Brian McGrory – Page 11

Six takeaways from BoMag’s big John Henry profile

This article was posted earlier at WGBH News.

The local media community has been buzzing since Tuesday, when Jason Schwartz’s 5,000-word Boston magazine article on the state of The Boston Globe under John Henry went live. The piece is chock-full of goodies, and you should read the whole thing. As you do, here are six takeaways for you to ponder.

1. It could have been a lot worse. Although we knew that Douglas Manchester, the right-wing hotel magnate who bought the San Diego Union-Tribune and unforgivably renamed it U-T San Diego, was interested in buying the Globe (he even threatened legal action after it was sold to Henry instead of him), it is nevertheless chilling to read Schwartz’s account of Manchester’s coming in and kicking the tires after the New York Times Co. put the Globe up for sale.

As I wrote in my book about online community journalism, “The Wired City,” Manchester has been described as “a minor-league Donald Trump” who uses his newspaper to promote his business interests as well as conservative causes such as his opposition to same-sex marriage.

In the Boston magazine article, Globe editor Brian McGrory tells Schwartz that “some potential bidders” — and by “some,” it’s clear that he’s including Manchester — would have “cut the living bejesus out of the place.” And Schwartz includes this delicious anecdote: “During the U-T San Diego presentation, people who were in the room attest, Manchester at one point instructed McGrory to call him ‘Papa Doug.’ McGrory did not call him Papa Doug.”

2. It’s official: The Globe is moving. Even before Henry won the Globe sweepstakes, it was clear that the next owner was likely to sell the paper’s 1950s-era Dorchester headquarters for redevelopment — a move that would presumably recoup virtually all of the $70 million Henry paid to purchase the Globe, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester and related properties.

Henry has now made it official, telling Schwartz his goal is to move the paper to a smaller space with better access “in the heart of the city.”

Of course, the Globe still needs a printing press, not only for its own use but for other publications it prints under contract — including its tabloid rival, the Boston Herald. One likely possibility: the Telegram & Gazette’s printing facility in Millbury, which Henry said he was keeping when he announced recently that he was putting the T&G up for sale.

3. The two-website strategy needs an overhaul. Since the fall of 2011, the Globe has offered two websites: BostonGlobe.com, a paid-subscription site offering Globe content and a few extras; and Boston.com, a free site that’s been around since the mid-1990s.

The problem, Schwartz tells us, is that Boston.com, stripped of most Globe content, has been struggling, while BostonGlobe.com hasn’t produced as much revenue as Globe executives would like. The next step: a looser paywall for BostonGlobe.com to encourage more social sharing and a mobile-first Boston.com that’s still in development. (Joshua Benton has more at the Nieman Journalism Lab.)

4. Henry wants to reinvent the newspaper business. This week’s New Yorker includes a rather dispiriting account by George Packer of how Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com took over the book business. Anyone looking for signs that Bezos has a clear idea of what to do with The Washington Post, which he agreed to buy just days after Henry’s purchase of the Globe was announced, will come away disappointed — although he is, to his credit, spending money on the Post.

By contrast, Henry comes across as energized, bristling with ideas — peppering Brian McGrory with emails at all hours of the night — and getting ready to unveil new products, such as standalone websites that cover religion, innovation and other topics.

“I wanted to be a part of finding the solution for the Globe and newspapers in general,” Henry tells Schwartz. “I feel my mortality. I don’t want to waste any of the time I have left, and I felt this was a cause worth fighting for.”

5. Mike Barnicle is lurking off stage. If you were worried when you spotted Barnicle with Henry during the World Series, well, you were right to be. Barnicle, who left the Globe in 1998 after a career full of ethical missteps finally caught up with him, really does have Henry’s ear — and even supplied him with the email address of John Allen, the National Catholic Reporter journalist whom Henry successfully talked into coming to the Globe.

The old reprobate hasn’t changed, either, supplying Schwartz with a great quote that artfully combines religion with an F-bomb.

6. The executive team is now in place. By accepting publisher Christopher Mayer’s resignation, naming himself publisher and bringing in former Hill Holliday president Mike Sheehan as his chief executive officer, Henry has completed a series of moves that have remade the top layer of Globe leadership. McGrory is staying. Andrew Perlmutter, who made his bones at Atlantic Media and The Daily Beast, has replaced Jeff Moriarty, who left for a job in Britain, as the Globe’s chief digital strategist.

That’s not to rule out further change, especially if Henry’s goals aren’t met. But the sense you get is that Henry — to use a Red Sox analogy — now has his Larry Lucchino/Ben Cherington/John Farrell triumvirate in place. No doubt they all realize that winning a world championship is a lot easier than finding a profitable way forward for the beleaguered newspaper business.

Globe editor McGrory gets vote of confidence

The Boston Business Journal has an interview with new Boston Globe chief executive Mike Sheehan, who tells Jon Chesto that he’s a fan of Globe editor Brian McGrory.

So it would appear that McGrory’s job is safe — as it should be. He’s done a terrific job in the year-plus he’s served since taking over for Marty Baron, now the top editor at The Washington Post.

Conflicts of interest and the new media moguls

Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron has rejected a demand by a group of left-leaning activists that the Post more fully disclose Amazon.com’s business dealings with the CIA.

Nearly 33,000 people have signed an online petition put together by RootsAction, headed by longtime media critic Norman Solomon, to call attention to Amazon’s $600 million contract to provide cloud services to the CIA. The Post’s owner is Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon. Here is the text of the petition:

A basic principle of journalism is to acknowledge when the owner of a media outlet has a major financial relationship with the subject of coverage. We strongly urge the Washington Post to be fully candid with its readers about the fact that the newspaper’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of Amazon which recently landed a $600 million contract with the CIA. The Washington Post’s coverage of the CIA should include full disclosure that the sole owner of the Post is also the main owner of Amazon — and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA.

Baron, in his response, argues that the Post “has among the strictest ethics policies in the field of journalism, and we vigorously enforce it. We have routinely disclosed corporate conflicts when they were directly relevant to our coverage. We reported on Amazon’s pursuit of CIA contracts in our coverage of plans by Jeff Bezos to purchase The Washington Post.” Baron goes on to point out that the Post has been a leader in reporting on the National Security Agency and on the CIA’s involvement in the Colombian government’s fight against an insurgency, writing:

You can be sure neither the NSA nor the CIA has been pleased with publication of their secrets.

Neither Amazon nor Jeff Bezos was involved, nor ever will be involved, in our coverage of the intelligence community.

(Note: I first learned about the petition from Greg Mitchell’s blog, Pressing Issues.)

The exchange between RootsAction and Baron highlights the conflicts of interest that can arise when wealthy individuals such as Bezos buy in to the newspaper business. It’s a situation that affects The Boston Globe as well, as its editors juggle the lower-stakes conflict between John Henry’s ownership of the Globe and his majority interest in the Red Sox.

Baron himself is not unfamiliar with the Red Sox conflict, as the New York Times Co., from whom Henry bought the Globe, owned a minority stake in the team and in New England Sports Network, which carries Red Sox games, during most of Baron’s years as Globe editor.

The way the Globe handled it during those years was just about right: don’t disclose in sports stories, but disclose whenever the paper covers the Red Sox as a business. Current Globe editor Brian McGrory has insisted that Henry will not interfere. Henry, in a speech before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce last week, said he would not breech the wall of separation between the Globe’s news operations and its business interests.

Of course, it’s not as though the era in which news organizations were typically owned by publicly traded corporations was free of such conflicts. (The Times Co., after all, is a publicly traded corporation, though the Sulzberger family calls the shots.) Media critic Danny Schechter noted in his book “Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception” that MSNBC — then in its pre-liberal phase — was a cheerleader for the war in Iraq even as its then-corporate parent, General Electric Co., was a leading military contractor.

But the rise of a new breed of media moguls such as Bezos, Henry and Aaron Kushner of the Orange County Register, who buy their way into the news business with their own personal wealth, seems likely to bring the issue of conflicts to the fore. The same is true of a media entrepreneur of a different sort — eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who is launching an online venture called First Look Media with (among others) the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.

It is the very fact that these individuals have been successful that makes them such intriguing players in the quest to reinvent the news business. But disclosure and non-interference need to be at the forefront of their ethical codes.

Chris Mayer to step down as Globe publisher

Boston Globe publisher Chris Mayer was his usual affable self when we exchanged New Year’s greetings this morning at the Mandarin Oriental hotel. He knew something very few others knew — that he would be announcing his departure before the end of the day. But no doubt he’d come to terms with that as early as last August, when Red Sox principal owner John Henry agreed to buy the paper from the New York Times Co. for $70 million.

Mayer, like me and several hundred other people, had turned out for a breakfast speech by Henry before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. The soft-spoken Henry didn’t make much news. He talked about his soccer and baseball teams for so long that I wondered if he would ever get around to his newspaper. When he did, it was to say he planned to apply the same formula to turning around the Globe that he did to reviving the Red Sox — hard work and smarts, leavened, he hoped, with good fortune.

“No one has a magic bullet for newspapers,” Henry said. “We have to get it right at the Globe, and we’ll work as hard as we need to do to do that.” And though he talked about boosting the paper’s coverage in areas in which it excels — particularly in local coverage — he conceded that it meant cutting back in some other, unspecified areas as well.

If it’s smarts that Henry is looking for, Mayer has plenty. A longtime Globe veteran who got the top job in 2010 following a string of Times Co. executives, Mayer was a popular choice both inside and outside 135 Morrissey Blvd. Moreover, he deserves much of the credit for some key business-side decisions made in recent years, such as raising the price of the print edition and introducing the paper’s two-website strategy — the subscription-based BostonGlobe.com and the free Boston.com.

Still, it’s hardly a surprise that the new owner would want to pick his own publisher. Last week came word that the Globe was hiring Hill Holliday chairman Mike Sheehan as an advertising consultant, a move that seemed more Henry than Mayer. And this morning Henry announced that he was seeking a chief operating officer to run the Globe — a person who, one might assume, could be handed the title of publisher as well. (Craig Douglas of the Boston Business Journal covers Mayer’s departure here and Henry’s talk here.)

With Mayer leaving, it’s time to start wondering how committed Henry is to keeping Brian McGrory as the Globe’s editor. Owners hire publishers; publishers hire editors. And Mayer’s successor may want to put his or her mark on the paper by choosing the Globe’s top news executive. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could have done a better job than McGrory, who oversaw the paper’s Pulitzer-caliber coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings as well as important enterprise projects. But it’s hard to imagine how Mayer could have done a better job, either.

The message today, in case anyone had missed it before, is that Henry didn’t inherit the Globe — he bought it. And though he seems sincere in talking about the paper as a public trust, he’s making it clear that he intends to run it as he sees fit.

A big hire for the Globe — and an intriguing idea

This may not be an exact analogy, but it looks like The Boston Globe is thinking in terms of networks. The paper just announced a major hire — John Allen, who covers the Vatican for the National Catholic Reporter. And the press release includes this intriguing quote from Globe editor Brian McGrory:

He will be a correspondent first and foremost. He will be an analyst on all things Catholic. He will also help us explore the very real possibility of launching a free-standing publication devoted to Catholicism, drawing in other correspondents and leading voices from near and far.

Allowing entrepreneurial journalists like Ezra Klein to operate semi-independently inside a traditional news operation like The Washington Post is one way to embrace the network. Another way is to do what the Globe is considering — treat the news organization as a hub, with various spokes feeding into it.

Some pressing questions for John Henry

This commentary was published earlier at The Huffington Post and at WGBH News .

The speculation had been building since Wednesday, when The Boston Globe reported that Red Sox principal owner John Henry had restructured his bid to buy the paper.

It reached a peak on Friday afternoon, when legendary baseball reporter Peter Gammons — himself a Globe alumnus — posted a one-line item on his new website, Gammons Daily: “A source says the New York Times Corporation has chosen John Henry as the new owner of the Boston Globe.”

Confirmation came early today, as the Globe and The New York Times each reported that Henry had purchased the Globe and its associated properties — most prominently Boston.com and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester — for $70 million. The Globe’s story led page one, whereas the Times’ version apparently didn’t even make it into today’s print edition.

The sale price represents a huge comedown from 1993, when the Times Co. purchased the Globe for $1.1 billion, half the company’s stock-market valuation at that time. As if by way of justification, the Times’ report on the Henry deal runs through several other pennies-on-the-dollar sales of major metropolitan newspapers in recent years, including those of Philadelphia’s daily papers, the Inquirer and the Daily News, as well as The Tampa Tribune.

Henry’s winning bid also thwarts an attempted comeback by members of the Taylor family, who owned the Globe almost from its founding in 1872 until the 1993 sale.

Among the would-be buyers was a group that included Stephen Taylor, a former executive vice president of the Globe, and Benjamin Taylor, a former publisher. A lot of people in Boston were rooting for the Taylors. But the money they got for selling the paper 20 years ago was split among dozens of family members, and their bid to repurchase the Globe was widely viewed as undercapitalized. You have to assume that if they had the money, the Times Co. would have sold it to them already — or in 2009, when the Globe was first put up for sale.

The ascension of a wealthy local owner may represent the best possible outcome for the Globe. Nevertheless there are questions Henry will have to answer soon — starting with the fate of publisher Christopher Mayer and editor Brian McGrory, well-liked Globe veterans who generally get high marks for the way they’re running the paper. Will they stay? Or will Henry bring in his own people?

Here are a few other questions for Henry.

1. Will he seek to improve the Globe’s bottom line by investing — or by cutting? Unlike newspaper owners who’ve financed their acquisition by taking on debt that they then have to pay off by slashing the newsroom, Henry has the luxury of being able to do anything he wants.

Although paid print circulation and advertising revenue have been dropping, the Globe is believed to be marginally profitable — a considerable improvement over 2009, when the Times Co. actually threatened to close the paper over mounting losses. The Globe today also has about 360 full-time editorial employees. That’s quite a drop from the 550 or so the Globe employed a dozen years ago, as my WGBH colleague Adam Reilly recently reported in Boston magazine, but it’s still enough to make the paper by far the largest news organization in Eastern Massachusetts. The Globe may no longer be the 800-pound gorilla, but a 600-pound gorilla can still accomplish a lot.

My guess (and hope) is that Henry will pursue a growth strategy, and that he has a healthy enough ego to believe he can succeed where others have failed. Perhaps he’ll emulate Aaron Kushner, the young greeting-card executive (and onetime Globe bidder) who’s attracted attention with his attempts to turn around the Orange County Register by hiring journalists and expanding coverage.

One aspect of Kushner’s stewardship I hope Henry doesn’t emulate is Kushner’s emphasis on print. The Globe has taken an innovative approach to the Internet with its two-website strategy (Boston.com, which is free, exists alongside the paid BostonGlobe.com site), a streaming music station, RadioBDC, and online coverage of Boston’s suburbs, neighborhoods and colleges through its Your Town and Your Campus sites. (Disclosure: Our students at Northeastern University contribute to Your Town and Your Campus as well as to other parts of the Globe.)

Henry could be a hero to the newspaper business if he can figure out new digital strategies. A print-first orientation would be a major step backwards.

2. What happens to the Globe’s Boston headquarters? The Globe occupies prime Dorchester real estate near the University of Massachusetts and the JFK Library, leading to considerable speculation that the next owner might want to sell the property and move the paper. Indeed, the Globe’s land and physical assets might be worth the $70 million purchase price all by themselves.

The challenge is that the Globe’s massive printing presses would have to be moved. And the paper has been able to build a nice business for itself by printing a number of other papers, including the city’s second daily, the Boston Herald, as well as some suburban papers.

Still, it would make all kinds of sense to move the presses to a low-cost exurban location and transfer the newsroom and business operations to a smaller space closer to the downtown.

3. How will the Globe cover the Red Sox? The jokes have already started (yes, I’ve done my best to help) about Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy, a notoriously negative presence who wrote former Red Sox manager Terry Francona’s trash-and-burn memoir Francona: The Red Sox Years, which is highly critical of the Red Sox’ ownership.

In fact, the Globe and the Red Sox have been down this road before. Until a few years ago, the Times Co. was a part-owner of New England Sports Network (NESN), which broadcasts Red Sox and Bruins games and whose majority owner is the Red Sox. Henry’s sole ownership of the Globe, though, would represent full immersion in a way that the NESN deal did not.

The real issue is not how the Globe covers the Red Sox as a baseball team but rather how it manages the tricky task of reporting on a major business and civic organization that’s run by the paper’s new owner.

Earlier this year the Globe published a tough report on a sweetheart licensing deal the Red Sox have with the city to use the streets around Fenway Park before games — making “tens of millions of dollars” while “paying a tiny fraction in licensing fees.” (Further disclosure: Some of the Globe’s reporting was done in partnership with Northeastern’s Initiative for Investigative Reporting.)

I’d expect to see tough scrutiny of how the Globe covers the Red Sox in the months and years ahead. No doubt the Herald and other rival news organizations will pay close attention to the relationship. The problem isn’t so much that the Globe is likely to go into the tank for the Red Sox (it isn’t), but that it’s really in a no-win situation.

The answers to those and other questions will emerge in the weeks and months ahead. What matters today is that our largest and most important news organization has been purchased by a local businessman with deep pockets and a track record as a good corporate citizen. That’s good news not just for the Globe, but for all of us.

Photo (cc) by Dan Kennedy.

Globe’s Leung to write a business column

Boston Globe business editor Shirley Leung is stepping aside in order to become a twice-a-week business columnist, according to the Globe’s Beth Healy. Editor Brian McGrory’s email to the staff follows.

I am delighted to announce that Shirley Leung has decided to become a business columnist for the Globe, giving our readers a fresh, creative, intelligent voice on matters of industry and the economy twice each week.

This is a huge development. You know as I know that Shirley literally exudes ideas, her hands always fluttering as if she’s trying to give them air. She recently became frustrated that people weren’t giving out their email addresses quite so readily, so we quickly had a front page story, the most widely read of the day. She heard about an auction of parking spaces in the Back Bay, and sure enough, the page one story that resulted — $560K for a pair of weed-strewn tandem spaces — was the talk of the town.

Now she’ll take her ideas, or at least many of them, and put them under her own name, presented in what I know will be a personable and blunt column-writing style, brimming with her unique experience and exhaustive reporting.

I’ve made no secret of my belief that good columnists are utterly critical to our mission, and have expressed my desire to add even more strong voices to our daily report to complement the ones we already have. The Business pages have been a priority, and as I looked near and far, I came to realize that the absolute best candidate might have been sitting in the editor’s chair — or more accurately, at home with a newborn during a maternity leave.

Shirley’s background is tailor-made for such a pivotal role. She was on a brief tryout at the Globe in 1995 when she was handed a tip scrawled on a piece of paper about a former state representative who became homeless after losing a fortune in the real estate crash. Others might have dismissed it. Shirley camped out in the guy’s hometown, got him, and wrote a Sunday front page story. She was, of course, hired. Old friend Caleb Solomon, then running the Boston bureau of the Wall Street Journal, lured Shirley away in 1997 to cover the wrangling over the Seaport District and the proposal to build a convention center. Shirley continued on to the Journal’s Los Angeles and Chicago bureaus, working a variety of beats from the California economy to fast food. Caleb, Caleb, as the Globe’s business editor, lured her back to Boston in 2004 as the Sunday business editor.

By 2007, Shirley was the business editor, soon overseeing coverage of the Great Recession, the housing bust, scary fluctuations in the stock markets, the rise of the Seaport, the $700 billion bank bailout, chronic unemployment, and the stagnant economy. She has been nothing shy of masterful at working with veteran reporters, spotting great talent, and developing sophisticated ideas in the throes of the ongoing economic storm. Then add in the stellar projects on Upper Crust, mislabeled fish, illegal workers, and child pornography, some of them garnering major national awards. That being not quite enough, Shirley built “Top Places to Work” into a profitable franchise and launched the boston.com innovation blog “The Hive,” which we are expanding.

On the personal side, Shirley is 41, married to Paul Lim, an editor at Money magazine, and they have two sons, Eli, who is 2-and-a-half, and Evan, who is six months.

Shirley will begin her column next week, her days being Wednesday and Friday. I couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come. Make sure you give her your congratulations. At the same time, be warned. Like any good columnist, Shirley will undoubtedly take the opportunity to shake you down for ideas.

Chris Chinlund and I will get to work selecting the next business editor. I have every expectation the position will stay in-house, and don’t expect the process will be a long one.

In latest circulation numbers, the difference is digital

Print circulation at the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald continues to slide, according to the latest data from the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations).

But the Globe’s success in selling digital subscriptions has led to a healthy 8.9 percent increase in its Monday-through-Friday paid circulation and a 4.6 percent increase on Sundays. The Herald’s paid circulation, by contrast, is down 11.6 percent on weekdays and 10.8 percent on Sundays.

The numbers are based on a comparison between the six-month periods ending on March 30, 2013, and March 30, 2012. Here are the topline figures:

Boston Globe: Weekdays, 245,572, up from 225,482. Sundays, 382,452, up from 365,512.
Boston Herald: Weekdays, 95,929, down from 108,548. Sundays, 73,043, down from 81,925.

The underlying totals tell an interesting story. The Globe’s weekday print circulation dropped from 195,947 to 172,048 (down 12.2 percent), and its Sunday print edition fell from 343,194 to 309,771 (down 9.7 percent). But the number of readers who use the Globe’s paid website, BostonGlobe.com, rose from 19,313 to 60,134 on weekdays and from 19,599 to 60,301 on Sundays.

(Note: Despite the seeming precision of these figures, there may be some minor discrepancies. The 2012 totals in the just-released “Newspaper Snapshot” do not perfectly match the audit reports posted elsewhere on the AAM site.)

As I’ve explained before, the actual number of digital subscribers is about half that reported by the AAM, since its totals include print subscribers who also make regular use of BostonGlobe.com, which home-delivery customers can access for free.

The Globe totals also include readers who access the ePaper — that is, the digital replica edition, which looks exactly like the print edition. A year ago, the ePaper was just barely getting off the ground. Now it accounts for 13,390 paid weekday subscriptions and another 12,380 on Sundays.

The challenge for the Herald is that, as readers lose the print habit, the paper is not offering a compelling paid digital alternative. The Herald has free smartphone and tablet apps, and, like the Globe, it posts a paid replica edition (the Electronic Edition), which is how we do most of our Herald-reading at Media Nation.

But replica editions just aren’t that compelling. Currently the Herald’s e-edition attracts 9,810 paying customers on weekdays and 1,216 on Sundays.

BostonHerald.com remains free. In the past, publisher Pat Purcell has dropped hints that that could change. Certainly it would surprise no one if that change came sooner rather than later.

Boosting digital subscriptions. The Globe’s free website, Boston.com, began running brief summaries of Globe stories today in an attempt to boost digital subscriptions.

The move had been expected for some time, as editor Brian McGrory talked about it in an interview with Andrew Beaujon of Poynter.org in February. But the timing could prove to be interesting, since it follows the Globe’s widely praised coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings.

The paper lowered the paywall during the worst of it, which, as Seth Fiegerman reported for Mashable, resulted in an enormous increase in Web traffic. It bears watching to see how many of those readers can now be converted into paying customers.

Masthead changes announced at the Boston Globe

Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory announced several changes to the masthead earlier today. The most significant: managing editor Caleb Solomon will become managing editor for digital to “oversee our rapidly evolving websites and portable platforms,” as McGrory put it in a memo to the newsroom.

Solomon was thought by some to be in the mix as a possible successor to Marty Baron when Baron left the paper late last year to take charge of the Washington Post. The position went to McGrory instead.

With Solomon shifting to the online side, Christine Chinlund will move up from deputy managing editor for news operations to managing editor for news. McGrory writes that Chinlund was his editor when he was the Globe’s national reporter — “though I don’t think she remembers, which, admittedly, sort of hurts.”

Getting a title enhancement is Mark Morrow, deputy managing editor for Sunday and projects, who will become senior deputy managing editor.

Combined with McGrory’s recent changes at Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com, it seems pretty clear that he’s determined to make his mark even as the New York Times Co. shops the paper around to prospective buyers. It calls to mind Baron’s steady hand during the tumult of 2009, when the Times Co. threatened to close the Globe, demanded $20 million in concessions from the paper’s unions, and then put it up for sale only to pull it back.

The full text of McGrory’s memo, a copy of which was sent to Media Nation earlier today, is below.

I’m excited to share some changes in the newsroom leadership.

I’ve asked Caleb Solomon, the managing editor for the past five years, to switch his focus to our digital operation and oversee our rapidly evolving websites and portable platforms as managing editor/digital. He has enthusiastically agreed.

This is an important role, vital actually, to the way our work is read and viewed by the region and the world, and key to our future in every imaginable way. The Globe has for years been at the vanguard of the digital news revolution, first with boston.com in 1995, and then with the introduction of Bostonglobe.com and the two brands web strategy in 2011. Now we’re in the process of sorting out the sites, untangling the content, and creating stronger identities that can mutually thrive with different revenue models. Caleb will shepherd this from the newsroom perspective. He’ll be our eyes and ears in the Nieman and MIT media labs, as well as in our own, and search high and low for what works and what doesn’t. Caleb, having arrived here from the Wall Street Journal in 2003, had an extraordinarily successful run as the Globe’s business editor. We worked together when he was the deputy managing editor for enterprise, and I worked for him when he ascended to be managing editor. My admiration has grown with every passing year and job. Caleb possesses the talent to see long distances and the innate ability to get things done. To that end, he has always viewed digital as the future, evidenced when he created a digital-first philosophy in business that served as a model for the rest of the paper. As managing editor, he was the hands-on editorial force behind the advent of Bostonglobe.com, which has won every accolade under the sun, as well as our highly decorated video operation. He’s already been more indispensable than merely valuable in my short time in this role, and that will flourish in his new position.

I’ve asked Chris Chinlund, the deputy managing editor for news operations, to assume the role of managing editor/news. There’s no one I could imagine more up to this critical job, with impeccable news judgment, journalism values of the highest order, and hands-on editing skills that are on sharp display night in, night out. There’s also the matter of her experience. Investigative background? Chris was part of the Spotlight Team that exposed Whitey Bulger as an FBI informant. National politics? She covered the 1988 presidential campaign as a reporter and was the editor overseeing the 1992 race. World news? She served as foreign editor after the September 11 attacks. She’s also been a New England reporter, suburban reporter and editor, and assistant health science editor in her 30 years at the Globe. She worked a memorable stint as our final ombudsman, and was the editor of the dearly departed Focus section. She was my editor when I was a national reporter way back when, though I don’t think she remembers, which, admittedly, sort of hurts. Chris worked in my shop when I was Metro editor, we worked alongside each other when she became deputy managing editor, and she was my editor again during a second stint as a columnist. All of this gives me pretty good perspective on what we’ll be getting as she ascends to the position of managing editor, and what we’ll be getting is nothing shy of great. She’s also, as each and every person in here well knows, a world class colleague.

I’ve asked Mark Morrow, the deputy managing editor for Sunday and projects, to become a senior deputy managing editor, keeping a similar portfolio. With this new status, Mark has fresh license to interject his trademark creativity across an even broader spectrum of Globe work. As we all know and appreciate, Mark has been the senior editor on just about every distinctive Globe project for the past decade, including the fallout to our Pulitzer Prize winning Catholic Church series, the Partners Health Care Spotlight series, the Probation Department series, and most recently, the 68 Blocks narrative and the Immigration series. He has also overseen and edited two major Globe books, on Mitt Romney and Whitey Bulger, both to critical acclaim. Name it, Mark has delved deeply into it, with wordsmithing skills and perspective that are unrivaled in my time at the Globe. Add to this the fact that week after week, Mark oversees the critical Sunday paper, the showcase for some of our best work. I have already sought Mark’s wise counsel on a constant basis and tapped into his steady stream of ideas, and that will only increase in this enhanced position.

It’s a real tribute to the breadth and depth of this newsroom that journalists of this caliber are ready-made for the task ahead. I’m excited about these changes, very much so. You should be as well. They are effective immediately. Now let’s continue the great and important work of the Globe.

Brian

Boston Globe fun-with-numbers edition

Ken Doctor’s analysis of the “newsonomics” of The Boston Globe’s pending sale continues to yield rich insights. One part I find particularly interesting is his estimate that the Globe’s natural ceiling for digital subscriptions is probably in the vicinity of 105,000. It’s currently 28,000.

(As I’ve explained before, the auditors also give the Globe credit for seven-day print subscribers who access BostonGlobe.com at least once a week, which means the paper currently reports having 50,000 digital subscribers.)

The Globe charges about $15 a month for digital subscriptions, with or without home delivery of the Sunday print edition. Yes, there are a lot of discounts in there, but just as a quick math exercise, let’s pretend there aren’t. So:

105,000 x $15 x 12 months = $18.9 million per year

If you figure an average of $100,000 in pay and benefits per employee, that adds up to 189 people — about half of the paper’s 365 journalists.

I’m leaving out a lot of expenses (including, most significantly, non-newsroom employees), but I’m also leaving out other revenue sources — mainly seven-day print circulation, print and online advertising, and commercial printing of other newspapers, including the Boston Herald, currently issuing daily predictions of the Globe’s imminent demise.

It also seems to me that one underexploited opportunity is online advertising at BostonGlobe.com. Yes, it’s nice to give paying customers a clean, uncluttered reading experience. But surely there could be a few more ads without devolving into flashing banners, pop-up windows and stuff floating across the page. I like ads. “Ads are content,” as Howard Owens says. They contribute to a sense of community and vitality.

Globe spokeswoman Ellen Clegg recently told me that the Globe’s total number of unique monthly visitors is 7.5 million — 6 million at the free Boston.com site and 1.5 million at BostonGlobe.com. I would think you could sell a decent amount of advertising to an online audience of 1.5 million. Currently, though, when you read articles you can often find white space where an ad ought to be.

One caution is the Globe’s new policy of limiting social sharing on BostonGlobe.com and cutting the amount of Globe content on Boston.com. Editor Brian McGrory has said that the goal is to boost digital subscriptions. The danger is that the restrictions:

may fail to turn all but a tiny handful non-subscribers into paying customers;
may hurt Boston.com’s traffic by making the site less enticing; and
may (actually, will) reduce unpaid traffic to BostonGlobe.com, thus making it a less desirable platform for advertisers.

Fortunately, the restrictions can be tightened or eased depending on whether or not they are working as intended.