Tag: Boston Globe

Why the Globe should acquire Universal Hub

The Boston Globe may be getting smaller, but it was just handed an opportunity to do something very intelligent. Let’s see if it can rise to the occasion.

Adam Gaffin, the chief impresario and co-founder of Universal Hub, just lost his day job as an online editor for the trade publication Network World. UH, if you don’t already know, is a “best of the blogs” site — an essential guide to nearly 1,000 local blogs in Greater Boston, all informed by Adam’s love of his adopted hometown and his puckish wit.

The Globe should hire Gaffin. I’ve been saying it to anyone who’d listen for quite a while now. Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix said it just last week. Yes, yes, the financially ailing Globe is in the midst of downsizing its newsroom by 50 people. But with fewer reporters, the paper is in more need than ever of someone who can intelligently aggregate content from a wide variety of sources. No one is better at it than Gaffin.

Recently, as you know, the Globe tried its hand at automated aggregation. It didn’t work out.

Gaffin’s ability to find what’s interesting, entertaining and important while holding down a demanding day job has always been awe-inspiring. If he were able to devote his full attention to it, Universal Hub would only become better. (In most respects, anyway. No doubt he would no longer offer his acidic observations about certain Globe columnists.)

Gaffin has been affiliated with the Globe in the past — for a while he wrote a roundup for the Sunday paper’s City Weekly supplement.

Do I have a conflict of interest? Yes, and thank you for asking, though it cuts the other way. Adam also runs the Boston Blogs ad network, which automatically places advertising on Media Nation and many other local blogs. Lately it’s been doing well enough to cover my Internet access fees. Were Adam to go to the Globe, I imagine we’d be left high and dry.

If the Globe is to reinvent itself, it’s going to have to act as a trusted guide to the best content out there. It should start with Gaffin.

Gaddafi to Israel: Drop dead

In the endlessly depressing category of “you can’t make this stuff up,” the New York Times today runs an op-ed by erstwhile Boston Globe columnist Muammar Gaddafi, the terrorist-coddling, human rights-abusing dictator of Libya.

Gaddafi has a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: wipe Israel off the map. Funny, but I somehow knew he was going to say that.

The Globe’s Kevin Cullen weighs in usefully on Gaddafi today, and Universal Hub wraps up the whole miserable affair.

Note: Gaddafi, Qaddafi and Khadafy are all the same person. I’m going with Gaddafi because that’s how the Globe recently spelled it.

Obama for sale

The newspaper business may be hurting, but Barack Obama — whether he realizes it or not — is doing what he can to help.

The latest paper to cash in on Obama’s popularity is the Boston Herald. According to a newsroom source, the paper has published an ad-free, 32-page color magazine called “Boston Celebrates President Obama,” which will cost $2.99 when it hits newsstands tomorrow. Overseen by city editor Jennifer Miller, the magazine will include contributions by everyone from Keith Lockhart to Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the hosts of NPR’s “Car Talk.”

The Boston Globe, meanwhile, printed 65,000 copies of an eight-page extra on Tuesday afternoon, following Obama’s swearing-in. The Los Angeles Times and several other papers did the same, and those that didn’t printed more copies of today’s paper than usual.

The New York Times is being unusually aggressive. I managed to scarf a couple of copies on Election Day, visions of eventual eBay riches dancing in my head. Yet the Times is still selling copies of that day’s paper, and has now added today’s edition, along with a lapel pin and a photo. So much for the three copies I scored in Danvers Square at 5:30 this morning.

Maybe I should invest in those Obama coins that Montel Williams is pushing? Uh, I think not.

More cuts coming at the Globe

Boston Globe editor Marty Baron tells his staff that as many as 50 newsroom positions will be eliminated soon — via buyout if possible, or layoffs if necessary. Baron concludes his memo with this:

All of us appreciate what a supremely dedicated and talented staff we have here, and we know the ache of seeing admired colleagues leave our newsroom. We also know the challenges of producing a high-quality newspaper and website when there are fewer of us to do the work.

Once again, we will have to assess everything we do. And so we will move promptly to evaluate a wide range of options. Not every option we review will come to pass, but reductions of this magnitude obviously will require us to make fundamental changes. Your ideas are welcome.

We have demonstrated repeatedly that we are a resilient bunch, capable of superb journalism even as we rethink our operations, reinvent our product, and refine our mission. We are being tested again, and a resourceful newsroom like ours can meet the test.

This is shockingly ugly stuff. I can’t imagine how the Globe can move forward without a dramatically redefined mission. Just focusing on local news isn’t going to do it, because that’s fundamentally about throwing bodies at stories.

Not exactly a novel observation that the newspaper business as we know it is rapidly coming to an end. (Via Romenesko.)

More: Adam Reilly of the Phoenix reports that Boston Newspaper Guild president Dan Totten wants any cuts to come exclusively from Globe management.

The art of the obit

Something for which the Boston Globe deserves a lot of credit is that it treats local obituaries with the seriousness they deserve. I especially like the way its obits shine a spotlight on the lives of ordinary people, who often turn out to be not ordinary in the least.

Today the Globe’s Bryan Marquard tells us about the life of Stella May Brown Weaco, a lovely soul of dubious sanity who died on Dec. 31 after many years of homelessness, which ended only after she became ill. Marquard writes:

Obituaries usually confer honorifics, but what title could capture Stella? Given occasionally to delusions, she offered no clear explanation of how she acquired the name Weaco, which is not on her birth certificate. Was she married or a mother? Workers at Women’s Lunch Place hope a relative will read this and inquire about Stella.

Born in Coffeeville, a small Mississippi town some 90 miles south of Tennessee, she spoke of having lived in Memphis. She also said she was born in Jerusalem, was a member of the Rockefeller family, “and was part of a very select group,” [Boston Health Care for the Homeless president Jim] O’Connell said. “And I think that last part was true.

“Among the homeless, he said, “she was an aristocrat.”

I tell my students that obituaries are the most important part of a newspaper, at least for friends and family members. But telling isn’t the same as showing, which Marquard does on a regular basis.

More: Mike Stucka rightly notes that Steve Landwehr of the Salem News has been performing similar journalistic artistry with obits.

A more optimistic take on the Times Co.

No one doubts that the New York Times Co. is in financial trouble, or that the Times as we know it will someday cease to exist.

But Rick Edmonds, who analyzes the news business for the Poynter Institute, has done a great job of demonstrating that there’s no there there in an attention-grabbing piece in the Atlantic arguing that the Times Co. is rapidly running out of money — and, in a worst-case scenario, could shut down as early as this May.

The Atlantic article, by Michael Hirschorn, is pegged to the writings of financial analyst Henry Blodget, who has been sounding the alarm about the Times Co.’s cash woes for some time now. Hirschorn says even the drastic measures that the Sulzbergers might consider could fall short of being enough: selling their share of the Red Sox (already under way, supposedly), selling About.com (even though it’s one of the few bright spots in their portfolio), even shutting down the Boston Globe.

But Edmonds carefully walks us through the numbers, demonstrating that the payment-due deadline the Times Co. faces in May is not at all what Hirschorn seems to think it is. Edmonds writes:

Long story short, the company will be able to meet the May deadline. And corporate finance is not like an auto loan, in which the repo man comes if you miss a few payments…. [C]reditors typically renegotiate the terms — as they have done to much sicklier newspaper companies than the New York Times Co.

Edmonds also shows that Hirschorn’s comparison of print and online readers isn’t just “not apples-to-apples,” as Hirschorn himself acknowledges, but more in the nature of apples to cinder blocks. In other words, Hirschorn doesn’t even come close.

There are three problems with the newspaper business right now: (1) the Internet is destroying its business model; (2) too many newspaper companies took on way too much debt in building their empires; and (3) the worst recession since the early 1980s, if not the ’30s, is wiping out the advertising that Craigslist didn’t already grab.

Right now, it’s the recession and the debt that are taking the biggest toll on the business; without those, newspapers might have some hope of making a downsized but successful transition to online.

The Times Co. took a couple of small but important steps this week, unrolling lucrative front-page ads in the Times and announcing that it will soon do the same in the Globe. The future of legacy media is going to look very different from what we’re all accustomed to, as Edmonds himself acknowledges. But the Times Co. should be able to make it through the recession. After that, we’ll see.

Photo (cc) by Steve Rhodes and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Why the Times’ front-page ads don’t matter

Three reasons why the New York Times’ decision to sell display ads on its front page is nothing to get excited about:

1. The Times’ most important front page is the home page of NYTimes.com, which, like nearly all news Web sites, has included advertising from the beginning. In a world in which the Web is your primary delivery vehicle, it’s silly to pretend there’s anything sacrosanct about print.

2. Back in newspapers’ heyday, the Times was one of the few quality papers to run front-page ads at all. The reason we’re all saying that the Times is now selling display ads on page one is that it’s always run classifieds. Remember those ads reminding Jewish women to light candles for Shabbat?

3. The Times actually held out longer than many. As Richard Pérez-Peña notes, a number of excellent national papers have been publishing front-page ads for a while, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times. Each of those papers has its own pathologies, but none is any more troubled than the New York Times is these days.

If front-page ads can help to offset newspapers’ mounting losses, then I’m fine with it. No doubt we can expect ads on the front of the Times Co.-owned Boston Globe in the near future.

Peering through the blue murk

The Boston Herald today tries to knock down yesterday’s Boston Globe story reporting that as many as 200 Boston police officers could be laid off because of the recession-driven budget meltdown. But it’s difficult to know exactly what is going on.

For instance, the Herald’s Jessica Van Sack writes that an aide to “enraged” (isn’t it ever thus?) Boston Mayor Tom Menino said, “It won’t be 200 police officers.” Well, what about 150? Not exactly reassuring.

For that matter, the online headline over Van Sack’s story goes quite a bit farther than her own carefully worded story: “Riled mayor Thomas M. Menino: Reports of cop layoffs untrue.” The cover line, “Menino vows to spare cops from budget ax,” strikes me as unsupported by Van Sack’s reporting as well.

Given the murk, it’s worth looking at what named sources have said. The Globe’s Donovan Slack and Maria Cramer yesterday cited “two officials” in their report that “as many as 200” officers could lose their jobs. It’s hard to know what to make of that, given that we don’t know who the “two officials” are.

But they also quote Menino spokeswoman Dot Joyce as saying, “There is nothing official at this point, and it is way too premature to determine the impact on any department, including the Boston Police Department.” And Police Commissioner Ed Davis weighs in with this: “Everyone knows that if your budget is 90 percent personnel and you sustain deep cuts, then personnel would be on the table. At this point in time, it’s not something that I can comment on, because I don’t know what those numbers are going to be.”

I take Joyce’s and Davis’ comments as essentially confirming the idea that the two officials with whom the Globe spoke are knowledgeable, and that they are indeed throwing around the 200 number as a worst-case scenario, if nothing else.

Now let’s take a look at what’s on the record in Van Sack’s Herald story today. Thomas Nee, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, tells her, “The mayor has assured me that while there are problems, there are no planned layoffs.” OK. But I don’t think anyone said there were at this point.

Joyce and Davis also pop up in the Herald story, and what they have to say is telling as well. Davis: “Somebody put this out to try to raise fear.” No doubt about it — it smacks of a political tactic. But does that mean it’s not true?

Joyce’s quote to the Herald is even more equivocal: “Any numbers are irresponsible to put out at this time, seeing as we have no idea what’s gonna happen with the state. There’s lots of employees at the Police Department. The mayor has made it clear that protecting the service to residents as much as possible is his first priority.”

Finally, the Globe’s Cramer today quotes an e-mail Davis sent out within his department following yesterday’s story: “At this time I want to be clear that no decision has been made to proceed with layoffs. Any suggestion to the contrary is premature.” That doesn’t contradict the Globe’s report that as many as 200 officers could lose their jobs, either.

So what is going on? It’s hard to say, but here’s one likely possibility. Two officials knowledgeable about discussions taking place at City Hall leaked to the Globe the possibility that as many as 200 police officers might face layoffs. More than anything, the leak was aimed at scaring Gov. Deval Patrick into ensuring sufficient local aid so that such cuts don’t have to be made.

Menino is angry — that’s a given. What we don’t know is if 1) he is genuinely angry because he didn’t want the layoff numbers to be leaked, at least not yet; 2) he is genuinely angry because the Globe’s emphasis on layoffs, rather than on Patrick’s options, puts more pressure on City Hall than he had intended; or 3) he is pretending to be angry but is actually pleased that he succeeded in floating this frightening trial balloon.

Because officials appear to be dialing back, that gives the Herald the opportunity to claim that the Globe got it wrong. The problem is that what officials are actually saying, on the record, does not contradict the notion that as many as 200 officers could be laid off if more money can’t be found.