Category: Uncategorized

The future of anonymous comments

From time to time I’ve considered instituting a real-names policy for Media Nation commenters. Take a look at this exchange and you’ll see why.

I know I would end up with many fewer commenters than I have now. Some folks who use regular pseudonyms add value, and I know there’s a good chance I would lose them.

But, too often, Media Nation — like most other Internet forums — has become a place where people come to say things behind a mask of anonymity that they would never say if they had to attach their names.

Thoughts?

Pin the tail on the potential owner

Who will buy the Boston Globe? Silly season may have already arrived. The Globe today attempts to knock down the Boston Herald’s claim yesterday that an investment group with ties to Thomas O’Neill III is interested, while at the same time identifying three other potential buyers.

The Herald, meanwhile, reports that Red Sox principal owner John Henry has told his Twitter followers he’s not interested; his name has been floating around for a while. (Sorry, but I don’t know Henry’s Twitter address.) Nothing new from Jack Welch, who has restricted his tweeting to sports the last couple of days.

Let me return to the Globe’s claim that the Herald got it wrong with respect to Intercontinental Real Estate Corp., whose board of advisers includes Tom O’Neill and former Bank of Boston head Ira Stepanian. The Globe’s Keith O’Brien and Beth Healy, with help from Casey Ross, write:

[A] person connected to the Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. refuted a report that the real estate investment and management firm is interested in buying the Globe. This person, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, said the report in the Boston Herald was not accurate.

Now, let’s go back to the Herald story, written by Christine McConville with assists from Jay Fitzgerald and Jessica Heslam. Here’s the key graf:

“Intercontinental is interested in any good investment that offers superior returns for our investors, as well as opportunities for job preservation, and even job growth, for our union investors,” said a top executive for Boston-based Intercontinental, which manages real estate and some $2.5 billion in investment funds, including union pensions. “The Globe fits our profile.”

Neither the Herald nor the Globe offers us an on-the-record source from Intercontinental, so it’s hard to know what to make of all this. But the specificity of the Herald quote suggests that there’s at least something to it. Most likely the Herald and the Globe stories are both accurate, but only one of them is true.

The possible buyers identified by the Globe — former Globe executive Stephen Taylor, a member of the paper’s former ruling family, as well as Boston advertising executive Jack Connors and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca — are all familiar names. It’s hard to know how serious any of them are. My guess is that when a buyer is announced, we’ll all be shocked. This is good coffee-machine conversation, but probably no one outside of New York Times Co. management really knows what’s going on.

In other Globe-related news, editorial-page editor Renée Loth is retiring to write a freelance column for the paper. She’ll be replaced by Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos, who’ll also oversee the Sunday Ideas section. The current Ideas editor, Gareth Cook, will remain in that post.

Bringing Canellos home in any capacity is a smart move. His specific job title is less important than getting him back inside the building, where he will no doubt be a key player in any and all reinvention initiatives. He also has a good relationship with Cook, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter.

Both Canellos and Cook are Boston Phoenix alumni, though Canellos had moved on before my arrival there. Cook and I worked together in the mid-’90s.

Finally, former Globe media consultant Lou Phelps has posted a commentary at Cape Cod Today in which she takes the Boston Newspaper Guild to task for being “unwilling to publicly acknowledge the core issues of the business model of The Boston Globe, and the changing newspaper industry that The New York Times company must face.”

Phelps’ main argument is that technology should allow a newsroom to operate with many fewer journalists than was the case before cell phones and the Internet.

Her take is interesting, but she should have acknowledged that the Globe has already done a lot of cutting — from 550 full-time newsroom positions in 2000 to about 330 today. I hope she’ll check in and let us know how much lower she thinks the Globe can go.

And wow — Phelps is easy on the Guild compared to Cape Cod Today editor Walter Brooks. Duck!

Photo (cc) by cmiper and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

How Tip’s kid might save the Globe

Some years ago I wrote a review/essay for the Boston Phoenix about Jack Farrell’s massive Tip O’Neill biography. The headline: “How Tip saved the Globe.” (Pay no attention to the today’s date stamp; it’s an old piece.)

Farrell wrote about services rendered by the future House speaker in the Globe’s years-long quest to persuade the FCC to strip the Boston Herald Traveler of its broadcasting licenses. That finally happened in the early 1970s, ensuring the Globe’s dominance and dooming the Herald to second-banana status.

Today the Herald reports that Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. is interested in buying the Globe from the New York Times Co. And look who’s on the Intercontinental advisory board: Thomas P. O’Neill III. (Thanks to Northeastern School of Journalism director Steve Burgard for passing along that not-so-little tidbit.)

According to the Herald’s Christine McConville, talks have been going on for weeks. So here’s something to ponder: O’Neill’s public-relations firm, O’Neill and Associates, has been handling communications for the Boston Newspaper Guild. Another fun fact: most of those communications have come from former Boston Herald business editor Cosmo Macero Jr., now with O’Neill.

Make of that what you will. And yes, Boston is a very small town.

A primer in getting to “no”

In this week’s Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly observes that New York Times Co. executives mangled things with the Boston Globe and the Newspaper Guild so thoroughly that you’re left wondering if a “no” vote was what they wanted all along.

I’ve been wondering the same thing, though for the life of me I can’t see how this benefits the Sulzbergers. Now that they’ve made it official that they want to sell the Globe, the last thing they need is an unfair-labor case before the National Labor Relations Board, which could drag on for months.

Over at the Beat the Press blog, former Globe staffer Ralph Ranalli explains how Globe publisher Steve Ainsley and Times Co. management snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Close to home

Eighth-graders from Danvers as well as Swampscott were inside the Holocaust Museum in Washington earlier today when a white supremacist pulled out a gun, began shooting and killed a security officer. The Salem News and the Danvers Herald both report that none of the students were injured.

Two years ago, our daughter was on that annual trip and I was a chaperone. I’d been to the museum several years before that to do research for “Little People,” my book on dwarfism. What happened today was a horrifying event.

We’ve now had three terrorist murders in the United States in the past few weeks — abortion doctor George Tiller, assassinated by a prolife extremist; Army recruiter William Long, gunned down by an apparent Muslim convert enraged by U.S. policy; and now this. What is going on?

Jack Welch (“Jack Welch”*?) on the Globe

A Boston Globe insider led me to this Twitter page, purportedly by retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch, who was interested in buying the Globe back when the New York Times Co. wasn’t selling. Check this message out:

So ironic to see NYT act so brutish toward labor. Certainly would be crucifying any Company with labor practices like theirs.

Not quite getting the point? Here’s a Welch (or “Welch”) update:

My New York Times labor tweet a few min ago refers to their BRUTISH dark age labor relations with their Boston Globe employees

There is nothing obviously fake about the Welch Twitter page. It’s mostly about sports, and the site links to his book. Times business columnist Joe Nocera recently wrote that Welch has a Twitter account, though Nocera didn’t supply the address. I think this is Welch, although I’m open to evidence that it isn’t.

Which raises an obvious question. Is Welch still interested in buying the Globe? If so, is this a ploy to reach out to employees?

Granted, I’m not sure what the logic would be. It’s management he needs to reach out to.

*Update: Dave Hersam nails it. It really is Welch.

Update II: The Boston Newspaper Guild has now sent out an e-mail publicizing Welch’s tweets.

Update III: Welch is certainly not my idea of a white knight for the Globe. Click here and here.

Photo (cc) by Josh Greenstein and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Talking about the Globe at the Mirror Awards

Alas, my work in the Guardian came up short for the second year in a row in the Syracuse University Mirror Awards, as I lost out yesterday to Clive Thompson of Wired.com in the category of online media commentary.

There was plenty of buzz about the Boston Globe at the luncheon, held in the not-very-spacious confines of New York’s Harmonie Club. Several New York Times people I spoke with, including media columnist David Carr, were speculating about why the Newspaper Guild voted “no” and what might happen next.

We also heard from Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, whose receipt of a lifetime achievement award was controversial given her perceived role in harming the news business.

She got off the best line of the day, saying (this is a close paraphrase; I should have taken notes, but I couldn’t extend my elbows sufficiently), It’s not true that I single-handedly destroyed the newspaper business. I had help from Craigslist. Ho, ho.

Buy high, sell low

There’s an ugly symmetry to the news that the New York Times Co. is soliciting bids for the Boston Globe.

Having paid $1.1 billion for the Globe in 1993, half the market capitalization of the entire Times Co., the Sulzberger family may now find there is virtually no interest in what once once its second-most-prized asset after the Times itself.

After the Boston Newspaper Guild narrowly rejected a proposal to cut salaries by about 10 percent and eliminate about 190 lifetime job guarantees, the Times Co., as expected, imposed a 23 percent pay cut. And the Guild, as expected, has appealed to the National Labor Relations Board.

What’s unclear today is the status of the lifetime job guarantees, widely thought to be a major stumbling block to any effort to sell the paper. Today’s Globe story, by Keith O’Brien, isn’t quite as explicit as I’d like it to be, but the gist seems to be that the guarantees remain in effect at the Guild — at least for the time being — and the paper’s other unions have given them up.

In the Boston Herald, Jay Fitzgerald and O’Ryan Johnson interview Poynter Institute business analyst Rick Edmonds, who wrote an excellent post the other day suggesting that the Globe was closer to break-even than is generally assumed.

Edmonds tells the Herald that the lifetime guarantees and the ongoing labor crisis remain major stumbling blocks to a sale: “Having these different things going on makes it considerably harder, if not impossible, to sell this newspaper.”