Tag: Christian Science Monitor

George Merry’s local legacy

George Merry, a longtime political reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, who died on July 1, is someone I knew slightly. We were both graduates of Northeastern University, and George often attended events organized by our journalism alumni group in the 1980s.

He was a proper gentleman, and though I can’t say I was intimately familiar with his coverage of Massachusetts politics, I could tell from talking with him that he was a fine journalist, fair-minded and curious about the world around him.

Gloria Negri has a lengthy obit in today’s Boston Globe. The Monitor ran a tribute on July 7.

Last fall I was reporting a story on the Monitor for CommonWealth Magazine. Monitor executives had just announced they were going to eliminate the daily print edition, going instead with their already-excellent Web site and a new weekly magazine.

Among the angles I wanted to explore was whether it might make sense for the Monitor — which is, after all, based in Boston — to re-establish its local presence at a time when the Globe and the Boston Herald were getting smaller and smaller.

The angle didn’t pan out. But I did have a chance to interview Merry, reaching him by phone at his home in Hyde Park. He clearly wasn’t well, and he labored to speak. Yet he was as courteous and helpful as he could be.

The Monitor, of course, is known for its national and especially its international reporting. Merry, though, told me that the Monitor took its local coverage very seriously at one time, and that it was an ideal training ground for the paper’s stars of the future.

“When I first went on the New England bureau staff, there were at least a dozen reporters,” he said. “I think we brought a different viewpoint. It was a different voice. It wasn’t so commercially oriented.” He added, though, that “it got very expensive to maintain.”

Merry was also skeptical of the Monitor’s plan to eliminate the daily print edition. “The Internet’s a wonderful thing, but I think it’s somewhat of a risk,” he said.

George Merry was not well-known outside of local media and political circles. But he was a good guy and a pro, and he’ll be missed.

A local take on global coverage

Three of the most interesting experiments in online coverage of international affairs are based right here in Greater Boston.

Global Voices Online, launched several years ago at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard Law School, is a site at which journalists cull and curate bloggers from around the world.

GlobalPost, a new project started by New England Cable News founder Phil Balboni and former Boston Globe reporter Charles Sennott, is assembling a worldwide network of correspondents and developing a variety of free and paid models.

And of course there’s the venerable Christian Science Monitor, which recently dropped its daily print edition. (It unveiled a weekly print magazine this week, but the emphasis is on the Web site.) There’s a Globe connection with the Monitor as well: the current editor, John Yemma, is a Globe alumnus.

Even as we lament the ongoing collapse of the newspaper business as we’ve known it, there are reasons to be optimistic about the survival of journalism. I thought I would take a look at how each is covering the anti-communist protests in Moldova, which have captured some worldwide attention because of the role played by social networks, especially Twitter.

Though none of the three is as comprehensive as what my former Boston Phoenix colleague Ellen Barry has been providing for the New York Times this week, each has been covering the story in unique ways.

This Global Voices post, a round-up of blog commentary by Veronica Khokhlova, along with two previous posts to which she links, shows some of the strengths and weaknesses of citizen journalism: the bloggers are good at giving you a flavor of what’s happening, but you get little idea of why it’s happening. I imagine this would mainly be of interest to people with a deep understanding of Moldova.

Indeed, folks at Global Voices will tell you that some of their most dedicated readers tend to be journalists and academics. Khokhlova’s post is not something I would want to wade into without at least having followed some of the mainstream coverage first.

I like the photo, which I found by following one of Khokhlova’s links, not because it’s great photojournalism — it isn’t — but precisely because it’s so mundane. I think it gives a better feel for what it must be like to be in the middle of a protest than a more dramatic shot would provide. Then again, isn’t giving you a true picture what journalism is supposed to do?

I’m also struck by the observation that if Moldovan young people had used a social-networking tool other than current media darling Twitter, the protests might not have received as much attention from the West.

At GlobalPost we find a 13-photo slideshow by Robert A. Reeder that takes us from a celebratory concert staged by the communist government, through protests and violence, and finally to a shot of Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin, who has ordered a crackdown and blamed the government of Romania.

Reeder’s pictures, along with the photo captions, give you enough of a flavor that you come away feeling as if you know something about what’s going on. But, as with the Global Voices post, this is supplementary material, not a substitute for a well-wrought news report.

Finally, the Monitor, on its Global News blog, presents a post by Fred Weir that is characteristic of Monitor journalism: it’s short but surprisingly deep, offering just enough news and lots of perspective and analysis. It carries a Moscow dateline, and lacks the up-close feel of the Times coverage. But it may be all that a curious, intelligent general reader needs to know.

Weir’s post went up on Wednesday, so the Monitor hasn’t been as timely on the Moldova story as the Times’ Barry has. But judging from Barry’s story in today’s paper, not a whole lot has gone on since then.

All in all, an impressive performance. If you start with the Monitor, then check out Global Voices and GlobalPost, you’ll come away pretty well-informed about a remote corner of Europe.

Photo taken from the blog Kosmopolito, linked from Global Voices Online, whose content is made available through a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

John Yemma on open-source news

Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma has some sharp observations about the demise of Encarta, the struggles of Encyclopedia Britannica and the dominance of Wikipedia. And he argues that there’s a cautionary tale for the news media therein:

If all the big newspapers at once adopted a pay model, some upstart would come along and use a small group of journalists and a larger group of Wikipedia-like amateurs to build a multimedia newspaper. Like Wikipedia, it would be the butt of countless jokes about unreliability.

Maybe it would even report on its own unreliability. But it would grow stronger because it would be organically constituted on the World Wide Web. That’s the power of open-source knowledge.

And that’s the challenge the news media face as they dive into the Internet.

This, of course, is week one of the Monitor’s Web-mostly existence, as the daily print edition has given way to a 24/7 Web site and a weekly magazine. (Via Jeff Jarvis.)

The future of the Christian Science Monitor

Sometime this April the Christian Science Monitor, one of our most venerable daily newspapers, will cease to be a daily newspaper. Instead, the Monitor will embrace a Web-first strategy, providing news and analysis online on a round-the-clock basis and unveiling a weekly print magazine.

In my latest media feature for CommonWealth Magazine, I interview Monitor editor John Yemma about the transition, what it means for the future of Monitor journalism and how we all might learn from this experiment.

Christian Science Monitor goes Web-mostly

The only reason to publish an old-fashioned print newspaper in 2008 is because print advertising is more lucrative than Web advertising. Flip through the print edition of the Christian Science Monitor and you will see virtually no advertising. Therefore, the paper’s announcement today that it will switch to a mostly Web model next April makes eminent good sense.

The Monitor’s daily print edition is already little more than rumor. Where would you get one, other than stopping by a Christian Science Reading Room? Yet the Monitor’s Web site is popular enough to attract about 1.5 million visitors a month. (For purposes of comparison, Boston.com, the Globe’s Web site, attracts nearly 4.5 million visitors a month.)

The Monitor’s announcement makes it clear that the paper, founded by Mary Baker Eddy nearly 100 years ago, is in pretty tough financial shape — as is every newspaper operation. What the Monitor has that commercial papers lack is nonprofit ownership that can look at the long term — and pay a subsidy, as new-media consultant Ken Doctor notes, thus providing a vital bridge to the day that online revenues will start to cover the cost of news-gathering.

Those who insist on the printed word will be able to buy a weekly edition, which will allow the Monitor to engage in reverse-publishing — that is, in republishing content that appears online first. That’s what they’re doing in Madison, Wis., where the Capital Times earlier this week dropped its daily print edition and replaced it with two free tabloids filled with material from its Web site.

What’s happening at the Monitor had been long anticipated. If handled properly, it could be a positive development — and another big step in the paper’s (and the industry’s) evolution toward a model of putting the Web first.

The Monitor’s hybrid strategy

Don Aucoin reports in today’s Boston Globe that the venerable Christian Science Monitor might be heading down the road blazed by the Capital Times in Madison, Wis. — a hybrid Web/print model, with the print newspaper coming out just once a week.

According to Aucoin, at the moment the Monitor is considering only a modest tweak — a weekly edition to supplement the daily. But, reportedly, there is a possibility that the weekly might eventually replace the daily. If that happens, the print edition could conceivably become an example of “reverse publishing,” a digest of the best content that’s already been published online.

Recently the Capital Times abandoned its paid daily edition in favor of two weekly free tabloids, a news-oriented product that comes out on Wednesdays and an arts-and-entertainment paper on Thursdays. At the same time, the online edition is being pumped up. This is a promising model likely to be emulated. A mostly online paper saves considerable printing and distribution costs without abandoning the print advertising market entirely.

I’ve tended to think of the Monitor as mainly a Web publication for some time now. I mean, where would you grab a print copy? At a Christian Science Reading Room? As long as the church remains committed to high-quality journalism, a shift to a mostly online paper might ensure the paper’s survival.

The Monitor also enjoys an ideal ownership model. These days, papers as diverse as the St. Petersburg Times, the New Hampshire Union Leader and the U.K.’s Guardian are often held up as examples of possible salvation for the news business, as they are all owned by non-profit organizations. (Disclosure: I write a weekly online column for the Guardian.)

So, too, with the Monitor. Unfortunately, as Aucoin notes, the church blew an inordinate amount of money on failed ventures in television and radio about 15 years ago, and has never really recovered. Church ownership may be benign, but in this case it doesn’t come with very deep pockets.

More than anything, the Monitor needs to carve out a new mission. In its heyday many decades ago, the Monitor thrived because it was the quality alternative — usually the only quality alternative — to the local rag. At a time when you can access any news source you want through the Internet, the Monitor must make a case for why you would want to read it instead of, or in addition to, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, et al.

In recent years, the folks running the Monitor have been pretty forward-looking in terms of moving past print. It’s encouraging that they’re still pushing in that direction.