Tag: Boston Globe

Is Dan Totten a hero or a hack?

Jason Schwartz has a good profile of Boston Newspaper Guild president Dan Totten, posted at Boston Magazine’s Web site. Totten and his members are the last remaining obstacle to the New York Times Co.’s plan to extract $20 million in union concessions at the Boston Globe. Key excerpt:

Should his members vote to send him back into the ring with management, he could very well emerge as the hard-spined hero who had the gall to stare down the Gray Lady. Of course, if he fails, he’ll be branded the foolhardy union hack who hastened the end of the Boston Globe as we know it.

Schwartz’s story is loaded with nice details, nearly all of them from anonymous sources. Funny, but just the other day I was having an e-mail debate with a reader objecting to what Slate’s Jack Shafer likes to call “anonymice.”

The Totten profile is evidence that though anonymity may be less than ideal, it’s absolutely necessary when reporting on Boston’s paranoid media scene. I know whereof I write.

GateHouse zings the Globe

The online-content war between the Boston Globe and GateHouse Media may have been settled out of court last winter, but resentments apparently linger. The Globe’s Boston.com site has a local-search function that lets you find content from other sites. Check out the description in this Patriot Ledger video at Boston.com.

Warsh responds to Paulson

David Warsh wrote a letter to the Boston Globe over the weekend responding to Michael Paulson, who, in turn, was responding to Warsh’s observation — which I think I’m characterizing correctly — that the Globe’s coverage of the pedophile-priest scandal was perhaps more popular with the Pulitzer judges than it was with readers.

Specifically, Warsh objects to being called “insane.”

One point Warsh makes that is undeniable is that the Globe’s relentless pursuit of younger readers has not paid off. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea. But by putting so much effort into trying to convert non-readers into readers, the Globe — and many other newspapers — may only have succeeded in the opposite.

My earlier item, with links to Warsh’s and Paulson’s previous salvos.

Show us the money (III)

The Boston Globe today runs an “Editor’s Note” saying that Ariel Ayanna, whose family was the subject of a feel-good story about people trying to get by with less money, “never meant to suggest” that he isn’t looking for a job.

It will be interesting to see if this is the end of it.

Update: And, no, that wasn’t the end of it. The Ayannas have posted a blog item taking issue with both the Editor’s Note and with a letter to the editor that they submitted and then retracted because of proposed cuts that they say eliminated most of their criticism of the Globe.

“I guess I was pretty naive to think I could express myself accurately and without censorship,” writes Amiri Ayanna.

My offer for the Globe to respond here remains on the table.

Globe gets ready to unveil GlobeReader

Thanks to rozzie02131, who discovered that an e-version of the Boston Globe will become available next month. Called GlobeReader, it will presumably be based on the same Adobe Air platform as Times Reader 2.0, which was unveiled earlier this week.

No word on pricing. The come-on says that it will be available with “all Boston Globe home delivery subscriptions.” If that means Sunday-only print customers can get it for free, that would represent quite a savings.

But being able to buy a separate GlobeReader subscription for $10 or $15 a month, as you can with Times Reader, would be better.

Figuring out the Globe’s new price structure

I’m not going to complain about the latest price increases announced by the Boston Globe, since I’m on the record as believing that newspapers can and should charge a lot more for their print editions. But does it have to be so confusing?

As home-delivery customers, we get charged by the month — $35.16, to be exact. But the new prices are by the week. Since we live in Greater Boston, the new price for us will be $12.25. As best as I can figure out, based on the Globe’s explanation, that’s an increase of $3 per week. Media Nation is an algebra-free zone. But if $9.25 is to $35.16 as $12.25 is to x, then I guess the new monthly price is $46.56.

Over at the Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly, ponders moving to online-only, and asks whether his readers will pay the higher price. My answer: I couldn’t rely solely on Boston.com, the Globe’s free Web site, because its ad servers are miserably slow. It’s fine for reading a few stories, but not the whole paper.

If I had a Kindle, I would certainly consider switching to the Globe’s Kindle edition, which costs $9.99 a month. And if there were a Globe Reader e-version similar to the new Times Reader 2.0, I would consider dropping print and subscribing to that instead.

As is the case with many newspaper observers, my sense is that the advertising market won’t come back that strongly even after the recession ends. There have simply been too many systemic changes — the rise of Craigslist and the fall of downtown retail businesses to name perhaps the two most important.

In such an environment, newspapers are going to have to find a way to get readers to pick up more of the cost. It may be a hopeless task, and it may fail, as Warren Buffett warned recently. But unless they try, failure is guaranteed.

Metro Boston changes hands

The subway freebie Metro Boston and its sister papers in New York and Philadelphia have been sold to a newly formed company.

In Boston, the situation is complicated by the fact that the New York Times Co. owns 49 percent. Recently I argued that the Times Co.-owned Boston Globe should use Metro to promote more vigorously the paid print edition and Boston.com.

It’s possible that this deal will pave the way for that. But the Times Co. is still stuck with just enough of Metro Boston not to have a say over what goes into it. (Via Romenesko.)

Show us the money (II)

Boston Globe columnist Maggie Jackson yesterday gave us a feel-good story about families who are enjoying all kinds of togetherness now that they’ve had to downsize their careers and get by on less money than it costs to drive through the tollbooths on the Tobin Bridge every day. Jackson’s lead example: the Ayanna family of Somerville, mom, dad and two kids making it on $35,000 a year.

Well, now we know that they’re not making it, and that all is not the bliss that Jackson describes. We can thank Amiri Ayanna, who has been open enough about her family’s situation to leave a series of comments here about life since her husband, Ariel, was laid off from his $170,000-a-year job as a corporate lawyer. To wit:

  • The Ayannas pay $1,850 a month for the mortgage on their Somerville condo. But they are trying to negotiate that down, and may soon be forced to move into a studio apartment — with a 5-year-old boy and a baby.
  • Jackson wrote that Ariel Ayanna is “considering becoming a stay-at-home dad for a year.” Not true, says Amiri: “I wanted to clear up one other inaccuracy stated in the Boston Globe article: Ariel is enjoying his family time now, out of necessity, but is very actively and strenuously looking for work, since, as I stated, our financial situation is fairly tenuous.”
  • Amiri also has this to say: “I agree our finances were painted way too rosily by this article (many things were selectively excluded from the lengthy interviews with both myself and my spouse, and our family was used as a story ‘hook’ because we were willing to disclose specific dollar numbers, I think).”

What seems clear is that the Ayannas are doing a lot better on $35,000 than most of us would — but that it’s not their choice, and that Jackson massaged their situation to fit a pre-existing template. The result: a story that is accurate, for the most part, but that is fundamentally not true.

If Jackson and/or the Globe would like to respond, I will, of course, post it immediately.

Show us the money

There has got to be something missing [or maybe not? see below] from Maggie Jackson’s account of the Ayanna family in today’s Boston Globe. She reports that the Ariel and Amiri Ayanna and their two young kids are living in Somerville “on $35,000 a year in unemployment and savings” now that Ariel has lost his job as a $170,000-a-year corporate lawyer.

Jackson writes:

[T]he job loss had some unintended perks: The family was able to save money — and spend more time together — on a two-week camping trip to attend a cousin’s Texas wedding. And Ariel, who is considering becoming a stay-at-home dad for a year, is around more often to cook, practice violin with their 5-year-old son, and play with their 9-month-old son.

“It’s hard to slow down. It’s hard to step back,” says Amiri Ayanna, who plans to begin a master’s degree program at Harvard Divinity School this summer. But “it’s a blessing in disguise.”

Well, fine. But don’t you think there’s something awfully suspicious about that $35,000-a-year figure? We’re not told if the Ayannas rent or own. But Somerville is a high-cost community. If they were somehow able to get away with paying just $1,500 a month in rent or mortgage payments, then they’ve only got $17,000 left for everything else — heat, electricity, food and (unless he’s teaching himself) violin lessons for the 5-year-old. Their trip to Texas — which they write about on their blog — may have been cheap, but it surely wasn’t free.

Either there’s a large pile of money lurking in the background or the Ayannas are truly miracle-workers. But Jackson leaves us in the dark. Given how many people are struggling these days, it’s pretty cavalier to suggest, on the basis of no evidence, that we could all live like the Ayannas if we were only willing to eat at home more often.

Update: Amiri Ayanna checks in, and says it’s all legit. Hard to see how they make the numbers work, but there you go.