Tag: GateHouse

Old ethics and new media (III)

In a weird coda to the controversy over the Beverly Farms “Horribles” parade, a source has informed Media Nation that YouTube has removed the video. Have a look at the Beverly Citizen’s story. When you click on the video, you’ll receive a message that says, “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.”

The GateHouse Media papers, like many smaller enterprises, uses YouTube as a free, easy-to-use publishing platform. Editors upload their videos to YouTube, then embed the code on their own sites. But it looks like publishers who wish to control their content are going to have to figure out a way to do it themselves.

Old ethics and new media (II)

The comments to my earlier post have transformed this into a substantive, productive conversation about journalism and standards in the new-media age. You’ll find intelligent posts on all sides of the issue, from outraged readers to GateHouse Media editors and executives.

I’m humbled by how much better the quality of the discussion is compared to my original post. As Dan Gillmor likes to say, “My readers know more than I do.”

Old ethics and new media

Let’s say some local yahoos decide to rent a truck, bolt a giant model of a penis to the front (complete with squirting water!) and festoon the sides of the truck with messages so crude and offensive that I’m not going to quote them.

Let’s say they decide to enter the truck as a float in a parade that is attended by hundreds of families and children.

Let’s say, further, that the people on the float decide it would be a fun idea to throw condoms at the crowd.

Of course, you already know this is not a hypothetical.

There are many ways of looking at the fallout from the “Horribles” parade in Beverly Farms, which featured three floats — including the one I just described — that made fun of the Gloucester High School pregnancy story.

Here’s another angle: the responsibility of community journalists, who are no longer armed just with a notebook and a pen but with video cameras as well.

The Beverly Citizen, a GateHouse Media paper, is in the spotlight because of a video that it posted showing all the highlights and lowlights, including some close-ups of the aforementioned penis and the signs.

Does the video go too far? I’ll take a cue from the Citizen itself. The news story, by Bobby Gates, is almost prissy in its description of the controversy. Not a single offensive sign is quoted from. As for the float, the story rather clinically refers to a “large, realistically shaped phallic symbol spraying water from the front of a truck.”

Even more out of sync with the video is a post on the Citizen’s blog that asserts the floats “went over the line” by mocking teenage girls. The signs? “And I won’t even go into the signs on the floats, which were lewd at best.” Well, OK. But the blog post was written by “dmacalpine.” And the video was shot by Dan Mac Alpine, whose camera hovered so seductively over the very signs that he (or maybe it was his doppelgänger?) didn’t think he could quote in his newspaper’s blog.

I’m not sure what the lesson is here. I do know that quick-and-cheap video is posing a challenge to community journalists, who are finding themselves embroiled in controversy for shooting footage of subjects that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if they merely described them in writing. That was the case at another GateHouse paper, the Somerville Journal, a few months ago, when its video of the Naked Quad Run at Tufts University sparked discussion and even outrage.

The current, situation, though, is different, as the Citizen is traveling much further in its video than it dares go in its written description. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Let me go back to my original question: Does the video go too far? I think it does. I haven’t checked, but I am confident that neither the squirting penis nor the worst of the signs made it on to any of the local television newscasts. I know that both were left on the cutting-room floor in a news video I watched at the Fox 25 Web site, and it’s probably safe to say that no one is going to go beyond our friends at Fox.

Except, it seems, the Beverly Citizen.

Look, it happened. Hundreds of people saw it. Hundreds more heard about it. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise. But if they didn’t think they should quote from the signs, then they shouldn’t have showed them in the video. As for the penis — well, let just say I think the written description was sufficient.

The folks at GateHouse are not bad people. They’re hard-working journalists trying to find their way in a news landscape that’s changing by the day. I’d rather see them taking too many chances than too few. I’m neither horrified nor offended by what they did. But I do think they made the wrong call in this case.

Update: The Salem News runs a front-page photo of the penis-bearing truck in its print edition. But unless you’ve seen the video, it’s impossible to figure out what you’re looking at. Here’s the News’ story.

Catching up on some recent posts

Following up a few recent Media Nation posts:

Hyperlocal is about conversation, not traditional news. Writing for the Online Journalism Review, Tom Grubisich takes a deeper look at the Washington Post’s LoudounExtra.com site, recently pronounced a failure by the Wall Street Journal. Grubisich’s verdict is that the site falls short in large measure because it doesn’t provide much in the way of interactivity and social networking.

Parsing the financials at GateHouse Media. The financial blog 247WallSt.com last week claimed that GateHouse Media — a national chain that owns some 100 community newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts — could go broke later this year because of its plummeting stock price and $1.2 billion debt. But, in fact, there is some positive news to report as well.

According to GateHouse, in the first quarter of 2008 revenues were $168.9 million, an increase of 78.4 percent over the previous year. And its EBIDTA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) was $30.1 million, up 93.9 percent over the previous year.

A not-so-mysterious increase in listeners. The Boston Globe today profiles “TOUCH 106.1 FM,” a pirate radio station serving the black community that’s been threatened by the FCC. Globe reporter Brian Ballou does a thorough job, but I had to chuckle at his writing that the station’s Internet listenership has recently jumped from 2,000 to 5,000 without offering any possible explanation.

Here is the explanation.

The iron lady versus the press

The Watertown Tab & Press will be in Waltham District Court today to argue that a subpoena brought against one of its reporters should be dropped. The subpoena was filed by town council member Marilyn Devaney, who faces charges that she threw a box containing a curling iron at a clerk in a Waltham store in April 2007.

Devaney wants Tab reporter Jillian Fennimore to testify about her knowledge of the case. But Fennimore, through Tab lawyer (and Friend of Media Nation) Rob Bertsche, counters (PDF) that Fennimore has no direct knowledge of what happened, covering the story only through “the traditional tools of journalism: official police reports, interviews with witnesses, and other shoe-leather reporting.”

Forcing Fennimore to testify, Bertsche adds, would have “the effect of preventing her [Fennimore] — the reporter with the most extensive knowledge of these proceedings — from reporting to the public about this criminal trial.” Such a result, Bertsche says, would interfere with the Tab’s newsgathering activities as protected by the First Amendment.

But Devaney’s lawyer, Janice Bassil, counters (PDF) that Devaney is entitled to know who supplied Fennimore with a Waltham police report labeled “Not for Public Release,” saying, “The information sought by the defendant goes to the heart of her claim for vindictive prosecution.”

That report, appended to Bassil’s brief, is highly entertaining. What allegedly set Devaney off was the clerk’s insistence that she couldn’t write a check without the proper ID. By far the best part is this quote from Devaney, which she allegedly spoke to the clerk shortly before hurling the bag at her: “Do you know who I am? I work for the Governor! I’m a lawyer! I’m in the Senate!”

Now, there are a few problems here. Assuming that Devaney knows what positions she holds, there is a good chance that she has been misquoted. She does not work for the governor, but she is a member of the Governor’s Council. She is not in the Senate, but, rather, serves on the Watertown Town Council. I could not immediately determine whether she’s a lawyer.

Devaney is something of a local legend — a contentious presence on the town council who has battled with her colleagues (there’s a whole section of Devaney clips on YouTube). As a Governor’s Council member, well, let’s just say she fits right in.

All kidding aside, it’s appalling that the Tab — part of the GateHouse Media chain — has been forced to spend one dime and devote more than one minute to fighting Devaney’s subpoena. Bassil, in her brief, makes a ludicrously offensive assertion:

The free flow of information will not be damaged as Ms. Fennimore will continue to be able to report on numerous matters similar to this so long as the information sought was authorized to be placed in the public domain.

This is a Soviet-style definition of journalism: Fennimore will continue to be able to do what is authorized, so where is the harm? I hope the judge can see through that and throws out Devaney’s subpoena with alacrity that it deserves.

Photo found on TheBeautyBrains.com.

Wolves at the GateHouse

I read a GateHouse paper. You probably do, too. Maybe even two: the chain owns good-size dailies such as The Patriot Ledger (Quincy), The Enterprise (Brockton), The Daily News Tribune (Waltham) and The MetroWest Daily News (Framingham), in addition to 100 or so weeklies in Eastern Massachusetts.

Anyway, sorry to bury the lede. GateHouse Media may be in deep trouble. According to the blog 247WallSt.com, the chain — based in suburban Rochester, N.Y. — is doing so badly that you might be able to get some furniture and computers cheap in a few months. After turning itself into a publicly traded company several years ago, the stock price has tanked, falling 80 percent over the past year.

247’s Douglas McIntyre writes: “Watch for GHS to be broken up before the end of the year or to enter Chapter 11.” (GHS is GateHouse’s symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.) Wow.

What’s more, the Motley Fool recently listed GateHouse as one of “5 Deathbed Stocks.”

GateHouse does some interesting things, but it has clearly been hampered by a lack of resources. Its Wicked Local sites were supposed to be a model of hyperlocal and citizen journalism, but they have yet to achieve critical mass. The company also pushes its reporters to shoot and edit low-end video, which is pretty smart. Earlier this year I wrote a post on Cathryn O’Hare, editor of the Danvers Herald, after I followed her through the process.

Mostly, though, the GateHouse papers in Massachusetts are good, solid community papers that have suffered under revolving-door ownership for many years.

During the 1980s, they were owned by a half-dozen or so regional groups, some based in Massachusetts, some out of state. Then, in the 1990s, most of them were combined by Fidelity into a chain that was dubbed Community Newspaper Co. Fidelity sold CNC to Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell for a reported $150 million in 2001.

Purcell did one thing wrong and one thing right. On the one hand, he took the Herald downscale, which made his purported flagship a weird fit with the affluent, well-educated readership he had just acquired.

On the other hand, Purcell unloaded CNC for $225 million just five years later, making him one of the few people to turn a profit on a newspaper deal in the 21st century. The money, many insiders believe, has allowed him to keep the Herald afloat. The CNC deal was part of a larger, $400 million purchase by Liberty Group Publishing, which renamed itself GateHouse, moved to New York State and went public.

GateHouse may or may not survive, but its papers should probably be all right in the long run. Community newspapers are in a better market position than major metros these days. Providers of quality local news don’t face a lot of competition either from other papers or, with a few exceptions, from the Internet.

The problem is that chains amass huge amounts of debt when they buy papers ($1.2 billion at GateHouse, according to McIntyre), and need to turn an unrealistically high profit in order to pay down that debt and satisfy their investors.

If the economy were rocking along, maybe GateHouse could pull out of this. But it’s not. Unfortunately, McIntyre’s post is an indication that things are going to get worse both for those of us who read GateHouse papers and the people who work for them.

Saturday morning roundup

If I were Ernie Roberts, the great Globe sports columnist, I’d tell you what I had for breakfast this Saturday morning. I’m not, so herewith a few observations about this and that.

Deval Patrick’s corporate benefactors. The drip-drip-drip over Gov. Patrick’s book proposal has been more a source of amusement than a cause for genuine concern. Today’s Globe story, in which we learn that he takes credit for the 10,000 people who turned out for a Barack Obama rally on the Common, is a hoot.

But yesterday’s Globe story properly noted a real problem — Patrick’s reliance on corporations, some of which will have business before the state, to buy books by the truckload in order to hand out to employees and clients. The impression you get is of a governor so convinced of his own rectitude that he believes he’s above the rules mere mortals have to follow.

Judge Murphy’s future on the bench. A Globe editorial today urges the state Supreme Judicial Court to suspend Judge Ernest Murphy, who was may be fined earlier this week for his bizarre and threatening letters to Herald publisher Pat Purcell after Murphy won a $2.1 million libel case against the Herald. [Correction: The Commission on Judicial Conduct has recommended that Murphy be censured, suspended for 30 days and fined $25,000.]

I assume the Globe means without pay. As a Herald editorial noted on Wednesday, Murphy has been out on paid leave since sometime last year, collecting his salary of nearly $130,000. It’s hard to think of a public official who has profited so handsomely from media criticism of his performance — which, no matter how imperfectly it may have been executed, is supposed to receive the highest possible protection from the First Amendment.

Helping the fans by gouging them. The Herald goes B-I-G today with the fact that the Red Sox are auctioning off Green Monster tickets to the highest bidder, with some seats going for more than $500.

The best quote is from Ron Bumgarner, the Sox’ vice president of ticketing: “We feel it’s our civic responsibility to keep tickets affordable for fans, and at the end of the day, this helps keep other ticket prices down.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Newspaper-killing chain faces death. The Journal Register Co., known within the business as the cheapest chain on earth, is sinking in a sea of debt and is in danger of being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. The Journal Register’s best-known paper is the New Haven Register, but it also used to own the Taunton Gazette and the Fall River Herald News, now held by GateHouse Media. It also used to own the Woonsocket Call, where I was a co-op student in the mid-1970s.

Cape Cod Today publisher Walter Brooks sent out a blast e-mail with the news, which he titled “Every tear remained unjerked in its little ducts.” No kidding.

Ledger Statehouse bureau lives

Media Nation has learned that The Patriot Ledger of Quincy is not closing its Statehouse bureau after all. Consider this a correction of this item. Although Statehouse reporter Tom Benner has indeed been laid off, I’m told that general-assignment reporter John Kelly will take Benner’s place until a permanent replacement is named.

Ledger closes Statehouse bureau

Adam Reilly reports at ThePhoenix.com that the GateHouse Media cuts detailed by the Globe yesterday include the end of the Statehouse bureau at The Patriot Ledger of Quincy. [Note: The Statehouse bureau is not closing after all. See this correction.]

This is a tough cut indeed — one of the benefits of a local paper’s having a Statehouse reporter is that he or she can cover hometown legislators, assess the local impact of various initiatives and the like. If this cut was really necessary, then things must be pretty bad.

About a dozen years ago, one of the first media pieces I wrote for the Phoenix was on the depopulated Statehouse press corps. It’s only gotten worse since then. Among the Statehouse reporters I interviewed for that piece was The Patriot Ledger’s Carolyn Ryan, who later moved to the Herald, the Globe and, now, the New York Times.

The Ledger’s just-laid-off Statehouse reporter, Tom Benner, is a colleague, as he teaches part-time at Northeastern.

Photo (cc) by koalie. Some rights reserved.

Balboni begins again

You can count the number of Boston media people who’ve created significant, sustained news organizations on one hand. Stephen Mindich, who in 1966 launched the weekly newspaper that became the Boston Phoenix. Jane Christo, who transformed WBUR from an eclectic college radio station into a news powerhouse. And Phil Balboni, who founded New England Cable News. Have I missed any?

Now Balboni, 65, is leaving NECN. But rather than retiring, he’s starting an international news site to be based in Boston. According to Jenn Abelson’s story in today’s Globe, this is no small venture, having attracted heavy hitters from business and journalism, including former Globe publisher Ben Taylor. The project will be known as Global News Enterprises. Balboni has already registered the domain name globalnewsenterprises.net (a placeholder is there at the moment).

The entire news business is undergoing a wrenching cycle of destruction and reinvention. It’s easy to focus on the destruction. Today comes word that GateHouse Media, which owns about 100 community newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts (including The Patriot Ledger of Quincy), is cutting 60 jobs. Nationally, Tribune Co. and other newspaper owners keep slashing.

But Balboni’s move shows that there’s plenty of reinvention going on, too. At a time when major metros like the Globe have eliminated their foreign bureaus to focus on local coverage, there are opportunities to provide new kinds of international reporting.

It sounds like Global News will be a relatively low-budget operation, occupying a slightly different space from Global Voices Online, a Berkman Center-affiliated project that intelligently aggregates bloggers from around the world.

This is worth watching — and rooting for.