The Monitor’s hybrid strategy

Don Aucoin reports in today’s Boston Globe that the venerable Christian Science Monitor might be heading down the road blazed by the Capital Times in Madison, Wis. — a hybrid Web/print model, with the print newspaper coming out just once a week.

According to Aucoin, at the moment the Monitor is considering only a modest tweak — a weekly edition to supplement the daily. But, reportedly, there is a possibility that the weekly might eventually replace the daily. If that happens, the print edition could conceivably become an example of “reverse publishing,” a digest of the best content that’s already been published online.

Recently the Capital Times abandoned its paid daily edition in favor of two weekly free tabloids, a news-oriented product that comes out on Wednesdays and an arts-and-entertainment paper on Thursdays. At the same time, the online edition is being pumped up. This is a promising model likely to be emulated. A mostly online paper saves considerable printing and distribution costs without abandoning the print advertising market entirely.

I’ve tended to think of the Monitor as mainly a Web publication for some time now. I mean, where would you grab a print copy? At a Christian Science Reading Room? As long as the church remains committed to high-quality journalism, a shift to a mostly online paper might ensure the paper’s survival.

The Monitor also enjoys an ideal ownership model. These days, papers as diverse as the St. Petersburg Times, the New Hampshire Union Leader and the U.K.’s Guardian are often held up as examples of possible salvation for the news business, as they are all owned by non-profit organizations. (Disclosure: I write a weekly online column for the Guardian.)

So, too, with the Monitor. Unfortunately, as Aucoin notes, the church blew an inordinate amount of money on failed ventures in television and radio about 15 years ago, and has never really recovered. Church ownership may be benign, but in this case it doesn’t come with very deep pockets.

More than anything, the Monitor needs to carve out a new mission. In its heyday many decades ago, the Monitor thrived because it was the quality alternative — usually the only quality alternative — to the local rag. At a time when you can access any news source you want through the Internet, the Monitor must make a case for why you would want to read it instead of, or in addition to, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, et al.

In recent years, the folks running the Monitor have been pretty forward-looking in terms of moving past print. It’s encouraging that they’re still pushing in that direction.

Globe’s Papelbon signs with Yankees

The Boston Globe has lost its second Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter this week, according to the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly. And while the departure of Sacha Pfeiffer for WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) means only that we’ll have to turn on the radio rather than pick up the paper, the latest loss — that of Charlie Savage, scourge of the Bush White House — is a rather different matter.

Savage is going to the New York Times. Given that he is only in his early 30s, this is like losing Jonathan Papelbon to the Yankees. Savage’s reporting on the Bush administration’s use and abuse of presidential signing statements showed that the Globe could still play on the national stage.
Globe editor Marty Baron and Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos tell Reilly all the right things. The good news is that Savage will be replaced. And, yes, people do move on, and, yes, the Globe would have had a hard time hanging on to a young, ambitious, talented reporter like Savage even before the newspaper apocalypse that’s now under way.
But this is a tough loss to take, and it plays to warnings that, in the future, only a tiny handful of newspapers — principally the Times, the Washington Post and perhaps the Murdoch-ized Wall Street Journal — will have the resources to do serious reporting outside their own back yards.

Internet abusers target Internet abuse

This is surreal. Casino supporter Hal Brown, who has compared opponents to the Ku Klux Klan, and Middleborough selectman Adam Bond, who has compared them to Nazis, are going to talk about “the sociopathology of internet abusers and why they feel compelled to do it” at 11 a.m. today on Bond’s radio show, “Coffee Shop Talk,” on WXBR Radio (AM 1460).

It seems that Bond and Brown are very excited over this story in the Taunton Gazette about Michael Quish, a limousine-company owner and casino supporter, who whines that he’s been harassed online. Hey, it’s a tough world out there. I’m not condoning the kind of behavior he describes, but it’s endemic to the medium, and the Gazette could have cited just as many examples on the other side. Quish, by the way, will be joining Bond and Brown.

Should be an interesting hour. You can listen live, and I’m going to try to do just that.

Update: Well, there’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back.

Keller on Obama and Patrick

I’m ridiculously late to the party, but if you haven’t read Jon Keller’s Wall Street Journal piece comparing Barack Obama to Deval Patrick, you should. It’s more timely than ever, given Obama’s emergence today as the all-but-certain nominee.

As Keller notes (joining many others), there are numerous stylistic and rhetorical similarities between Obama and Patrick, and he wonders what that portends for an Obama administration, given Patrick’s rocky stint (it’s now officially too late to call it a rocky start) as governor of Massachusetts.

Personally, I’ve thought for some time that the similarities between the two men are exaggerated, mainly because they’re both African-American. Their life stories couldn’t be more different. Obama, who deliberately chose the life of a community organizer and state legislator, knows his way around the streets; Patrick knows his way around a corporate boardroom.

Then there’s this nugget from an unnamed Republican analyst, dug up by Mickey Kaus and brought to my attention by Jay Fitzgerald: “Deval Patrick is an idiot. Obama is not an idiot.” Oof. Pretty harsh. But the evidence thus far suggests that there may be something to it.

Aftermath of the Burmese cyclone

What is a cyclone? It’s a hurricane, according to Wikipedia. According to the BBC, state media in Myanmar (Burma) are now reporting that the death toll has exceeded 22,000, a far cry from the 4,000 deaths that were claimed in the print edition of today’s New York Times. With another 41,000 missing, it’s certain that the body count will keep rising.

This Al-Jazeera English report is pretty interesting:

The cyclone could be a paradigm-changing event for Myanmar, once of the world’s most closed and repressive regimes, as the ruling junta has apparently decided to accept international assistance. On the other hand, the Al-Jazeera report notes that the junta has not given the green light to non-governmental organizations, and that it plans to go ahead with a May 10 referendum aimed at strengthening its repressive grip.

The Democratic Voice of Burma (via Global Voices Online) says that the authorities have done little to help beleaguered storm victims. One anonymous resident of Rangoon, the capital, is quoted as saying:

We don’t know where they [the authorities] are, which corners they have gone to. It is not good to talk about it. They only know how to beat up people. In this kind of situation, we don’t know where they are. These people only know how to beat up people.

Danny Schechter hails Laura Bush for speaking out, and adds: “I spoke with a veteran UN Correspondent last night who said that the infrastructure in Burma is in such poor shape [that] he doubted that they had the capacity to warn the public.”

“Russert Watch” watch

Question: Would Todd Gitlin be capable of writing an interesting analysis of Tim Russert’s interview with Barack Obama if he weren’t trying to thread the needle of producing a weekly column for the Columbia Journalism Review called “Russert Watch” after having outed himself as an Obama supporter — a fact that he does not disclose even though it is still probably not widely known?

Answer: I have no idea. I do know that this certainly isn’t interesting.

Right and wrong on a new casino poll

The Herald’s Scott Van Voorhis rightly notes that a new UMass Dartmouth poll purporting to show an increase in support for casino gambling is undercut considerably by the fact that it “was commissioned by Northeast Resorts, a real estate firm that owns sites in Palmer and New Bedford that have been identified as possible casino sites.”

But he’s at least partly wrong in reporting that a March survey showed public opinion was split. That was indeed the lede, as reported by Stephanie Vosk in this story in the Cape Cod Times. Scroll down a bit, though, and you’ll see that the key finding was that 57 percent of respondents were “strongly opposed” to a casino’s being built in their community, and another 10 percent were “somewhat opposed.”