Tag: David Skok

Why The New York Times’ acquisition of The Athletic could create an existential crisis for local news

Previously published at GBH News.

Imagine that you’re the editor of a big-city daily newspaper whose reporting staff has been slashed by its corporate owner. You struggle to cover the basics — local politics, business, the arts. But you’ve managed to preserve a fairly robust sports section. After all, a lot of your readers are avid fans. If they no longer needed to come to you for coverage of their favorite teams, then your circulation, already sliding, would fall off a cliff.

Well, your worst nightmare just came true. The New York Times Co.’s announcement last Thursday that it was buying The Athletic represents nothing less than an existential crisis for regional newspapers.

The Athletic is a five-year-old website that covers sports — not just national sports, but local sports as well. If sports is the only reason you haven’t stopped subscribing to your local newspaper, that’s about to change. You’ll soon be able to buy a digital subscription to The New York Times that includes The Athletic’s coverage.

“This acquisition should make mid-market metro newspaper publishers shudder,” wrote David Skok, a former top editor at The Boston Globe who’s now the editor of a Canadian business website he founded called The Logic. “The Times can now offer a unique bundle of international, national and local news that offers readers a value proposition better than that of many local newspapers with eroding sports coverage and whose news sections largely consist of wire copy from The Associated Press, Reuters and even The New York Times’ syndication service.”

The Times Co.’s acquisition of The Athletic was a certified big deal. The company paid $550 million in cash, making it the Times’ largest takeover since it purchased The Boston Globe for $1.1 billion in 1993, according to Alex Webb of Bloomberg Businessweek. (The Times Co. sold the Globe to Red Sox principal owner John Henry in 2013 for $70 million — among the more devastating markdowns in media history.)

The Athletic, with 1.2 million subscribers, will help push the Times’ paid circulation for all of its projects from about 8 million closer to its goal of 10 million. The Athletic is currently a money-loser, but, as Webb writes, the Times Co. will seek to close the gap by selling more advertising and by “cross-selling the products: persuading existing Times subscribers to pay for the Athletic and vice versa.”

That strategy has already proven successful with other Times products such as its Cooking app and Wirecutter, a consumer recommendation site that it acquired several years ago. Although the Times Co. hasn’t announced exactly how The Athletic will be priced, it seems likely that it will be included with its All Access digital subscription and sold separately to those who have a cheaper Basic subscription, or no Times subscription at all.

It’s the attractiveness of getting The Athletic bundled with an All Access subscription to the Times that has got to be causing local newspaper executives to break into a cold sweat. You might think that the best way for local newspapers to fight back is by offering quality. And, of course, there’s something to that. But cultural changes, not just newsroom reductions, put local news at an enormous disadvantage.

We are living at a moment when national trends trump anything taking place at the local level. We follow national news avidly — if not quite as obsessively as we did during Donald Trump’s presidency — while paying less and less attention to what is going on in our communities. Even local school committee races are dominated by national issues such as critical race theory rather than math scores and who can most effectively negotiate a new contract with the teachers union.

Given those trends, a high-quality regional paper like the Globe may not be safe from the Times-Athletic juggernaut. The economies of scale being what they are, an All Access subscription to the Times is actually a little bit cheaper than a digital subscription to the Globe. In addition, surely there is a contingent of Globe readers who come for the sports and don’t care all that much about the paper’s comprehensive regional coverage. It’s a good thing that the Globe’s sports reporting continues to be as strong as it is.

Aron Pilhofer of Temple University puts it this way: “The Times has placed itself in direct competition with every local news site for the same pool of subscribers. And since the average number of news sites people will pay for is one, that is very bad news indeed for local legacy news organizations.”

What’s especially disconcerting is that the Times is pulling away from the journalistic pack to an extent that couldn’t have been imagined a few years ago. Since the late aughts, the paper has avoided a close call with bankruptcy, moved far ahead in its competition with the resurgent Washington Post and now is threatening to overwhelm large swaths of the regional media ecosystem.

At a time when local news is in crisis, with newsrooms downsizing and papers closing, the Times’ dominance is starting to look like a threat to our ability to inform ourselves about what’s taking place in our communities and neighborhoods.

The acquisition of The Athletic may be good for the Times. It remains to be seen whether it’s good for democracy.

Katie Kingsbury is leaving the Globe for a position at The New York Times

Kathleen Kingsbury, The Boston Globe’s managing editor for digital, is leaving the paper to accept a position as deputy editorial-page editor of The New York Times. This is a big one. Kingsbury is a Pulitzer-winning editorial writer, and she stepped into her current role last fall just as the Globe’s reinvention effort was heating up. She replaced David Skok, who was returning to his native Canada.

Ben Mullin of Poynter has editor Brian McGrory’s farewell note:

I interviewed Kingsbury for my forthcoming book last fall, and I found her to be smart in all the right ways. When we talked, she told me she was testing out various smartphone apps for possible adoption by the Globe — an effort that we long-suffering mobile readers certainly hope pays off soon.

Kingsbury announced her departure just as the Globe is settling in at its new headquarters at 53 State St. On Saturday, the Globe’s entire print run took place at its new Taunton facility for the first time, according to a message to employees from  Rich Masotta, the Globe’s vice president for operations.

Kingsbury proved to be a good internal candidate for the top digital position. It will be interesting to see if the Globe goes outside or inside for her successor. Globe owner John Henry has bet the farm on paid digital. If anything, the Globe needs to accelerate its efforts on improving its digital products.

Four Globe personnel moves are aimed at bolstering digital

Katie Kingsbury. Photo via. Twitter.
Katie Kingsbury. Photo via Twitter.
Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory this afternoon announced some major moves, and all of them are aimed at bolstering the Globe‘s digital presence. The big news is that Katie Kingsbury will replace David Skok as managing editor for digital. Skok, who’s also vice president for digital, is heading back to his native Canada.

Kingsbury, as McGrory notes below, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and has more recently been editing the Ideas section. I think it’s significant that what she can bring to digital is seen as more urgent than her more traditional work as a writer and editor. Globe print subscribers might also remember that last winter, during the paper’s home-delivery fiasco, Kingsbury was a constant presence on Twitter, where she helped to solve problems and in a few cases delivered papers to customers’ doorsteps.

As always, these memos don’t just magically appear in my inbox. I depend on leaks—and leakers. That means you.

The text of McGrory’s email to the staff follows.

I’m delighted to announce some key personnel moves in the newsroom.

First, Katie Kingsbury will take the role of managing editor, digital.

You know we’re a great news organization when a transformative figure like David Skok can leave and we’re able to fill the void from our own midst with a Pulitzer Prize winning editor of uncommon intellect and unparalleled commitment. Katie is her own weather system, someone who isn’t only a learned digital journalist, but also an entirely natural one. Digital isn’t an added element with Katie; it’s what she does—and always has done. Look no further than her work on Ideas, and her role propelling opinion journalism to the forefront of bostonglobe.com. Linger, especially, on some of the projects she’s helped oversee, particularly our exquisite Make It Stop wraparound and digital presentation that owned the web for the better part of a week. That project would never have happened as it did without Katie driving it forward.

Katie is, at her core, a storyteller, though with a digital soul and spine. She’s spent the better part of her career as a reporter—with Metro in Boston, then with Time in Asia and New York. She arrived in our room in 2013, another smart Peter Canellos hire, as a freelance editorial writer. It took her, what, less that two years to pen that utterly extraordinary series on the plight of fast food workers that earned her the previously mentioned Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2015. Katie became the Sunday op-ed editor in 2014, and then Ideas editor in 2015. There’s been nothing but unabashed success at every turn.

There’s also a book contract, and a whole lot more, making for a schedule that is virtually unimaginable, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter. Katie is a relentlessly cheerful presence, a world-class colleague who treasures ideas and creativity and seems to have been put on this earth to challenge the status quo.

Katie will start in her new role very soon, and by that I mean whenever she can work out a smooth transition from Ideas with Ellen [Clegg] and her successor.

Second, Jason Tuohey will become the deputy managing editor for audience engagement.

At one level, it’s accurate to say that Jason may be the steadiest human being on the planet, quietly driving bostonglobe.com forward for years such that it’s the single most successful aspect of our entire enterprise, up 20 percent in uniques year over year, topping the 70,000 paid subscriber mark earlier this month, an uncommonly accessible site that always seems to strike just the right note at just the right time.

But even that somehow sells Jason short, because he’s far more than steady. Behind that unflappable demeanor is a brilliant editor and beloved manager who knows the exact levers to push and pull with staff to keep the site humming with readers. There’s nobody in the industry I’ve looked to more for counsel on all things digital, and Jason is always dead on the mark.

In this new role, Jason will continue to have oversight of globe.com. In addition, he’ll be charged with connecting our journalism with the community and larger world in ways that we currently don’t do enough of. He will do outreach. He will also guide the room, with an appropriate emphasis on metrics, as to what works and what doesn’t—topics, tones, times of day, platforms, and so much more. Ideally, sooner rather than later, Jason will have his own team of audience development specialists, and will work with a larger team across the building.

Jason will start in his new role on October 17.

Third, Heather Hopp-Bruce will become design director. Heather is the outrageously talented designer of editorial and Ideas, constantly pushing industry boundaries with provocative sections fronts and projects that have earned her a stunning 11 SND [Society for News Design] awards in the past two years. Think of Heather as an activist designer, not only there at the inception of a piece or project, but immediately helping to shape it, probing and prodding it, and thinking across all platforms. Design, in her view, is a partner, something that comes through week after week, time and again, in her work in Ideas. Her sprawling intellect and boundless energy leads her in many directions. Surfing? She’s rabid, as well as talented. Marksmanship? A champion back in grade school—really. Heather swam across Boston Harbor a couple of years ago and still talks about all the little jelly fish that made it feel like pudding.

None of it got in the way of what has been an extraordinary career as a designer and writer, one that has brought Heather from Montana to San Francisco to Santa Cruz to Seattle, and then to Newsday. She was another brilliant Dan Zedek hire in 2010. She took some time away from journalism to work at a web design firm in Santa Cruz, though in her words, “I realized I could never be happy outside of a newsroom.”

Heather, too, checks off the box of world class colleague. She’ll start in her new role in early November.

Fourth, Lauren Shea has become a dedicated product manager for the newsroom, working hand in hand with our entire editorial team.

Lauren joined the Globe in June of 2014 and she has left an indelible mark on everything that you read and experience on Globe.com ever since. As the head of product for the Globe, Lauren was a driving force in modernizing the look and feel of our website, along with building out new digital advertising products and refining our meter to improve our efforts at more subscriptions. This was on top of her work launching Crux, BetaBoston, and Sports 2.0. Put another way: Lauren gets stuff done.

She now brings her talent solely into the storytelling realm. Along with elevating our special projects, Lauren will identify and build new products that allow us to tell everyday stories in new ways on all platforms. In her prior roles, including at Arnold Worldwide, Lauren has managed digital strategy, user experience/site architecture, visual design, end-to-end software development, and quality assurance testing. And yes, she’s a generous colleague beloved by everyone fortunate enough to work with her.

Again, the very fact that we have a roster like this ready to lead the newsroom ever more into the digital era is a tribute to us all.

Many thanks,

Brian

David Skok’s final day at the Globe will be this Friday

David Skok, the Boston Globe‘s managing editor and vice president for digital, will be leaving what he would probably prefer I not refer to as “the paper” this Friday. His departure was announced last July; though Friday will be his last day at the Globe‘s headquarters, he will continue to help editor Brian McGrory with the Globe‘s ongoing reinvention effort for a few more weeks. His farewell to the staff is below.

Hi all,

This Friday will be my last official day at the Boston Globe.

I have accepted a new position in my family’s hometown of Toronto that will begin in early November.

It has been the greatest privilege of my professional life to serve each and every one of you, our readers, the wider community, and of course, this wonderful institution.

You welcomed me with enthusiasm and open arms. From the hallway conversations, to the office visits, and the many meetings, you’ve always been infused with a curiosity that is the hallmark of any living, breathing newsroom.  For that, I say, thank you.

No one encapsulated this kindness better than my counterpart as managing editor, Chris Chinlund. From day one, Chris exhibited warmth, support, and respect for the new “digital guy.” I quickly came to understand that none of this was political, it’s just who she is: A graceful, brilliant editor, a generous mentor and friend, whom I will miss dearly.

Of course, I would never have been in this position had Brian [editor Brian McGrory] not plucked me from relative obscurity in Toronto. Watching and learning from Brian has been the thrill of my career. His passion and loyalty to this community and to all of you in this newsroom is an absolute joy to behold.

I only wish that you all could witness first-hand what I’ve been able to witness from the office next door to our editor. Brian’s courage, patience, tenacity, and most of all, his humanity, will continue to be an inspiration for me long after I’m gone from Morrissey Boulevard. I’ve never met anyone with better news judgment, a greater sense of fairness, humility and determination, than Brian. I count myself among the lucky ones to have worked alongside him, and we are all so lucky to have him in the corner office.

To all the others who I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the past three years, from the newsroom to the boardroom, the product team to the engineering team, thank you. A particular note of thanks to [BostonGlobe.com editor] Jason Tuohey, [product director] Lauren Shea, and [team leader/development manager] Joe George. Their leadership, dedication, and talent have made me look so good over the past few years, I’m forever grateful.

The last few months have been especially rewarding for me because I’ve gotten to sit at the helm of the reinvention project, watching, listening, and guiding, as this already talented, motivated, and sophisticated newsroom transforms itself into a newsroom of the future.  The reinvention project leaves me confident and assured that the Boston Globe newsroom has a tremendously bright future.

While I won’t be in the newsroom after Friday, Brian has asked me to remain involved in an advisory capacity on the reinvention project, through the week of October 14th.

I know that change can be hard and uncertainty can be difficult. All we can do is put one foot in front of the other until one day, we can look down from the top of the mountain and see how far we’ve come. This week, I get to do that, and the view is spectacular.

You have turned Globe.com into a powerhouse: Tripling readers and revenues all the while maintaining the fabric of this great journalism institution. Your journalism is vibrant, relevant, and interesting, on all platforms. Your reporting matters as much, if not more, than it ever has to the communities that you serve. You rightly put your readers and your users, first.

If I’ve managed to accomplish anything during my time here, it’s been to hopefully clear away the obstacles to your creativity. You get to paint a bright new future on that canvass.

It will be bittersweet to watch from afar, but I will, with enormous pride.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you. What an honor it has been

Please stay in touch

—David

Talk about this post on Facebook.

Linda Henry, wife of Globe owner, will oversee Boston.com

Linda Henry. Photo via Twitter.
Linda Henry. Photo via Twitter.

Well, that was fast. Just a day after Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory announced that chief digital guy David Skok would be leaving later this year, two people who will take over some of his duties have been named. One is a real eye-opener: Linda Pizzuti Henry, wife of Globe owner John Henry, who will oversee Boston.com.

The other is Anthony Bonfiglio, currently the executive director of engineering, who’ll be in charge of engineering, development, product, and design.

When I gave a “Rave” to Skok on Beat the Press Friday, host Emily Rooney asked me if Skok’s departure was related to Linda Henry’s elevation. My honest answer is that I have no idea. It’s something I would certainly like to find out.

It’s also not clear how hands-on Linda Henry intends to be. Eleanor Cleverly, the general manager of Boston.com, has gotten good reviews for stabilizing the site after a rocky transition from being the Globe‘s online home to its current incarnation as a free standalone service. And Cleverly will remain.

It’s way too early to assess what this will all mean, but I’ve heard from a number of insiders that Linda Henry is smart and generally a force for good. Still, it’s an unorthodox move.

The Globe still needs a journalist to replace Skok as managing editor for digital (he’s vice president for digital at Boston Globe Media Partners as well). But since Skok isn’t leaving right away, I suppose that can wait.

What follows is a memo from Mike Sheehan, chief executive of BGMP.

I want to let everyone know that Anthony Bonfiglio will now oversee digital operations, including engineering/development, product, and design across all of BGMP.

Anthony joined us two years ago from Visible Measures, where he was VP of Engineering. Since then, his impact has been immense. He oversaw the rollout of agile software development processes and best practices across the product and engineering teams. As a result, we’ve shortened time-to-market from weeks to multiple releases every week across all teams, creating a predictable and transparent development process. Anthony helped transition much of the business to WordPress and has overseen many of our digital redesigns. He was a key contributor in the launch of Stat.

On the business side, Anthony folded creative services developers into the overall engineering organization and greatly increased their productivity. He also successfully assumed management of our ad operations organization during a critical phase and has since transitioned it back to Advertising.

In short, Anthony has proven himself as a leader who can make a very complex organization faster, better, and more agile. He will continue to report to Wade Sendall.

Brian McGrory informed the newsroom yesterday that David Skok has decided to leave the Globe by the end of the year. Regarding David’s boston.com responsibilities, Eleanor Cleverly will continue day-to-day oversight and management of boston.com, but it will now report to Linda Henry in her current role as Managing Director.

I know I join everyone in wishing David Skok nothing but success and happiness in all his future endeavors and in expressing deep gratitude for all he’s done over the past three years. He has been a driving force in the success we’ve experienced on bostonglobe.com and, with Eleanor and her team, was key to stabilizing boston.com over the past six months. As he transitions out, the leadership of Anthony, Eleanor, and Linda will help us continue to be the region’s leading source of journalism that becomes more relevant and interesting by the hour.

Digital guy David Skok to leave the Boston Globe

David Skok. Photo via the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
David Skok. Photo via the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

Big news from the Boston Globe: chief digital guy David Skok is leaving later this year. I’m trying to do this on my phone. So, for now, the memo from editor Brian McGrory will have to suffice.

Friday update: Skok’s departure is especially significant given that the Globe is in the midst of a major reinvention effort as well as another round of downsizing. Skok is a huge part of solving a big problem for the Globe: although it has made strides in becoming a round-the-clock digital news organization, as McGrory notes below, most of its readers continue to view the print edition as the main event. That’s true at newspapers generally—even the Washington Post, perhaps the most digitally focused newspaper in the country.

No one is irreplaceable, but it’s not going to be easy for the Globe to find someone as knowledgeable and respected as Skok.

Here is the Nieman article co-authored by Clayton Christensen, Skok, and James Allworth that McGrory mentions below. And here is a talk Skok gave at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center in April 2015.

McGrory’s message to the newsroom follows.

When I journeyed to Toronto one summer day three years ago to meet David Skok, I brought with me no small number of demands. The Globe had a new and beautiful website, but we needed far more traffic to make it matter. The newsroom had many digital ambitions, but lacked someone to point us in the right directions. We could hear the music, but were slow to pick up the rhythm. Basically, we needed to find the most capable and disciplined digital journalist in the industry to guide us toward an entirely better place.

David’s work launching a confederation of news sites that spanned Canada was widely lauded, and his paper on disruption, co-authored with Clay Christensen during his Nieman fellowship, served as something of an instruction manual for many in the business. In a part of the industry filled with hucksters spouting jargon, it was immediately apparent to me over dinner that David stood far apart. He very much belonged at the Globe.

The rest has been nothing short of transformational. In the two-and-a-half years since David arrived on Morrissey Boulevard, globe.com readership and revenues have soared. Last year was a record year for traffic, and this year we’re already up by nearly 20 percent. We now have a fresher, bolder, more relevant, and increasingly provocative site filled with a heady mix of digital-first journalism that captures the moment and deeper enterprise presented in ways that are geared toward the web. Our social and video teams are producing visual and social journalism that rivals many digital native news sites. Most important of all, this entire room has arrived at an understanding of what it means to be a digital-first operation and why it’s vital to our future. It’s often easy to lose sight of how far we’ve come as we focus on how much work is left to do.

I’ve buried the lede here, certainly because the next line pains me so to write, but here goes: David has decided to leave the Globe. He’s seeking his next professional challenge, which he very much hopes will lead him back to Canada. I’ve asked him to continue to lend his insights to our vital reinvention initiative, and he has agreed. We’re both thinking of a departure around the end of the year, give or take.

David’s legacy here can be distilled rather easily. While self-proclaimed digital gurus are always chasing the newest new thing – More video! A landing page for newsletters! – David takes a distinctly different approach. He constantly and consistently preaches quality – quality story-telling, quality editing, quality decision-making. He wags his finger at anyone seduced by the siren song of page views – “Vanity metrics,” he calls them – and recites from memory what specific stories led to the most subscriptions. The reason behind this is very simple: David is a journalist first, a digital visionary second.

More recently, he has taken his managerial skills outside of the newsroom, imposing a rare sense of order in our digital efforts building-wide. He has had no problem whatsoever holding demanding department heads at bay because of precious resources, while holding his own team accountable for its time.

One other note that probably shouldn’t come this far in: David is a world-class colleague, smart, humane, funny in his own Canadian way, and a person of some of the highest integrity I’ve ever seen. Add to that the fact that he quite simply never lets up on himself.

There’s no need to say goodbye to David just yet; as I said, that won’t occur until later in the year. But David wanted to give me, and us, plenty of notice. The front office will make announcements imminently on who will take over the digital operations in other parts of the building, and I’ll begin putting together a plan for the newsroom. It could involve a specific person, a different structure, or some combination of the two. Please stay tuned.

Perhaps the greatest tribute to David’s work is the extraordinary digital team that he’s assembled over the past couple of years, so infused with authority and confidence that it will prosper long after he is gone. We are on the verge of even greater things, and that doesn’t change at all.

Brian

The Globe will shutter Crux and reposition BetaBoston

Screen Shot 2016-03-11 at 12.49.00 PMCrux, a standalone website “Covering all things Catholic” that was launched by the Boston Globe in the fall of 2014 (see my WGBHNews.org piece from that time), is shutting down, according to a memo I obtained a little while ago that was written by Globe editor Brian McGrory and managing editor/vice president for digital David Skok. BetaBoston, a vertical that covers the local innovation economy, will be incorporated into the Globe‘s regular offerings and will no longer be a free, standalone site.

I can’t say I’ve been a regular reader of Crux, but as a lifelong non-Catholic I’ve found it to offer interesting insights into the Catholic Church—especially John Allen’s column. (Allen will acquire the site, as McGrory and Skok explain below.) My WGBH News colleague Margery Eagan recently won an award for her spirituality column. Overall, the quality—under the direction of editor Teresa Hanafin, who’ll return to the Globe newsroom—has struck me as consistently excellent.

Although you might think the problem was a lack of readers, I’ve been told that Globe executives were not unhappy with the size of the audience. (You could look up the numbers on Compete.com, but they’re probably not very accurate.) Rather, as McGrory and Skok note, the real problem has been finding advertisers.

In any case, it’s a shame that the Globe couldn’t find a way to make Crux work. It was a noble effort. I hope Stat, a far more ambitious Globe-affiliated vertical covering life sciences, is able to avoid a similar fate.

We’ll be talking about this tonight on Beat the Press. And below is the full text of McGrory and Skok’s memo.

We want to bring everyone up to date on a couple of digital fronts.

First, Crux. We’ve made the deeply difficult decision to shut it down as of April 1—difficult because we’re beyond proud of the journalism and the journalists who have produced it, day after day, month over month, for the past year and a half. At any given moment on the site, you’ll find textured analysis by John Allen, the foremost reporter of Catholicism in the world. You’ll find an entertaining advice column, near Margery Eagan’s provocative insights on spirituality. You’ll find Ines San Martin’s dispatches from the Vatican, alongside Michael O’Loughlin’s sophisticated coverage of theology across America, as well as the intelligent work of ace freelancer Kathleen Hirsch. All of it is overseen, morning to night, by editor Teresa Hanafin, who poured herself into the site, developed and edited consistently fascinating stories, and created a mix of journalism that was at once enlightening and enjoyable. Readers and industry colleagues have certainly taken note with strong traffic and awards.

The problem is the business. We simply haven’t been able to develop the financial model of big-ticket, Catholic-based advertisers that was envisioned when we launched Crux back in September 2014.

Let’s be clear that this absolutely can’t and won’t inhibit any future innovations. We in this newsroom and all around the building need to be ever more creative and willing to take risks. We also need to be able to cut our losses when we’ve reached the conclusion that specific projects won’t pay off.

There will be several layoffs involved in the closing of Crux, which is our biggest regret. To the good, we plan to turn the site over to John Allen, who is exploring the possibility of continuing it in some modified form, absent any contribution from the Globe. Teresa will be redeployed in the newsroom, most likely in an exciting new position as an early morning writer for Bostonglobe.com, setting up the day with a look at what’s going on around the region and the web.

The second front is BetaBoston. We’re planning to bring it behind the Globe paywall, making it part of bostonglobe.com, in what amounts to the next logical step in the natural evolution of the site. It began as a standalone destination, and with this move, it will become a fully integrated part of the Globe’s business coverage in practice and presentation.

Beta’s been a key part of our vastly more comprehensive business report. It has allowed us to dramatically expand our reporting on the region’s burgeoning tech scene, with a fresh team of reporters devoted to the news and culture of Kendall Square, the Seaport, and elsewhere. None of that will change. The only thing that will be different is their material will appear on the Globe site, with clicks working against the meter. And we’ll save more than a few dollars on the maintenance of the external URL. We’ll set a date soon.

The reality is, we can’t merely be accepting of change in this environment, we have to seek it out. As always, we’re available for questions, insights, and ideas.

Brian and David

The Globe’s Saturday shrinkage and its digital future

saturday-globe

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I thought The Boston Globe and other metropolitan dailies would still be printing news on dead trees in 2015, I’d have replied, “Probably not.” Even five years ago, by which time it was clear that print had more resilience than many of us previously assumed, I still believed we were on the verge of drastic change — say, a mostly digital news operation supplemented by a weekend print edition.

Seen in that light, the Globe’s redesigned Saturday edition should be regarded as a cautious, incremental step. Unveiled this past weekend, the paper is thinner (42 pages compared to 52 the previous Saturday) and more magazine-like, with the Metro section starting on A2 rather than coming after the national, international and opinion pages. That’s followed by a lifestyle section called Good Life.

The larger context for these changes is that the existential crisis threatening the newspaper business hasn’t gone away. Revenue from print advertising — still the economic engine that powers virtually all daily newspapers — continues to fall, even as digital ads have proved to be a disappointment. Fewer ads mean fewer pages. This isn’t the first time the Globe has dropped pages, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. (The paper is also cutting staff in some areas, even as it continues to hire for new digital initiatives.)

How bad is it? According to the Pew Research Center’s “State of the Media 2015” report, revenue from print advertising at U.S. newspapers fell from $17.3 billion in 2013 to $16.4 billion in 2014. Digital advertising, meanwhile, rose from just $3.4 billion to $3.5 billion. And for some horrifying perspective on how steep the decline has been, print advertising revenue was $47.4 billion just 10 years ago.

The Globe’s response to this ugly drop has been two-fold. First, it’s asked its print and digital readers to pick up more of the cost through higher subscription fees. Second, even as the print edition shrinks, it has expanded what’s offered online — not just at BostonGlobe.com, but via its free verticals covering the local innovation economy (BetaBoston), the Catholic Church (Crux) and, soon, life sciences and health (Stat). Stories from those sites find their way into the Globe, while readers who are interested in going deeper can visit the sites themselves. (An exception to this strategy is Boston.com, the former online home of the Globe, which has been run as a separate operation since its relaunch in 2014.)

“I don’t quite think of it as the demise of print,” says Globe editor Brian McGrory of the Saturday redesign. He notes that over the past year-plus the print paper has added the weekly political section Capital as well as expanded business and Sunday arts coverage and daily full-size feature sections in place of the former tabloid “g” section.

“There are areas where we do well where we’re enhancing in print and there are areas where we’re looking to cut in print,” McGrory adds. “It’s a very fine and delicate balancing act.”

Some of those cuts in print are offset by more digital content. Consider the opinion pages, which underwent a redesign this past spring. (I should point out that McGrory does not run the opinion pages. Editorial-page editor Ellen Clegg, like McGrory, reports directly to publisher John Henry.) The online opinion section is simply more robust than what’s in print, offering some content a day or two earlier as well as online exclusives. This past Saturday, the print section was cut from two pages to one. Yet last week also marked the debut of a significant online-only feature: Opinion Reel, nine short videos submitted by members of the public on a wide variety of topics.

All are well-produced, ranging from an evocative look at a family raising a son with autism (told from his sister’s point of view) to a video op-ed on dangerous bicycle crossings along the Charles River. There’s even a claymation-like look at a man living with blindness. But perhaps the most gripping piece is about a man who was seriously beaten outside a bar in South Boston. It begins with a photo of him in his hospital bed, two middle fingers defiantly outstretched. It ends with him matter-of-factly explaining what led to the beating. “It was because I stepped on the guy’s shoe and he didn’t think I was from Southie,” he says before adding: “It was my godmother’s brother.”

Globe columnist and editorial board member Joanna Weiss, who is curating the project, says the paper received more than 50 submissions for this first round. “It has very much been a group effort,” Weiss told me by email. “The development team built the websites and Nicole Hernandez, digital producer for the editorial page, shepherded that process through; Linda Henry, who is very interested in promoting the local documentary filmmaking community, gave us feedback and advice in the early rounds; David Skok and Jason Tuohey from BostonGlobe.com gave indispensable advice in the final rounds, and of course the entire editorial board helped to screen and select the films.”

But all of this is far afield from the changes to the Saturday paper and what those might portend. McGrory told me he’s received several hundred emails about the redesign, some from readers who liked it, some who hated it and some who suggested tweaks — a few of which will be implemented.

Traditionally, a newspaper’s Saturday edition is its weakest both in terms of circulation and advertising. In the Globe’s case, though, the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday papers sell a few thousand fewer copies than Saturday’s 160,377, according to a 2014 report from the Alliance for Audited Media. No doubt that’s a reflection of a Thursday-through-Sunday subscription deal the Globe offers — though it does raise the question of whether other days might get the Saturday treatment.

“We have no plans right now to change the design or the general format of those papers,” McGrory responds. “But look, everything is always under discussion.” (The Globe’s Sunday print circulation is 282,440, according to the same AAM report. Its paid digital circulation is about 95,000 a day, the highest of any regional newspaper.)

One question many papers are dealing with is whether to continue offering print seven days a week. Advance Newspapers has experimented with cutting back on print at some of its titles, including the storied Times-Picayune of New Orleans. My Northeastern colleague Bill Mitchell’s reaction to the Globe’s Saturday changes was to predict that, eventually, American dailies would emulate European and Canadian papers by shifting their Sunday papers to Saturdays to create a big weekend paper — and eliminating the Sunday paper altogether.

The Globe and Mail of Toronto is one paper that has taken that route, and McGrory says it’s the sort of idea that he and others are keeping an eye on. But he stresses that the Globeisn’t going to follow in that path any time soon.

“Right now we have no plans to touch our Sunday paper,” he says. “It’s a really strong paper journalistically, it’s a strong paper circulation-wise, it’s a strong paper advertising-wise. We’re constantly thinking and rethinking this stuff. But as of this conversation, Sunday is Sunday and we don’t plan to change that at all.”

He adds: “We’re trying to mesh the new world with the printing press, and I think we’re coming out in an OK place. Better than an OK place. A good place.”

The Globe’s David Skok takes on more responsibilities

The Boston Globe’s David Skok is putting on yet another hat. According to Benjamin Mullin of Poynter, Skok, the Globe’s managing editor for digital and general manager of BostonGlobe.com, has been named Boston Globe Media Partners’ vice president for digital.

Among other things, Skok will be in charge of the company’s troubled Boston.com site, which in the past few weeks has seen a dozen layoffs as well as changes at the general manager’s and editor’s positions.

The announcement is well-timed given that the company seems determined to right the Boston.com ship. Globe Media chief executive Mike Sheehan last week told the Globe that a new direction for the site would be set over the next two to three months.

Globe appends clarification to Shaughnessy’s column

The Boston Globe on Tuesday appended a clarification to Dan Shaughnessy’s online column about fired Red Sox announcer Don Orsillo, explaining the extent to which his Monday piece was changed after it was first posted.

Shaughnessy, as you no doubt recall, had reported that two Red Sox employees whom he did not name told him Fenway Park workers were under orders to confiscate signs supporting Orsillo. The removal of that line set off a tweetstorm Monday evening given that Globe publisher John Henry is the principal owner of the Red Sox, which, in turn, controls most of New England Sports Network (NESN), Orsillo’s employer. The clarification addresses the sign issue as well as how NESN handled the timing of the Orsillo announcement.

The clarification reads:

Because of a reporting error, an earlier version of this story made reference to signs being confiscated at Fenway Park. The reference has been removed because the Globe could not independently verify that any signs were confiscated at the ballpark. This story has been edited to describe the degree to which NESN intended to keep the news of Don Orsillo’s departure confidential. The network did not intend to keep the information from Orsillo until January.

A shorter version appears in the print edition, leaving out the bit about the signs since that didn’t make it into print in the first place:

Screen Shot 2015-09-02 at 7.32.35 AM

No doubt the conspiracy theories will continue. But the Red Sox specifically denied that their employees had been given any order to confiscate signs, and Michael Silverman of the Boston Herald reported Tuesday that he couldn’t find any evidence of it. If any signs were confiscated, presumably we’ll hear about it. I’m sure the Herald or any number of other news outlets (including Media Nation) would love to report such a story.

I think what matters here is that the Globe explained how and why Shaughnessy’s column was changed as Monday evening wore on. Managing editor for digital David Skok (on Twitter) and Shaughnessy himself (in an email exchange with me) both described it as part of the editing process. The difficulty is that, today, there are strong incentives to post first and edit later. As I noted Tuesday, many newspapers, including the Globe, are not as good as they should be at explaining why stories are changed after they’re first posted.

In this case, the Globe deserves praise for transparency.

Also published at WGBHNews.org.