Tag: Mark Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Barlett was 88.

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

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

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

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

Oliver Darcy

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

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

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

And here’s Darcy’s take:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo (cc) 2006 by Tinou Bao

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Does Fox News lead or follow its audience? Yes.

Brian Stelter. Photo (cc) 2017 by nrkbeta

Does Fox News lead or follow its audience? I’ve long thought it was both.

During the 2015-’16 presidential campaign, Fox tried to take out Donald Trump, as when then-Fox host Megyn Kelly confronted Trump with his misogynistic remarks at the first Republican debate. It didn’t work, and eventually Fox got with the program. Then, after Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020, Fox tried to play it straight, more or less. Famously, it was the first media outlet to call Arizona for Biden, a state that ensured his victory. But when Fox’s audience started stampeding to farther-right cable channels like Newsmax and OAN, Fox reversed itself and embraced Trump’s lies so tightly that it cost them $787 million in a libel settlement.

Brian Stelter makes that argument in an interview with Tom Jones of Poynter. Stelter, who’s written a new book about Fox called “Network of Lies,” tells Jones that most Fox employees don’t much care about politics. Instead, they are motivated by the usual: making a living. Here’s an excerpt:

For most, it’s just a job, not a calling. Some producer and director types truly believe in the Trump agenda and will stop at nothing to see him reelected. But most are just trying to make good TV. They definitely aren’t losing sleep about Fox’s coarsening of the culture or Trump’s brainwashing of the base.

I write in the book that rank-and-file staffers like to gossip about hookups between hosts and ratings rivalries between shows. On the occasions when I steered my source chats in a more serious direction, toward the impact of Fox-fueled disinformation on society and democracy, staffers turned cagey or dismissive. I heard some predictable whataboutism and rants about the flaws of other networks.

Bottom line: I think introspection and accountability are in short supply at Fox, a tone that’s set at the top, by Rupert, who advised Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott years ago to “ignore the noise.”

You should read the whole thing. And by the way, although Stelter probably isn’t interested, I wonder if it might be possible for new CNN head Mark Thompson to lure Stelter back now that the brief, unlamented Chris Licht era is over. Stelter appeared on CNN last week to plug his book, so who knows? I wouldn’t expect to see Stelter return to his old job, which is being ably filled by Oliver Darcy. But Stelter is among the very best media reporters in the business, and it would be great to see him return in some capacity.

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Overcoming digital distraction. Plus, The New York Times’ $1.1b folly, and saving community access TV.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Do you find it more difficult to read a book these days? Or even a long article? Do you catch yourself pausing every so often (OK, make that every few minutes) to see what’s new on Facebook, scroll through Twitter, check email, or possibly all of the above? Has concentration given way to distraction?

You’re not alone. For years, writers like Nicholas Carr (“The Shallows”) and Virginia Heffernan (“Magic and Loss”) have worried that the internet is rewiring our brains and transforming us from deep readers into jittery skimmers. In “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,” Jaron Lanier writes that — well, you know.

The latest entry in what has grown into a burgeoning list of digital jeremiads is an essay that appeared in The New York Times over the weekend. The piece, by Kevin Roose, is headlined “Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain.” Over the course of nearly 2,500 words, Roose describes in anguished detail how his smartphone had left him “incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies or having long uninterrupted conversations.” Social media, he adds, had made him “angry and anxious.”

Roose’s solution: A detox program overseen by Catherine Price, the author of “How to Break Up with Your Phone.” Without going into detail (after all, you can read about it yourself), by the end of the program our hero is happier, healthier, and less addicted to his phone.

Digital dependency is a real problem, and it’s hard to know what to do about it. I know that as well as anyone. Over the years, my writing has become symbiotically enmeshed with the internet — I look things up and fact-check as I go, and I can’t imagine returning to the days of writing first, checking later, even though the result would probably be more coherent. Social media and email are ever-present impediments to the task at hand.

But it’s a lot easier to describe what we ought to do than to actually do it. I recommend mindful reading either in print or on one of the more primitive Kindles. In reality, I read the news on an iPad while admonishing myself not to tweet any of it — usually without much success. I need to be on social media for professional purposes, which makes it all the harder to stay away from energy-draining non-professional uses.

We are not doing ourselves any favors. “You know the adage that you should choose a partner on the basis of who you become when you’re around the person?” writes Lanier. “That’s a good way to choose technologies, too.”

The problem is that we didn’t choose our technologies. They chose us, backed by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, whose billions grow every time his engineers figure out a way to keep us more addicted and less able to break ourselves of the habit. We need solutions. I’ll get back to you on that. Right after I check Facebook. Again.

Looking back at a deal gone bad

More than a quarter-century after the New York Times Co. bought The Boston Globe for the unheard-of price of $1.1 billion, the transaction remains a sore point in some circles. As I’m sure you know, Red Sox principal owner John Henry bought the paper for just $70 million in 2013, which turned out to be less than the value of the real estate.

In her new book, “Merchants of Truth,” former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson is blisteringly critical of the 1993 acquisition. Describing the Times Co.’s strategy of that era, she writes: “Some recent business blunders had made the structural damage inflicted by the internet even more painful. The worst was the purchase of The Boston Globe at precisely the moment the glory days of newspaper franchises were ending.” (My “Beat the Press” colleague Emily Rooney interviewed Abramson for our most recent broadcast, and she did not shy away from asking some tough questions about errors in Abramson’s book as well as credible accusations of plagiarism.)

In a recent interview with the newspaper analyst Ken Doctor, Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson described what he and his fellow executives were up against in late 2012: “The thinking at the top of the company when I arrived was that the Times should sell The Boston Globe, and that it was going to be fantastically difficult to manage the Globe in a way where it wasn’t going to become over time a net depleter of the total business, rather than something that was going to add to the success of the company.”

So was the Times Co.’s decision to pay all that money for the Globe really such a boneheaded move? When I was interviewing people for my book “The Return of the Moguls,” I got some pretty strong pushback to that proposition from former Globe editor Matt Storin and current editor Brian McGrory.

Storin told me that the Globe turned a profit of some $90 million in one of its first years under Times Co. ownership. “Imagine today if you made a $90 million profit,” he said. “I mean, those classified ads were just a gold mine. The Times knew that, and I think that’s one of the reasons why they bought us. They didn’t foresee that that was going to disappear, obviously.”

McGrory sounded a similar theme. “For 15 to 18 years there were Brinks trucks driving down I-95 with tens of millions of dollars every year, amounting to hundreds millions over that time, taking money from Boston to New York,” he said. “They made their investment just fine.”

The reality is most likely somewhere in the middle. From 1993 until about 2005, the Globe earned plenty of money for the Times Co. But then things went seriously south, with the Globe losing $85 million by 2009, a situation so dire that the Times threatened to shut down the paper unless the unions agreed to $20 million worth of givebacks. (They did.)

For the Times Co., the real mistake wasn’t in buying the Globe — it was in keeping it for too long.

Last stand for community access TV

This past November I wrote about an industry-supported effort by the FCC to allow the cable companies to save money by cutting what they spend to support local public-access operations.

Naturally, the FCC is pushing ahead with this anti-consumer proposal. So now advocates of local do-it-yourself media are asking supporters to sign an online petition to Congress asking that lawmakers stop the new rule from taking effect.

“PEG [public, educational, and governmental] access channels provide local content in communities that are not served by the broadcast industry and are increasingly under-served by newspapers,” says the petition. “They help prevent ‘media deserts’ in towns and cities across the U.S. and ensure diversity of opinion at the local level.”

Will it matter? I suspect that elected members of Congress from both parties will prove more amenable to public pressure than FCC chair Ajit Pai, who led the campaign to kill net neutrality. But we won’t know unless we try. So let’s try.

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Auletta chips away at the Jill Abramson story

Jill Abramson
Jill Abramson

Ken Auletta of The New Yorker keeps chipping away. This is fascinating stuff. The fickle finger of blame for why New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was fired shifts from chief executive officer Mark Thompson (OK, that was just a theory of mine) to new editor Dean Baquet. (And, of course, and always, publisher Arthur Sulzberger.)

And as Auletta points out, the big question still hasn’t been answered: “Why did the Times, which so heralded the hiring of its first female executive editor, terminate Abramson in such a brutal fashion?”

Photo via Instagram.

Jill Abramson, accountability and The New York Times

Jill Abramson
Jill Abramson

Previously published at WGBH News.

My two favorite stories about Jill Abramson both speak to her insistence on holding The New York Times to account. Those stories may help explain why she was removed as executive editor on Wednesday.

The first pertains to investor Steven Rattner, a friend of publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. who was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission over a kickback scheme involving the New York State pension fund. (In November 2010 Rattner paid a $6.2 million settlement and accepted a two-year ban on some of his trading activities.)

According to The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, Abramson — then the managing editor, serving as Bill Keller’s number two — didn’t hesitate to green-light a front-page investigative report on Rattner, the Sulzberger connection be damned. “What better test is there for an editor than how they handle the publisher’s best friend?” Auletta quoted an unnamed Times source as saying.

To Sulzberger’s credit, the incident didn’t prevent him from naming Abramson to succeed Keller in 2011. But what may have created an irreparable breech was a second, similar story. In 2012, Sulzberger chose Mark Thompson, the former director general of the BBC, to become chief executive officer of the New York Times Co. Before Thompson could begin, Abramson dispatched one of the Times’ top investigative reporters to look into whether Thompson had any role in the child-sex-abuse scandal whirling around Jimmy Savile, a once-popular TV host.

Both Thompson and Sulzberger were angry, reports Gabriel Sherman in New York magazine. A source was quoted as saying of Sulzberger: “He was livid, in a very passive aggressive way. These were a set of headaches Jill had created for Arthur.”

Now the Times’ internal top cop is off the beat. And Thompson, presumably, has a freer hand to enact his agenda — an agenda that is said to include, among other things, more online video and more native advertising, the term of art used to describe what used to be disparagingly referred to as “advertorials.”

Abramson’s successor and former number two, Dean Baquet, is now the paper’s first African-American executive editor, a not-insignificant milestone on a par with Abramson’s being the first woman. He is said to be a fine editor and a popular choice with the newsroom.

But given that Sulzberger’s own son recently wrote a report arguing that the Times isn’t moving quickly enough on the digital front, it might seem strange that Abramson’s successor would be someone regarded as even less digitally savvy than she. The likely explanation is that Thompson sees himself as the paper’s chief digital officer. Certainly Thompson does not lack for confidence. Less than a year ago he supposedly told a Times executive, “I could be the editor of the New York Times,” according to an article by Joe Hagan in New York magazine.

I don’t mean to play down any of the other reasons that have been given for Abramson’s abrupt and brutal dismissal. There is the matter of her brusque demeanor, described in detail last year by Dylan Byers of Politico. At the time I dismissed it as anonymously sourced sexism, but Byers is deservedly taking a victory lap this week.

Another factor was her complaints about making less money than Bill Keller did when he was editor, a story Ken Auletta broke within hours of Abramson’s dismissal. Auletta reported that Abramson even learned she made less than a male deputy managing editor when she was managing editor. The Times has denied all, although in language that makes it hard to figure out what, precisely, it is denying.

And then there is the incident that may have precipitated the final crisis — her reported attempts to hire Janine Gibson away from The Guardian to serve as a co-managing editor for digital without bothering to inform Baquet. Certainly that’s the angle that the Times’ David Carr and Ravi Somaiya play up in their own coverage of Abramson’s dismissal. (Other accounts say Gibson would have been a deputy managing editor, and thus presumably less of a threat to Baquet’s authority.)

Still, none of these reasons sufficiently explains why Sulzberger believed Abramson needed to be dealt with so harshly. She was all but hustled out of the building, treated like Howell Raines after he was dismissed for enabling a plagiarizing, fabricating young journalist named Jayson Blair. By contrast, the Times under Abramson’s editorship has been a journalistic success and has done reasonably well financially at a time when the news business has been imploding, as Matthew Yglesias explains at Vox. (Vox also takes the prize for the best Abramson headline: “Tattooed, puppy-stealing badass editor Jill Abramson out at the New York Times.”)

“I think what it says to us is there is still enormous challenges for women out there, for women who assume those key and influential roles in journalism,” Melissa Ludtke, a pioneering sports journalist and former editor of Nieman Reports, told Politico’s Anna Palmer.

I think it’s more complicated than that. It is nevertheless a fact that in the past few years Sulzberger has fired two of the highest-ranking women in the newspaper business — first Janet Robinson, creating the vacancy that Mark Thompson later filled, and now Abramson.

In addressing the staff Wednesday, Sulzberger referred to “an issue with management in the newsroom.” That’s not good enough. And it’s not the kind of accountability Abramson pushed for in covering the powerful institution that she worked for. I hope we’ll learn more in the days ahead.