Tag: Boston Globe

How Rupe got away with it

Rupert Murdoch
Rupert Murdoch.

HACK ATTACK: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch. By Nick Davies. Faber & Faber, 448 pages, $27.

For one brief moment, it looked as though Rupert Murdoch’s international media empire might be on the brink of collapse.

In the summer of 2011, Britain was in an uproar over revelations that the Murdoch-owned tabloid News of the World had hacked the voice-mail messages of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl who had been kidnapped and murdered in 2002. The scandal soon spread to other papers owned by Murdoch’s News Corp. And it nearly jumped the Atlantic, as allegations circulated that Murdoch journalists had tried to listen to cellphone messages of victims of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.

Yet, in the end, not much happened.

Read the rest at The Boston Globe.

Photo (cc) by the World Economic Forum and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Some questions about a bicyclist and an enraged driver

After reading Tom Farragher’s Boston Globe column this morning about Chris Smith, a legally blind bicyclist who says an enraged driver got out of his car in Brookline and came at him with a baseball bat, I’ve got two questions.

  • Is it wise or even legal for someone who has lost much of his vision to be riding his bike on public ways? Aren’t we always told that cyclists have to follow the same laws as drivers?
  • Was it a good idea for Smith to rap his knuckles on the side of the car as they were both making their way through traffic? Farragher calls it “a signal of safety. I’m right here, it said, don’t hit me.” I wouldn’t. I’d call it obnoxious behavior by a cyclist, and at the very least I’d be giving him the hairy eyeball.

Let me be clear: There was no excuse for the driver to go off the way Smith describes. But I don’t think it’s all that clear-cut that Smith was in the right. Cyclists: I want to hear from you, either here or on Facebook.

Globe to offer buyouts to some staff members

Here’s some late-Friday-afternoon-in-August news for you: Boston Globe chief executive officer Mike Sheehan says the paper will be offering buyouts to some employees. Sheehan says the buyouts will be “voluntary in nature, the terms of which are generous by any standard.”

No numbers are given in either Sheehan’s memo (posted earlier at Universal Hub) or in a follow-up from editor Brian McGrory (exclusive to Media Nation). “There’s no set number we’re trying to achieve,” McGrory writes. “Most significantly, it’s not meant as a cost-cutting exercise in the newsroom. In fact, when all is said and done, I don’t expect staffing levels here to change much, if at all. We’ll see growth in some areas as we’ll see cutbacks in others. Hiring will continue.”

But, McGrory adds: “That’s not to say there won’t be difficult moments in this process. We’ll undoubtedly be saying goodbye to talented colleagues who have committed themselves to this great institution.”

(Update: Craig Douglas of the Boston Business Journal reports that layoffs are possible if the Globe doesn’t achieve its buyout goal.)

First, Sheehan’s email to the staff:

Over the past two years, there have been a number of significant changes at the Boston Globe: a new owner, a new editor, and new leadership in a number of departments. Since January 2013, we’ve added a number of new people as well — 250, to be precise. These key hires are helping us create a media property whose commitment to excellence in journalism is second to none in New England, and on par with the best in the business globally. They’ve allowed us to improve the quality of our offerings across the board and to introduce initiatives like Address and Capital in print, a re-imagined boston.com, plus Betaboston.com and Crux, the new Catholic digital site which will launch in a few weeks. On the business side, our efforts are paying off — after the first six months of 2014, our circulation and advertising revenue are both ahead of plan, which reflects the enthusiasm of readers, visitors, and advertisers.

Our mission of creating award-winning journalism that’s “aggressively interesting” is only realized if we create a business model that’s sound and eminently sustainable. To reposition our business for the future, we have decided to offer some employees a buyout, voluntary in nature, the terms of which are generous by any standard. These employees will receive a letter at home over the next few days outlining specific terms.

We will continue to adapt and change, to stay ahead of the market and our competitors. We will continue to recruit and hire and explore new initiatives. But we will do so with financial discipline and rigor.

While the letters will be detailed and thorough, if you have any questions, feel free to ask me, your supervisor, or anyone in Human Resources.

All the best,
Mike

And here is McGrory:

Following up on Mike’s note, I’d like to offer my assessment on what this means for the newsroom.

Thankfully, this newsroom has embraced necessary change since the dawn of boston.com in 1995, right up through the new sections and sites we’ve introduced over the past year, with our most ambitious undertakings yet to come. This innovative spirit has allowed us to be one of the most successful papers in the nation in terms of digital subscriptions. It has allowed us to deliver our stories and images to readers in bold new ways. It has allowed us to rack up awards of every stripe. It’s also allowed us to beat financial forecasts over the first half of this year.

But change, as you well know, rarely comes easy, or at least not easily enough. It means making difficult decisions on what facets of our journalism we need to curtail to allow more investment in what we believe is most important to our readers. In other words, we can’t keep doing things just because we’ve always done them. We need to be ever bold in the way we think about the journalism ahead.

With that in mind, this buyout is different than many that have come before, in terms of what it means for our operation. For starters, it’s more generous (the details will be in the packets). There’s no set number we’re trying to achieve. Most significantly, it’s not meant as a cost-cutting exercise in the newsroom. In fact, when all is said and done, I don’t expect staffing levels here to change much, if at all. We’ll see growth in some areas as we’ll see cutbacks in others. Hiring will continue.  The goal of this buyout is flexibility, to allow us to devote people with just the right talents to the areas where we need them most.

That’s not to say there won’t be difficult moments in this process. We’ll undoubtedly be saying goodbye to talented colleagues who have committed themselves to this great institution.

My take, no spin, is that this is an exciting endeavor — certainly fortuitous for those inclined to leave for retirement or a new venture, and absolutely for the newsroom at large, as we continue to strategically invest in the excellent journalism that you produce every day. I’m available, as always, to talk this through, and so are your department heads. Don’t hesitate to come by.

Brian

The Globe’s Erin Ailworth heads for The Wall Street Journal

In addition to the Geoff Edgers move that I mentioned earlier, I understand that Boston Globe business reporter Erin Ailworth is leaving for The Wall Street Journal. Ailworth has been a stalwart on the Market Basket story.

Apologies for not having much in the way of details. But the fact that papers like the Journal and The Washington Post are hiring suggests that the journalism-jobs logjam of recent years is starting to break free — at least at a few of our largest news organizations.

https://twitter.com/ailworth/status/494961200846094336

Geoff Edgers leaving Globe for Washington Post

Geoff Edgers
Geoff Edgers

A big loss for The Boston Globe: Geoff Edgers, the paper’s arts and culture reporter since 2002, is leaving for The Washington Post. Edgers is a talented and versatile journalist — a filmmaker as well as a traditional reporter — and he will be hard to replace. The move will reunite Edgers with Post executive editor Marty Baron, who hired Edgers when he was editor of the Globe.

Geoff was a colleague at The Boston Phoenix in the mid-1990s, and his wife, Carlene Hempel, is now a colleague at Northeastern. Yes, Boston is a small town.

The following is a memo to the Globe staff from arts editor Rebecca Ostriker and  Janice Page, deputy managing editor for features. As always, Globies, keep those memos coming.

When Geoff Edgers arrived at the Globe in 2002, he carved out a new beat: covering the region’s key arts institutions and individuals with the drive and focus of a hard-news reporter. Smart, enterprising, energetic, and resourceful, Geoff has simply excelled. He’s written nearly 200 page 1 stories on everything from Boston Symphony Orchestra maestro James Levine’s health woes to the Institute of Contemporary Art’s gleaming new waterfront home, plus scores of other pieces that brim with life and make even the most complex subjects accessible. One of our favorites was when Geoff captured the debacle of a Mass MoCA exhibition that involved installing a 35-foot oil tanker, a two-story house, a carousel of bombs, and an old movie theater — all of which never opened to the public. Then there was Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video “The Clock’’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, which our department covered tag-team-style. Of course Geoff signed up for the toughest, most yawn-inducing stretch — midnight to 4 a.m. — and came up swinging, with some sharp insights on video licensing and a filmmaking crew “big enough to work the Indy 500.”

On the subject of film, Geoff knew what he was talking about: In his spare time, he’s produced a full-length documentary, “Do It Again,” which captured his quixotic quest to reunite the rock band the Kinks (and gave him a chance to duet with Sting), and hosted the Travel Channel series “Edge of America,” crossing the country to try such stunts as tackling alligators and competing in a haggis-eating contest. And Geoff has brought his impressive filmmaking knowhow to the Globe, teaming with the talented Darren Durlach to earn a New England Emmy Award for a video about the soprano Barbara Quintiliani, and to create the Boston Marathon documentary “5 Runners,” which recently premiered at the JFK Library and aired on NESN.

When there’s a story, Geoff wants to be — and almost invariably makes sure he is — the guy who gets it. Which makes it all the harder to announce that he’ll be getting those stories somewhere else in the future. Geoff has accepted a job as national arts reporter for the Washington Post. He’ll be covering cultural stories across the country, from museum and opera controversies to the latest trends in pop music and web culture. Geoff says he relishes the opportunity to take what he’s learned at the Globe and apply it on a broader stage. This is a new position, he notes, as the Post aims to compete with The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. (He’s assured us that any competition with the Globe should not be taken personally.)

Happily, Geoff will be doing all of this from a base in Boston. So although his last day at the Globe is Sept. 12, and we’ll toast him before he goes (details to come), he’s not really leaving us. And if the Kinks someday reunite in a Boston venue, we’ll celebrate with him there.

Rebecca and Janice

The Globe’s Catholic website gets a name: Crux

Screen Shot 2014-07-30 at 11.37.01 AM

The Boston Globe’s Catholic website will be called Crux, according to an announcement the paper posted a little while ago. Also, Globe editor Brian McGrory and Crux editor Teresa Hanafin talk about Margery Eagan’s role as the site’s spirituality columnist.

According to the announcement, “In her column for Crux, Eagan will explore issues of spirituality, contemplation, and devotion, drawing on her personal experience with her Catholic faith, as well as that of other Catholics and those of various religious traditions.”

Earlier: “Boston Globe Edges Closer To Launching Catholic Site And Moving Downtown” (WGBHNews.org)

Eagan leaves Herald, will write for Globe’s Catholic site

Margery Eagan
Margery Eagan

Longtime Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan has left the paper and will write for The Boston Globe’s Catholic website when it debuts later this summer. Eagan is a colleague at WGBH, where she cohosts “Boston Public Radio” with Jim Braude.

“I’ll be joining the Catholic site when it begins,” Eagan tells me by email. “And I am thrilled.”

Eagan has been one of the Herald’s signature columnists for quite a few years; here is her most recent effort. This is a big loss for the local tabloid — a day after the paper announced it had hired Kimberly Atkins to be its first full-time Washington reporter in a decade.

Globe executive announces digital moves

This email to Boston Globe and Boston.com employees was sent out a little while ago by Andrew Perlmutter, executive vice president of Boston Globe Media Partners. A source passed it along to Media Nation. The main news here seems to be that David Skok continues his rise on the Globe digital side and that the company is still in ramp-up mode with the new Boston.com. Interesting stuff if you geek out on these things, as I do.

Colleagues —

From launching Boston.com during the early days of the Internet to developing a responsively designed BostonGlobe.com in 2011, digital innovation and success have always been in our DNA here at Boston Globe Media. At the heart of this success lies the ability to evolve our products over time alongside new trends in digital consumption.

With the consumer web transforming faster than ever before, we must evolve again. In this phase in our evolution, we aim to become a world-class digital product operation. We must continue to produce great digital journalism. That is a given. But like the best web product companies today, we must also develop the ability to build and iterate products with great creativity, discipline, and efficiency. This requires a re-imagination of everything from the structure of the organization to our strategy for identifying and developing new content areas.

Luckily, we pursue this next phase with an incredibly strong foundation, anchored by our three core businesses: Boston.com, BostonGlobe.com, and our Digital Marketplaces. Because each business has the potential for independent growth, the initial step in our evolution is to build excellent, standalone digital product operations for all three properties. Great leadership and a top-notch talent base form the core of this strategy. With that as context, it is my pleasure to make some important personnel announcements.

First, I would like to formally announce that David Skok has, as part of his role as the Globe newsroom’s digital leader, taken the helm at BostonGlobe.com. David came to The Globe in early January and has been in the lead on BG.com since early April. An incredibly strong editorial and product leader, David comes to The Globe from Shaw Communications, where he ran the Global News’ website, Canada’s leading news organization. Additionally, Lauren Shea has joined the BG.com team as Product Director. Lauren comes to us from Arnold Worldwide and brings years of digital product expertise.

Second, I would like to announce that Corey Gottlieb and Angus Durocher will take over Boston.com and our Online Marketplace businesses as Executive Directors of Digital Strategy and Operations. Corey has spent five years building cutting edge digital media experiences at MLB Advanced Media. Meanwhile, Angus has over 15 years of consumer web experience, including leading and managing the front-end engineering team at YouTube for 5 years (both pre and post Google acquisition). With their remarkable combination of product, engineering, content, and marketing leadership skills, Boston.com and the Online Marketplace businesses are in great hands. In this updated structure, Corey will be responsible for Marketing, Content, and Business while Angus will oversee Technology and Design. And they will jointly guide our Product efforts.

Several other very talented individuals have also joined our digital operation recently. On the Boston.com editorial side, Adam Vacarro has joined us from Inc. Magazine while Sara Morrison and Eric Levenson have both come over from The Atlantic Wire. Please welcome them to the organization.

It is very exciting to bring these talented individuals to the organization. And this is just the beginning. Our leadership teams are building high-growth strategic roadmaps for their respective businesses, and we will continue to bring in top-tier talent to help us grow. In other words, the future looks very bright for us. We have a lot to accomplish and many challenges to overcome, but I know we are building the team to do it.

Here we go.

Andrew

Update. And now we learn that Laura Amico, the cofounder of Homicide Watch, will be joining BostonGlobe.com as news editor for multimedia and data projects. This is a huge move (disclosure: Laura and her husband and journalistic partner, Chris Amico, have worked with us at Northeastern) as well as a very smart one.

Still more. Here’s the announcement from David Skok:

I’m thrilled to announce that Laura Amico, the founder of Homicide Watch, will be joining the Globe newsroom to take on the new position of News Editor, Multimedia and Data Projects.

Without exaggeration, I can say that Laura is a bit of a rockstar and a trailblazer in the digital journalism community. She was both the first Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation at Harvard and the first MJ Bear fellow through the Online News Association. She also teaches at Northeastern University and is the editor of WBUR’s Learning Lab.

Reporting to Jason Tuohey, Laura will oversee our talented data team along with our new metro producer, Andy Rosen.

Having someone of Laura’s pedigree to help push our creative efforts on story-centric journalism is a tremendous coup.  While Laura is most well-known for building the Homicide Watch platform, in our conversations, I’ve found that she possesses an intrinsic understanding of how to engage digital audiences in unique, purpose-driven, community journalism.

Laura understands that we’ve already had some great success with immersive multimedia reporting projects, most recently with Maria Sacchetti and Jessica Rinaldi’s ‘Unforgiven,’ the year-long Spotlight ‘Shadow Campus’ investigation, and the Filipov, Wen, Jacob’s triumvirate on the ‘Fall of the House of Tsarnaev.’ I’m confident that Laura’s diversity of thought will take us in new, extraordinary directions.

Laura (@LauraNorton) will join the Globe newsroom in late August.

— David

Your must-read on the Probation Department case

As you may have heard, former state Probation Department commissioner John O’Brien and two underlings have been convicted in federal court of charges related to patronage.

In Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Harvey Silverglate and his legal assistant Daniel Schneider criticize U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and other officials for transforming behavior they don’t like — behavior that, to be sure, was grotesquely corrupt — into a federal crime, even though patronage is perfectly legal under state law. (No, neither Silverglate, Schneider nor I am impressed that this was done via a legal theory criminalizing the system O’Brien used to facilitate the patronage rather than the patronage itself.)

More broadly, Silverglate explained how it’s done in his 2009 book “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,” which I wrote about for The Guardian. As for Ortiz, she recently won her third consecutive New England Muzzle Award, now hosted by WGBHNews.org.

More: Even though I join Silverglate and Schneider in believing the legal case was dubious, the facts that were unearthed would make a jackal puke. Kudos to The Boston Globe for exposing this violation of the public trust.

Globe’s Catholic site, downtown move are getting closer

Published previously at WGBHNews.org

John Henry’s vision for The Boston Globe is slipping more and more into focus, as the paper is edging closer to launching its website covering Catholicism and moving from Dorchester to downtown Boston.

The Catholic site will include three reporters and a Web producer, according to an announcement by Teresa Hanafin, the longtime Globe veteran who will edit the project. Look for it to debut in September.

In addition to John Allen, who’s been covering the Church for the Globe since being lured away from the National Catholic Reporter earlier this year, the team will comprise Ines San Martin, an Argentinian journalist who will report from the Vatican; Michael O’Loughlin, a Yale Divinity School graduate who will be the site’s national reporter; and Web producer Christina Reinwald.

Unlike the Globe’s new print-oriented Friday Capital section, which covers politics, the Catholic site will be aimed both at and well beyond Boston with national and international audiences in mind. “It will have a global audience. There’s a natural audience for it,” Globe chief executive officer Mike Sheehan said in a just-published interview with CommonWealth magazine editor (and former Globe reporter) Bruce Mohl.

Because of that, Globe spokeswoman Ellen Clegg tells me, the Catholic site will be exempt from the Globe’s paywall. It will be interesting to see how Sheehan, an ad man by trade, grapples with the difficult challenge of selling enough online advertising to make it work. Although this is pure speculation, I wonder if some of the content could be repackaged in, say, a weekly print magazine supported by paid subscriptions and ads.

The relocation from Dorchester to downtown, meanwhile, has moved closer to reality. Thomas Grillo reported in the Boston Business Journal on Tuesday that John Henry has hired Colliers International to find 150,000 square feet of office space — a considerable downsizing from the 815,000 square feet in the 1950s-era Dorchester plant. The Globe’s printing operations would most likely be shifted to a facility in Millbury, which Henry kept when he recently sold the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester to a Florida chain.

One of the locations Colliers is investigating, Grillo reports, is in the Seaport District. And Sheehan, in the CommonWealth interview, says that would be his top choice: “I’d love to be in the Seaport area. If we were within walking distance of South Station, that would be ideal.”

If it happens, among the Globe’s new neighbors would be the Boston Herald, which moved to the Seaport District in 2012.