By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Boston Globe religion reporter Michael Paulson responds to the David Warsh piece I linked to yesterday, and takes umbrage with Warsh’s suggestion that the Globe hurt itself with readers by pursuing the pedophile-priest story so vigorously.
Let’s assume for a moment that Warsh is right, although I don’t think he is. Isn’t a good newspaper supposed to ignore public opinion in pursuing an important story? Warsh’s piece is smart and well-informed, but I do disagree with him about that.
In what can only be described as great news for the city and the region, the New York Times Co. and the Boston Newspaper Guild have reached an agreement, ending an increasingly tense and ugly standoff over the future of Boston’s largest and most important news organization.
The Globe’s Rob Gavin and Keith O’Brien report on the deal here; the Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam and Christine McConville’s story is here. Not many details yet, but it sounds like the Guild agreed to take significant pay cuts (though not the 23 percent cuts that were being bandied about yesterday), and to yield at least to some extent on those lifetime job guarantees.
If you want to know what’s happening at the Globe, just read my predictions and go with the opposite. After the Times Co. made it clear earlier this week that closure of the paper was at least 60 days away, I was certain that the two sides would break off talks for a while. Instead, they got it done.
There seems little doubt, though, that the $20 million in union givebacks is just the beginning. Guild president Dan Totten has warned his members that management is hinting at a massive round of layoffs. And the easing of lifetime job guarantees, the Globe notes, could clear the way for a sale of the paper, as no prospective owner wanted to take on the task of revitalizing the Globe without maximum flexibility.
In the long run, I suspect that the major metropolitan daily is a doomed relic of the Industrial Age. Still, I’d like to think papers like the Globe can survive another five to 10 years as we transition to whatever’s next. The Globe produces the lion’s share of public-interest journalism and investigative reporting in Greater Boston. The challenge will be to preserve that function with a much smaller staff — keeping in mind that the newsroom has already shrunk from 550 to 330 full-timers in recent years.
In today’s Globe, columnist Jeff Jacoby challenges those who believe the Globe and papers like it are being punished for their liberal bias. Jacoby’s premise is based on the common-sense observation that the Globe isn’t actually losing readers. There’s an apples-and-oranges quality to to readership numbers. But there’s a strong case to be made that when you factor in online readers, the Globe is reaching as many people as it ever has, regardless of its plummeting print circulation.
George Snell offers some worthwhile thoughts on what’s next for the Globe. He has correctly identified the biggest challenge: How can the Globe reinvent itself while simultaneously slashing its news coverage? It’s already cut much of its international and national reporting and closed its foreign bureaus. In order to thrive as a great local paper, it’s got to offer compelling local coverage. Will it be able to continue doing that?
Finally, Herald columnist Joe Fitzgerald sanctimoniously tells us why he’s got no problem with the Herald’s snarky comments on the Globe’s meltdown. He says the Globe was mean to the Herald 27 years ago, when Rupert Murdoch saved the tabloid from what had seemed like certain death.
Good grief. Talk about a long, long, long memory. Howie Carr wasn’t around in 1982. Neither was current Herald owner Pat Purcell. The Herald American, as it was then called, was being mismanaged into extinction by Hearst. For that matter, the Globe was under different ownership, too.
I guess this is why they say the two favorite sports in Boston are politics and revenge.
The New York Times Co. is trying to force a 23 percent pay cut on the Newspaper Guild, which prompts the Outraged Liberal to ask: “What, no sacrifice of first borns?”
That really is one hell of a proposed pay cut. It’s hard to know what to make of such a move except to assume that management wants some sort of dramatic end game — a walkout by the Guild, bankruptcy, whatever.
Earlier today the Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam — back from hardship duty — reported that Guild officers have gotten some mighty nice raises the past few years. But though Heslam’s enterprise might have sowed some dissension within the ranks at 135 Morrissey Boulevard, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and company seem intent on keeping Globe staffers united and pissed off.
You may have seen this already, but the Washington Post’s newly minted Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Eugene Robinson, has a smart take on the Globe’s woes today. And on and on it goes.
One final thought: Management’s latest offer could be thought of more as an opening gambit than a “last, best offer.” The 30-day deadline has passed, and the company has now said it will not close the paper until after a federally mandated 60-day warning period has passed — and it hasn’t even filed the necessary paperwork for that to happen.
What will management do when the Guild says no? Announce that it will close the Globe in two months? Sorry — now that we know the company wasn’t serious about closing the paper on Friday, and then on Sunday, that’s no longer credible. Unless you’re North Korea, you only get to make threats once.
The Boston Globe’s Sean Murphy has been doing some terrific work recently on the scandal that is the Massachusetts public pension system. As Michael Jonas notes at CommonWealth Unbound, similar stories were published in CommonWealth Magazine five and seven years ago.
Unfortunately, the only thing we seem to have learned is that, eventually, the public forgets.
GateHouse Media is launching a free, 25,000-circulation daily on Cape Cod that will be published from late June through Labor Day weekend. As I’ve written before, newspapers need to embrace free, advertiser-supported specialty publications as a way of bolstering the bottom line.
The Boston Globe today announces that longtime foreign correspondent David Greenway’s column has been cut from weekly to monthly. That prompts Bill H. to ask if there’s anywhere else he can get his Greenway fix.
The answer: Yes, indeed. Greenway is a regular contributor to GlobalPost, the Boston-based start-up that covers international news.
In my latest for the Guardian, I offer an update on a proposal to crack down on the Internet in Kazakhstan, which I earlier wrote about here and here.
Recently I threw some numbers around regarding the possibility that the Boston Globe could give away the Amazon Kindle to its home subscribers and shut down its presses.
Today, Media Nation reader M.G. points to this Time magazine story about a new, bigger Kindle that’s in the works and that might be ideal for displaying newspaper and magazine content. Yesterday, the New York Times reported on other e-readers that are being developed.
The challenge, needless to say, is to come up with an experience so compelling that people will be willing to pay for it rather than click around the free Web edition. For it to work, you need a critical mass who really want to read the paper, as opposed to spending 10 minutes grazing the headlines during their lunch hour.
Nick Cafardo’s blasé take on the latest Alex Rodriguez controversy has me scratching my head.
In her forthcoming book on A-Rod, Selena Roberts alleges that, when he was with the Texas Rangers, he would sometimes deliberately tip pitches to opposing hitters. It’s nice to know that David Ortiz would “beat the crap out of him” if he were the pitcher and the allegations were true. But why are we not talking about an immediate investigation, followed by a possible lifetime ban?
Cafardo writes in today’s Boston Globe:
This is New York, a city and a team built to handle controversy. So A-Rod took steroids in high school, the book alleges … so A-Rod went to strip clubs … so A-Rod allegedly tipped pitches to opposing hitters … so A-Rod had the Texas clubhouse guy put toothpaste on his toothbrush every day.
Beyond the entertainment value, who cares?
Who cares? Other than the apparent absence of a gambling angle, what A-Rod is alleged to have done is akin to throwing games.
Roberts is no hack — it was she who flushed out the first round of A-Rod allegations, which turned out to be true. Yet no one seems to be all that upset about the possibility that Rose — er, Rodriguez — was stabbing his Texas teammates and fans in the back.
This now appears on the Web site of WTKK Radio (96.9 FM):
WTKK and Greater Media value an open and vigorous dialogue, but we also adhere to basic principles of civility, common decency and respect for all cultures. We believe Jay’s suspension is the best way to uphold both of these corporate policies. WTKK Management met with Jay Severin and his agent today. He will remain on suspension until further notice.
V.B., who took the afternoon shift today, said he was “filling in for Jay.” Sounds like Severin may be back. And if management means what it says, it also sounds like Severin will be helming a very different show.