Tag: CNN

The Globe’s circulation levels off; plus, the Tampa Bay Times, angst at CNN and remembering Donald Barlett

Paid circulation growth at The Boston Globe has leveled off, as a modest increase in digital subscriptions has barely been enough to offset the continued deterioration of its print business. That’s according to publisher’s statements filed with the U.S. Postal Service that were printed in the Globe earlier this week as well as numbers provided by the Globe.

On weekdays, the average paid print circulation between Sept. 1, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024, was 57,450. A year earlier it had been 64,977. That’s a decline of 7,527, or 11.6%.

On Sundays, the average paid print circulation was 102,703, down from 116,456 a year earlier. That represents a drop of 13,753, or 11.8%.

The Globe also reported paid digital circulation to the Postal Service, but those numbers — the same that it provides to the Alliance for Audited Media — are not a good reflection of the paper’s actual digital subscription base. According to Carla Kath, the Globe’s director of communications, paid digital circulation is now 261,000, an increase of about 6.5% compared to last October, when it was around 245,000.

When you combine paid print and digital, the Globe’s average weekday circulation is about 318,000, up by 8,000 over a year ago, for an increase of 2.5%.

On Sundays, average combined circulation now stands at 364,000, a rise of 3,000, or a little more than 0.8%.

Oddly enough, the paid digital numbers that the Globe reports to the Postal Service and AAN are higher than its internal figures because AAN uses a different methodology that allows for some double-counting.

Earlier this year, Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry told employees that her “North Star” goal for paid digital circulation is 400,000, plus another 100,000 for Stat, the company’s health-and-science news site. She did not put a timetable on that, but in May she told Don Seiffert of the Boston Business Journal that she expected 2024 to be a “building year,” with accelerated growth coming in 2025 and beyond.

“Our subscribers can see this investment with our expanded daily news videos, our new weather center, better games, new podcasts, deeper geographic expansion, and more,” Henry told Seiffert. “We do not expect growth to follow a linear pattern — we have a long-term strategy for continuing to serve our community as a strong and sustainable organization.”

Kath’s email message to me struck a similar tone. “Like most publishers in 2024, we have seen moderation in non-subscriber traffic. However, we’ve adjusted our strategy and continue to grow digital subscriptions while focusing on long-term growth and sustainability,” she said.

“Total paid subscriptions are up more than 30% over the last five years, and 2024 is performing as we expected. We continue to innovate and plan for growth in 2025 as we aim for our ongoing goal of 400,000 paid digital subscribers.”

Media notes

• The Tampa Bay Times has dropped its paywall for coverage of Hurricane Milton and its aftermath — just in time for a story on the Times’ own building being damaged by a collapsing crane. Zachary T. Sampson and Chris Urso report:

A crane collapsed in downtown St. Petersburg during Hurricane Milton’s thrashing winds Wednesday night — leaving a gaping hole in an office building that houses several business, including the Tampa Bay Times.

The crane fell from the Residences at 400 Central, the 46-story skyscraper being built across from the Times’ office, as the storm pummeled the region.

The crane remained crumpled across 1st Avenue South early Thursday, completely blocking the street.

The city said in a news release that no injuries have been reported at the site. The building damaged by the crane had closed ahead of Milton’s arrival Wednesday. No one from the Times’ newsroom was working inside when the crane collapsed.

• Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy has a tough item on CNN chair and chief executive Mark Thompson on the first anniversary of his tenure. Darcy, who left CNN a few months ago to start his newsletter, Status, writes:

In conversations that I have had over the last few weeks with employees at all different levels inside the company, it has become clear that morale has fallen considerably since Thompson took the helm. Staffers, who were once wide-eyed and filled with hope that Thompson would stroll into Hudson Yards with a toolbox full of foolproof, executable ideas, are now questioning whether he will ultimately prove to be successful in reversing the outlet’s dimming fortunes.

• Donald L. Barlett, one of the great investigative reporters of the 20th century has died. I remember reading his and James Steele’s “America: What Went Wrong” in the early 1990s, when it was first released. You might call it an early warning signal about the damage that Ronald Reagan’s economic and tax policies favoring the rich were doing to the country — damage that has contributed to the anger and polarization of politics today. The book was a compilation of reporting that Barlett and Steele had previously produced for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

In an obituary for The New York Times, Glenn Rifkin writes (gift link):

Over four decades, Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele’s investigative prowess, rooted in deep, systematic research and complex analysis of issues and institutions that profoundly affected Americans, resulted in two Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting (they were finalists for the award six times), six George Polk awards and various other honors.

Mr. Barlett was 88.

The looming competition between Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy is also a test for free versus paid

Brian Stelter. Photo (cc) 2017 by Ståle Grut / NRKbeta.

This is going to be interesting. Last month, CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy announced he was leaving in order to start his own subscription-based newsletter called “Status.” CNN said it would replace Darcy as the lead writer on its “Reliable Sources” newsletter, but it wasn’t clear who that person would be or when it might happen.

On Tuesday, it was announced that Brian Stelter — Darcy’s predecessor at CNN — would be returning as the network’s chief media analyst, and that he’ll be back at the helm of the “Reliable Sources” newsletter next Monday. His old television show, also called “Reliable Sources,” will not be back, but Stelter said he expects to pop up on a number of CNN programs to talk about media topics.

Oliver Darcy

This is very good news for people who care about the media, as Stelter and Darcy are both outstanding. But let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Darcy is charging $14.95 a month — triple what solo newsletter writers normally charge, but no doubt what he calculated he needs to make ends meet. Stelter’s newsletter presumably will be free, although that caveat is important given that CNN chief executive Mark Thompson is reportedly developing some paid products.

Here’s what Stelter had to say about the looming competition:

All the while I remained an avid reader of “Reliable Sources,” and especially admired Oliver Darcy’s fearless reportage, as well as his decision to launch Status last month. I’m rooting for Oliver and, as I have told him personally, I think we’re going to complement each other wonderfully.

And here’s Darcy’s take:

It goes without saying, but I am very much looking forward to Stelter’s second act at CNN. As I’ve said before, he has been a first-class mentor to me. Now, I look forward to him being a first-class competitor!

Darcy’s challenge is that though Stelter’s newsletter may be the most similar to what he does, there are also a number of other media newsletters, and most of them are free. Indeed, the author of one of them, Tom Jones of the Poynter Institute, devoted the top of his morning round-up today to Stelter’s return.

As you may recall, Stelter was one of a handful of high-profile people who were fired by Chris Licht during Licht’s brief stint as CNN’s top executive. Stelter had emerged as an important voice in speaking out against then-President Donald Trump’s war on journalists, who he called “enemies of the people,” and the new owners of CNN apparently believed Stelter was too hot for them.

The ownership hasn’t changed, but fears that CNN was going to turn into Fox Lite proved unfounded, and Stelter — who’s been busy as a freelancer — has popped up frequently on CNN’s air in recent months. Darcy, meanwhile, established a reputation for independence right from the start and wrote a number of newsletter items that must have made Licht extremely unhappy before Licht himself was finally shown the door.

I hope there’s room in the burgeoning media newsletter universe for both Darcy and Stelter. But, as I said, I have to wonder how paid can compete with free if they are both mining essentially the same ore. Best wishes to both of them.

Speaking of free versus paid, Media Nation is a free source of news and commentary — but you can become a paid supporter, and receive a weekly supporters-only newsletter, for $5 a month. Just click here.

A predictably uneventful interview; plus, media links and observations for your weekend

Dana Bash interviews Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

Labor Day weekend is upon us, and we’re getting away for a few days. Before we do, though, here are a few links and observations.

• In Thursday night’s CNN interview, Dana Bash’s questions were predictable, Vice President Kamala Harris’ and Gov. Tim Walz’s answers were fine, and that was that. I don’t know why anyone thought two experienced politicians were going to have any trouble in such a setting. Here’s a theory I haven’t heard from anyone else: Donald Trump invariably runs off the rails, and President Biden has an increasingly difficult time expressing himself. We’d forgotten what these things normally look like.

• A New Hampshire man named Taylor Cockerline has been sentenced to 27 months in prison and three years of supervised probation for his role in harassing and intimidating New Hampshire Public Radio journalist Lauren Chooljian, her parents and her editor, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston. Co-defendants Eric Labarage and Michael Waselchuck have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing, while a fourth defendant, Keenan Saniatan (identified only as “Saniatan” in the news release), will reportedly plead guilty on Sept. 5. Earlier, more in-depth coverage of this bizarre case is here.

• In other New Hampshire media news, The News and Sentinel, a weekly paper in Colebrook, is shutting down after the Harrigan family, which owns the 154-year-old paper, was unable to find a buyer. The InDepthNH story on the closure contains a lot of fascinating details about the paper, especially a 1997 incident when a gunman killed four people, including the editor. The late publisher, John Harrigan, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the shooting. The News and Sentinel’s slogan, by the way, should be a model for other news outlets: “Independent but Not Neutral.”

• Barnes & Noble is opening 58 new stores in 2024, and media newsletter writer Bo Sacks says that’s good news for the ailing magazine business: “B&N has a terrific well curated newsstand for magazines. 54 [sic] new newsstands may not sound like much, but it will be a big national help in magazine sales.” By the way, Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio died earlier this week at 83.

• Veteran tech writer Mathew Ingram is leaving the staff of the Columbia Journalism Review, where he’s been working since 2017 after earlier stints at the late, lamented Gigaom and, before that, The Globe and Mail of Toronto. Ingram is a calm, sometimes contrarian voice at moments when everyone else’s hair is on fire, and he is well worth paying attention to. No word on what’s next, though he says he’ll continue to write for CJR from time to time. Best wishes to him.

A thoughtful, nuanced take on how the press is (and isn’t) performing in covering the campaign

Donald Trump and President Biden at the June 27 debate

In Nieman Reports, John Harwood offers a nuanced assessment of how the media are performing in covering the presidential campaign. If I may summarize, Harwood’s take is that the press has neither been as awful as Democratic partisans would have you believe nor as good as it ought to be in holding Donald Trump to account. He writes:

Elevating democracy raises the question: Should a reporter actively promote the candidate committed to preserving it? But elevating neutrality, and passively watching an authoritarian gain power, could unravel the press freedoms woven into the fabric of the U.S. since its founding. Different journalists, sometimes gingerly, walk different paths….

In fact, neither the [New York] Times nor other major outlets have ignored the threat to democracy. Trump’s vow to be a “dictator for a day,” the criminal prosecutions of his allies in the scheme to count “fake electors,” and his plan to seize greater personal control of the government bureaucracy have all drawn significant attention. In the case of Project 2025, the radical right-wing agenda prepared in part by some of his close advisors, news stories later amplified by Democrats produced a storm intense enough that Trump disavowed the blueprint.

Harwood devotes some attention to the media’s obsession with President Biden’s age, observing that Trump received nowhere near the same level of scrutiny despite being nearly as old as Biden and showing clear signs of mental decline.

Yet it has seemed clear to me from the start, especially since the June 27 debate, that the press — led by the Times — became obsessed with driving Biden out of the race because they were so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump presidency. And, sure enough, once Biden was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, the Democrats moved into a small but consistent lead in the polls.

Harwood, by the way, was one of several journalists who were let go by CNN during the brief reign of Chris Licht, allegedly for his staunch anti-Trumpism. Given Harwood’s measured, thoughtful tone in his Nieman piece, that says more about Licht than it does about Harwood.

Oliver Darcy leaves CNN and starts a newsletter

Oliver Darcy

Oliver Darcy, who had ably helmed CNN’s media newsletter, “Reliable Sources,” after Brian Stelter was fired by the short-lived Chris Licht regime in 2022, is striking out on his own.

Darcy’s new venture, Status, promises to provide “the new, definitive nightly briefing that informs readers about what is really happening in the corridors of media power.”

It will be interesting to see whether he can succeed. Darcy is excellent, but he’s blown past the $5-a-month fee charged by nearly all solo newsletter authors. To read more than his Sunday edition and limited previews, you’ll need to fork over $14.95 a month — as much as most daily newspapers charge.

I wish Oliver luck, but I’m going to hang back for a while and see whether he’s able to establish Status as a must-read. Meanwhile, “Reliable Sources” will be back this fall with a new lead writer, according to Variety.

Biden helped himself a little. So what happens next?

If President Biden had handled himself in the debate the way he did at his news conference Thursday night, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. He was OK — far better than in the debate and better, too, than he was in his interview with George Stephanopoulos.

He navigated the weeds on foreign policy, rambling on in a way that demonstrated his deep knowledge of the international scene. I don’t care that he mixed up a few names — he always has. But he faded toward the end and lost some of his earlier coherence. I think he helped himself a little. And that creates a dilemma. It’s one thing if he’s clearly unfit to run and to serve. It’s quite another if he comes across merely as low-energy and perhaps not up to the challenge of defeating the authoritarian menace that Donald Trump represents. What do you do then?

Writing on Threads, media observer Brian Stelter put it this way: “Millions of Democratic voters watched Biden’s press conference, and now some of them are wondering, ‘why are the chattering classes trying to force this man out of office?’”

If Biden had helped himself a lot, maybe we could exhale. If he’d melted down, well, the next steps would be obvious. But by helping himself a little, he left himself in a tenuous position, insisting he’s in the race to stay while much of the media and a rising tide of Democratic officials insist that the time has come for a new candidate.

Ah, yes, the media. They’ve been providing tough coverage of a story that’s of paramount importance — and they’ve been overdoing it, too. This has especially been true of The New York Times and CNN, which have been overloading us with stories about whether Biden is still fit to serve while playing down other news. Yes, that’s a hard accusation to make stick against the Times since it publishes so much about so many topics. But, day after day, its homepage has been dominated by upwards of a half-dozen stories about the latest on whether Biden might step aside. The Times is guilty of one serious misstep as well, botching a report that the president might be under evaluation for Parkinson’s disease.

So on we go. I suggest that we all calm down. If Biden needs to step aside, it doesn’t have to happen immediately. One option is to resign, making Vice President Kamala Harris the president. That’s the cleanest solution, presumably answering any questions about ballot access and campaign funds. A short sprint to Election Day might actually help her.

In any case, there was no reason to feel especially good or bad about what happened Thursday night.

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CNN’s dicey reinvention plans: Layoffs, AI and another attempt at paid digital

Photo (cc) 2006 by Tinou Bao

You may have heard that CNN’s chief executive and president, Mark Thompson, has plans. As the network’s media reporter, Oliver Darcy, wrote on Wednesday, Thompson is laying off about 100 people, or 3% of the workforce; embracing artificial intelligence; and developing a paid subscription service.

Now, let me acknowledge that it would be incredibly easy to snark. I can’t imagine paying for CNN in addition to all the other stuff I pay for, and I’m getting sick of media executives blurting out “AI” as some sort of solution whenever they have a problem to solve. Moreover, if Thompson is serious about rebuilding CNN, how does another round of layoffs figure into that?

But Thompson is up against some serious challenges, and he may be the person to solve them. He is, after all, the executive who revitalized The New York Times’ business prospects by transforming it into a lifestyle brand as much as it is a news organization. The Times today has more than 10 million paying customers, and many of them signed up for access to games, recipes, consumer advice and other ancillary products.

Ubiquitous though CNN may be, it doesn’t have the brand power of the Times. But it faces the same need to do something dramatic: as more and more people flee cable and embrace internet streaming, cable channels are losing one of their most important sources of revenue. CNN, for instance, makes about $1 per subscriber. As Joshua Benton wrote for Nieman Lab:

The number of U.S. cable subscribers has fallen from 98.7 million in 2016 to 58 million in 2023, with projections — optimistic ones, arguably — putting that number at 40 million by 2028. That’s a lot of monthly $1 charges gone. Add in a steep ratings decline (and an accompanying ad collapse) and the future looks very fuzzy.

Of course, we’ve been down this road before. Thompson’s predecessor once removed, Jeff Zucker, tried a subscription service called CNN Plus, which was killed by new ownership almost as soon as it got off the ground. Thompson has not be especially clear about his own subscription plans, but I think that at a minimum he needs to offer a standalone streaming channel that features the same programming that’s on TV plus some extras. I wouldn’t be interested because I still have cable; if done right, though, such a service could prove to be compelling.

One of the most ridiculous shortcomings of CNN Plus was that CNN-TV was missing, which was no doubt a concession to the cable industry. That’s less important than it was a couple of years ago.

I like to say that friends don’t let friends watch cable news. But CNN, more so than MSNBC’s opinion-heavy lineup and much more so than Fox News’ right-wing propaganda, has its roots in journalism, and they’ve been trying to get back to those roots under Thompson. It hasn’t paid off in ratings; I just hope that Thompson’s corporate masters are allowing him to play a long game.

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A few Biden updates

With the prospects of President Biden’s remaining in office still uncertain despite his insistence that he’s not going anywhere, here are three updates:

• The Wall Street Journal posted a five-byline story Monday night headlined “How Biden’s Inner Circle Worked to Keep Signs of Aging Under Wraps.” It’s a well-reported reprise of a piece that the Journal published a month ago that was widely dismissed at the time because of its reliance on partisan Republican sources. Now that earlier article looks prescient (free links).

• What you might call a mini-feeding frenzy broke out Monday afternoon when The New York Times, CNN and others reported that a specialist in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House eight times over the past eight months. Hours later, the story looked like a cautionary tale in not getting ahead of the story, as we learned that the doctor had almost certainly been called in to see other patients, and that his service at the White House goes back a dozen years.

• Josh Marshall is always worth reading when you’re trying to make sense of complicated political stories. On Monday he wrote that he’s less sure than he was a week ago that Biden would step aside, mainly because, well, he hasn’t stepped aside. “By the end of the weekend,” he wrote, “I was back to near total uncertainty about where any of this was going.”

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It’s worth saying again: Let’s stop paying partisan political hacks to bloviate on TV

Reporting for double duty: Donna Brazile was a paid bloviator for CNN while she was also deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee. Photo (cc) by Tim Pierce.

I’ve been arguing against hiring partisan political commentators for years, including three times (here, here and here) in the past week. Now NPR’s media reporter, David Folkenflik, has written a smart analysis questioning the practice, which has come under renewed scrutiny following NBC News’ hiring and firing of the election-denying, Trump-enabling Ronna McDaniel, former chair of the Republican National Committee. Folkenflik writes:

The networks — not just NBC — want to be able to rely on a stable of people to show up and be lively and informed on the air, often with little notice. They want to make sure they have voices reflecting an array of views from both parties. And they want exclusivity, which means they want to prevent the same high-profile figures from appearing on their competitors’ shows.

The hiring of McDaniel made conventional sense under this rubric.

We do not live in conventional times.

Indeed we do not, and if there’s a reason to have someone like McDaniel on the air, surely that can be accomplished without paying her $300,000 a year. After all, “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pointed out that McDaniel had already been scheduled to appear this past Sunday, as she had previously. One of the first rules of journalistic ethics is that we don’t pay sources, except, apparently, party hacks.

In fact, as Folkenflik reminds us, CNN actually stooped even lower than NBC by paying Democratic operative Donna Brazile while she was deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee. As he asks: “There are more than 330 million Americans and thousands of political professionals. Why pay for the right to interview them? Does anyone think Newt Gingrich will boycott television appearances if he’s not paid?”

The problem, of course, is that television news outlets, particularly cable, have endless hours to fill, and talk shows are a lot cheaper than actual journalism. But I would argue that the McDaniel fiasco offers an opportunity to revisit the whole practice of hiring political figures, Democrat or Republican, to come on the air and offer predictable talking points, all while keeping one eye on their next chance to get back in the game.

You can simultaneously believe (as I do) that hiring McDaniel was many bridges too far because of her election denialism on behalf of Donald Trump — and that the time has also come to stop throwing money at any political operatives.

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McDaniel is out. But don’t get your hopes up that network execs have learned a lesson.

Ronna McDaniel. Photo (cc) 2018 by Gage Skidmore.

Ronna McDaniel is out at NBC News. Veteran media critic David Zurawick writes for CNN, “It was two days of the most aggressive, public and passionate pushback by employees against a decision by their bosses that I have seen in 35 years of covering the media.” His lead:

As wrongheaded as it was on so many levels, NBC’s decision to hire former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor might actually have done the nation a favor. The highly controversial move has helped drive a crucial conversation about the role of media in our political life at this moment of democratic crisis.

The NBC executives who thought this was a great idea really had no choice. Hosts on MSNBC from Rachel Maddow to Joe Scarborough said they wouldn’t have her on, and she was finished on NBC itself after she was eviscerated on “Meet the Press,” first by Kristen Welker, then in a post-interview commentary by Chuck Todd. It will be interesting to see whether anyone at the network will pay the price for this boneheaded move.

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As I’ve said before, I’m trying to balance two impulses. On the one hand, I don’t think the networks should hire any partisan players to bloviate on their airwaves, Democrat or Republican. Let’s hear from journalists. On the other hand, since they’re going to continue making such hires, I think it’s useful to differentiate someone like McDaniel, who amplified Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, from your run-of-the-mill Trump-friendly commentator. Several observers have pointed out that CNN once hired the loathsome Corey Lewandowski, but that was during the pre-insurrection days when Trump was merely a racist sociopath rather than a budding authoritarian dictator.

Rather than learning the lesson that Zurawick is hoping for, my guess is that NBC executives are probably now going to feel pressured to hire a less toxic Trumper, someone like Marc Thiessen (currently on Fox News) or Byron York (ditto). And no, no one at Fox feels similarly pressured to bring in a liberal Joe Biden supporter. That’s not the way it works.

Earlier:

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