Tag: Boston Globe

Optimism amid the newspaper gloom

espnboston_20090828Two pieces of news prompt this post. First, the Associated Press reports that newspaper advertising was down 29 percent in the second quarter of 2009, a devastating decline that is sure to renew questions as to how much longer the traditional newspaper business can hang on. Second, the Boston Globe’s main football writer, Mike Reiss, is leaving for a new ESPN Web site to be called ESPNBoston.

What do these two events have in common? They are further evidence that media organizations whose business models are relatively healthy have an opportunity to invade the turf traditionally occupied by newspapers. That doesn’t offer much hope for newspaper publishers. But it’s certainly cause for optimism among those who want to see journalism survive — and something worried journalism students should take solace from as well.

ESPNBoston, which has not yet launched, is not to be confused with the radio station of the same name — an also-ran with two bad signals, now reduced to spectator status in the sports-talk battle between WEEI (AM 850) and WBZ-FM (98.5). ESPNBoston, writes the Globe’s Chad Finn, is part of a strategy by the parent company to launch regional Web sites in the most sports-crazed parts of the country.

Disney-owned ESPN, among other things, operates wildly successful cable channels, publishes a magazine and produces a Web site that, according to Quantcast.com, attracts between 14 million and 20 million unique visitors each month. I don’t pretend to know what ESPN’s business strategy is for the new local sites, but it seems logical that company executives would be willing to subsidize them for quite a while if they help cement brand loyalty.

Reiss is not the only local sports reporter to leave for sites operated by non-newspaper companies. Previously, the Boston Herald lost Rob Bradford to WEEI.com, and Globe baseball writer Gordon Edes decamped to Yahoo. The Globe and the Herald have always had good sports sections, and their coverage has helped drive a lot of circulation. Their sports sections are still good, but now they must compete with online coverage produced by companies with fewer financial problems than the newspaper business is experiencing.

And sports is just one example. Tom Palmer retired from the development beat at the Globe last year and kept right on doing his thing for McDermott Ventures, a public-relations firm — a relationship that may raise eyebrows among journalism ethicists, but that is sure to becoming increasingly common.

Also in 2008, Boston.com political blogger James Pindell left to head a national network of state political sites called Politicker.com. The project was ahead of its time, and it folded in the midst of last fall’s economic crisis. But the idea lives on: Pindell is now trying a similar project on his own in New Hampshire.

Finally, and not to repeat myself, but one of the more interesting projects under way right now is the redesigned WBUR.org, published by Boston’s public-radio powerhouse, WBUR (90.9 FM); the site combines local and NPR news into a quality online newspaper. Public radio has not been immune from having to make recession-related cuts. But, unlike newspapers, both its distribution model (commuters stuck in their cars) and its business model (listener contributions, corporate underwriting and grants, supplemented with a small amount of taxpayer money) remain intact.

If the next owner of the Globe keeps on cutting, it’s easy to imagine WBUR.org morphing into a real alternative. And, of course, there’s nothing to stop the city’s television news operations from pumping up their Web sites, though they, like the newspaper business, are experiencing tough economic times.

We often hear that if newspapers die, there will be nothing left but amateur citizen-media sites that, for all their strengths, lack the capacity to do the sort of public-interest journalism a democracy needs to thrive. In fact, there is reason to be a lot more optimistic than that. I hope newspaper companies can find a way of combining their print and online operations so they can thrive for years to come. But if they can’t, it won’t be the end of journalism.

Times Co. executives to visit Globe

New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and president Janet Robinson will visit the Boston Globe on Sept. 9, according to an e-mail sent to Globe staffers that was obtained by Media Nation. The full text of the e-mail follows:

Please mark your calendars!

Arthur and Janet will visit the Globe on Wednesday, September 9th to hold business update meetings that are open to all employees.

The meetings are scheduled for 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM. Each meeting will be held in the Link.

All employees are encouraged to attend. There will be time for Q&A’s.

[Globe publisher] Steve [Ainsley] will begin the meeting with a brief overview of The Boston Globe and Boston.com business plan.

No doubt the number-one question on most folks’ minds will be the status of Times Co. efforts to sell the Globe, Boston.com and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

Update: For what it’s worth, Media Nation has received a revised e-mail stating that Ainsley “will hold a series of separate employee meetings in mid-September” in order to “ensure that all employees have ample opportunity to both meet with and
ask questions of Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson.”

Globe’s Kennedy series drives Web traffic

The Boston Globe’s Web site, Boston.com, received more than 8 million page views yesterday by 5 p.m., according to Zachary Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab — a surge driven by the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy.

And though Seward doesn’t have specific numbers, he notes that Boston.com was (and still is) giving prominent play to its multimedia series on Kennedy’s life that was published last February. As I wrote then, the package was likely to serve as an important resource for some time to come, especially giving that Kennedy was nearing the end of his life.

Interestingly enough, Seward learns that the text had been taken down for a while at the request of Simon & Schuster, which published a book based on the series, and was only recently restored.

Inside story from the Globe

The Boston Globe is delivered to Media Nation at about 5:30 a.m. Ted Kennedy’s death became public shortly before 1:30 a.m. So how did the Globe manage to remake the front page so quickly?

According to Joe Strupp of the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, editor Marty Baron was awakened and gave the proverbial order to “stop the presses,” or words to that effect. The news made it into more than half of the day’s press run.

Tomorrow, Baron tells E&P, the paper will include a special 12-page section on Kennedy’s life. (Via Universal Hub.)

Caught flat-footed

Word of Ted Kennedy’s death broke around 2 a.m. — too late for most of the Boston Herald’s print run. A friend of Media Nation reports that Kennedy is not on the front page in the news boxes he’s seen around the area.

Of course, the Herald rectifies that online. Presumably the boxes are being restocked as I write this.

Meanwhile, what is up with the folks who put together the mobile edition of Boston.com? It’s almost 9:30 a.m., and there’s not one word about Kennedy’s death on the front page of mobile.boston.com. (I’ve saved the page here.) Nice picture of Jacoby Ellsbury, though.

I thought breaking news was automatically pushed to the site. I guess not.

Update: It’s now 11:15 a.m., and Kennedy stories are finally migrating to Boston.com’s mobile edition.

Arrogance and anger over newspapers’ decline

us dollar billsNewspapers executives have the right to charge whatever they want for their products, be it the print edition, Web-site access or speciality channels such as Kindle and mobile editions. The public, in turn, has the right to decide whether to buy or seek its news elsewhere.

What news organizations do not have a right to do is raise the price of what they produce by creating artificial scarcity through an illegal cartel.

Thus it was that Los Angeles Times media columnist Timothy Rutten’s latest commentary became the talk of the Twitterverse over the weekend. Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Vin Crosbie and I were among those kicking Rutten’s column around.

Rutten, in calling for an exemption from federal law so that newspaper companies can collude on a plan to charge for online access, made some important points about government’s role in fostering a free and independent press. In particular, he singled out the favorable postal rates going back to the earliest days of the republic as a key factor in the rise of a vigorous Fourth Estate. (Paul Starr, in his 2006 book “The Creation of the Media,” traces those postal policies to Colonial times, and identifies them as an important reason that newspapers and magazines became a mass medium in the United States in a way that they never did in Europe.)

But Rutten undermines his argument with unwarranted arrogance, including flashes of anger, at what has happened to his business. Here is a particularly choice passage:

[I]f Congress acts as it should, it will do so not on behalf of newspapers but for their readers. The press, after all, does not assert 1st Amendment protections on its own behalf but as the custodian of such protections on behalf of the American people.

Stating that the press is the “custodian” of the First Amendment is breathtaking not only for its insular cluelessness, but also because it goes against basic constitutional principles. Rutten should re-read the Supreme Court’s landmark Branzburg v. Hayes decision of 1972, in which Justice Byron White explained in ringing language why it would be wrong to grant journalists a constitutional privilege to protect their anonymous sources:

[L]iberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph just as much as of the large metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition methods.

I don’t think White got it entirely right — surely certain types of journalism could be protected, as opposed to a professional class of journalists. But he’s inspiring in his assertion that the First Amendment belongs to all of us, and that we the people, not the press alone, are its custodians. Today, of course, the pamphleteers are armed with computers; they are legion, and they are not lonely.

Like Rutten, I want to see the newspaper business find a way out of the mess it’s in. Outside of newspaper Web sites, sources of news that consumers do not have to pay for — principally television and radio stations and their Web sites — do a fine job with the basics of local coverage.

But let’s take the Boston Globe as an example of two entirely different dilemmas. Yesterday’s edition included two stories that required a considerable amount of journalistic enterprise — a deep analysis of Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s development record and an investigative feature into the death of 7-year-old Nathaniel Turner, whose father has been charged with his murder. Those are the types of stories that are too expensive to do in the world of fast, cheap Web journalism.

On the other hand, have you seen the new WBUR.org? Combining news from its local staff with reports from NPR, the station’s Web site has the makings of a high-quality online newspaper. If the Globe started charging for access to Boston.com, maybe the Boston Herald would follow suit. But WBUR (90.9 FM), as a public station with hundreds of thousands of listeners, is going to keep its Web access free — as will New England Cable News and the city’s broadcast television and radio stations. Given that there is a considerable amount of overlap in the Globe’s and WBUR’s audiences (affluent, well-educated, liberal), the Globe would charge for Web access at its peril.

Absolutely no one knows the way forward for the troubled newspaper business. My own hope is that, once the recession ends, newspapers can thrive through a combination of smaller-circulation but more-expensive print editions, subscription fees for non-Web speciality products for the Kindle, cell phones and the like, and a more imaginative approach to Web advertising.

What makes no sense whatsover is the Rutten plan: a backroom deal to charge for something that readers have made clear they are not willing to pay for.

A Taylor-made Globe?

In what may prove to be very good news for readers of the Boston Globe, a group led by Stephen Taylor — a prominent member of the family that sold the paper to the New York Times Co. in 1993 — has, if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, moved into the pole position to buy the paper.

Beth Healy reports in today’s Globe that Taylor and California-based Platinum Equity have made it to the next round, and that both groups will tour the paper around Labor Day. Meanwhile, a group led by Partners HealthCare chairman Jack Connors and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca — pointedly described as having submitted “the lowest bid” — will be on the outside looking in. Whether that might change is unclear.

No new owner of the Globe, not even a Taylor, is going to restore the glory days. But the Taylors were very good stewards of the paper, and Stephen Taylor, a former Globe business executive, is said to be one of the sharper members of his family. In addition, a Media Nation source who knows him tells me he’s a good guy.

Connors, too, is a good guy. But he’s also involved in just about every civic and business group in Greater Boston, and it’s hard to believe he could offer the Globe the sort of independent leadership it needs. Given that he and Pagliuca are said to be interested in pursuing some sort of non-profit arrangement, you also have to wonder whether they’ve got enough capital to pull it off.

According to Healy, both the Taylor group and Platinum submitted bids to buy the Globe, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester and Boston.com for about $35 million (a far cry from the $1.1 billion the Times Co. paid 16 years ago for just the Globe) and agreed to assume $59 million in pension liabilities.

Given that Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. recently said price will not be the only consideration, I would think a group with deep roots in both Boston and journalism would have an advantage over Platinum, whose executives may be interested mainly in the real estate.

For big-money investors, $94 million is not an enormous sum. I suspect that what will separate the winner from the losers in this deal is the willingness and ability to keep losing money until the paper can be restructured into a profitable business. And yes, I’m confident that someone can do it.

More: Over at Beat the Press, Ralph Ranalli laments the exclusion of the Connors group, arguing that non-profit is the only viable model for the newspaper business moving forward. Ralph and I agree, though, that Platinum would be bad news all around.

Democracy and the Senate (II)

The notion that the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald represent ideologically opposite editorial positions is overblown. The Herald and its editorial-page editor, Rachelle Cohen, aren’t really all that conservative. And the Globe, whose editorial page recently transitioned from longtime editor Renée Loth to former Washington-bureau chief Peter Canellos, is just contrarian enough on issues like charter schools to keep liberals agitated.

An exception is today. The Globe offers its full-throated endorsement to Sen. Ted Kennedy’s proposal that would allow Gov. Deval Patrick to name an interim senator in the event of a vacancy. The interim would serve until a special election could be held five months later. With Kennedy’s battle against brain cancer apparently entering its final stages, the matter has taken on special urgency.

In supporting Kennedy’s proposal, the Globe criticizes the Legislature for having taken the gubernatorial appointment away five years ago, when it appeared that Sen. John Kerry might be elected president and Democratic leaders at the Statehouse did not want then-governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, to name Kerry’s successor. The Globe calls the 2004 law “a partisan bill.”

Which, of course, it was. And which leads the Herald to invoke that same 2004 action as a reason to reject Kennedy’s current proposal, in an editorial headlined “Hypocrisy factor.” Continue reading “Democracy and the Senate (II)”