McGrory says the Globe will pass 100,000 digital subs in the next six months

Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory closed out 2017 with a characteristically upbeat message for his staff. Weighing in at nearly 900 words, his email — sent out at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday and passed along to me by a newsroom source — looks back on the paper’s journalistic successes of the past year and forward to continued progress on the business front.

There is no mention of how badly the Globe’s botched launch of its Taunton printing plant affected the bottom line. The situation has improved to the point where it’s no longer the talk of social media, but I continue to hear about delivery problems from time to time. Nor is there any mention of dark clouds on the horizon. But the Boston Herald, an important print customer of the Globe, has gone bankrupt and is likely to end up in the hands of GateHouse Media, which has several printing plants of its own in the region. In addition, a burgeoning trade war with Canada could drive up the cost of newsprint, according to a Bloomberg story that actually appears in today’s Globe.

On the other hand, McGrory writes that the Globe continues to make progress in selling $30-a-month digital subscriptions, John Henry’s make-or-break bet for saving the paper and possibly showing the way for other large regional newspapers as well. McGrory predicts that the Globe will pass the 100,000 mark during the first half of 2018 and says the paper currently has more paying subscribers — print and digital — than it had five years ago. Early last year, when I interviewed McGrory for my forthcoming book, “The Return of the Moguls,” he put it this way: “If we got to 100,000 things would be feeling an awful lot better. And if we got to 200,000, I think we’d be well on our way to establishing a truly sustainable future.”

The full text of McGrory’s message follows.

Hey all,

There was a stretch in early December when our homepage and print fronts were filled with stories of the state Senate president stepping aside because of Globe reporting, three Bridgewater State Prison guards on trial because of Globe reporting, and a federal indictment of a state senator based on Globe reporting.  The thought hit me then, as it does tonight, that there’s not another metropolitan newspaper in this land that has the impact on its community that the Globe does on Boston. Really, name one. And if the question is why, as in why is the Globe so central to the civic life of this region, the answer in no small part is you.

I’m not going to spend time now trying to recap the year we just had; it would be futile to try to capture such an epic collection of once-a-generation events in an email like this. Suffice it to say that your response, your journalism, from January to December, Sports to Spotlight, the initial days of Trump to the burgeoning MeToo movement, was nothing shy of spectacular.

In terms of our DC bureau, have four reporters and an editor ever had such a profound impact providing desperately needed perspective to events unfolding with dizzying speed? The answer: No. Metro and Business, the backbone of our report, continued their stellar accountability reporting, beautiful narrative writing, and the kind of perfectly-timed features that gave readers a break from all things Trump.

This was the year when we finally realized the goal of publishing multiple Spotlight projects, without ever sacrificing quality, culminating in the vital series on race that launched a difficult but overdue conversation across the region. Our sports coverage is so great, so consistently, that it’s easy to take for granted — but please don’t. As strong as it always is, this year was better than any that I can remember.

There’s so much more. 2017 may well have been the year of the columnist, with ours breaking news and offering clarity. Photo, from its arresting daily hits to gorgeous project work, had a banner year again. Our weekly sections — Food, Travel, Address, the Globe Magazine, Sunday Arts — are recognized as among the absolute best in the industry.

This was the year that we enthusiastically ramped up our headline writing, print and digital. It’s the year we started to change the look and feel of our site, thanks to our great design team. It’s the year we broke convention in the ways we tell stories, most notably with two productions of Globe Live that were nothing shy of masterful, and our sports podcast, Season Ticket, which started with well-deserved fanfare and is rapidly gaining audience. WBUR, by the way, is a great partner.

And the most enduring part of the year I’ve yet to mention, which was our reinvention. We created new departments, new philosophies, new beats, new roles. It’s been hard, often anxiety-inducing work, but it’s paid off spectacularly. Our Express Desk, and all the urgent teamwork that goes into it, is a thing of beauty. Our Super Department is gelling now in the exact ways that we hoped. The audience engagement team has brought insight into our coverage decisions. Stories are getting edited earlier and posted at far more impactful times. Many of the new beats have been a huge hit. We are finally — finally — starting to break the stubborn rhythms of a print operation.

And the metrics bring nothing but good news. The key figure: We increased the number of digital-only subscribers by 26 percent in 2017, simply a phenomenal success. We’re closing in on 95,000, and will be at 100,000 in the first half of the year. Overall, we have more paying subscribers now than we did five years ago. It is impossible to overstate how important this is, and the enviable position that this kind of digital growth puts us in.

And one more thing: We moved from Morrissey Boulevard to State Street, in and of itself a huge accomplishment, which we basically fit between everything else. And it already feels like home, the Globe exactly where it belongs, in the heart of the city — even if everyone is still acting a notch too polite.

Yet again, wouldn’t it be great to rest on our successes for a year, but alas, no. The news is not about to slow down, not now, not for a while. Please don’t panic when I talk about Reinvention 2.0, but there is more work to be done, more beats to invent and refine, and better and more productive relationships to build between the newsroom and the rest of the building. We will do all of this in a far less disruptive fashion.

One more thought for 2018: Let’s rededicate ourselves, and by ourselves I mean everyone, to a better balance between work and the rest of life. Some of the most meaningful journalism isn’t conjured under the fluorescent lights of even a beautiful downtown newsroom. No, it’s discovered in our communities, by journalists living eventful lives. We should work hard, yes, but let’s commit to working a little less, and by doing so, I guarantee our work will improve.

For now, though, thank you for all that you did in a year unlike any other. You’ve been amazing, and it’s been an honor.

Brian

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Radio for the people: Providing a voice for Boston’s communities of color

My friend Donna Halper has a great suggestion for how Boston can help bridge the racial divide that continues to define our city and region: bring back local radio that serves the African-American community. The Boston Globe today follows up its recent Spotlight Team series on race, “Boston. Racism. Image. Reality.,” with some ideas from its readers. (And kudos to the Globe for dropping the paywall.) Here is what Halper, a Lesley University professor and longtime radio consultant, has to say:

A professor said that Boston’s media landscape may suffer from the lack of a prominent local radio station that’s black-owned. Boston used to have a station owned by black community members, WILD, but under new corporate ownership it stopped focusing on African-American issues a number of years ago.

“In most cities with a sizable black population, there have been local radio stations around which the community could rally,” wrote Donna L. Halper, an associate professor at Lesley University. “These stations were not just about playing the hits; they were a focus of information and news that the so-called ‘mainstream’ stations didn’t usually address.”

Black-owned media, such as the Bay State Banner newspaper, have had trouble generating significant advertising support, she said, and “a thriving black media would go a long way towards making the black community feel as if its story is being told.

“Relying on the ‘mainstream’ media often means the only time stories of your neighborhood get told is when crimes are committed,” Halper said. “White Bostonians have long held inaccurate ideas about black Bostonians because more often than not, the only stories widely reported depicted danger and criminality.”

(Note: In 1997, during my Boston Phoenix days, I wrote about WILD’s struggle to survive as an independent radio station in the face of corporate consolidation unleashed by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.)

Now, if I were reading Halper’s comments and wanted to follow up, the first person I’d talk with is Paul Bass, the founder and editor of the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit online-only news operation that is still thriving after 12 years. When I was writing about the Independent for my book “The Wired City,” the Independent had a mostly white reporting staff to cover a city with a large African-American community. They did a good job, but it wasn’t ideal.

The Independent’s staff is more diverse today. Even more important, though, is that in 2015 Bass launched a nonprofit low-power FM radio station, WNHH, which also broadcasts online. Rather than writing stories for New Haven’s communities of color, members of those communities have come inside to host programs and tell their own stories. It has proved to be a real boon to New Haven. And though it would be hard to replicate something like that in a city as large as Boston, there surely must be ways to adapt what Bass is doing.

More: Of course Touch 106.1 FM is already providing a valuable service in Boston — but without an FCC license. The city needs a community radio station that can operate legally and can thus enjoy a higher profile and more influence. Also popping up in the Facebook comments: Zumix, a youth-oriented bilingual LPFM and online station in East Boston.

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Once more with feeling: My most-read WGBH News columns of 2017

Photo by Pixabay/public domain. Photo illustration by Emily Judem for WGBH News.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The media and “fake news” in the Age of Trump. The long, slow fade of newspapers in the face of technological and social change. The irrepressible urge to silence unpopular speech. The demise of net neutrality.

Those are some of the themes that rose to the top of my most-read commentaries for WGBH News during the past year. With 2017 drawing to a close, I thought I’d take a look back. Will 2018 be any different? Better? Worse? As the hack’s favorite cliché would have it, time will tell.

1. Political polarization is real, but especially on the right (March 15). Scholars at Harvard Law School and MIT studied how 1.25 million articles about the presidential campaign were shared on social media from April 2015 through Election Day. And they discovered something disturbing: While supporters of Hillary Clinton were consuming a relatively healthy media diet of mainstream and liberal sources, Donald Trump’s supporters were clustered tightly around a right-wing echo chamber dominated by Breitbart News. This “asymmetric polarization,” as the authors described it, helped explain why many Trump voters were likely to believe falsely that Clinton had committed a crime by using a private email server — or, in the more fetid swamps of the far right, was involved in a child sex ring run out of the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant.

2. The long, ugly decline of the newspaper business (Jan. 26, 2016). No good news here, but it resonated enough to rise near the top of my list even though it was from a year earlier. Fittingly, I wrote this column on the Amtrak to Philadelphia, where I was heading to interview folks about billionaire H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest’s just-announced decision to donate his money-losing Philadelphia Inquirer and its affiliated media properties to a nonprofit organization. The newspaper crisis is not one of readership. Rather, it is a story about advertising. Print ad revenues have dropped dramatically, while any hopes that those losses would be offset by a rise in digital income have been squelched by the Facebook-Google duopoly. The result: Armageddon.

3. When should the media call a falsehood a “lie”? (Jan. 3). Several weeks before the fact-challenged president-elect was sworn in, I took on the dicey issue of how to label untruthful political statements. Except in the most egregious cases, I came down on the side of explaining why a particular utterance is untrue without resorting to the L-word. After all, in most cases we can’t be sure whether someone speaking falsely actually knows he is doing so. I’m sticking by that judgment, even though President Trump has turned out to be, according to PolitiFact, every bit as untruthful as candidate Trump.

4. Fake news, false news, and why the difference matters (Nov. 21, 2016). Another holdover from the previous year. I’m afraid that the distinction I was trying to make has been lost now that we have a president who routinely denounces the traditional media as peddling “fake news” simply because he doesn’t like what they’re reporting. But I thought that if we could narrow the definition of fake news to for-profit crapola produced by content farms trying to game Google’s and Facebook’s algorithms, then it might be possible to eliminate at least some of it. Meanwhile, “false news” — untrue or distorted political propaganda — could be dealt with as we always have: by countering it with the truth.

5. Paul Ryan, partisan hack (March 21). Your basic hit job on a loathsome politician. There was a time when Ryan was regularly described as a principled conservative intellectual. He never deserved it; and, following the passage of massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, it appears that much of the public now knows it.

6. Everything is not the same (Oct. 11). The traditional media’s obsession with balance, even at the expense of the truth, has persisted in the Age of Trump. The example I invoked in this column were assertions in our papers of record, The Washington Post and The New York Times, that the Democrats’ growing embrace of old-fashioned liberalism was just like the Republicans’ move to the extreme right. Perhaps the Republican establishment’s support for a credibly accused pedophile in the recent Alabama Senate race will dampen such instincts, at least for a little while.

7. The end of net neutrality — and of online free speech (Nov. 27). I am shocked to report that this column did not have the desired effect. Two weeks after it was published, the Federal Communications Commission went ahead and repealed net neutrality anyway. The indignity.

8. The 2017 New England Muzzle Awards (July 3). For 20 years, my co-conspirator Harvey Silverglate and I have been singling out affronts to free speech — first for the late, much-lamented Boston Phoenix and in recent years for WGBH News. The 2017 edition focused on the rise of social media as a menace to freedom of expression. Among the examples: YouTube’s restricting access to a pro-Israel video by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz; Instagram’s taking down nude photos posted by the Museum of Fine Arts; and the Boston Police Department’s proposal — later withdrawn — to monitor social-media activities to make sure we’re not doing anything suspicious. As Huxley predicted, repression would come in the form of free services that let us share pictures of our cats.

9. Why the Entercom-CBS merger will harm Boston radio (Feb. 13). Starting in the mid-1990s, nearly all meaningful ownership restrictions on radio stations have been cast aside. Rather than requiring localism as a guiding principle, Congress and the FCC have embraced corporate empire-building. Some months after I wrote this column, CBS announced that it would sell the last news station on the local commercial dial, WBZ (AM 1030), to iHeartMedia, formerly known as Clear Channel. Naturally, iHeart’s first move was to fire WBZ’s respected program director, Peter Casey. The demise of commercial stations has helped fuel the rise of public radio, including news outlets WGBH (89.7 FM) and WBUR (90.9 FM). In this case, though, what’s good for public media is not good for the public at large.

10. Keeping it neutral on social media (Oct. 26). After The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were diagnosed with terminal old fogeyism for issuing elaborate policies on their journalists’ use of social media, I came to their defense. My basic rule of thumb: Reporters expected to cover their beats in a fair, impartial manner should act accordingly on Twitter. And even opinion journalists have an obligation to stay away from using offensive language, endorsing candidates, or anything else they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to do.

Finally, my thanks to WGBH News for the privilege of having this platform and to you for reading. Best wishes to everyone for a great 2018.

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What’s next for the Globe after Brian McGrory’s message to readers?

What’s next for The Boston Globe and the burgeoning #MeToo sexual-harassment story now dominating virtually every facet of society? The Globe is the only local news organization with the size and the clout to hold institutions accountable — and it has been doing so, with tough stories on the Statehouse, the restaurant business and, just last week, an ugly situation at Fenway Community Health Center. But recent missteps in applying the same standard to itself have made its watchdog role more difficult to carry out.

Editor Brian McGrory sought to rectify that with a message to readers that was posted Thursday evening and that appeared on page one of the Friday print edition. He didn’t answer every question or clear up every inconsistency about the full range of former political reporter Jim O’Sullivan’s misbehavior — especially his reported harassment of women on Beacon Hill. But McGrory acknowledged that the Globe should have identified O’Sullivan in its original story, and he said a few things that needed to be said:

While our discussions on the O’Sullivan matter were mostly focused on proof, fairness, and spectrums of misconduct, there’s now a fairly obvious realization that I didn’t focus enough on another very important factor: the Globe’s institutional credibility….

This has been an important time in our country, but by no means an easy time for many organizations. I unintentionally made it more difficult for the Globe. Please know that we’ve learned vital lessons about holding ourselves to a higher standard, lessons that I pledge will be vigorously applied to our coverage of these and many other issues going forward.

Shortly after McGrory’s message was posted, O’Sullivan tweeted an apology.

Looking ahead, here are three additional steps I’d like to see the Globe take.

1. Do more reporting on incidents involving Globe journalists. The Globe’s Dec. 8 story by Mark Arsenault needs to be revisited. As many observers, including me, have argued from the beginning, it was simply untenable to report on what has happened at the Globe without using any names. McGrory has now acknowledged that. But before the paper can move on, its readers deserve a fuller accounting of what O’Sullivan did, what his editors were aware of in real time, and what accusations have been made about other employees, some of whom are alluded to in Arsenault’s story. And if there is a genuinely defensible reason not to name names, the Globe needs to provide enough details so that we will all understand why, whether we agree or not.

2. Do more reporting on the newsroom culture. Arsenault’s story offered some information about managing director Linda Pizzuti Henry’s efforts to reform the culture in the advertising department. What about the newsroom? Again, this is a matter of accountability rather than singling out the Globe. Officials at every institution right now should be thinking about whether they have encouraged or tolerated sexual harassment and how that can be stopped. What is the Globe doing to respond to the opportunity presented by #MeToo to fix what was broken? Arsenault’s story included a few details, but more would be better.

3. Keep promoting women to positions of responsibility. As recently as seven months ago, the Globe had two women in top-ranking newsroom management positions. But last summer, Katie Kingsbury, the managing editor for digital, left to take a post at The New York Times. And last week, Christine Chinlund, the managing editor for news, retired. Linda Henry is a highly visible presence; Ellen Clegg, the editorial-page editor, is McGrory’s hierarchical equal on the masthead; and women run the news (Jennifer Peter) and arts (Janice Page) operations. But according to Arsensault’s story, only about 37 percent of the Globe’s full-time news and opinion employees are women. I don’t know whether the ever-shrinking Globe will have two managing editors again, but surely it needs one. McGrory should hire a high-profile woman whose portfolio specifically includes encouraging the career paths of female journalists.

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Bernard Law’s legacy of evil

Bernard Law in the 1980s. Photo (cc) via City of Boston Archives.

In late 1990 and early 1991 I spent four and a half months as the production manager for The Pilot, the Archdiocese of Boston’s venerable weekly newspaper. It was a difficult time in my life, and I was happy to take the job. They didn’t ask if I was a Catholic; I didn’t tell them I wasn’t.

One of my responsibilities was to proofread and lay out Cardinal Bernard Law’s weekly column. There wasn’t much to that particular task. As I was reminded in reading Law’s obituary this morning, he had spent the early part of his career as the editor of a Catholic newspaper.

Of course, Law’s facility with a typewriter is not the first thing we think of when we look back upon his legacy. Law was an evil man — evil in the way of people who accept the realities of whatever bureaucratic environment they happen to find themselves in, carrying out their tasks without regard for morality or humanity. Law facilitated the serial rape of children, and if that made him not much different from others in his position, that doesn’t exonerate him, either.

In 2001 I had the privilege of sharing a pod at The Boston Phoenix with Kristen Lombardi, one of the country’s great investigative reporters. Kristen, who’s now with the Center for Public Integrity, wrote a series of detailed articles showing that Law was reassigning and covering up for the pedophile priests under his command. The following year, The Boston Globe began its remarkable Spotlight series, which resulted in Law’s resignation and a well-deserved Pulitzer for the Globe — not to mention the movie “Spotlight.” (Walter Robinson, who oversaw the Spotlight Team’s coverage of pedophile priests, spoke with WGBH Radio earlier today.)

After fleeing Boston 15 years ago, Law lived the good life in the Vatican. I don’t know if he understood the horror of what he had done, but surely he understood that he was a reviled figure. It’s too bad that, when he was still alive and healthy, Pope Francis didn’t fly him back to Boston under armed guard and order him to fend for himself in the city where he did so much harm. But not only did Francis not take such action, he’s honoring him with his presence at the funeral.

The phrase “banality of evil” is unavoidable in thinking about Law. I doubt he even realized he was doing anything wrong until it was too late. His life demonstrates the importance of exercising our individual conscience and of never putting the needs of an institution ahead of human lives. It would be easy to describe his fall as a tragedy, and I’m sure it was to him. The real tragedy, though, was in the suffering of his victims.

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Bitcoin publishing: Why the digital media bubble is about to burst

Photos by Pixabay/public domain. Photo illustration by Emily Judem for WGBH News.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The digital media bubble is neither as ephemeral nor as notorious as the bitcoin bubble. After all, no one is getting rich from digital media. And when the bubble finally bursts, it’s not going to destroy the life savings of ordinary people who should have known better. Nevertheless, the digital media bubble is very real, and if it crashes it could diminish the journalistic landscape in 2018 and beyond.

In recent years, a number of digital-only media organizations have risen to prominence. Some, like BuzzFeed and Mashable, started out as viral sensations and gradually added high-impact journalism. Others, like Vice and Vox, have embraced quality from the start. Indeed, Vice’s “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” may have been among the most important documentaries of 2017.

What these projects all have in common, though, is that they are free or mostly free, with business models that are dependent on advertising revenue. And with the giant platforms Facebook and Google soaking up 89 percent of all new digital ads, as Ken Doctor reports at the Nieman Journalism Lab, there is virtually no likelihood that they will ever attain consistent profitability. Meanwhile, they subsist on vast seas of venture capital — and the investors who supplied that capital are beginning to realize that they may never get their money back.

“The big picture is that Problem #1 (too many publications) and Problem #2 (platform monopolies) have catalyzed together to create Problem #3 (investors realize they were investing in a mirage and don’t want to invest any more),” wrote Josh Marshall in an influential blog post last month. “Each is compounding each other and leading to something like the crash effect you see in other bubbles.”

How serious is the problem? Last March, Lucia Moses of Digiday reported that $15.6 billion in venture capital had been invested in digital media during the previous three years, a huge increase over the $4.5 billion invested during the three years before that. The idea, Moses wrote, was to invest in companies with the potential for annual revenues of at least $100 million a year. Some have succeeded; but others seem unlikely to reach that threshold, leading to some mighty anxious investors.

The weakest link at the moment appears to be Mashable, recently bought by Ziff Davis for $50 million. As Maxwell Tani notes at Business Insider, the site had been valued at $250 million only last year. Tani obtained documents showing that Mashable was gushing red ink at the time of its acquisition. The most significant problem: Mashable relied on digital advertising for 72 percent of its revenues at a time when Facebook and Google were hoovering up the vast majority of new spending.

But, you might say, Mashable was a bit player without a clear identity. Yet even mighty BuzzFeed and Vice are having their problems. In November, Amol Sharma and Lukas I. Alpert reported in The Wall Street Journal that BuzzFeed would miss its revenue target by $50 million to $70 million — a shortfall of 15 to 20 percent — and that Vice was flagging as well.

“Some companies courting investors or buyers are finding a disappointing level of interest,” Sharma and Alpert wrote, adding: “Across the industry, digital media companies are finding that lines of business that caught fire for them early on — like creating custom content for brands — are becoming harder to scale up. Meanwhile, with each passing year, Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. [yes, them again] are tightening their grip on the online ad market.”

So what, if anything, works? Look around, and you’ll see that, fundamentally, the digital media bubble was created by a belief — a hope — that investors could become fantastically rich by putting their money into journalism. There was an era when that was actually true, especially at the television networks and at prestigious magazine companies like Time Inc. and Condé Nast. Those days are over. But it doesn’t mean that sustainable news organizations can’t be created at a more realistic scale.

Take, for instance, Josh Marshall’s news organization, Talking Points Memo, a liberal political site that’s so old it was part of what we used to call “the blogosphere.” Over the years TPM has grown gradually from a one-person operation to a company with about 15 editors and reporters. Although there are ads on the site, much of the revenue comes from membership in TPM Prime, a paid service that offers additional content and a better user experience.

On a larger scale, The New York Times and The Washington Post are proving that a major national newspaper can move toward sustainability through digital subscriptions — something regional papers like The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times are attempting to do as well.

At the local level, attention tends to be focused on high-profile players hitting the skids, like the Gothamist network or, sadly, Washington City Paper, the latest alt-weekly to struggle with an existential crisis. Yet the country is peppered with local and regional news projects, some for-profit, some nonprofit, that provide a real service to their communities.

What’s driving the digital media bubble is money, not journalism. If it bursts, then some good and important stories won’t be told. But once the dust settles, there will be a chance to build something smaller and more sustainable in the long run — not to mention something that helps meet the information needs of a democratic society.

That’s more than you can say about bitcoin.

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This post has been banned by the CDC

The following post would be banned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Whenever I criticize some action by government officials, I try to make sure that what I’m writing is evidence-based. Otherwise I might be vulnerable to charges that I was motivated mainly by political bias and was acting with a sense of entitlement. Fortunately, this post is grounded in reporting by The Washington Post, so I think I should be fine.

Of course, not every post needs to be science-based. For instance, in writing about issues involving transgender people, it is perfectly valid to argue for their inclusion in mainstream society simply on the grounds of diversity without getting into the technical aspects of whether sex selection takes place at the level of a fetus or if it is something that happens with children as they get older.

In any event, I hope you have enjoyed my small attempt at keeping myself entertained. Perhaps it will help you take your mind off the horror of having a CDC that can no longer be taken seriously.

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Tuesday’s election results were a triumph for journalism

Doug Jones’ victory in Tuesday’s Alabama Senate race underscores the crucial role that journalism plays in our public discourse.

If The Washington Post’s Stephanie McCrummen, Beth Reinhard and Alice Crites hadn’t interviewed courageous women and exposed Roy Moore as a likely pedophile, the outcome of the election could have been very different. And if the Post hadn’t turned the tables on Project Veritas when it attempted a sting to discredit its reporting, the consequences for journalism would have been catastrophic.

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With the Herald changing hands, here are five updated ideas for making it better

Photo by Emily Judem for WGBH News

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

If I had a nickel for every time someone predicted the death of the Boston Herald over the past 25 years, I would have — well, many nickels. So I see last week’s announcement by Herald owner Pat Purcell that he plans to sell his paper to GateHouse Media as just one more bump in what has been an exceedingly bumpy road.

GateHouse, a national chain that owns more than 100 community weeklies and dailies in Eastern Massachusetts and environs, has given little indication of what it intends to do with the city’s number two paper. First the Herald has to go through bankruptcy, and though it’s likely GateHouse will end up with the tabloid, there is no guarantee.

What we do know is that a GateHouse-owned Herald will be smaller. Preliminary reports suggest that the staff will be cut from 240 to 175 across all departments. That is going to have a huge impact on the Herald’s newsgathering capacity, as the newsroom accounts for about half of that 240. On the other hand, a daily newspaper with 175 employees should still be able to do good work and provide at least some competition to The Boston Globe.

Twelve years ago, as The Boston Phoenix’s media columnist, I offered five suggestions for how the Herald could improve and build a more sustainable business. With the Herald changing ownership for the first time since 1994, when Purcell bought it from his mentor Rupert Murdoch, I thought I’d take a look at what I had to say in 2005 and see whether any of it is relevant today.

1. Get smart. This is probably the single most important step that GateHouse could take in trying to appeal to new readers. More than 20 years ago, a journalist who had left the paper told me something he’d once said to Purcell. It went approximately like this: You’ve already got all the stupid readers, Pat. You need to find a few smart ones as well.

Unfortunately, Purcell never really took that advice. From the mid-1990s until the early 2000s, the Herald thrived on the strength of strong local news coverage, an aggressive business section, an excellent sports section, and good photography. But as the economics of newspapering began to crater, the Herald embraced a flash-and-trash approach while continuing to get smaller.

In recent years, under editor Joe Sciacca, the sensationalism has been toned down considerably, and the daily report is solid if shrunken. But the goal seemed to be to hang onto the paper’s shrinking pool of existing readers rather than try to cultivate, say, the young workers in Boston’s growing innovation economy — many of whom may not be as liberal on economic issues as the Globe thinks they are and who would thus be open to an alternative.

2. Upgrade the look. Twelve years ago I wrote: “Newcomers to Boston no doubt are perplexed when they hear old-timers refer to the Herald as ‘the Record.’ That’s a reference to the Record American, a Hearst-owned tabloid from a bygone era that, along with several other papers, eventually morphed into the modern Herald. Trouble is, the Herald really does look like the Record, if the Record could be exhumed, updated a bit, and printed in color.”

Unfortunately, nothing has changed. Today, as I did then, I would recommend a makeover along the lines of (for instance) the Boston Business Journal, an attractive tabloid that takes a more restrained approach. The old urban tab look is perfect if you’re looking for something to fold up and take with you to Suffolk Downs — provided you’re going to the horse races. Now the city hopes the Suffolk Downs property will become Amazon’s second headquarters. GateHouse ought to be thinking about how to design a Herald that will appeal to the sort of young, highly educated folks who would work there — a sizable group even if Amazon ultimately picks another city.

3. Turn right. Despite the Herald’s reputation as a bastion of right-wing Trumpery, the paper’s editorial pages have long been rather staid and moderate. The right-wing reputation comes from a few of its news columnists, especially Howie Carr, who’s long since slid into self-parody; Joe Fitzgerald, a former sportswriter who traffics in snoozy social conservatism; and Adriana Cohen, who recycles seemingly every talking point from Fox News, including the network’s outrageous attacks on the FBI.

The opinion pages, on the other hand, carry respectable syndicated conservatives like Jonah Goldberg, George Will, and Michael Gerson, as well as local voices like freelancer Jim Sullivan, who rarely writes about politics. What would help is if editorial-page editor Shelly Cohen recruited some young, smart, conservative local columnists. Surely there’s some recent college graduate out there who wants to be the next Ben Shapiro or Tomi Lahren who’d be willing to work for a low salary and a shot at Twitter immortality. Unfortunately for the Herald, now as then, the best conservative columnist in Boston is Jeff Jacoby — a Herald alumnus who left the paper for the Globe many years ago.

4. Dump the website. I first made this recommendation on the grounds that the Herald simply didn’t translate well online — it was a quick read that people flip through on the subway or at Dunkin’ Donuts just before they go to work. Today’s smaller Herald is an even quicker read. Besides, the Herald’s website is not exactly a joy to navigate, though its mobile app is decent.

What I hadn’t anticipated 12 years ago was that the Herald would launch an internet radio station that has become an integral part of the paper’s identity. The problem is that it is essentially an old-fashioned conservative talk station, and people listen to talk radio in their cars, most of which are not especially well suited to streaming audio. But it has been a worthwhile experiment, and GateHouse should continue with it.

5. Live free or die? Purcell never wanted to take this step, though there was some buzz that he might when the free commuter tab Metro first came to Boston. I thought a free Herald could make sense; certainly it’s a better read than the Metro. Moreover, the Herald relies on point-of-purchase sales, and there are simply fewer places to buy newspapers than there used to be.

The trend in newspapers these days is to charge as much as the market will bear, either in print or online. Persuading readers to pay for journalism is essential given the collapse of digital advertising (for anyone other than Facebook and Google) and the ongoing decline of print advertising. But what little advertising value remains in newspapers is all on the print side. And if GateHouse can cut expenses enough (probably the one thing the compay is really, really good at), it might be able to turn a profit with a free Herald.

Last week’s announcement that the Herald would be sold was good news in the sense that Boston will continue to have two daily papers. But it’s sad, too, because a lot of people will be losing their jobs, and the likelihood is that the Herald is going to offer less. “More newspapers mean more coverage,” wrote Herald sports columnist Steve Buckley over the weekend. “More newspapers mean more opinions. And listen up, Globe: More newspapers mean more hustle. If we lose the Herald, the Globe will lose something as well.”

So, too, will all of us.

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What will GateHouse Media do with the Boston Herald?

There is so much local media news breaking today that it’s hard to keep it all straight. Late this afternoon came the huge announcement that Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell, who bought the tabloid from his mentor Rupert Murdoch in 1994, was taking the paper into bankruptcy with the intention of selling it to GateHouse Media.

I’ve posted the clip of us talking about the deal on “Beat the Press.” Here is the Herald’s coverage. And here is The Boston Globe’s. The Boston Business Journal has some interesting details as well, including the bankruptcy filing. I talked with Jenna Fisher of Patch about what’s next.

At this point, we all have far more questions than answers. A friend suggested something to me a little while ago that is worth pondering: Can we be sure that GateHouse will end up with the Herald? Once a business goes into bankruptcy, it’s up for grabs. As I note in my forthcoming book, “The Return of the Moguls,” the executives who were running California’s Orange County Register took that paper into bankruptcy several years ago with the goal of buying it themselves. They lost out, and today the Register is part of the Digital First Media empire.

Other questions: Although cuts have already been announced, will the diminished Herald be its old recognizable blend of local news, good photography and sports coverage, and feisty tabloidism? Or will it be something else entirely? Will GateHouse keep Herald Radio up and running? Will it honor its printing contract with the Globe, or will it move operations to a GateHouse facility? We’ll learn the answers to all these questions in the weeks and months to come.

Interestingly, for a few years Purcell owned around 100 community papers in Eastern Massachusetts in addition to the Herald, selling all but the Herald to GateHouse about 15 years ago. Now things have come full circle.

No one wants to see hard-working journalists lose their jobs. We all hope GateHouse will keep the pain to a minimum, and that the Herald will be with us for many years to come.

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