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Boston.com boosts its political coverage

Later this year, the Boston Globe will move most Globe content off its free Boston.com site and onto a paid, redesigned BostonGlobe.com. Which raises a question: Will the still-free Boston.com include enough high-quality, original material to stand on its own?

We got an encouraging answer to that this week in the form of an announcement that veteran political reporter Glen Johnson will be returning to the Globe as Boston.com’s political editor. According to a staff-wide e-mail from deputy managing editors Jen Peter and Bennie DiNardo, Johnson —

— will oversee the expansion and redesign of the site’s political coverage leading into the 2012 presidential race and beyond, with a blog, videos, aggregated content, the smart display of original Globe stories, and any other creative ideas we can come up with.

You can be sure that Eric Fehrnstrom is thrilled.

Peter and DiNardo’s full statement follows:

We are thrilled to announce that Glen Johnson, most recently of the AP’s State House bureau in Boston, will be returning to Morrissey Boulevard to become boston.com’s political editor. In this role, Glen — who has covered Massachusetts politics for nearly two decades — will oversee the expansion and redesign of the site’s political coverage leading into the 2012 presidential race and beyond, with a blog, videos, aggregated content, the smart display of original Globe stories, and any other creative ideas we can come up with. He will draw on the expertise of our political staff, both locally and in D.C., to make the page a must-read for anyone interested in Massachusetts and New England politics. We will also look for opportunities to republish some of Glen’s politics blogs in the Globe, and we contemplate a regular presence for Glen in the Globe in the form of a regular political column that would be based on his reporting and analysis. With his deep knowledge of the local political scene, his agility as a writer, and his embrace of new media, Glen is the ideal candidate to fill this position. And it couldn’t come at a better time for us, as we prepare to strengthen our web presence with a two-brand strategy and gear up for a presidential primary in our backyard.

This is a homecoming for Glen, who worked for the Globe for more than five years, from 2000 to 2005, in between two stints at the Associated Press. He has covered four presidential races — including Paul Tsongas’ 1992 bid, when Glen worked for the Lowell Sun — and four administrations on Beacon Hill, stemming back to the Weld years. Most recently, he served as the AP’s lead Romney reporter in 2008. He lives with his wife in North Andover and has two college-age sons. He is an avid cook and observer of professional cooks (ask him about his stint in the kitchen at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon). Glen will join us on Jan. 31, and we couldn’t be happier to have him back on board. All cooking tips welcome.

Jen and Bennie

Glen is a good guy and a dogged reporter. A very smart move by the Globe.

A possible buyer emerges for the Globe and T&G

Is the Boston Globe for sale? For the right price — maybe. An investment group headed by a 37-year-old greeting-card entrepreneur named Aaron Kushner emerged this afternoon as a possible buyer for the Globe, Boston.com and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester.

But the New York Times Co., which wanted to sell the properties in 2009, may no longer be interested. No doubt that would change if Kushner’s group is prepared to fork over some serious money. But we don’t know that yet.

Another caution: Kushner says he wants to beef up the newsroom. Well, wouldn’t we all? He may be well-intentioned, but no one is going to bolster the Globe’s staff unless his intention is to operate the paper at a loss.

Ralph Ranalli is gathering links at Beat the Press.

Publisher Chris Mayer on the Globe’s new pay model

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I’m skeptical, but I’m impressed. Yesterday’s announcement that the Boston Globe will move most of its content to a subscription-based website sometime in the second half of 2011 shows that Globe executives know where their strengths are and that they’re prepared to think innovatively to protect those strengths.

The Globe’s dilemma is that it has an enormously successful free website, Boston.com, that is quite different from the paper itself. Start charging for access to Boston.com, and many of those 5 million unique visitors a month would vanish.

The solution: keep Boston.com free, but split off the Globe’s content into a separate, paid site called BostonGlobe.com, currently a free subsite. The decision raises lots of questions. Perhaps the biggest is how much free Globe content will be posted on Boston.com, and whether Boston.com will remain as popular once it has to stand on its own.

Still, it’s a far more interesting idea than the metered model embraced by the Globe’s parent company, the New York Times Co., which rolled it out at the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester recently and which will give it a go at the flagship paper sometime next year. Under the metered model, readers can access so many articles for free each month, after which they have to pay. It might work for the T&G and the Times, but it would have been deadly for Boston.com.

Yesterday I conducted an e-mail interview with Globe publisher Christopher Mayer, which he graciously agreed to do because I still can’t take notes. (Although it’s getting better. I’ve got a pillow propped up and am typing two-handed now for the first time since my accident.) Our unedited conversation follows. I’ve got a few closing thoughts after the jump.

Q: The metered model seemed to be the way the New York Times Co. was going. Why did you choose something different?

A: We’ve said all along that each organization would need to come up with a custom-made approach that takes into account unique market factors. We felt this was the best course for us, given the fact that we have two strong brands and essentially two different types of users of our Boston.com site. We have the opportunity to build a free site and a subscription-based site, and based upon extensive research, that emerged as the best option for us.

Q: The advantage of the metered model is that you’re not entirely cut off from the great conversation that’s taking place on blogs and in social media. Are you concerned about breaking a big story and not having as much impact as you should because people can’t link to you? Please address what Clay Shirky said about the importance of online sharing with respect to the Globe’s reporting on the pedophile-priest story.

A: We don’t intend to be cut off from the conversation. We haven’t announced, or even worked out, all the details of what will be on which site. But we can envision that some full-text Globe stories will be available on the free site. I suspect we would have put many of the initial priest sex-abuse stories on the free site because that Spotlight Team investigation was viewed as clear public service reporting. In the future, we’ll make those judgments as appropriate. Continue reading “Publisher Chris Mayer on the Globe’s new pay model”

For the Globe, a hybrid paid-content model

As you may have heard, the Boston Globe today finally made its long-anticipated announcement on placing some of its online content behind a paywall. I think publisher Chris Mayer’s decision to offer a free Boston.com site and a paid BostonGlobe.com is interesting. I’ve got some questions. I’ve got concerns.

I’ll have more to say tomorrow. Meanwhile, Ralph Ranalli at Beatthepress.org and Boston Phoenix editor Carly Carioli have some worthwhile thoughts.

David Beard leaves Globe for National Journal

Over the past few years, we’ve grown accustomed to watching talented people leave the Boston Globe. But this one hurts more than most: David Beard, the editor of Boston.com, has accepted a top editing job with the Washington-based National Journal Group.

According to this announcement, posted at Romenesko, Beard will be deputy editor-in-chief and online editor of the group, which is adding a number of free online services to its subscription site in order to compete with Politico. Though there’s no mention of it in the announcement, the Journal is a sister publication of the Atlantic, which owner David Bradley yanked out of Boston, its ancestral home, in 2005.

Beard has done a great job of positioning Boston.com as something different from the Globe. Perhaps even more important, he has been a huge presence for the Globe outside 135 Morrissey Blvd., evangelizing not just on behalf of the Globe, but for new forms of journalism in general. Plus, he’s a great guy.

The Globe’s ability to replace key people and reinvent itself is impressive, but Dave is going to be a hard act to follow. Subscribe to his Twitter feed here.

What follows is a memo that Globe editor Marty Baron and deputy managing editor for multimedia Bennie DiNardo sent to the staff a little while ago, a copy of which was obtained by Media Nation:

To all:

David Beard has been many things for us since arriving at the Globe in 1998 — online evangelist, deputy foreign editor, tweeter-in-chief, Facebook promoter, soccer fan, zones chief, recruiter, community liaison, reader advocate, teacher, valued adviser, friend. Sadly for us, he is about to add another title to his portfolio — former colleague.

David is taking his unlimited energy and his enthusiasm for news to Washington, where he will become deputy editor-in-chief and online editor for the National Journal Group, which includes National Journal, CongressDaily, The Hotline, NationalJournal.com, and The Almanac of American Politics.

In a building full of amazing Rolodexes, no one has a more extensive list of contacts than Dave. He’s a human version of LinkedIn. Whether you are writing about Belmont or Bogota, David inevitably knows someone and connects you. Before coming to Boston to be our deputy foreign editor, Dave reported from South America, the Caribbean, the US South, and the Cleveland area for the Plain Dealer, Associated Press, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. He also served as Caribbean editor for the AP for three years, overseeing coverage of the US intervention to restore an elected president in Haiti. After his three-year stint on the Globe’s foreign desk, he immersed himself in local coverage, overseeing the regional editions.

Four years ago, he again staked out new territory, becoming editor of Boston.com. Since then, the website has grown from 150 million page views a month to almost 200 million, and our mobile traffic has gone from nonexistent to almost 13 million page views. In his recent digital years, he supervised online coverage of Barack Obama’s presidential election victory and the death of Senator Kennedy, cultivated a growing network of community bloggers, and helped launch “Secret Spaces,” an online project that turned into a book.

With Dave leaving us in two weeks, a search for the next editor of Boston.com begins immediately, but first things first: Please offer your thanks to Dave for the invaluable creativity and collegiality he brought to this organization for the past 12 years, and wish him well as he pursues a promising opportunity in Washington.

Marty and Bennie

A few more thoughts on Patch.com

My Thursday posting of an e-mail from a Patch.com local editor who considers herself overworked and underappreciated brought an unusually strong reaction from Media Nation readers — many of them, no doubt, people who work for Patch or who are thinking about it. I received nearly 4,400 page views on Thursday, well over double the usual amount of traffic.

I received several e-mails from current and former Patch folks, also insisting on anonymity, and wary about whether they wanted their words posted at all. I am not normally in the habit of publishing anonymous e-mails, and I’d just as soon Media Nation not turn into a forum for anonymous pro- and anti-Patch missives. But I can say that a few folks agreed with the anonymous e-mail and a few disputed it. One even asked that I pressure my source into giving up her identity so that other local editors will not be suspected. (Uh, no.)

What’s beyond dispute is that community journalism is hard work, and has never been particularly lucrative. In Greater Boston, what’s shaping up is a three-way battle involving Patch, GateHouse Media’s Wicked Local sites and the Boston Globe’s Your Town sites. Here’s what I’m hearing from folks who’ve been in touch with me:

Though no one is getting rich working for Patch, it offers better pay and benefits than its competitors. But that comes with an unusually heavy load of responsibilities, as outlined by my anonymous e-mailer. Local editors must manage every aspect of the site.
Many GateHouse journalists earn less than Patch editors. But though they also put in dauntingly long hours, editors and reporters don’t have as many non-journalistic responsibilities.
Correspondents for the Globe’s Your Town sites are freelancers, and receive no benefits at all.

I should note that nearly all Wicked Local content is repurposed from GateHouse’s newspapers, most of them weeklies. The Your Town sites combine online-only stories, an occasional Globe story and aggregation from other news sources (but not from Wicked Local). Patch is online-only.

I should also note that the Your Town/Wicked Local/Patch combination is far from the only game in community journalism. Medium-size dailies such as the Eagle-Tribune papers north of Boston, GateHouse’s own dailies west and south of Boston, and Rupert Murdoch’s (yes, believe it or not) Standard-Times of New Bedford and Cape Cod Times are among our most important sources of local news. Journalists at those papers tend to be more experienced and better paid, too.

There are two pieces of good news in all of this: there’s a lot of competition for local news in Greater Boston, and competition is good for readers; and, a year after the news business seemed to be collapsing, news outlets are hiring young reporters at a healthy clip in order to staff new hyperlocal sites.

Hard times working the Patch

Boston Globe reporter Johnny Diaz today writes about Patch.com, the AOL-owned network of hyperlocal news sites that is (excuse me) sprouting up around the country.

As I noted earlier, Diaz writes that Patch is up against considerable competition in Greater Boston, principally from GateHouse Media’s Wicked Local websites and the Boston Globe’s Your Town sites — both of which, unlike Patch, are tied to established newspapers.

There are already 13 Patch sites in Massachusetts, with more to come.

After I posted my earlier Patch item, I heard from a Patch local editor (LE, in Patch-speak) who described working conditions that sound pretty challenging. Granted, community journalists in general work very hard for not much money. But the LE who wrote to me suggested that Patch takes it to another level.

The LE who contacted me asked that her name not be used, but gave me permission to publish her e-mail. I have verified that she is who she says she is. I don’t consider this to be the last word, and I would welcome a response from Patch. The e-mail:

The working conditions for local editors at Patch sites raise the question of whether this model is sustainable or about whether this is the reality for journalists working in this new media age.

Basically, the job is 24/7 with so far little support in getting any kind of time off — nights, weekends, vacation days guaranteed under our AOL contract. (Some regional editors do try to help; others don’t.) This time-off issue has become a major concern among local editors. You might hear about the 70-hour work weeks. Yes, 70 hours and more. It’s a start-up and all that, and I knew it would be hard work going in. But what is becoming distressing is this sense that I can’t get a break. I’ve worked in journalism for more than 20 years as a newspaper reporter, online editor, magazine editor, and I’ve never worked so much in my life.

Patch has a policy that it the local editor’s responsibility to find our nights/weekend/vacation replacements. And we must pay that person out of our freelance budgets. I’m just three months into this job, and I’ve heard from LEs around the country that this task of finding your replacement can be daunting, because it is hard to find qualified journalists who have that sort of time to do a vacation fill-in — who who will do it for what Patch pays its freelancers. I’ve been hearing that LEs who have been around longer, up to a year, are starting to question whether the job is worth it.

And, it’s not just being a reporter, but it’s also being a city editor/assignment editor/managing editor/copy editor, and it’s handling freelance payments (and freelance payment troubleshooting), doing videos, monitoring calender and event listings, doing some of our own marketing, and even HR. It seems the business model of this organization is to add tasks, traditionally handled by others in other organizations, to the plate of the local editors. More recently, I’ve been wondering if it would be possible, time-wise, to do the kind of enterprise journalism I would like.

Maybe I should be grateful I have a job and stop griping.

Follow-up: “A few more thoughts on Patch.com.”

Patching in to AOL’s Patch (II)

Old friend Mark Leccese, blogging at Boston.com, offers further thoughts on the competition among Patch, GateHouse Media’s Wicked Local sites and Boston.com’s Your Town initiative.

Let me repeat: The most interesting local online journalism is taking place at the grassroots. And no one in Greater Boston does a better job of aggregating it than Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub. If you didn’t know that already, well, now you do.

(Disclosure: Media Nation is part of Gaffin’s Boston Blogs advertising network.)

Earlier item.

Patching in to AOL’s Patch

AOL’s local-news initiative, Patch, has been ramping up in Massachusetts in recent months. The effort deserves a full post, so consider this a placeholder. Universal Hub has been all over Patch, chronicling the departure of several GateHouse Media employees who’ve signed on as Patch editors.

My tendency is not to get too excited when a national corporation with no roots in journalism decides to take on hyperlocal news. There have simply been too many instances of the suits deciding that journalism isn’t as lucrative as they had hoped and then pulling the plug a year or two down the line.

Based on Arlington Patch, the sites seem attractive and easy to navigate, with a strong emphasis on community participation. But I don’t know that I see anything that would make me choose it over GateHouse’s Wicked Local Arlington site, or Boston.com’s Your Town page for Arlington.

Besides, I think online local news works best when it grows from the ground up. Local blogs vary wildly in quality. But I’d rather check in on Bob Sprague’s Your Arlington blog than to spend my time with the progeny of Steve Case.

That said, it’s early. Maybe Patch will represent some sort of breakthrough. We’ll see.

Some quiet (so far) upgrades to Boston.com

If you’re a regular visitor to the Boston Globe’s Web site, Boston.com, you may have noticed some new features creeping into view during the past week. Media Nation has obtained an internal e-mail written by Bennie DiNardo, the Globe’s deputy managing editor for multimedia. Here is what’s going on:

• A one-and-a-half- to two-minute daily video of news headlines, called “GlobeToday,” will appear on the home page every weekday from 11:45 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. I viewed a sample on YouTube and found it to be slick and spritely, though limited by the extremely short length.

• A new section called “The Angle” is described by DiNardo as an “online news magazine that pulls together the most provocative content on Boston.com that day and engages readers to join in the conversation on these hot topics.” It is produced by the editorial and Ideas sections.

• A particularly promising new feature is “Thought Leader,” a gathering spot for blogs by a variety of folks in the community — from ACLU of Massachusetts executive director Carol Rose to Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce. Other contributors thus far are my “Beat the Press” colleague Kara Miller, Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, Boston University journalism-department chairman Lou Ureneck and music buff Ben Collins. I am told that the bloggers are unpaid, which could limit the amount of work that folks are willing to put into it. But this bears watching.

Other new features include “App Sampler,” a blog in which Hiawatha Bray will, you know, sample apps (it doesn’t appear to be online yet); “Munch Madness,” some sort of interactive attempt to tie together the NCAA tournament and eating; and improvements to breaking news and sports coverage.

As is generally the case with Boston.com, a lot of this stuff could be easier to find. But what’s impressive is the air of experimentation, and the New York Times Co.’s willingness to invest modest amounts of money at a time when other newspaper companies remain in cutback mode.

I also think it’s smart that Boston.com continues to move in the direction of being a different product from the Globe. Since the idea is to maintain paid print and electronic editions alongside a free Web site, they should each offer a different experience. To that end, I’ll repeat what I’ve said in the past: I would get rid of Boston.com’s “Today’s Globe” feature. Though I think all (or most) of the Globe’s content should be available on Boston.com, it shouldn’t be packaged exactly the same way. (By way of comparison, BostonHerald.com has a very different look and feel from the print edition.)

Good news from an organization that appeared to be on the ropes a year ago.