By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Michael Prager singles out Media Nation as one of 64 notable Boston Web sites in this Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine. There are a lot of terrific local bloggers in his roundup, and a few I don’t know about, so I’ve got some checking out to do.
Prager somehow finds the space to poke fun at my prediction that the Red Sox would fall short in the postseason this year, in large measure because of Josh Beckett’s injury. Even though they, uh, fell short, in large measure because of Beckett’s injury.
I would have thought the Boston Globe got the letter “g” from the ancient Romans. But the Winchester Star reports that the head of the Griffin Museum of Photography believes the Globe was inspired by the logo it uses on its own promotional material.
Even though the museum has trademarked its own “g,” the Star’s item is refreshingly free of lawsuit threats.
Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker unleashes a high, hard one today destroying any pretense that Boston city councilor Chuck Turner and former state senator Dianne Wilkerson were set up by racists at the FBI.
Walker has a page-one interview with Ron Wilburn, better known as “Cooperating Witness,” the guy who lured Wilkerson and Turner into posing for those can’t-get-enough photos of them taking cash, allegedly in return for their help in getting Wilburn a liquor license for a bar he was trying to open.
Wilburn is not a racist FBI agent. Nor is he in trouble himself. Rather, he is a well-known, 69-year-old African-American businessman and longtime Wilkerson supporter who tells Walker that he’d had enough, and that he expects more city officials will be arrested before this is over.
I’d say he’d be in a position to know, wouldn’t you? After all, he knows who smiled for the camera. This excerpt from Walker’s piece is priceless:
“People do things,” Wilburn said. “There are decisions, there are choices, and there are consequences.” Asked if he was surprised that public officials would allegedly take money to help push a liquor license, he responded quickly. “Hell, no,” and let out a hearty laugh….
“You’re dealing with favoritism, cronyism, classism, and if you don’t have the right connections it’s very difficult to make things happen,” Wilburn said. “The average person that works hard and has a plan to get a license, it’s very hard for them to move through that system. And you find out if you have the right people pushing the buttons, things can happen fast.”
So much for Turner’s media-bashing performance yesterday outside City Hall.
Wilburn does say that the FBI remains its usual bumbling self. For one thing, he says he never told the FBI that he was tired of being shaken down by Wilkerson, as the FBI claims in its affidavit (PDF). For another, he’s upset that the FBI gave him so little cover that his identity quickly became known.
But, he adds, “I was not forced or coerced.”
And now Wilburn finds himself at the center of the biggest corruption scandal Massachusetts has seen in several decades.
File photo of Turner (cc) by stand4security and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
One of the great journalistic advances enabled by the Internet is that reporters can now link to the background information that underlies their work. All too often, though, news organizations don’t take advantage of it. They should, because it would enhance their credibility.
Case in point this morning is Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham’s call for an increased gasoline tax. (She’s right on the merits, by the way.) She bolsters her call, in part, with several statistical assertions, including this: “that whole ‘Taxachusetts’ thing is so 1978. Our state currently ranks 35th in the nation for taxes as a proportion of income.”
Columnists can’t attribute every fact, or their 600- to 700-word essays would double in size, and we’d all fall into a stupor from boredom. But they could link. There are no links in the online version of Abraham’s column, though.
The most widely circulated number I’ve seen is the Tax Foundation’s estimate that Massachusetts’ state and local tax burden as a percentage of personal income is 23rd. That’s the difference between Massachusetts being a low-tax state, as Abraham claims, or somewhere in the middle of the pack. And it’s something we’d all have to think about before pushing a gas-tax hike, or in deciding how large that hike should be.
Abraham, a former Boston Phoenix colleague of mine, is a fine reporter, and I know she could back up her assertion that Massachusetts is 35th, at least by someone’s measure. But the Internet enables all of us to show our work. The practice should be more routine than it is.
And kudos to Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby and the editorial-page crew. Jacoby’s column has been fully linked for quite some time. Whether you agree with him or not, linking makes him more a part of the online, multi-level conversation into which journalism is evolving.
The battle between the Boston Globe and GateHouse Media over the Globe’s hyperlocal Newton site isn’t really about the possibility that the Globe will grab more content from the Newton Tab than fair use — or fair play — should allow.
Rather, it’s over a more fundamental issue that will likely be a key to survival as struggling news organizations seek to reinvent themselves: Who will control the virtual front door to Newton, as well as to other cities and towns?
At first glance, Boston.com Newton strikes me as attractive, well-organized and generous. By generous, I mean the blog-like feature that fills the center well is a nice mix of content from the Globe, the Tab and local blogs. Just as important, the items give you just a bare taste of the story — if you have any interest at all, you’ll click through. So it seems likely that Boston.com will drive some traffic to the Tab, not to mention the blogs.
By combining content from different sources so seamlessly, Boston.com, at least for the moment, has leapfrogged ahead of the Tab’s Wicked Local Newton site. GateHouse’s Wicked Local sites, which debuted in Plymouth a few years ago, before there even was a GateHouse, were supposed to combine content from the local GateHouse paper with blogs and citizen journalism in order to be a one-stop community guide. That never quite panned out, although Wicked Local is stronger in some towns than in others.
Probably the least generous item on Boston.com Newton right now involves my friends at the Boston Phoenix. There’s a big photo of a plate of food, along with a headline that says, “Foodies: Phoenix reviews Hotel Indigo.” Follow the link, though, and you find a Globe blog item that summarizes the Phoenix review. You have to click again to get to the actual Phoenix review.
There’s a lot more to Boston.com Newton than the news blog. Readers can contribute to a wiki, discuss issues and send in photos. There’s a calendar of events, real-estate listings and local school data.
At the moment, at least, there is no RSS feed. That may change, though the site strikes me as ill-suited to reading via RSS, as it consists of many little items that require you to go off-site if you want to learn more. (Boston.com’s director of community publishing, Teresa Hanafin, makes exactly that point in a comment to the Garden City blog. And don’t miss GateHouse editor Greg Reibman’s hilarious retort.)
The Globe and GateHouse face different challenges.
The Globe, like all big regional papers, is caught in a squeeze. People who are interested mainly in national and international news are now getting it elsewhere, online. And though it’s often said that local is the future, it’s difficult for a big paper that covers all of Eastern Massachusetts to become local enough. Boston.com Newton, which is clearly intended as a prototype (note the “yourtown” in the URL), is an interesting way of overcoming the disadvantage of being a regional paper — and of attracting local advertisers who could never afford to buy space in the paper.
GateHouse, which publishes about 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts, is all about local, so it doesn’t have to reorient its mission. But its natural advantage in print doesn’t necessarily hold up online, because players as large as the Globe and as small as a few passionate activists can play on the same turf.
What’s going on in Newton will tell us a lot about the future of the newspaper business over the next few years. I hope both sides find a way to win.
Boston.com’s Newton site debuted today. I’ll try to offer at least a quick assessment tomorrow. At first glance, it strikes me as an attractive mix of content from the Boston Globe, GateHouse Media’s Newton Tab, the Boston Phoenix and local bloggers.
Meanwhile, take a look at this video, posted on Boston.com’s Green Blog. Be sure to watch the closing credits. Pretty aggressive, don’t you think?
More: It’s only fair to point out it’s virtually impossible to learn that the video is from the GateHouse’s Belmont Citizen-Herald unless you watch all the way to the end. Even if you go directly to the YouTube site, you’ll find nothing unless you click on “more info.” And even then, it’s pretty cryptic.
So I can believe it’s an innocent mistake — but one that should be corrected soon.
Still more: Now fixed — see fourth paragraph.
It’s a little after 11:30 a.m. So I guess we can now officially say that the Boston Globe has delayed the unveiling of its hyperlocal Newton site, the subject of much speculation and angst this week.
I would imagine the delay is due to some tech snafu, though it’s possible it’s being retooled in response to the concerns raised by GateHouse Media, owner of the Newton Tab.
Though I’ve been among those who’ve been wondering if the Globe’s plans might unfairly make use of the Tab’s content, I also expect that the Globe folks are smart enough not to go too far. If there’s a blog on the Globe site that links to some Tab content, well, you can’t stop the Globe from blogging. Nor should you.
If the Globe refrains from linking to every story in the Tab; and if, when it does, it does so in such a way that you feel as though you need to click on through, then everyone should be happy.
Update: Media Nation reader G.R. tells me that the the site now says the Newton page will debut on Monday.
That’s what Boston Globe executives have been telling union members, according to this story by Boston Business Journal reporter Craig Douglas. That number comes from the summer, before the paper reorganized its sections and saved itself some money. On the other hand, the economy is much worse now than it was then.
As for the possibility that the Globe will soon be sold, Douglas offers this:
“Who wants to catch a falling safe?” said a source familiar with the Globe’s financials. “Nobody’s going to fund a $50 million hole in the ground.”
A falling safe with no money in it, apparently.
Bad as things may be, so far the New York Times Co. has spared Boston the chaos that has rocked other large regional papers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. At some point, though, something’s got to give. (Via Universal Hub.)
A potential battle is shaping up over the Boston Globe’s plans to start a hyperlocal Newton site on Boston.com that could feature, among other things, content from the weekly Newton Tab.
“This is just the latest move from the 800-pound gorilla in the market, which is currently weighing in at 200 pounds,” GateHouse Media New England publisher Kirk Davis tells Amy Derjue at Boston Daily. GateHouse, a national chain based in suburban Rochester, N.Y., owns about 100 newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts, including the Tab.
Davis adds: “We’re not surprised the Globe would like to play in our sandbox.”
Although it’s not entirely clear what the Globe’s got planned for Newton, a report by Chuck Tanowitz suggests that the paper will display headlines and summaries from Newton blogs and from the Tab.
It’s possible that the Globe will make everyone a winner by driving traffic to those sites. But it’s also possible that, for some stories, the headline and summary is all most people are looking for, which means they’ll stay at Boston.com. The stakes are high: both the Globe and GateHouse are trying to sell advertising on their local Web sites.
Depending on how the Globe proceeds, it could find itself facing copyright-infringement issues on two grounds:
When I wrote about this over the weekend, GateHouse’s director of digital publishing, Howard Owens, posted a comment in which he said, “I think we need to have a little chat with Bob Kempf.” Kempf, now a top executive with Boston.com, was a key player in developing GateHouse’s Wicked Local sites.
While the GateHouse folks appear to be gearing up for battle, we haven’t heard much from Boston.com. On Sunday the Globe’s regional editor, David Dahl, sent an e-mail to let me know the Globe would be making an official announcement later this week. I told him I’d welcome comments from him and other Globe executives. So far, though, they’re maintaining their silence.
For those of us who care about local journalism, it’s painful to watch two financially challenged giants battling over a shrinking advertising base. On Monday the Globe’s parent company, the New York Times Co., reported that the value of its New England holdings continues to plummet. GateHouse was recently delisted by the New York Stock Exchange, although its revenues appear to be holding up reasonably well.
It’s possible that once the Globe announces its plans, we’ll see that this is much ado about nothing. But this bears watching.
Photo of Newton City Hall and the Newton Free Library (cc) by the Newton Free Library and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Chuck Tanowitz reports that the Boston Globe’s Boston.com affiliate is about to unveil a series of hyperlocal Web sites, including one for Newton.
The Globe doesn’t intend to provide any original content. Rather, each hyperlocal site will serve as a guide to existing material. In the case of Newton, that means, among other things, stories from GateHouse Media’s Newton Tab.
This strikes me as hyperlocal journalism on the ultracheap. I understand the purpose: to come up with a more affordable advertising platform for local businesses. And I understand that the Globe is hurting financially; Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix detailed the latest round of cuts on Thursday.
But think of the value that Boston.com could add by hiring a mobile journalist to cover three or four towns, uploading blog posts, photos and videos throughout the day.
Tanowitz notes that there may be an intellectual-property issue that needs to be resolved, too. Indeed. Yes, the Globe could drive traffic to the Tab by publishing a headline, a summary and a link. But what if that’s all some readers are looking for, so they never follow the link? GateHouse publishes its content online under a Creative Commons license that allows for noncommercial re-use. But that certainly wouldn’t cover the Globe.
Financially challenged news organizations are exploring new ways to survive. My own sense is the ones that will pay off are those that aren’t solely about making money, but that provide a real service for readers as well. At least based on Tanowitz’s account, this sounds rather more cynical than that. But we’ll see. (Via Universal Hub.)