Tag: Boston Globe

BoMag and the Globe offer dueling theories about who shot David Ortiz

David Ortiz celebrates the first of his three championships with the Red Sox. Photo (cc) 2013 by Colin Steele.

Boston magazine and The Boston Globe published dueling stories over the weekend that recount the 2019 shooting of Red Sox legend David Ortiz.

The Boston magazine story, by Mike Damiano, appears to have been many weeks, if not months, in the making — it’s a rich, deeply reported story about Ortiz’s life in the Dominican Republic and his complicated family situation. The Globe article, by Bob Hohler, may have been assigned (or least put on the fast track) in reaction to  BoMag. It’s a newsy account of that attempts to get to the bottom of who ordered Ortiz’s shooting, and why.

By all means, read both. But by far the most interesting detail is the dueling theories about the role of a major drug trafficker, César Peralta, known as “The Abuser.” According to the Globe’s account, former Boston police commissioner Ed Davis, who was hired by Ortiz to investigate the shooting, Peralta is in fact the guy who ordered the hit. Hohler writes:

Davis, disclosing his findings for the first time, said the powerful and politically connected drug lord César “The Abuser” Peralta came to feel disrespected by Ortiz, prompting him to place a bounty on Ortiz’s head and sanction the ragtag hit squad that tried to kill him.

“Peralta said he had David shot,” Davis said in an interview, citing information that he said US law enforcement officials gathered and shared with him.

The BoMag story, on the other hand, all but rules out Peralta as having any role. Here’s what Damiano has to say:

As I, too, tried to get to the bottom of what caused the shooting, I found that the closer I got to people with genuine knowledge of the Santo Domingo underworld, the more skepticism I heard about the love-triangle theory and any possibility of Peralta’s involvement. One man I spoke with who knows many of the men in Peralta’s circle, as well as some of the men accused of involvement in the shooting, said that the theory was bunk. No part of it added up, he said, and hardly anyone in his neighborhood — Herrera, a hot bed of Dominican drug trafficking — believed it.

The two accounts also raise some questions about access. The Globe’s owner and publisher, John Henry, is also the principal owner of the Red Sox. Davis is a security consultant for the Globe. It does not appear that Davis shared his theory about Peralta with BoMag.

Both stories dismiss the widely mocked theory put forth by Dominican authorities that Ortiz was the victim of mistaken identity.

The conclusion I took away from Damiano’s and Hohler’s reporting was that we may never know who ordered the hit on Ortiz. I’m just glad he’s still with us.

Footnote: I’m told that Damiano has been hired by the Globe.

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Boston Globe staffers will return to the newsroom three days a week in May

Seldom seen for the past two years

Boston Globe journalists will be returning to the newsroom at least three days a week starting Tuesday, May 3, according to a message sent to the staff by Linda Pizzuti Henry, CEO of Boston Globe Media.

Henry’s message reflects optimism that COVID-19 has reached the stage where we can all live with it and manage it. Let’s hope she’s right. I imagine most Globe staff members will be happy to return. As Henry notes in her memo, the lack of downtown workers has had a devastating effect on the city’s economy as well.

Here is her full message.

Team,

Two years. We left our offices in March of 2020 with the hope that a few weeks would change the course of the virus spreading around the world. We informed, we comforted, we entertained, we helped where we could, and we got the critical news and information to our community when they needed it most.

And lately, our coverage has included an inspiring note of us emerging from this pandemic, with an increasing number of articles and columns about the declining infection numbers, offices reopening, what different companies are doing, and how important it is to the vitality of our city that people do come back to their offices.

As we all know, the world is different from 2020, and so going back to exactly the way things were is not our plan. We have been doing a lot of listening, a lot of reading, and a lot of deep thinking about how our business operations work. You have been able to get things done for two years despite trying circumstances, and the organization is thriving. The experience has allowed us to learn a lot about how we work. At the same time, we have missed the chance to think together in the same way. We have over 80 new people at the Exchange Place offices that we all really want to get to know. The connection, the ability to bring in more people to a conversation spontaneously, the ability for different parts of the organization to collaborate easily, the faster sharing of knowledge, the mentorship, the camaraderie of this special Globe community, the culture of being part of this historical organization filled with brilliant people — it has been harder to maintain. As a multimedia organization that is constantly innovating to provide the best possible journalism for our readers, we see the need and advantage of being together.

So, to balance our business need to work together and our understanding of how we can function well, we are going to start with a 3/2 schedule with three set days in the office and two flexible days. For this flexibility to work, we all need to be in the office on the same days — that way we all get the benefit and efficiency of working together in the same place at the same time. Input from managers across Exchange Place and a review of our operations have led us to the days of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in person in the office. Mondays and Fridays will be flexible for at least a few months, meaning you can work in the office or remote, as your work permits and as you prefer.

As an organization that is constantly learning and innovating, we will survey, listen, and reassess how it is working after a few months to see if adjustments are needed or if we have it right. “Right” means doing what is best for both this institution and for the people who make this institution what it is.

We are pacing the return in consideration of the month-long timing of various commuter passes, so we will officially be in person at the offices with our 3/2 schedule on Tuesday, May 3rd. To make this an easier re-entry, we are encouraging people to go into the office at least once a week in April — on whatever day works for you. Many of you have been going in regularly already and have been finding it productive. We are hearing from other companies that this helps with the transition back to the office.

Thank you for your help in this next transition. We believe that maintaining a physical office in the heart o

f the city matters. As a Boston institution dedicated to helping our community thrive, being there also matters.

Can’t wait to be back together,

Linda

The Boston Globe marks 150 years as a growing and profitable news organization

There’s a bit of news in Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory’s message marking the paper’s 150th anniversary today: he writes that the Globe now has “about 250 staffers in its newsroom and on the editorial pages.”

That’s up significantly from a few years ago. In 2018, the Globe had a full-time staff of about 220 journalists, which means that the size of the newsroom has increased by nearly 14% over the past four years. Regular readers know that the paper has been boosting its coverage of climate change and technology, among other topics.

McGrory and owners John and Linda Henry deserve to take a bow for the Globe’s renaissance in recent years. After buying the paper from the New York Times Co. in 2013, the Henrys compiled an uneven record in rebuilding the Globe as a sustainable business. When I checked in with John Henry in mid-2018, the paper was still losing money and had fallen short of its goal of selling 100,000 digital subscriptions. Henry was forced to declare that he had no plans to sell.

Six months later, Henry said the Globe had finally become profitable. Today the paper has some 235,000 paid digital subscribers, making it a leader among large regional newspapers, and has far more reporting capacity than most of its peer news organizations, many of which are owned by cost-obsessed hedge funds.

I’ve been a Globe reader for nearly 50 years. It’s a very different institution compared to the pre-internet glory days, when it covered national and international news with its own reporters and had a staff — at its 2000 peak — of about 550 full-timers.

Yet it remains one of the best, most deeply staffed papers in the country. It’s also evidence that committed, deep-pockets local ownership can be the difference between a thriving journalistic enterprise and a decimated newspaper hanging on for survival.

How The Boston Globe could help offset the local news vacuum

Could The Boston Globe, profitable and growing, help make up for the local news vacuum in Eastern Massachusetts? The shortage of reliable community journalism became much more acute last week when Gannett told reporters at most of its weekly papers that they would be reassigned to regional beats or to one of the chain’s dailies.

The Globe could conceivably step in by reviving an idea that was perhaps before its time. Under New York Times Co. ownership, the Globe published web pages known as YourTown, one for each suburban community as well as a few of Boston’s neighborhoods. They relied heavily on aggregation — too heavily, as the Times Co. found out in court — and they competed with papers owned by GateHouse Media (now Gannett) that weren’t nearly as hollowed-out as they are today. What’s more, YourTown was part of the Globe’s free Boston.com site (this was before BostonGlobe.com), and the hyperlocal advertising that was supposed to support YourTown never materialized. John Henry shut down YourTown not long after he bought the Globe in 2013.

So what would a revived YourTown look like? Advertising isn’t nearly as important as it used to be, but the Globe has been successful in selling paid digital subscriptions. So imagine a YourTown with one full-time reporter in each community. If the Globe signed up 500 new subscribers in a community, that could bring in as much as $120,000 a year. I’m basing that on an average subscription costing $20 a month (the full cost is $30, but many people would be paying discounts).

No doubt this would work better in some places than in others. I live in Medford, a city of about 58,000 residents that, as of now, doesn’t have a single full-time reporter covering the community. Selling an extra 500 subscriptions — or more — ought to be doable.

But right next door, in Arlington (population: 43,000), there’s a good-quality nonprofit news website, Your Arlington, which would make a Globe-branded YourTown less attractive. Or consider a small town like Bedford — not only are there just 13,000 residents, but it’s the home of a well-established nonprofit news site, The Bedford Citizen.

Still, I think a revived YourTown would work well enough in a few communities that it’s worth trying. I doubt it would be a money-maker for the Globe, but it might be a break-even proposition. And the paper would be filling a real need.

Lincoln Millstein on his journey from media exec to hyperlocal journalist

Lincoln Millstein

Lincoln Millstein played a critical role in launching The Boston Globe’s free digital site, boston.com, in 1995. Boston.com began as a portal, and carried Globe journalism but also curated other news sites and community blogs. It had a separate staff, and the office was in downtown Boston, not in the old Dorchester plant. Lincoln went on to be executive vice president at New York Times Digital, then moved on to the Hearst Corporation, where he held a number of different roles.

When Lincoln retired as senior assistant to CEO Steven Swartz of Hearst in 2018, he wondered what was next. He found the answer by returning to his roots as a local reporter, recalling the days when he started out in the Middletown bureau of the Hartford Courant in the mid-1970s.

He and his wife, Irene Driscoll, also a longtime journalist, had upgraded their summer place in Maine in anticipation of spending more time there in retirement. Then the pandemic hit, and they moved in. He started picking up lots of local scoops on how the pandemic was affecting businesses. Not to mention the occasional deer collision. That’s how The Quietside Journal got its start.

Dan has a Quick Take on the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, which recently won a big public-records victory over the city of Worcester, which has been stonewalling them for years, and Ellen looks at newsroom layoffs and transparency.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app (as long as it’s not Spotify).

Digital circulation is growing, but it needs to be more and faster

Photo (cc) 2005 by rnv123

Will digital subscriptions save the newspaper business? They had better. With advertising in a death spiral, publishers have to hope that readers will pick up the slack. Progress has been slow, but it may finally be picking up.

Marc Tracy reports in The New York Times that several newspaper chains, including Lee Enterprises and Gannett, have experienced significant increases in paid digital circulation. The problem is that these increases are spread over many papers, and the situation at any one of them remains dicey.

For instance, Gannett is up 46% over the past year, to 1.5 million paid digital subscriptions — yet it owns about 250 daily papers, including USA Today. Those numbers need to be exponentially greater if Gannett is going to re-establish itself as a lucrative business and actually start adding rather than cutting journalistic resources.

“There’s a big misperception out there that there’s a big hole in local journalism, and I think that narrative’s been created by people who aren’t sitting in local markets,” Gannett chief executive Mike Reed told Tracy. As a longtime reader of Gannett’s (previously GateHouse Media’s) community weeklies, all I’ve got to say is: You’ve got to be kidding.

In order for paid digital to work, you also have to charge enough. To go back to USA Today, I see that the cost is $9.99 a month after the first-year discount expires. That’s not bad, but it’s well behind The Boston Globe’s $30 a month. And the Globe has managed to sell a reported 235,000 digital subscriptions. Of course, the Globe, like most newspapers, offers a huge discount to new subscribers, which means it then has to figure out a way to keep them.

In order to succeed with digital subscriptions, you need good content and good technology. Many of the papers now trying to succeed in the digital space have been cut substantially. And too many newspaper websites are still clunky mish-mashes with pop-ups, pop-unders and other annoyances.

It’s better to grow than to shrink, so in that sense I guess Tracy’s story is good news. But there’s still a long way to go.

Getting to the Crux of the matter with a Catholic news project that began at The Boston Globe

John Allen

Inés San Martín and John Allen join the “What Works” podcast to discuss the founding of Crux, a digital site that covers all things Catholic, and the “corporate resurrection” that took place three days after The Boston Globe shut it down.

Crux quickly partnered with the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic service organization, and now is a hybrid business model combining nonprofit support, crowd-funding and advertising. That means Crux has much in common with digital local news startups.

Inés San Martín

In our weekly Quick Takes, Ellen shares an update on a high-impact investigative project by Sahan Journal, and Dan discusses the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which has bipartisan support on Capitol Hill but is not a perfect solution to the local news crisis.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app — as long as it isn’t Spotify. Like a number of musicians and podcasters, we’ve pulled our content from the service out of concern over vaccine disinformation being promulgated by Spotify podcast host Joe Rogan.

The Boston Globe’s digital circulation rises to 235,000

The Boston Globe’s paid digital circulation keeps growing. According to an email that editor Brian McGrory sent to the staff Friday afternoon and that was passed on by a trusted source, the paper is now at 235,000. I won’t quote the whole thing, but here’s the relevant part:

In the past two months, what David Epstein would call the meteorological winter, we’ve added more than 8,500 new digital subscribers, bringing our total to about 235,000. It’s easy to take this massive achievement for granted, but you need to know, there’s not another major metro paper in the US that’s near this. And we’re retaining our existing subscribers better than any forecast. We’ve also had some of our biggest traffic days since the early pandemic in the past month.

Much of this is a tribute to the good work the Globe is doing. But some of it has to be a consequence of the high cost of a print subscription — a cost that will soon be rising even more. This showed up in my inbox several days ago:

I do wonder what the Globe sees as the future of its print edition. As recently as December, the paper reported that 55% of its revenue continues to come from print. I have to assume they have no intention of getting rid of it. But as I tweeted, I’m curious as to whether there’s a deliberate strategy to shrink the print run and move more readers over to digital.

Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory thanks staff in his year-end memo

Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory’s year-end message came in a little later than expected — he sent it out on New Year’s Eve, and I only received it just now from one of my trusted sources. It’s unusual for its brevity.

There is one tidbit worth flagging: McGrory says the Globe now has “more than 230,000 digital-only subscribers.” Just a few weeks ago, Tom Brown, vice president for consumer revenue, put the number at 226,000. I’ll chalk it up either to different counting methods or the possibility that McGrory was writing off the top of his head. I doubt that the Globe added 4,000-plus subscribers in two weeks.

Here’s the full text of McGrory’s memo:

It’s taken me a lot of years to realize that perhaps an overly long note from the editor is not exactly the thing you’re looking for on New Year’s Eve. So when I say again I’ll be brief, I mean it more than in the past.

If 2020 was the year in which we rode massive adrenaline waves to do the best and most important work that the Globe has ever done, which we did, then 2021 is entirely different. Whole stretches of this year felt like metal grinding against metal. Exhaustion ran deep. The pandemic, and all that came with it, got really old. Hope kept getting trampled by reality.

And yet you wouldn’t ease up — every hour, every day. Maybe it’s because of your commitment to each other, the craft, the organization, or the community. Probably it’s a lot of each. What you accomplished this year, every single aspect of this newsroom, is nothing short of remarkable. There’s a good argument to be made that it was somehow even more impressive than the year before.

It matters, to the region and to the Globe’s future. We now have more than 230,000 digital-only subscribers. We are financially healthy and investing in our journalism, which you know is rare in the world of major metro news organizations. Every part of the Globe, beyond the newsroom, is operating at peak performance, which is truly something to behold. And there’s simply no region in the country better informed than ours.

Amid the exhaustion and anxiety and remaining bits of hope, take more than a moment tonight and this weekend to allow yourself a big dose of pride. The Globe just had another year for the ages, and everyone in the newsroom played a vital role.

Happy New Year might be a slight stretch on a day with 21,397 new cases. But I’m really proud of the whole organization and grateful to you all.

Brian

WHAV Radio takes note of the 200th anniversary of The Haverhill Gazette

The Haverhill Gazette in the early 1900s. Photo via WHAV.

The Haverhill Gazette marked its 200th anniversary in 2021, and WHAV Radio has taken note of the occasion in a lengthy tribute. The Gazette, an independently owned daily for most of its existence, launched WHAV in 1947 under the auspices of a publisher who was distantly related to the Taylor family, which then owned The Boston Globe. The station was revived about 15 years ago and converted to a nonprofit, low-power FM station (it also streams) by local advertising executive Tim Coco, who continues to run it as an independent source of news.

Coco and David Goudsward trace the Gazette from its founding in 1821 to the present day. I had no idea that Haverhill’s favorite son, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, was the editor for a brief period in the 1830s.

A long series of events that led to the shrinkage of the Gazette began in 1957, when William Loeb, the notorious right-wing publisher of the Manchester Union Leader (now the New Hampshire Union Leader), took advantage of a strike at the Gazette by starting a competing paper, the Haverhill Journal. Coco and Goudsward write that the Gazette was sold to a consortium comprising The Eagle-Tribune, then of Lawrence, now of North Andover; The Sun of Lowell; and Vermont’s Burlington Free Press.

John Greenleaf Whittier. Image via the National Portrait Gallery.

Although the arrangement somehow managed to pass antitrust muster, I’m old enough to recall stories that The Eagle-Tribune and The Sun weren’t going to let the Gazette get too good. The Gazette changed hands several more times and in 1998 was sold to The Eagle-Tribune. Today, the Gazette is a weekly. Both the Gazette and The Eagle-Tribune, which remains a daily, are owned by CNHI, a corporate newspaper chain based in Montgomery, Alabama. As Coco and Goudsward write of the Gazette:

It is better off than the thousands of newspapers that have succumbed in recent years, but still a shadow of its former self — the victim, first of consolidation that reduced it from a robust daily to a weekly, and then of the loss of its advertising base to electronic media.

For several years, I followed news coverage in Haverhill quite closely, as it was the first community chosen by the Banyan Project in which to launch a cooperatively owned news organization, to be known as Haverhill Matters. The idea never came to fruition despite years of planning. During those same years, Coco was building WHAV into a vital source of local news and information, both over the air and online.