GoLocalProv is reporting that GateHouse Media is on the verge of buying The Providence Journal for an estimated $50 million to $60 million. John Henry only paid $51 million for The Boston Globe if a GoLocalWorcester report that he sold the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester for $19 million is accurate (Henry paid $70 million for the Globe, the T&G and some smaller related properties).
This story is still developing. But GoLocalProv offers some insight as to why the price might be so high: lucrative printing contracts and a highly desirable downtown headquarters that could be sold and leased back.
Correction: I initially misreported the purchase price of the Globe. Apologies to Matt Drudge for the siren.
I am honored and pleased to report that I have been officially awarded tenure at Northeastern and have been promoted to the rank of associate professor. I’ve been confident this was coming for the past six weeks, but it wasn’t official until I received a letter from the provost’s office Wednesday.
This has literally been a 10-year quest for me — one year as an adjunct, three as visiting faculty and then six on the tenure track. I’m filled with gratitude for all the support and help I received along the way.
The political press today is engorged with analysis that attempts to explain why House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost the Republican primary in his Virginia district to a Tea Party challenger on Tuesday. But given that the pundits were as surprised as everyone else, there is no particular reason to think they are capable of telling us why it happened.
Nearly a month ago, though, Jenna Portnoy and Robert Costa of The Washington Post saw it coming. In an article headlined “Eric Cantor’s tea party opponent in Va. primary may be picking up momentum,” the two wrote that Cantor’s opponent, David Brat, had energized the right-wing base of the party. Cantor, Brat’s supporters believed, had been insufficiently hardline on issues such as immigration reform, the debt ceiling and the Affordable Care Act.
Weeks before the voting, Portnoy and Costa also put their finger on a Cantor tactic that seems to have backfired: going after Brat so hard that he improved his unknown opponent’s name recognition and gave him legitimacy. They quote Brat as saying, “I’m a rookie, he’s never gone negative, and he’s putting my face and name on Fox News, which is unheard of. If they’re doing that, that means their internal polling shows that I’m not at zero. I’m a risk of some sort.”
Portnoy is a local reporter for the Post, having previously covered New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for The Star-Ledger of Newark. I’m sure she’s a fine reporter. What the Cantor story tells me, though, is that the Post’s move to poach Costa from National Review last November is paying off. As Joe Coscarelli wrote in New York magazine, Costa — who is not yet 30, and who rose to prominence during last year’s debt-ceiling debacle — is rare among conservative journalists in that he sees himself as a reporter first, trusted by and well-plugged-in among all factions.
If you want to know why Cantor lost, don’t bother with the Wednesday morning quarterbacking taking place elsewhere. Instead, go back and read what Portnoy and Costa wrote weeks ago.
Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
A week after Aaron Kushner announced major cuts at the Orange County Register and its affiliated papers, it sounds like the wheels may be coming off. In an interview with Larry Mantle of Southern California Public Radio, Kushner kept insisting that the cuts were nothing but a temporary setback, saying:
To continue to invest and grow over the long term, we have to align our cost structure with what we now know we can achieve in revenue growth. Doing so will not be easy and will impact all of us, but it is necessary to ensure a strong and healthy future for our newspapers.
But Mantle was having none of it. He pressed Kushner on the all-but-closing of the start-up Long Beach Register and asked him if he expected his newest paper, the Los Angeles Register, to compete seriously with the Los Angeles Times. Kushner’s answers might best be described as on message to a fault, leading to this testy exchange near the end:
Mantle: I have to say, if I worked for you, hearing your description and the lack of specifics, I’d be very nervous about the future.
Kushner: Any other questions?
Meanwhile, Gustavo Arellano, editor of the OC Weekly, an alternative paper that has been so dubious of Kushner’s plans that it even has a blog category called “OC Register Death Watch,” posted a scorcher on Monday, reporting that the Register’s staff is all but fleeing toward the exits. Arellano quotes a “longtimer” as saying of Kushner, “He’s lost the newsroom. No one has any faith in him at all. People want to get the hell out while they can.”
(An aside: If everything is truly coming apart, why did the “longtimer” think it was necessary to remain anonymous? And why did Arellano go ahead and quote him anyway? Look, I’ve been there and done that. And there’s no reason to think the quote doesn’t reflect the genuine sentiment of the newsroom. But I’m more skeptical of anonymous quotes these days than I used to be, and I think readers are too.)
I continue to hope that Kushner and his business partner, Eric Spitz, can right their leaking ship. But the simplest explanation for what is happening is that Kushner never had a real plan — he simply thought that all he had to do was spend lavishly and readers and advertisers would flock to his side.
Newspaper analyst Ken Doctor, whom I would characterize as a sympathetic Kushner observer up until now, weighed in with a devastating piece last week. I linked to it then, and here it is again. I recommend it highly.
WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) is adding a third hour of “Boston Public Radio” with Jim Braude and Margery Eagan this September, when it will be on the air weekdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
In addition, the program — and WGBH in general — will partner with The GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit venture recently begun by the Boston-based international news site GlobalPost and its co-founder and editor-at-large, Charles Sennott.
You can find the full announcement here — and my standard disclosure here.
The message last night was straightforward: The Boston Globe was launching a new weekly political section, Capital, in print and online.
It was the messaging, though, that really mattered. About a hundred invited guests mingled in the lobby of the historic Paramount Theatre, elegantly restored by Emerson College, helping themselves to free food and an open bar. Owner/publisher John Henry joined the minglers, working the room like one of the politicians his reporters might write about.
And if you didn’t quite get the messaging, chief executive officer Michael Sheehan and editor Brian McGrory were there helpfully to explain.
“You can’t cut your way to success. You can only grow you way to success,” Sheehan said while introducing a panel discussion. Added McGrory in his closing remarks: “We are investing in our political coverage at a time when virtually every other paper is retreating.”
If you’re a news junkie, a political junkie or both, enjoy it. The newspaper implosion that has defined the past decade may have slowed, but it hasn’t stopped.
Some 16,200 full-time newspaper jobs disappeared between 2003 and 2012, according to the American Society of News Editors. Just this week, about 20 employees — one-fourth of editorial staff members — were let go by the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, recently sold by Henry to Halifax Media Group of Daytona Beach, Florida. Aaron Kushner, whose print-centric approach was hailed as the salvation of the newspaper business just a year ago, is now dismantling the Orange County Register and its affiliated Southern California properties as quickly as he built them up.
The only major papers bucking this trend are Henry’s Globe and Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, both of which are adding staff and expanding their portfolios. (The New York Times remains relatively healthy, but in recent years the ruling Sulzberger family has tended to define success by keeping cuts to a minimum.)
So what is Capital? Simply put, it’s a Friday-only section comprising features, think pieces, polling, commentary and lots of graphics. The debut consists of 12 pages, including three full-page ads — two of them advocacy messages of the sort that might not have made their way into the paper otherwise — and a smaller bank ad on the front of the section.
The lead story, by Jim O’Sullivan and Matt Viser, looks at the implications of a presidential race that is not likely to have a Massachusetts candidate for the first time since 2000. A poll (and Capital is slated to have lots of polls) suggests that Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker is making some headway, trailing Democratic contender Martha Coakley by a few points and leading Coakley’s rival Steve Grossman by a similar margin.
Among the more intriguing pieces of content is a “social networks dashboard,” put together by SocialSphere of Cambridge, which tracks conversations and the “biggest influencers” on Twitter. The print version has the highlights; online, it goes into more depth. It could use some tweaking, though. For instance, it’s fine to know that Gov. Deval Patrick is +463, but I’d like to see an explanation of what that means.
And if the Globe is looking for suggestions, I’d like to see a more outward-looking orientation, at least in the online version. There are no few links to outside content. How about a curated reading list of the best political coverage appearing elsewhere? (Online, Capital does offer some outside links in an automated feature based on Twitter called “The Talk,” which combines mostly Globe content with a little bit of offsite stuff. I’m also told that a daily newsletter to be written by political reporter Joshua Miller will include non-Globe links.)
One challenge the Globe faces is to come up with compelling content that isn’t tied to the daily news cycle. Today, for instance, the paper’s two most important political stories appear not in Capital but, rather, on the front page: more questions about Scott Brown’s dubious dealings with a Florida firearms company and insider shenanigans involving Mayor Marty Walsh’s administration and the city’s largest construction company. Of necessity, Capital will have to focus on analysis and smart step-back pieces.
During the panel discussion, political editor Cynthia Needham said that a frequent topic of conversation in the newsroom is whether the Globe’s political coverage should appeal to “insiders” or to readers “who dip in every once in a while.” For Capital to work week after week, the answer needs to be both — and then some.
But seriously — how refreshing is it to be able to write about the Globe’s latest expansion instead of the cuts and layoffs that pervade the rest of the newspaper business? We’ll remember these times. Let’s hope they last.
I’m told that The Boston Globe is one of the few daily newspapers that still publishes a travel section. Now it has added a staff writer. The following memo to the newsroom is by Chris Morris, the travel editor.
Chris Muther is trading one runway for another.
Chris, who has written about fashion for eight years, will be shifting into a new role this month as writer for the Travel section. He’ll bring his discriminating tastes, sharp wit, and distinctive voice to a section that hasn’t had a staffer for years. Once he gets his footing, he’ll launch a column, certain to contain his irrepressible sense of humor and become a Sunday morning must-read. He’ll tell us tales from interesting places — mostly near, occasionally far — and write the kinds of non-travel travel stories that speak to the wanderer in all of us. No doubt he’ll pack the section with personality.
Chris arrived at the Globe in 2001, being told that he would be here exactly one month, and no longer. Highlights of his tenure include strolling the streets of Boston in a Norwegian onesie and touring Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment. And while he’s covered 16 seasons of fashion week, he’s been writing about travel even longer. He went 600 feet under the sea in a mini submarine in Curacao, found that the hills were alive with music in Salzburg, and induced the wrath of a nation when he wrote about his dislike of Lisbon. Before the Globe, he was a news reporter. He lives in South Boston with his partner Alex and his cat, Admiral Jules Verne von Picklebottoms III.
Though Chris is leaving the Style beat, his fans can only hope he’ll continue to wage his one-man battle against Uggs and Crocs, both of which he’s deemed crimes against fashion. His clever prose, easy wit, and impeccable collection of men’s shirts will be sorely missed by the whole Living/Arts department.
Please join me in congratulating Chris on his new gig.
From left: Raney Aronson Rath, deputy executive producer of “Frontline,” who introduced the panel: moderator Joshua Benton, Tim O’Brien, Clay Shirky and Ethan Zuckerman. Photo by Lisa Palone via Twitter.
Have we reached the limits of clickbait media exemplified by The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed? According to three experts on Internet journalism, the answer is yes.
At a forum on the future of journalism held in WGBH’s Yawkey Theater on Wednesday, the consensus was that aggregating as many eyeballs as possible in order to show them advertising does not produce enough revenue to support quality journalism. Instead, news organizations like The New York Times are succeeding by persuading a small percentage of their audience to support them through subscription fees. (Click here for some tweets from the session.)
“One of the things that interests me is the end of the audience as a discrete category that can be treated as an aggregate,” said Clay Shirky of New York University. “Scale was the business model,” he said, describing the attitude among Web publishers as “‘At some point scale will play out.’ And it didn’t.”
As it turns out, Shirky continued, pushing people to “a hot new story” didn’t really matter that much. “What really matters,” he said, “is that there’s about 3 percent of that audience who really cares whether that newspaper lives or dies. We’re just at the beginning of that.”
O’Brien and Zuckerman disagreed over the need for mass media. O’Brien argued that the audience for an entertainment program can come up with ways of paying for it that don’t depend on attracting a larger audience. “We’re talking about different ways to finance passion,” he said.
To which Zuckerman retorted: “We’re not just talking about ‘Downton Abbey.’ We’re talking about news.” The challenge, Zuckerman said, is to find ways not just of funding journalism but of building enough of an audience so that investigative reporting at the local level can have enough clout to influence events.
Zuckerman also raised the issue of how news organizations do and don’t foster civic engagement, offering the example of the sudden closing of North Adams Regional Hospital in western Massachusetts. The closing put about 500 people out of work and left residents about 45 minutes away from the nearest emergency room.
Zuckerman praised the Berkshire Eagle’s coverage, but said the paper offered little sense of what the public could do. That, he said, would require “advocacy journalism” of the sort that makes traditional journalists uncomfortable.
That led to an observation by Shirky that newspaper editors are actually well-versed in telling their readers how to get involved when it comes to something like a theater review. Not only do readers learn whether the critic liked the play or not, but they are also told when and where it is being performed, how much tickets cost and how to buy them. But when covering a political story, Shirky continued, readers never learn how to make a donation or get involved.
Zuckerman said the problem is that news organizations don’t like to promote what-you-can-do measures when it comes to partisan politics.
By contrast, he added, news organizations have no issues with telling their audience how they can help after a natural disaster, explaining: “There is not a huge pro-hurricane constituency.”
If you’re going to make an audacious bet on the future of newspapers, as Aaron Kushner did with the Orange County Register, then it stands to reason that you should have enough money in the bank to be able to wait and see how it plays out.
Kushner, unfortunately, is now slashing costs at his newspapers almost as quickly as he built them up. On Tuesday, Kushner announced that Register employees would be required to take unpaid two-week furloughs during June and July. Other cuts were announced as well. The most significant: buyouts for up to 100 employees; and one of Kushner’s startup dailies, the Long Beach Register, will more or less be folded into another, the Los Angeles Register.
Those cuts follow the elimination of some 70 jobs at the OC Register and the Press-Enterprise of Riverside in January — cuts that came not long after a year when Kushner’s papers, in a celebrated hiring spree, added 170 jobs.
Is it time to push the panic button? The estimable Ken Doctor, writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab, says yes, arguing that the latest round of cuts raise “new questions about its very viability in the year ahead.” Doctor may be right. But as I wrote at The Huffington Post earlier this year, I hope Doctor is wrong, given the promise of Kushner’s early moves.
In 2013 Kushner and his business partner, Eric Spitz, were the toast of the newspaper industry. In the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum hailed their print-centric approach and hypothesized that being able to scoop up the Register debt-free might enable them to succeed where others — including Tribune Co. and the Journal Register Co. — had failed. “Kushner,” Chittum wrote, “had the benefit of buying Register parent Freedom Communications out of bankruptcy — after newspaper valuations had already fallen 90 percent in some cases.”
Spitz, in a cocksure interview last October with Lauren Indvik of Mashable, mocked his competitors for giving their journalism away online, insisting that he and Kushner had a better idea.
“The key decisions they made — and they were the worst decisions anyone has made in my memory — they made 20 years or so ago. They took their core product, the news, and priced it at free,” Spitz told Indvik, adding: “I think 20 years later the amount of revenue you can derive from advertising is less than they thought. But the bigger problem they created is telling your customer that your product has no value.”
Unfortunately for Spitz and Kushner, there are few signs that their strategy of pumping up their print editions (even improving the paper stock) while walling off their digital content behind relatively inflexible paywalls has paid off.
According to the Alliance for Audited Media, paid circulation at the Orange County Register for the six months ending Sept. 30, 2011, before Kushner and Spitz took charge, averaged 283,997 on Sundays and 172,942 Monday through Saturday. The sale took place in July 2012. That September, paid circulation actually rose, to 301,576 on Sundays and 175,851 the rest of the week. But in September 2013 it dropped below pre-Kushner levels, to 274,737 on Sundays and 162,894 the other six days. (I am excluding what AAM refers to as “branded editions” — mainly regional weeklies published by the Register. The numbers combine print and paid digital circulation, which, in the case of the Register, is negligible.)
Kushner is a Boston-area native who made his money in the greeting-card business. Before his move to Southern California, he tried to buy The Boston Globe and, later, nearly closed a deal to purchase the Portland Press Herald of Maine. So it’s interesting to note that Red Sox principal owner John Henry, who eventually won the sweepstakes for the Globe, has taken a very different approach from Kushner, sinking money into an online-only vertical covering innovation and technology as well as repositioning the paper’s venerable free Boston.com site as a “younger, voicier, edgier” complement to the Globe. Soon the Globe is expected to unveil an ambitious website covering the Catholic Church in the hopes of attracting a national and international audience.
Perhaps the most important difference between Henry and Kushner, though, is the depth of their pockets. There are limits to Kushner’s wealth, and those limits are becoming apparent as he attempts to make his newspaper mini-empire profitable. Henry, a billionaire investor, can afford to take the long view. In that respect, he is more like Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who announced that he would buy the Washington Post just days after Henry said he would acquire the Globe.
Ryan Chittum, in his CJR piece, called Kushner’s approach “the most interesting — and important — experiment in journalism right now.” It would be easy and facile to make too much of Kushner’s woes. He may simply have gotten ahead of himself, and is now buying the time he needs to make sense of what he is building. Then again, if Ken Doctor is right, the end of this particular newspaper story may be in sight.
Tom Farragher is stepping aside as the editor of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team. As Globe editor Brian McGrory points out, Farragher, who’ll become an associate editor, is leaving on a high note — the recently published “Shadow Campus” series, which documented dangerous housing conditions for college students who live off campus. McGrory’s full memo to the staff is below.
If we accept that all good things must come to an end, then I’ve now learned that all great things are finite as well. Tom Farragher has let me know that his eight years as editor of the Spotlight Team are enough. At his request, Tom will return to the newsroom to write high impact enterprise stories, report and help oversee projects, and contribute to our coverage of major news events, taking the well-earned title of associate editor in this new role.
Tom’s decision closes out a spectacular run in Spotlight, one which saw an ambitious expansion of the reach and scope of our elite investigative unit. Under Tom’s leadership, there were no sacred cows, no targets too big or powerful, no topics too unwieldy or complex. The results were immediate and deep — state reviews, Justice Department investigations, IRS raids, and grand jury indictments. When Tom writes (he’s a stellar wordsmith, by the way), systems change and officials are often at risk of jail.
Consider for a moment the series on the state Probation Department. The Supreme Judicial Court suspended the agency head by lunchtime the following day. Federal indictments followed state indictments, and the project provided the blueprint for the criminal trial that is unfolding in US District Court.
Consider, too, the series on Partners HealthCare. When we published, health insurance premiums were rising at more than 10 percent a year. Municipalities were laying off teachers and cops to afford coverage. Spotlight exposed the monopolistic practices of our elite hospitals, spurring a state attorney general’s review, a federal probe, and vows by Partners to hold down costs — promises that have, for the most part, been fulfilled.
The series on lenient dispositions of operating under the influence cases, which involved the laborious sifting of thousands of documents, won the Polk Award, among the most prestigious in investigative reporting. Last year’s taxi series revealed fundamental injustices in a system right in front of all of our eyes. The prison suicide series, Tom’s first, literally saved lives.
Here I’ll confide that when I took this job in January 2013, Tom let me know that he hoped to leave Spotlight within months. “I’ve stared at the ceiling for too many sleepless nights,” he said. I asked him to stay for another project, and it was one of the smartest moves I’ve ever made. The result was the recently published “Shadow Campus,” a vital, sprawling series with multiple antagonists that revealed how overreaching universities, coupled with unethical landlords, are placing college students not only in squalor, but danger. And the city agency in charge of addressing problems just isn’t up to the task. The reforms have already begun.
One more thing about Tom, especially for those who haven’t gotten to know him since he descended to the mezzanine eight years ago: Tom is a world class colleague, something to which his charges in Spotlight will readily attest. He oozes kindness. He’s utterly hilarious. He’s deeply empathetic. You’re going to like having him back upstairs.
Before he arrives, though, I’ve asked Tom to finish a couple of critical follow-ups to the off-campus housing series. Tom will then take his prominent place among the four other editors emeritus who oversaw Spotlight in the forty-plus years since it was launched – Tim Leland, Steve Kurkjian, Gerry O’Neill, and Walter Robinson.
I’ll come back to you soon with word on the next editor. More important, though, please offer Tom your congratulations, best wishes, and sincerest thanks.
GoLocalProv is reporting that GateHouse Media is on the verge of buying The Providence Journal for an estimated $50 million to $60 million. John Henry only paid $51 million for The Boston Globe if a GoLocalWorcester report that he sold the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester for $19 million is accurate (Henry paid $70 million for the Globe, the T&G and some smaller related properties).
