By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
“Beat the Press” blogger-in-chief Ralph Ranalli writes that Boston Globe staffers are now “cautiously optimistic” that the New York Times Co. and the Boston Newspaper Guild will come to an agreement in renewed talks, which resume next week.
And Ranalli asks an excellent question: How can the Times Co. stick to the 23 percent pay cut — based on its contention that the two sides are at an impasse — when management and the Guild are actively engaged in bargaining sessions?
In my latest for the Guardian, I attempt to make sense out of the past week’s developments regarding the Boston Globe — and to urge an amicable divorce between the Globe and the New York Times Co.
I know we’re not supposed to take Howie Carr seriously when he writes about the Boston Globe. But check out his Boston Herald column today. “Danny Donuts” is Dan Totten, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild. Carr writes:
Let’s face it, the Globe is on the ropes because it’s crammed to the rafters with writers who can’t write, reporters who can’t report, and editors who can’t edit, because Danny Donuts and his cohorts couldn’t sell an ad to save their inherited, tastefully weathered summer homes on Nantucket.
Now here is Jason Schwartz, describing Totten’s background in a Boston Magazine profile:
Totten first got active in the union in 2002, and it was a natural fit. His father was a member of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association for more than 35 years, his sister was a union representative for the Boston school system, and his grandmother had been a steward for the hotel and telephone workers union “back in a time,” Totten says, “when it wasn’t very popular or easy for a woman to hold such a position.”
We also learn from Schwartz that Totten is a graduate of the former Boston State College, surely one of the forgotten Ivies, and earned his MBA at Anna Maria College in Paxton, widely regarded as the Wharton School of Central Massachusetts.
Carr, meanwhile, lives in Wellesley and makes some three-quarters of a million dollars from his talk show on WRKO Radio (AM 680), as well as a presumed six-figure income from the Herald. He’s also a graduate of Deerfield Academy and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — a real working-class hero.
For Howie to characterize a self-made man like Totten as overprivileged is laughable, bordering on the offensive.
Depending on how things go, this could be a very big day for the future of the Boston Globe and its employees. The Newspaper Guild is sending in its national president, Bernie Lunzer, to try to work out an alternative deal with New York Times Co. management. (Boston Herald coverage here; Globe coverage here.)
It’s easy to say the Times Co. is going to stick with the 23 percent pay cut it imposed last week, but there are reasons to think that management would be amenable to negotiations. Management’s chief aim is to extract $10 million in concessions from the Guild, and to do it in a manner that paves the way for selling the paper.
The 23 percent pay cut accomplishes the first goal but not the second, since the Times Co. is now dealing with building full of seething employees. And about 190 Guild members still have lifetime employment guarantees, which will make it more difficult for a new owner to do the sort of drastic restructuring that’s needed.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the two sides reach an agreement that looks quite a bit like the one that was narrowly rejected last week: a pay cut of around 10 percent; cuts to retirement and other benefits; and an end to the lifetime job guarantees. If Times Co. executives have any sense at all — a debatable proposition at this point — then they will sweeten the pot a little bit so that Guild members can feel that they actually got something out of last week’s “no” vote. As long as it adds up to $10 million, then it really doesn’t matter.
New York Times columnist David Carr today, meanwhile, checks in with a group of outside analysts to try to put a price tag on the Globe. It proves to be a futile exercise, as the prices range anywhere from $250 million to the Times Co.’s actually having to pay a new owner as much as $25 million to make the Globe go away. Nor does the longer online version add much.
The takeaway quote comes from the venerable analyst John Morton, who writes to Carr:
Should a private buyer be found I suspect that any Globe employees still employed after the deal goes through will recall the contract they have just rejected as paradise compared with what a new owner will impose in cost-cutting.
Times Co. executives have behaved badly enough through this crisis that it’s easy to forget the larger truth: the newspaper business is coming apart at the seams, and what’s happening at the Globe is no different from what’s happening to major metropolitan dailies across the country. Morton’s assessment is a reminder of that reality.
Who will buy the Boston Globe? Silly season may have already arrived. The Globe today attempts to knock down the Boston Herald’s claim yesterday that an investment group with ties to Thomas O’Neill III is interested, while at the same time identifying three other potential buyers.
The Herald, meanwhile, reports that Red Sox principal owner John Henry has told his Twitter followers he’s not interested; his name has been floating around for a while. (Sorry, but I don’t know Henry’s Twitter address.) Nothing new from Jack Welch, who has restricted his tweeting to sports the last couple of days.
Let me return to the Globe’s claim that the Herald got it wrong with respect to Intercontinental Real Estate Corp., whose board of advisers includes Tom O’Neill and former Bank of Boston head Ira Stepanian. The Globe’s Keith O’Brien and Beth Healy, with help from Casey Ross, write:
[A] person connected to the Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. refuted a report that the real estate investment and management firm is interested in buying the Globe. This person, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, said the report in the Boston Herald was not accurate.
Now, let’s go back to the Herald story, written by Christine McConville with assists from Jay Fitzgerald and Jessica Heslam. Here’s the key graf:
“Intercontinental is interested in any good investment that offers superior returns for our investors, as well as opportunities for job preservation, and even job growth, for our union investors,” said a top executive for Boston-based Intercontinental, which manages real estate and some $2.5 billion in investment funds, including union pensions. “The Globe fits our profile.”
Neither the Herald nor the Globe offers us an on-the-record source from Intercontinental, so it’s hard to know what to make of all this. But the specificity of the Herald quote suggests that there’s at least something to it. Most likely the Herald and the Globe stories are both accurate, but only one of them is true.
The possible buyers identified by the Globe — former Globe executive Stephen Taylor, a member of the paper’s former ruling family, as well as Boston advertising executive Jack Connors and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca — are all familiar names. It’s hard to know how serious any of them are. My guess is that when a buyer is announced, we’ll all be shocked. This is good coffee-machine conversation, but probably no one outside of New York Times Co. management really knows what’s going on.
In other Globe-related news, editorial-page editor Renée Loth is retiring to write a freelance column for the paper. She’ll be replaced by Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos, who’ll also oversee the Sunday Ideas section. The current Ideas editor, Gareth Cook, will remain in that post.
Bringing Canellos home in any capacity is a smart move. His specific job title is less important than getting him back inside the building, where he will no doubt be a key player in any and all reinvention initiatives. He also has a good relationship with Cook, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter.
Both Canellos and Cook are Boston Phoenix alumni, though Canellos had moved on before my arrival there. Cook and I worked together in the mid-’90s.
Finally, former Globe media consultant Lou Phelps has posted a commentary at Cape Cod Today in which she takes the Boston Newspaper Guild to task for being “unwilling to publicly acknowledge the core issues of the business model of The Boston Globe, and the changing newspaper industry that The New York Times company must face.”
Phelps’ main argument is that technology should allow a newsroom to operate with many fewer journalists than was the case before cell phones and the Internet.
Her take is interesting, but she should have acknowledged that the Globe has already done a lot of cutting — from 550 full-time newsroom positions in 2000 to about 330 today. I hope she’ll check in and let us know how much lower she thinks the Globe can go.
And wow — Phelps is easy on the Guild compared to Cape Cod Today editor Walter Brooks. Duck!
Photo (cc) by cmiper and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Some years ago I wrote a review/essay for the Boston Phoenix about Jack Farrell’s massive Tip O’Neill biography. The headline: “How Tip saved the Globe.” (Pay no attention to the today’s date stamp; it’s an old piece.)
Farrell wrote about services rendered by the future House speaker in the Globe’s years-long quest to persuade the FCC to strip the Boston Herald Traveler of its broadcasting licenses. That finally happened in the early 1970s, ensuring the Globe’s dominance and dooming the Herald to second-banana status.
Today the Herald reports that Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. is interested in buying the Globe from the New York Times Co. And look who’s on the Intercontinental advisory board: Thomas P. O’Neill III. (Thanks to Northeastern School of Journalism director Steve Burgard for passing along that not-so-little tidbit.)
According to the Herald’s Christine McConville, talks have been going on for weeks. So here’s something to ponder: O’Neill’s public-relations firm, O’Neill and Associates, has been handling communications for the Boston Newspaper Guild. Another fun fact: most of those communications have come from former Boston Herald business editor Cosmo Macero Jr., now with O’Neill.
Make of that what you will. And yes, Boston is a very small town.
In this week’s Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly observes that New York Times Co. executives mangled things with the Boston Globe and the Newspaper Guild so thoroughly that you’re left wondering if a “no” vote was what they wanted all along.
I’ve been wondering the same thing, though for the life of me I can’t see how this benefits the Sulzbergers. Now that they’ve made it official that they want to sell the Globe, the last thing they need is an unfair-labor case before the National Labor Relations Board, which could drag on for months.
Over at the Beat the Press blog, former Globe staffer Ralph Ranalli explains how Globe publisher Steve Ainsley and Times Co. management snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Writing in Slate, Jack Shafer picks up on the ideas of Philip Meyer, whose argues in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper,” and in a more recent piece in the American Journalism Review, that newspapers should cater to the elite, well-educated audiences that are already their last dedicated readers.
A Boston Globe insider led me to this Twitter page, purportedly by retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch, who was interested in buying the Globe back when the New York Times Co. wasn’t selling. Check this message out:
So ironic to see NYT act so brutish toward labor. Certainly would be crucifying any Company with labor practices like theirs.
Not quite getting the point? Here’s a Welch (or “Welch”) update:
My New York Times labor tweet a few min ago refers to their BRUTISH dark age labor relations with their Boston Globe employees
There is nothing obviously fake about the Welch Twitter page. It’s mostly about sports, and the site links to his book. Times business columnist Joe Nocera recently wrote that Welch has a Twitter account, though Nocera didn’t supply the address. I think this is Welch, although I’m open to evidence that it isn’t.
Which raises an obvious question. Is Welch still interested in buying the Globe? If so, is this a ploy to reach out to employees?
Granted, I’m not sure what the logic would be. It’s management he needs to reach out to.
*Update: Dave Hersam nails it. It really is Welch.
Update II: The Boston Newspaper Guild has now sent out an e-mail publicizing Welch’s tweets.
Update III: Welch is certainly not my idea of a white knight for the Globe. Click here and here.
Photo (cc) by Josh Greenstein and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Alas, my work in the Guardian came up short for the second year in a row in the Syracuse University Mirror Awards, as I lost out yesterday to Clive Thompson of Wired.com in the category of online media commentary.
There was plenty of buzz about the Boston Globe at the luncheon, held in the not-very-spacious confines of New York’s Harmonie Club. Several New York Times people I spoke with, including media columnist David Carr, were speculating about why the Newspaper Guild voted “no” and what might happen next.
We also heard from Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, whose receipt of a lifetime achievement award was controversial given her perceived role in harming the news business.
She got off the best line of the day, saying (this is a close paraphrase; I should have taken notes, but I couldn’t extend my elbows sufficiently), It’s not true that I single-handedly destroyed the newspaper business. I had help from Craigslist. Ho, ho.