Tag: Boston Globe

Telegram.com takes the paid-content plunge

The Telegram & Gazette of Worcester began charging for online content today. It’s a move widely seen as a test run for the New York Times, which plans to start charging for Web access next year, and whose parent company also owns the T&G (as well as the Boston Globe).

The T&G model, explained in a memo from publisher Bruce Gaultney and editor Leah Lamson, is fairly complex, as the Times model reportedly will be. Here are the basics:

  • Print subscribers will have full access to Telegram.com for no additional charge.
  • Non-subscribers will be able to access up to 10 local stories per month without paying. But they will have to register.
  • Non-subscribers who wish to access more than 10 local stories will have to pay $14.95 per month or $1 for a day pass.
  • Some Web content will remain free, including breaking-news stories.

Will the plan succeed? It depends on your definition of success. It may bolster print circulation, or at least slow its decline. The tiered pricing system is clearly aimed at non-subscribers who make heavy use of the website. Anyone who’s thinking about dropping his print subscription will now have a good reason not to do so.

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the T&G’s Monday-through-Friday circulation is about 70,000, and 81,000 buy the Sunday paper. Among other things, charging for Web access will allow management to count paying online readers in those numbers.

On the other hand, I doubt many people are going to fork over $14.95 a month to read Telegram.com without getting the paper. Even if the move bolsters the Telegram’s bottom line, the danger is that the website will wither. (According to Compete.com, the T&G’s website draws about 275,000 unique visitors each month. The T&G claims about 800,000. Measuring online traffic is notoriously difficult.)

I also don’t see how this amounts to a test run for the Times — the papers are too different. The T&G’s readership is almost entirely local, and I can’t imagine its website has ever been a major priority. The Times is a national paper whose website, NYTimes.com, with nearly 20 million unique vistors per month, is the most widely read newspaper.com in the country.

Yet the T&G may be better positioned to get away with this than the Times, which has any number of competitors for national and international news. There is little competition for news in Worcester and the surrounding area — although this does present an opportunity for an existing news organization to beef up its own free website.

Based on a sampling of the more than 300 comments to Gaultney and Lamson’s memo, it doesn’t seem that the T&G’s announcement has been well-received. Yet that’s a self-selecting group. I did like the comment from the reader who buys a copy on his way to work every morning and thus won’t get free Web access. Management needs to think about how to take care of good customers like him.

My prediction is that the move will be of limited benefit, but that it won’t look that way. Very few people will sign up for Web access, and print circulation will continue to decline — but the drop in print would be worse if the T&G hadn’t made this move.

Note: I spoke with WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) this morning about the T&G’s move. I’m not sure whether it made it on to the newscast, and it doesn’t seem to have been posted online yet.

For Amorello, a sad and ugly ending

Both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald give the front-page treatment today to former Big Dig chief Matt Amorello. Each paper also features those horrendous mug shots of Amorello, barely conscious, being held by a police officer so that his picture could be taken.

There’s a case to be made that the photos shouldn’t have been published, but I’m not going to make it here. I suspect that any impulse to hold back disappeared when Amorello himself disappeared. He later turned up at UMass Medical Center.

The two dailies offer some details (here and here) on Amorello’s slide following his forced resignation in 2006, after a woman was killed when a concrete slab fell from a Big Dig tunnel onto her car. You will find nothing surprising in either story.

The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, whose coverage area includes Haverhill, where Amorello was arrested, sticks to what’s in the police report, as well as the observations of a few witnesses. “I’m just glad nobody got hurt,” Leonor Santos tells the paper. “We’re angry about him being drunk and driving. But thank God he’s OK. I’d rather he hit my car than the pole.”

Amorello easily could have killed someone. WBZ television and radio analyst Jon Keller writes that Amorello deserves compassion, but not forgiveness. I agree.

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.

Slack heads to D.C., Milligan to Harvard

I think I was traveling when the latest changes at the Boston Globe were announced. Anyway, metro reporter Donovan Slack is heading for the Globe’s Washington bureau to replace Susan Milligan, who’s taking a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Jessica Heslam of the Boston Herald has the details, as well as memos from the Globe’s Washington bureau chief, Chris Rowland.

Eileen McNamara to write for Boston magazine

Eileen McNamara

In a very smart move, Boston magazine announced today that it has persuaded former Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara to write a monthly column. Romenesko has the details and the press release.

McNamara, who won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, is now a journalism professor at Brandeis University. Says McNamara:

These are challenging times for the city and for the commonwealth. I am eager to rejoin the public conversation and excited to join the talented team of journalists at Boston magazine.

Like many others at the Globe, McNamara in 2007 took an early-retirement buyout while the paper was going through several rounds of painful downsizing. Her voice has been missed, and I’m glad to learn that we’ll be hearing from her once again.

Jim Smith leaves Globe for Harvard

Jim Smith

Boston Globe reporter and editor Jim Smith is leaving the paper in order to become director of communications at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Last August, Smith won the 2009 International Perspective Award from the Associated Press Managing Editors Association.

What follows is an internal e-mail from deputy managing editor Mark Morrow, sent on behalf of himself and editor Marty Baron. Media Nation obtained a copy a little while ago.

All: Hard news today — Jim Smith, who brought his remarkable talent and humane presence to the Globe eight years ago, will be leaving us this month for a new foreign posting — in Cambridge. Jim has just been named the director of communications at the JFK School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the school’s global policy issues hub, joining the growing Globe ex-pat community at Harvard.

Jim came to the Globe, from the LA Times Mexico City bureau, in March 2002, which meant that he started as foreign editor at a time of maximum tumult, complexity, danger and opportunity. It was one of the finest hours for our small but astonishingly gifted team of foreign correspondents, and a time when the Globe, under Jim’s leadership, extended itself to the limit to bring thoughtful, nuanced, enterprising and brave coverage of the Afghan and Iraq wars to our readers. By early 2003, 14 reporters and photographers were covering the conflict, not to mention terrorist attacks in London, Madrid and 2006 war in Lebanon.

Near disaster, and unthinkable loss also marked his tenure. Within weeks of Jim’s start as foreign editor, Anthony Shadid was shot in the shoulder in Ramallah. Two months later came one of the greatest tragedies ever suffered by the Globe staff, when Elizabeth Neuffer, one of the most brilliant, resourceful and courageous reporters ever to work here, died in Samarra, north of Baghdad. Jim’s gift of humanity and personal connection helped his staff, and helped us all, to make it through and eventually out of the darkness.

With the closure of our foreign bureaus in 2007, Jim took on another extraordinarily demanding challenge, working side-by-side with Peter Canellos in managing our standout coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, right up through an Extra Edition on the morning of Obama’s inauguration. And then it was on to his latest endeavor, creating out of whole-cloth a new beat mining Boston’s many remarkable connections to the world, and the world to it. This meant not only penning a stream of enterprising pieces, but also mastering a newer art form, the blog.

To say Jim made a swift success in his new beat would be to understate the case. Within six months, he won the Associated Press Managing Editors award for international perspective. It was, in fact, the second time the Globe won that prize for work in which Jim played a central role. The first was for the Lives Lost project, a 16-page special section focused on the 24,000 people around the world who die every day for want of basic medical care. Searching, smart, compassionate and richly readable work — that, start to finish, was Jim’s gift to us.

We’ll find just the right way to say good-bye and make Jim blush one day — and evening — soon. But in the meantime, wish him well and book your place on his lunch schedule soon. It gets lonely on the other side of the Charles.

Mark and Marty

Names, faces and anonymous comments

Click on image to visit "Greater Boston"

Have we reached the final days for anonymous news-site commenters? Probably not — that’s more hope than reality. But there’s no doubt the tide is shifting away from the anonymous and pseudonymous insults, libel and hate speech that comprise the majority of comments at news sites.

This past Sunday, the Boston Globe Magazine posted a feature by Neil Swidey on the anonymous commenters who waste electrons on the Globe’s website, Boston.com. Except that Swidey didn’t quite succeed. The truly anonymous whackos with whom he hoped to connect refused to crawl out from under their rocks. Instead, he ended up with a highly entertaining profile of two men who didn’t mind revealing their identities and to a female Red Sox fan who all but identified herself. Swidey writes of his quest to interview the worst of the worst:

[H]ere are the people I didn’t hear back from: the screamers, troublemakers, and trolls (Internet slang for people behind inflammatory posts). Not a single one. The loudest, most aggressive voices grew mum when asked to explain themselves, to engage in an actual discussion. The trolls appear to prize their anonymity more than anyone else.

The story is accompanied by a video starring the two men. Also, last night Swidey talked about the story with “Greater Boston” host Emily Rooney on WGBH-TV (Channel 2). I couldn’t find a direct link, but you’ll find it easily enough if you click here or on the image above.

For much of the year, the news business has been growing increasingly uneasy over anonymous comments. Swidey himself discusses some of the problems — legal challenges that could force news organizations to help potential libel plaintiffs expose commenters they want to sue, and the bizarre situation at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which outed a judge who had apparently been commenting on her own cases under a pseudonym. (For what it’s worth, Media Nation started requiring real names earlier this year.)

As Rooney points out in her interview with Swidey, just yesterday the Buffalo News announced that it would soon banish anonymous comments. And American Journalism Review editor Rem Rieder has called for an end to anonymity, pointing out that the same newspapers that allow them customarily ban anonymous letters to the editor and do not allow unnamed sources to level personal attacks. Rieder writes:

Comments sections are often packed with profanity and vicious personal attacks. The opportunity to launch brutal assaults from the safety of a computer without attaching a name does wonders for the bravery levels of the angry.

One alternative, which I’ve mentioned before, is to use Facebook as a commenting system. Nearly everyone on Facebook uses his or her real name, usually accompanied by a photo. The Globe itself is among newspapers that posts links to some of its stories on Facebook, where you will find a far more civil conversation than what’s on Boston.com.

Anonymous commenting is an idea whose time has come and gone. Whatever hopes early Internet visionaries had that anonymity could be compatible with community have long since proven to be wrong. I hope Swidey’s story serves as an inadvertent spur to the Globe — and to other news organizations — to end this failed experiment.

WBUR wins $250,000 Knight News Challenge grant

John Davidow

Congratulations to WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) and John Davidow, the executive editor of WBUR.org, who won a $250,000 Knight News Challenge grant to experiment with how digital tools should be used to cover trials and other court proceedings.

Davidow tells Laura McGann of the Nieman Journalism Lab that Quincy District Court will be used as a model to come up with a consistent set of guidelines that will foster greater openness.

Issues to be dealt with include whether and under what circumstances citizen journalists can live-blog a trial, and if one of the parties may post to Twitter in real time — as former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who faces federal corruption charges, wanted to do. Davidow tells McGann:

The courts have sort of gone further and further way from the public and public access. In the old days, they were built in the center of town. The community was able to walk into the courts and see what was going on. Modern life has done away with that. The bridge that was going in between the courts and the public was the media. The media has just less resources.

Davidow’s was one of 12 projects that will receive $2.74 million in the coming year. The others range from ideas to crowdsource the funding of public radio stories to various efforts aimed at melding mapping and gaming features with news presentations. Here is the complete list.

The Boston Globe, too. The Knight folks have announced that the Globe will receive a contract for more than $130,000 to develop and test a widget based on EveryBlock, an automated, hyperlocal aggregation platform, as part of a $450,000 program called OpenBlock.

How Robert Healy helped save the Globe

Tip O'Neill

Mark Feeney has a nice tribute to Robert Healy in today’s Boston Globe. But Healy, the paper’s former executive editor, who died on Saturday at 84, was a lot more important to the Globe than Feeney lets on. In fact, Healy, with considerable help from future House Speaker Tip O’Neill, had much to do with the Globe’s rise as New England’s dominant media institution.

O’Neill’s actions in the 1960s, goaded by Healy, revealed that Robert “Beanie” Choate, owner of the Boston Herald Traveler, had improper dealings with the FCC that allowed him to circumvent the ban against owning a daily newspaper and a television station in the same market. The Herald was stripped of its license to operate Channel 5 in 1972, leading to the death of two separate incarnations of the Herald. (Today’s Herald is essentially a start-up that dates back to the early 1980s.)

The story was revealed in John Aloysius Farrell’s biography of O’Neill, “Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century,” which I had the great pleasure of writing about for the Boston Phoenix in February 2001. The story of how O’Neill and Healy made common cause is a rollicking tale involving the Kennedys, a corrupt deal that resulted in John Kennedy winning an undeserved Pulitzer Prize for “Profiles in Courage” and O’Neill’s fear that if his role in helping the Globe were discovered, the Republican Herald would crucify him.

Farrell has a great quote from Ben Bradlee, retired executive editor of the Washington Post, who said of Healy: “This little angelic-faced Healy. He looked like a choirboy. Nobody would think what he was up to. He and I shared stuff. I loved the fact Choate was in trouble.”

Healy himself said of O’Neill: “He did right by the Globe and all right in the Globe through the years.”

Not exactly a tribute to the journalistic ethics of the era. But a great story nevertheless.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.