Tag: John Henry

No, the Digital First approach to newspaper ownership is not defensible

Politico media columnist Jack Shafer has written, if you can believe it, a semi-defense of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital and its principal, Randall Smith, who are in the midst of running their newspapers into the ground. Alden owns the Digital First Media chain, whose Denver Post is the locus of an insurrection against hedge-fund ownership. The 100-paper chain also owns three Massachusetts properties: the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.

Shafer’s argument is a simple one: the end is at hand for the newspaper business, no one has figured out how to reverse its shrinking fortunes, and so therefore Smith can’t be blamed for squeezing out the last few drops of profit before the industry collapses. “Smith may be a rapacious fellow,” Shafer writes, “but his primary crime is recognizing that print is approaching its expiration date and is acting on the fact that more value can be extracted by sucking the marrow than by investing deeper or selling.”

Now, it’s possible that Shafer is right. But I’m considerably more optimistic about the future of newspapers than he is. Let me offer a few countervailing examples.

1. I certainly don’t want to sound naive about GateHouse Media, a chain of several hundred papers controlled by yet another hedge fund, Fortress Investment Group. GateHouse, which dominates Eastern Massachusetts, runs its papers on the cheap, too, and I’ve got a lot of problems with its barebones coverage of the communities it serves.

But GateHouse, unlike Digital First, is committed to newspapers. That’s why both insiders and outsiders were hoping GateHouse would buy the Herald. I genuinely think the folks at GateHouse are trying to crack the code on how to do community journalism at a profit for some years to come — and yes, its journalists are underpaid, and yes, I don’t like the fact that some editing operations have been centralized in Austin, Texas. But it could be worse, as Digital First demonstrates. For some insight into the GateHouse strategy, see this NPR story.

2. Smaller independently owned daily papers without debt can do well. The Berkshire Eagle is in the midst of a revival following its sale by Digital First to local business interests several years ago. In Maine, a printer named Reade Brower has built an in-state chain centered around the Portland Press Herald that by all accounts is doing well.

3. Large regional papers like The Denver Post are the most endangered. Transforming The Washington Post into a profitable national news organization, as Jeff Bezos has done, was a piece of cake compared to saving metros. As I describe in “The Return of the Moguls,” billionaire owner John Henry of The Boston Globe is pursuing a strategy that could result in a return to profitability: charging as much as the market will bear for print delivery (now up to more than $1,000 a year) and digital subscriptions ($30 a month). Globe executives say the paper is on track to pass the 100,000 mark for digital subscriptions in the first half of this year, and that the business model will start to look sustainable if it can reach 200,000.

In other words, reinventing the newspaper business is not a hopeless task. Randall Smith and Alden Global Capital have taken the easy, cynical route — but not the only route. There are better ways.

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What the new owner of the Los Angeles Times can learn from Jeff Bezos

Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron (left) and Jeff Bezos in 2016. Photo from a Post video.

Last week a years-long ownership crisis at the Los Angeles Times may have come to an end. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire surgeon and entrepreneur, purchased the Times from tronc for a reported $500 million.

Drawing on the lessons I write about in my new book, “The Return of the Moguls,” I e-talked with Dave Beard about what lessons Soon-Shiong could learn from Jeff Bezos’ vision for The Washington Post, and why other billionaire owners both good (John Henry of The Boston Globe) and bad (Sam Zell, who ran the former Tribune newspapers into the ground) have had a rougher go of it.

Our conversation is now up at Poynter.org, and I hope you’ll take a look.

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At The Boston Globe, the editorial pages are looking for new ways to engage readers

Photo (cc) 2017 by Domenico Bettinelli.

For the past two years, The Boston Globe’s opinion pages have published new year’s resolutions in the first Sunday edition of January. This year’s, headlined “We Resolve: What Readers Can Expect from the Globe’s Editorial Pages in 2018,” outlines an eclectic agenda, from keeping a close eye on Google and Facebook, to pushing for transportation improvements, to addressing racism “in all its forms.”

The editorial struck me as of a piece with other innovative moves by the Globe’s opinion section — including an interactive editorial on gun violence, a parody front page of what a Donald Trump presidency would look like, and expanded digital content.  I asked the Globe’s editorial-page editor, Ellen Clegg, where the idea for editorial-page new year’s resolutions came from and what she hopes it will accomplish. Our lightly edited email exchange appears at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Read my interview with Clegg at the Nieman Lab. And talk about this post on Facebook.

Media notes: Making sense of departures from the Globe; plus, Purcell’s big payday

Eight top executives out at The Boston Globe since last summer. Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell paying himself nearly $1 million in the past year as his paper was sliding into bankruptcy. It has been a significant week for the city’s two daily newspapers, and there’s some important context to both stories. So let’s try to tease out what’s really going on.

First the Globe. Last March, as I was finishing up my book on wealthy newspaper publishers, “The Return of the Moguls,” the Globe seemed to be well-positioned to make a legitimate run at financial sustainability. The strategy was a sound one: move the newsroom and business operations to the downtown and open a new printing facility in Taunton dedicated to producing the Globe as well as publications such as the Herald, The New York Times and USA Today.

As we know, the execution turned out to be disastrous. The Taunton plant simply couldn’t handle the work. All kinds of stories were floating around. Among the ones I heard was that management had failed to negotiate an agreement with the unions in a timely manner and that the presses lacked the needed capacity. Whatever it was, the situation quickly devolved into a rerun of the home-distribution fiasco of a year and a half earlier, except with fewer obvious options for fixing it. The story went public in a big way in September, when the Herald published an apology to its readers, putting the blame squarely on the Globe. From a personal point of view, I found myself frantically inserting material into my book about the printing problems during copy-editing and on page proofs.

What I’ve heard in the months since then is that the printing problems have eased but have not been entirely solved. It’s in that light that the eight departures ought to be evaluated, even if not all of them were related to the printing disaster and even if some of the blame was unfairly assigned. Globe publisher and owner John Henry told Don Seiffert of the Boston Business Journal this week that the changes were made in an attempt to change the culture of the Globe’s business operations.

“The culture of the Globe on the business side … needed to be reset,” Henry told Seiffert via email, adding: “The challenge and disappointment has been squarely with senior leadership. We’ve finally dealt with those issues. I am squarely responsible for not dealing with these issues in the first year.”

Fortunately, the Globe’s long-term strategy of selling expensive digital subscriptions is on track, with editor Brian McGrory recently writing that he expects the paper will cross the 100,000 mark during the first half of this year.

If I had one piece of advice for Henry, it would be this: No doubt the Taunton mess blew up whatever financial projections that had been made, delaying any visions of returning to profitability. But this would be the worst possible time to cut. At a moment when the digital strategy is working, it would make no sense to try to get readers to pay $30 a month for a shrinking product.

The signs are good: the Globe recently added a sixth journalist to its Washington bureau, and it is planning to hire replacements for Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee, who’s left for The Washington Post, and Statehouse reporter Jim O’Sullivan, who resigned amid accusations of sexual harassment. Slashing the newsroom because of Taunton’s problems would be the worst possible move.

***

The Herald today published some unsettling news about Pat Purcell, who has owned the paper since 1994 after previously running it for his mentor Rupert Murdoch. According to bankruptcy records obtained by reporter Brian Dowling, Purcell paid himself $970,000 in the year before he declared Chapter 11 on Dec. 8. Finance and operations executive Jeff Magram, a part-owner, was paid another $653,000. Four of Purcell’s children received more than $200,000 among them.

“I continued to pay myself what I was earning previously at News Corp.,” Purcell told Dowling, referring to the name of Murdoch’s company. “I took some raises, same as everyone else. When there were no raises, I took no raises.”

Globe columist Jeff Jacoby, a Herald alumnus, put it this way:

And no, of course Purcell didn’t take a vow of poverty when he bought the Herald. But as former Herald columnist Peter Lucas pointed out last Friday in his column for the Lowell Sun and the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise, Murdoch practically gave Purcell the Herald and the South End property it was located on. Several years ago Purcell sold the property, which was redeveloped as the Ink Block high-end combination of condos, apartments, a hotel and a massive Whole Foods.

Now the money-losing Herald owes $31 million and the fate of employee pensions is up in the air. GateHouse Media, Purcell’s preferred buyer, proposes to shrink the number of employees from 240 to 175, although another possible buyer has emerged.

The Herald has gotten smaller and smaller over the years, and it seems reasonable that it was time for the Purcell era to end. But given how well he has done as a direct result of Murdoch’s largesse, I hope his employees’ worst fears aren’t realized when the bankruptcy proceedings are over and the paper is sold. He owes them much.

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McGrory says the Globe will pass 100,000 digital subs in the next six months

Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory closed out 2017 with a characteristically upbeat message for his staff. Weighing in at nearly 900 words, his email — sent out at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday and passed along to me by a newsroom source — looks back on the paper’s journalistic successes of the past year and forward to continued progress on the business front.

There is no mention of how badly the Globe’s botched launch of its Taunton printing plant affected the bottom line. The situation has improved to the point where it’s no longer the talk of social media, but I continue to hear about delivery problems from time to time. Nor is there any mention of dark clouds on the horizon. But the Boston Herald, an important print customer of the Globe, has gone bankrupt and is likely to end up in the hands of GateHouse Media, which has several printing plants of its own in the region. In addition, a burgeoning trade war with Canada could drive up the cost of newsprint, according to a Bloomberg story that actually appears in today’s Globe.

On the other hand, McGrory writes that the Globe continues to make progress in selling $30-a-month digital subscriptions, John Henry’s make-or-break bet for saving the paper and possibly showing the way for other large regional newspapers as well. McGrory predicts that the Globe will pass the 100,000 mark during the first half of 2018 and says the paper currently has more paying subscribers — print and digital — than it had five years ago. Early last year, when I interviewed McGrory for my forthcoming book, “The Return of the Moguls,” he put it this way: “If we got to 100,000 things would be feeling an awful lot better. And if we got to 200,000, I think we’d be well on our way to establishing a truly sustainable future.”

The full text of McGrory’s message follows.

Hey all,

There was a stretch in early December when our homepage and print fronts were filled with stories of the state Senate president stepping aside because of Globe reporting, three Bridgewater State Prison guards on trial because of Globe reporting, and a federal indictment of a state senator based on Globe reporting.  The thought hit me then, as it does tonight, that there’s not another metropolitan newspaper in this land that has the impact on its community that the Globe does on Boston. Really, name one. And if the question is why, as in why is the Globe so central to the civic life of this region, the answer in no small part is you.

I’m not going to spend time now trying to recap the year we just had; it would be futile to try to capture such an epic collection of once-a-generation events in an email like this. Suffice it to say that your response, your journalism, from January to December, Sports to Spotlight, the initial days of Trump to the burgeoning MeToo movement, was nothing shy of spectacular.

In terms of our DC bureau, have four reporters and an editor ever had such a profound impact providing desperately needed perspective to events unfolding with dizzying speed? The answer: No. Metro and Business, the backbone of our report, continued their stellar accountability reporting, beautiful narrative writing, and the kind of perfectly-timed features that gave readers a break from all things Trump.

This was the year when we finally realized the goal of publishing multiple Spotlight projects, without ever sacrificing quality, culminating in the vital series on race that launched a difficult but overdue conversation across the region. Our sports coverage is so great, so consistently, that it’s easy to take for granted — but please don’t. As strong as it always is, this year was better than any that I can remember.

There’s so much more. 2017 may well have been the year of the columnist, with ours breaking news and offering clarity. Photo, from its arresting daily hits to gorgeous project work, had a banner year again. Our weekly sections — Food, Travel, Address, the Globe Magazine, Sunday Arts — are recognized as among the absolute best in the industry.

This was the year that we enthusiastically ramped up our headline writing, print and digital. It’s the year we started to change the look and feel of our site, thanks to our great design team. It’s the year we broke convention in the ways we tell stories, most notably with two productions of Globe Live that were nothing shy of masterful, and our sports podcast, Season Ticket, which started with well-deserved fanfare and is rapidly gaining audience. WBUR, by the way, is a great partner.

And the most enduring part of the year I’ve yet to mention, which was our reinvention. We created new departments, new philosophies, new beats, new roles. It’s been hard, often anxiety-inducing work, but it’s paid off spectacularly. Our Express Desk, and all the urgent teamwork that goes into it, is a thing of beauty. Our Super Department is gelling now in the exact ways that we hoped. The audience engagement team has brought insight into our coverage decisions. Stories are getting edited earlier and posted at far more impactful times. Many of the new beats have been a huge hit. We are finally — finally — starting to break the stubborn rhythms of a print operation.

And the metrics bring nothing but good news. The key figure: We increased the number of digital-only subscribers by 26 percent in 2017, simply a phenomenal success. We’re closing in on 95,000, and will be at 100,000 in the first half of the year. Overall, we have more paying subscribers now than we did five years ago. It is impossible to overstate how important this is, and the enviable position that this kind of digital growth puts us in.

And one more thing: We moved from Morrissey Boulevard to State Street, in and of itself a huge accomplishment, which we basically fit between everything else. And it already feels like home, the Globe exactly where it belongs, in the heart of the city — even if everyone is still acting a notch too polite.

Yet again, wouldn’t it be great to rest on our successes for a year, but alas, no. The news is not about to slow down, not now, not for a while. Please don’t panic when I talk about Reinvention 2.0, but there is more work to be done, more beats to invent and refine, and better and more productive relationships to build between the newsroom and the rest of the building. We will do all of this in a far less disruptive fashion.

One more thought for 2018: Let’s rededicate ourselves, and by ourselves I mean everyone, to a better balance between work and the rest of life. Some of the most meaningful journalism isn’t conjured under the fluorescent lights of even a beautiful downtown newsroom. No, it’s discovered in our communities, by journalists living eventful lives. We should work hard, yes, but let’s commit to working a little less, and by doing so, I guarantee our work will improve.

For now, though, thank you for all that you did in a year unlike any other. You’ve been amazing, and it’s been an honor.

Brian

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The Worcester Sun gets ready to take its next step: A weekend print edition

Fred Hurlbrink Jr., left, and Mark Henderson. Photo (cc) 2015 by Dan Kennedy.

New England’s second-largest city is about to get a new print newspaper. A little more than two years ago, the Worcester Sun debuted as a for-profit, online-only news organization. Founded by two GateHouse Media refugees, the site has been behind a hard paywall from the beginning, with subscribers paying $2 a week.

Now Mark Henderson and his business partner (and cousin), Fred Hurlbrink Jr., are ready to take the next step: repurposing their journalism in a Saturday print edition that will be mailed free to paid digital subscribers who live in the Worcester area. If you’re not a subscriber, you’ll be able to buy a copy for $2 at various locations in Central Massachusetts.

Print has been part of Henderson and Hurlbrink’s thinking right from the start. Just after the Sun went live, I wrote about the project for the Nieman Journalism Lab. Though the Sun is clearly a digital-first operation, its founders wanted to capture the value that still exists in print advertising as a way of developing a second revenue stream.

“If you’re going to start something new, monetizing digital is tough,” Henderson told me at the time. “And you can’t look at print as a medium without understanding that there is a ton of money still to be made there.”

(Disclosure: Some months after I interviewed Henderson and Hurlbrink, they asked me to serve on an unpaid board of advisers. The Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen wrote a follow-up on the Sun’s progress several months ago.)

Worcester’s daily paper, the Telegram & Gazette, has shrunk dramatically in recent years. Sold by Boston Globe owner John Henry to a Florida-based chain under disputed circumstances, it later ended up in the hands of GateHouse, of Pittsford, New York, which owns more than 100 daily and weekly papers in Eastern Massachusetts. Henderson is the T&G’s former online director; Hurlbrink worked as a copy editor and in production for GateHouse’s MetroWest Daily News of Framingham and for a design facility in Framingham that later closed, with the jobs being outsourced to Austin, Texas.

Henderson and Hurlbrink have a tough road ahead of them. But they’re still here after two years, and they have the advantage of being local owners who are part of their community. The best-case scenario is that the Sun will be a success and that GateHouse will respond by bolstering the ranks of the T&G. Best of luck to Mark and Fred.

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Globe editor McGrory talks numbers at First Amendment gathering

Because I get memos, this blog is perhaps more dedicated to the words and thoughts of Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory than is strictly necessary. But he does lead New England’s largest news organization, and we all care about the fate of the Globe at a time of economic uncertainty. So I thought I’d pass along a bit of what McGrory had to say at last week’s New England First Amendment Institute.

First, some numbers. McGrory said the newsroom currently employs about 225 full-time journalists, down considerably from its heyday of about 540 at the turn of the century. Last spring, when I was wrapping up reporting for “The Return of the Moguls,” my not-yet-published book on Globe owner John Henry, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and other wealthy newspaper publishers, the number I heard was 240. Counting bodies is more difficult than you might imagine. I don’t think there has been any significant change since last spring — just different ways of measuring the size of the staff.

McGrory also said that classified-ad revenue has dropped from $180 million a year when the newspaper business was at its peak to about $10 million today. Again, nothing that will surprise people who watch the newspaper business, but a reminder of why newspapers are not what they used to be.

On a more positive note, the Globe has signed up 92,000 digital-only subscribers, continuing its momentum from the spring, when it was around 80,000. Despite the Globe’s progress, McGrory acknowledged that it no longer has the largest number of digital-only subscribers among regional dailies. That distinction now belongs to the Los Angeles Times. But of course the LA area is far larger than Greater Boston, and digital subscriptions to the LA Times are much cheaper than they are to the Globe, which charges $30 a month.

McGrory attributed this rise to the Trump effect, which has driven paid subscriptions to The New York Times over the 2 million mark and another 1 million at The Washington Post. Though the Globe has focused mainly on local and regional news in response to the changing economics of journalism, it maintains a robust Washington bureau. In fact, McGrory said the bureau is actually adding a person, bringing it to six.

Finally, and perhaps of the greatest significance, he said that 87 people have different jobs in the Globe newsroom since the staff-led reinvention that went into effect earlier this year. The two ideas behind the reinvention: (1) to report the news online throughout the day and move away from the habits formed by the daily cycle of the print edition; and (2) to focus on being a “paper of interest” rather than a “paper of record” that dutifully cranks out stories that few people read.

Nothing about the Globe’s ongoing print problems, but McGrory had addressed that just a few days earlier in a memo to the staff. McGrory essentially described the problem as having eased. That comports with what I’ve heard, though there are still plenty of complaints from longtime customers about missed papers, early editions without scores from the previous night’s game, missing sections and the like.

Despite the difficulties facing daily papers, McGrory told the NEFAI crowd, “We have more readers of Boston Globe journalism than we have ever had in the history of the Globe,” an assertion that takes into account the paper’s print and digital readers, Boston.com and Stat, a health- and life-sciences vertical that’s part of Boston Globe Media.

As John Henry ponders the huge expenses he has no doubt incurred from the print fiasco, I hope he’ll keep in mind that people will not pay for a diminishing product. It could be disastrous if he offsets those expenses with another big cut in the newsroom. The upward momentum in digital subscriptions is the key to the Globe’s future. But that momentum will stall quickly if people start to believe that they’re not getting their money’s worth.

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Questions remain as The Boston Globe tries to solve its epic printing woes

Photo by WGBH News

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The big unanswered question about The Boston Globe’s printing woes is whether they are merely serious — that is, they remain an agonizing pit of misery for months to come but are ultimately fixable — or if, instead, they are so catastrophic that they will require publisher John Henry to get rid of his new used presses and start over.

No one other than a few insiders knows for sure. But the Globe took a good first step toward providing its increasingly disenchanted customers with some answers by publishing an in-depth story by staff reporter Mark Arsenault over the weekend on what we know, what we don’t know, and what we still need to find out.

It was about time. Before Arsenault’s story was posted on Saturday night, the Globe’s only published acknowledgment of the problem came in the form of a front-page note from Henry on Aug. 18 in which he wrote that the presses at the paper’s new Taunton printing facility “are operating too slowly and breaking too often.” He added: “We are embarrassed. We are sincerely sorry to all those affected.” He also said it was unlikely those problems would be resolved by Labor Day — an observation that proved to be prescient.

Arsenault did not address every aspect of what can now fairly be called a crisis. I would have liked to see him do some reporting on what by all accounts has been a terrible experience for customers trying to cancel their subscriptions for papers that often never show up. And though Arsenault reported union official Stephen Sullivan’s response to Globe president Vinay Mehra’s claim that the problems were due in part to employees who are “resistant to change” (Arsenault’s phrase, not Mehra’s), it struck me that the accusation deserved further exploration. I don’t think Mehra helped the situation by insulting the very front-line people who’ve been stuck trying to fix a mess created by the paper’s top executives — two of whom lost their jobs as a result.

Still, there was important information in Arsenault’s story, especially regarding a company in Lubbock, Texas, called West Texas Printing Center. The company reportedly installed a set-up similar to, though smaller than, the Globe’s, which led to a world of hurt before matters were finally brought under control. “First year, year-and-a-half, we struggled,” West Texas official Kristi Holt told Arsenault. “Finding the demons and eliminating the demons is a long, tedious process. I feel for y’all. I’ve been where you are.”

A year. A year and a half. Does the Globe really have that long to get it right? Probably not. The paper solved its previous self-created fiasco over home-delivery vendors in a few months, but it’s not likely the Globe’s customers can wait until 2019 for the current mess to be cleaned up. And let’s not forget that those customers include not just readers but other newspapers that have entrusted their printing to the Globe, including the Boston Herald, The New York Times, and USA Today.

Then there’s the nightmare scenario. Last week a 38-year Globe pressman, Phil McColgan, sent me an email outlining what he thought needed to be done. With his permission, I forwarded his message to my colleagues at “Beat the Press,” and it was featured in our report last Friday. “In my opinion unless Mr. Henry is willing to dig deep into his pockets and install the correct presses such as the Goss presses that are sitting idle in Boston [at the former Morrissey Boulevard headquarters] we are going to continue to struggle to make deadlines,” he wrote.

When you take the long view, the idea that a newspaper could be laid low by printing problems in 2017 seems ludicrous. The Globe is doing well on the internet front, having signed up more than 80,000 digital-only subscribers, more than any other regional newspaper. The Globe’s website could use some updating, and it’s long past time for the paper to offer a usable mobile app. But, overall, the paper has made decent progress in its quest to become a digital-first news organization.

The challenge is that print remains vital to the business of publishing a daily newspaper. The value of digital ads has cratered in recent years, largely because of Google’s automated auction system for allocating advertising to websites. Revenues from print advertising are a fraction of what they used to be — but they remain far greater than online income. Then, too, newspaper readers tend to be older, and they still like print. According to the Globe’s most recent year-old figures, paid print circulation was 143,000 on weekdays and 243,000 on Sundays.

Cynics sometimes observe that Henry got the Globe more or less for free: the value of the property underneath the paper’s former headquarters should offset the $70 million he paid in 2013. But Henry has invested significantly, even as he has made cuts in the newsroom in an effort to stay ahead of declining revenues. The Taunton plant cost Henry $75 million. It may cost him a lot more before this is over.

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Print is the Globe’s albatross — and lifeblood

The shame about The Boston Globe’s printing problems (and it will be a tragedy, not a shame, if they’re not fixed soon) is that, online, the paper is doing just fine. Earlier this year the paper reported that it had signed up more than 80,000 digital-only subscribers, the highest number of any regional paper in the country. The website looks good and is regularly updated, although a real mobile app would be welcome. The fall arts preview, which did not arrive with many people’s papers last Sunday, has been posted online; just bookmark it.

Unfortunately, for the second time in a year and a half the dead hand of print has reached out from the grave and grabbed the Globe by the ankle as it attempts to escape the past. It’s not like John Henry and company can walk away from print — print ads still pay most of the bills, and printing other newspapers is an important part of the Globe’s business strategy. That’s why it’s so important that the current meltdown be reversed as soon as possible

Of course we’ll be talking about this on “Beat the Press” tonight.

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It’s time for some answers on the Globe’s printing woes

In trying to think through what’s behind the crisis at The Boston Globe’s new Taunton printing facility, it seems logical that one of two things is going on. The first possibility is that the problems are fixable but that they have taken longer to resolve than anyone expected. The second is much worse: that the presses the Globe bought are not up to the task, will never be up to the task, and shouldn’t have been purchased in the first place. I certainly hope it’s the former and not the latter.

The Boston Business Journal’s Don Seiffert, citing “multiple sources,” reports that Boston Globe Media’s chief operating officer, Sean Keohan, has left the company — a departure that, Seiffert hastens to add, may or may not be related to the printing problems.

This comes within days of a tough statement from the Boston Herald — which is printed by the Globe — apologizing to its readers for the poor job the Globe is doing of printing its tabloid rival. “We talk with the Globe on a regular basis but unfortunately the remedies they put forth to solve the production problems have failed miserably,” the Herald said. (My WGBH News colleague Emily Rooney praised the Herald on “Beat the Press” for speaking out.)

A number of sources have told me that printing woes have required the Globe to set deadlines so early that the print edition is often missing sport scores — even when the Red Sox play at home. Papers are going undelivered. In addition to the Herald, the Globe also prints The New York Times, and, needless to say, that is not a relationship that Globe owner John Henry wants to endanger.

The problem right now is that few people know for sure what’s going on. When the Globe endured its home-delivery fiasco about a year and a half ago, the paper itself published the definitive story about what had gone wrong. It was thorough and unsparing. This time, we haven’t heard much since Globe Media chief executive Doug Franklin left in mid-July. We need to see the Globe once again rise to the occasion and report on what has gone wrong and how it is going to be fixed.

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