invariably makes sure he is — the guy who gets it. Which makes it all the harder to announce that he’ll be getting those stories somewhere else in the future. Geoff has accepted a job as national arts reporter for the Washington Post. He’ll be covering cultural stories across the country, from museum and opera controversies to the latest trends in pop music and web culture. Geoff says he relishes the opportunity to take what he’s learned at the Globe and apply it on a broader stage. This is a new position, he notes, as the Post aims to compete with The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. (He’s assured us that any competition with the Globe should not be taken personally.)
Happily, Geoff will be doing all of this from a base in Boston. So although his last day at the Globe is Sept. 12, and we’ll toast him before he goes (details to come), he’s not really leaving us. And if the Kinks someday reunite in a Boston venue, we’ll celebrate with him there.
The redoubtable Ian Donnis of Rhode Island Public Radio reports that The Providence Journal may shed up to 40 jobs once an affiliate of GateHouse Media has completed its purchase of the paper. Donnis’ source is impeccable: the number is included in paperwork GateHouse filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Donnis does not say how many employees the Journal now has, and I was unable to find that number in recent coverage of the sale. I’ll add it if someone passes it along. Also, I assume that all 40 cuts will not be in the newsroom.
Also, Philip Eil of The Providence Phoenix takes a look (link now added) at what the sale means for the venerable paper. (Founded in 1829, the Journal bills itself as the oldest continuously published daily paper in the United States.)
In other dispiriting news, Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent reports that another round of deep cuts is imminent at the New Haven Register. Once part of the Journal Register Co., perhaps the worst newspaper chain in the country, and in more recent years a beacon of hope under Digital First impresario John Paton, the entire chain — which includes Massachusetts titles such as The Sun of Lowell, the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg and The Berkshire Eagle — is now believed to be for sale.
The Boston Globe’s Catholic website will be called Crux, according to an announcement the paper posted a little while ago. Also, Globe editor Brian McGrory and Crux editor Teresa Hanafin talk about Margery Eagan’s role as the site’s spirituality columnist.
According to the announcement, “In her column for Crux, Eagan will explore issues of spirituality, contemplation, and devotion, drawing on her personal experience with her Catholic faith, as well as that of other Catholics and those of various religious traditions.”
Longtime Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan has left the paper and will write for The Boston Globe’s Catholic website when it debuts later this summer. Eagan is a colleague at WGBH, where she cohosts “Boston Public Radio” with Jim Braude.
“I’ll be joining the Catholic site when it begins,” Eagan tells me by email. “And I am thrilled.”
Eagan has been one of the Herald’s signature columnists for quite a few years; here is her most recent effort. This is a big loss for the local tabloid — a day after the paper announced it had hired Kimberly Atkins to be its first full-time Washington reporter in a decade.
This email to Boston Globe and Boston.com employees was sent out a little while ago by Andrew Perlmutter, executive vice president of Boston Globe Media Partners. A source passed it along to Media Nation. The main news here seems to be that David Skok continues his rise on the Globe digital side and that the company is still in ramp-up mode with the new Boston.com. Interesting stuff if you geek out on these things, as I do.
Colleagues —
From launching Boston.com during the early days of the Internet to developing a responsively designed BostonGlobe.com in 2011, digital innovation and success have always been in our DNA here at Boston Globe Media. At the heart of this success lies the ability to evolve our products over time alongside new trends in digital consumption.
With the consumer web transforming faster than ever before, we must evolve again. In this phase in our evolution, we aim to become a world-class digital product operation. We must continue to produce great digital journalism. That is a given. But like the best web product companies today, we must also develop the ability to build and iterate products with great creativity, discipline, and efficiency. This requires a re-imagination of everything from the structure of the organization to our strategy for identifying and developing new content areas.
Luckily, we pursue this next phase with an incredibly strong foundation, anchored by our three core businesses: Boston.com, BostonGlobe.com, and our Digital Marketplaces. Because each business has the potential for independent growth, the initial step in our evolution is to build excellent, standalone digital product operations for all three properties. Great leadership and a top-notch talent base form the core of this strategy. With that as context, it is my pleasure to make some important personnel announcements.
First, I would like to formally announce that David Skok has, as part of his role as the Globe newsroom’s digital leader, taken the helm at BostonGlobe.com. David came to The Globe in early January and has been in the lead on BG.com since early April. An incredibly strong editorial and product leader, David comes to The Globe from Shaw Communications, where he ran the Global News’ website, Canada’s leading news organization. Additionally, Lauren Shea has joined the BG.com team as Product Director. Lauren comes to us from Arnold Worldwide and brings years of digital product expertise.
Second, I would like to announce that Corey Gottlieb and Angus Durocher will take over Boston.com and our Online Marketplace businesses as Executive Directors of Digital Strategy and Operations. Corey has spent five years building cutting edge digital media experiences at MLB Advanced Media. Meanwhile, Angus has over 15 years of consumer web experience, including leading and managing the front-end engineering team at YouTube for 5 years (both pre and post Google acquisition). With their remarkable combination of product, engineering, content, and marketing leadership skills, Boston.com and the Online Marketplace businesses are in great hands. In this updated structure, Corey will be responsible for Marketing, Content, and Business while Angus will oversee Technology and Design. And they will jointly guide our Product efforts.
Several other very talented individuals have also joined our digital operation recently. On the Boston.com editorial side, Adam Vacarro has joined us from Inc. Magazine while Sara Morrison and Eric Levenson have both come over from The Atlantic Wire. Please welcome them to the organization.
It is very exciting to bring these talented individuals to the organization. And this is just the beginning. Our leadership teams are building high-growth strategic roadmaps for their respective businesses, and we will continue to bring in top-tier talent to help us grow. In other words, the future looks very bright for us. We have a lot to accomplish and many challenges to overcome, but I know we are building the team to do it.
Here we go.
Andrew
Update. And now we learn that Laura Amico, the cofounder of Homicide Watch, will be joining BostonGlobe.com as news editor for multimedia and data projects. This is a huge move (disclosure: Laura and her husband and journalistic partner, Chris Amico, have worked with us at Northeastern) as well as a very smart one.
Congrats to @LauraNorton, who will be joining the http://t.co/QSNdYoCvxX team as News Editor, Multimedia and Data Project and my boss!
Still more. Here’s the announcement from David Skok:
I’m thrilled to announce that Laura Amico, the founder of Homicide Watch, will be joining the Globe newsroom to take on the new position of News Editor, Multimedia and Data Projects.
Without exaggeration, I can say that Laura is a bit of a rockstar and a trailblazer in the digital journalism community. She was both the first Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation at Harvard and the first MJ Bear fellow through the Online News Association. She also teaches at Northeastern University and is the editor of WBUR’s Learning Lab.
Reporting to Jason Tuohey, Laura will oversee our talented data team along with our new metro producer, Andy Rosen.
Having someone of Laura’s pedigree to help push our creative efforts on story-centric journalism is a tremendous coup. While Laura is most well-known for building the Homicide Watch platform, in our conversations, I’ve found that she possesses an intrinsic understanding of how to engage digital audiences in unique, purpose-driven, community journalism.
Laura understands that we’ve already had some great success with immersive multimedia reporting projects, most recently with Maria Sacchetti and Jessica Rinaldi’s ‘Unforgiven,’ the year-long Spotlight ‘Shadow Campus’ investigation, and the Filipov, Wen, Jacob’s triumvirate on the ‘Fall of the House of Tsarnaev.’ I’m confident that Laura’s diversity of thought will take us in new, extraordinary directions.
Laura (@LauraNorton) will join the Globe newsroom in late August.
A very smart move by the Boston Herald: Kimberly Atkins, who covered state politics for the paper before moving to Washington in 2006, will become the tabloid’s full-time Washington reporter. Atkins has been writing a political column part-time for the Herald in recent years in addition to covering legal issues for the Lawyers Weekly newspapers. She tells me by email:
I’m really excited! Covering the law was fun, but I really missed covering politics regularly. And with all the big Supreme Court cases coming up (Facebook threats, state same-sex marriage ban challenges, the trio of Obamacare challenges) I’ll still be able to flex my legal brain pretty frequently as well.
Atkins, who’s also a lawyer, will be the Herald’s first full-time Washington reporter since Andrew Miga, who’s been working for the Associated Press since 2005. Herald editor-in-chief Joe Sciacca says in the Herald announcement, “Kimberly is very smart and politically savvy and our readers will benefit by her knowledge of the inner workings of the nation’s capital.”
Last week I had a chance to sit down with Josh Stearns to talk about his new job as director of the Journalism and Sustainability Project at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Dodge has received a two-year, $2 million grant from the Knight Foundation to study new ways of paying for local journalism, with an emphasis on civic engagement.
After a long stint as policy director of Free Press, whose headquarters was just a bike ride away, Stearns is now commuting from Western Massachusetts to New Jersey, where the hyperlocal sites he is working with are located. We talked on July 15 at his home in Easthampton.
The online news site GoLocalProv is taking a well-deserved victory lap now that it’s been announced that GateHouse Media will acquire The Providence Journal from A.H. Belo of Dallas for $46 million. GoLocalProv reported on June 13 that the sale was imminent. But there the matter stood until Tuesday, when we learned that the Journal had been sold to GateHouse’s parent, New Media Investment Group.
As I told Ted Nesi of WPRI.com, I think it’s a shame that some way couldn’t be found for the Journal to return to local ownership — a lost opportunity, just as it was when John Henry sold the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester to Halifax Media Group of Daytona Beach, Florida, earlier this year. There is no substitute for a newspaper that is fully invested in the community. I have no doubt that cuts will follow, just as they did when New Media/GateHouse last year purchased Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones community papers, including the Cape Cod Times and The Standard-Times of New Bedford.
Still, any incoming chain would make cuts, and I think the new, post-bankruptcy GateHouse, based in Fairport, New York, deserves a chance to prove it will be good steward of the Journal. Despite reductions at the Cape Cod and New Bedford papers, journalists there continue to do a good job of serving their communities. On the other hand, the more than 100 community papers GateHouse already owns in Eastern Massachusetts are strictly barebones operations.
In a full-page ad in today’s Journal aimed at reassuring his new employees, customers and the community of the company’s good intentions, GateHouse chief executive officer Kirk Davis concludes:
We know The Providence Journal plays an indispensable role in helping you live your life in and around Rhode Island. We look to uphold these great traditions and make the investments needed to thrive in the new multimedia world. The purchase is expected to close later this summer. We are looking forward to welcoming the readers, advertisers and employees of The Providence Journal to our family.
At $46 million, New Media/GateHouse paid a surprisingly high price for the Journal. Although Belo is keeping the pension liabilities, it’s also keeping the downtown property. By way of comparison, John Henry paid $70 million for the Globe, the Telegram & Gazette and all associated properties — then turned around and sold the T&G for $17.5 million, according to a source involved in the sale. One possible explanation is that the New York Times Co. sold the Globe and the T&G to the low bidder, as one of the spurned suitors, “Papa Doug” Manchester, complained at the time. New Media/GateHouse, by contrast, was presumably the high bidder for the Journal.
Another possible explanation is that the Journal is worth more to GateHouse than to other buyers because it gives the company new territory for its Propel Marketing subsidiary. According to a perceptive analysis of the deal by Jon Chesto in the Boston Business Journal, Propel is seen by GateHouse executives as “the primary engine for growth at the company.”
Yet another wrinkle: The Globe has developed a nice side business printing other newspapers, including the Boston Herald and GateHouse properties such as The Patriot Ledger of Quincy and The Enterprise of Brockton. At a time when Henry is getting ready to sell the Globe’s Dorchester plant and move printing operations to a former T&G facility in Millbury, the prospect of losing GateHouse’s business has got to be disconcerting.
Could Rupert Murdoch turn out to be the savior of CNN?
Not directly, of course. After all, his Fox News Channel is a blight upon the civic landscape — a right-wing propaganda machine whose elderly viewers are, according to a 2012 Fairleigh Dickinson study, even less well-informed than people who watch no news at all.
Nevertheless, I felt my pulse quickening last week when I learned that Murdoch is trying to add Time Warner to his international media empire. Among Time Warner’s holdings is CNN. And according to The New York Times, Murdoch would sell the once-great news organization in order to appease federal antitrust regulators.
(Murdoch’s acquisition would not affect Time magazine, a diminished but still valuable news outlet: Time Warner recently set Time adrift after stripping it of most of its assets.Time’s future is far from secure, but at least Rupe won’t have a chance to put Fox News chief Roger Ailes in charge of it.)
As you no doubt already know, CNN in recent years has fallen into the abyss. When I Googled up its increasingly ironic slogan, “The Most Trusted Name in News,” I was taken to a page at CNN.com dating back to 2003, complete with photos of former CNN hosts such as Aaron Brown, Judy Woodruff and Larry King, the seldom-seen Christiane Amanpour and others who evoke a better, more substantive era.
These days, unfortunately, CNN is known mainly for its endless coverage of the missing Malaysian jetliner and for a series of embarrassing screw-ups, such as its misreporting of the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act in 2012 and its false report that a suspect had been arrested in the Boston Marathon bombing (to be fair, CNN was not alone on either mistake).
Then, too, there have been a series of mystifyingly bad hires, such as the talentless yipping Brit Piers Morgan to replace Larry King and the creepy Eliot Spitzer to cohost a talk show. Even solid choices like Jake Tapper seem to disappear once brought into the CNN fold. Of course, it’s hard not to disappear when your ratings are lower than those of Fox and MSNBC.
Is CNN worth saving? Absolutely. Its journalistic resources remain formidable. It’s still must-see TV when real news breaks, which certainly has been the case during the past week. Folks who are able to watch CNN International (I’m not among them) tell me it remains a good and serious news source. Anderson Cooper is among the more compelling figures in television news.
But domestically, and especially in prime time, CNN has utterly lost its way — starting at the top, with its self-congratulatory president, Jeff Zucker, who wants us to believe that everything is proceeding according to plan.
The time for a complete overhaul is long overdue. If Rupert Murdoch can help usher CNN into the hands of a new owner that might actually know what to do with it, then bring it on.
Photo (cc) by the World Economic Forum and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
