Tag: media business

At the Globe, “Dear Colleagues”

Media Nation has obtained an e-mail sent to the staff by Boston Globe publisher Steve Ainsley confirming reductions at the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. I’ve done a little guessing at where the paragraph breaks ought to be. Here’s the text:

Dear Colleagues:

As part of a company-wide effort to achieve greater operational efficiencies, we will be offering voluntary buyouts to employees of The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. Boston Globe employees will receive offers next week. Telegram & Gazette employees will receive offers the following week. Boston.com and GlobeDirect employees are ineligible for this program.

We are expecting a total reduction of 80 positions, with approximately 60 from the Globe and roughly 20 from the T&G. This reduction in staff is a difficult but necessary step toward our ongoing goals of reducing costs and finding efficiencies that allow for the long-term health of our business.

As you all know, these are difficult times in the newspaper business. The good news is that our on-line revenue continues to grow although not yet at a scale that offsets the downturn in print. Going forward our newspapers must continue to adapt to changing patterns of media consumption while our on-line business expands our capabilities to present high quality news and information in new formats and new platforms.

For these strategic reasons we are excluding Boston.com from the voluntary buyout program. Instead, we will continue to invest in this growing area of the business as it scales up in content delivery, advertising and audience. We are also excluding GlobeDirect from the buyout program because it just completed a restructuring as part of its consolidation into the Millbury facility and further reductions are not warranted.

Finally, I should note the terms of this buyout — while still generous — are less generous than similar offers in the recent past. For most employees the basic severance payout will be two weeks of pay for every pension year of service with a cap of one-year’s pay. We are offering an enhanced package to some employees — those Newspaper Guild members at the Globe with lifetime job guarantees, in recognition of their many years of service to the company and the value to them of the job guarantee benefit. They will be eligible to receive three weeks of pay for every year of service with a cap of two years pay. This distinction will not be made in any future buyouts that may be offered. A complete package will be mailed to your homes shortly which will go into greater detail as to the payout components, timing and healthcare benefits associated with the package.

I know that it can be a stressful time for eligible employees at the Globe and Telegram & Gazette who must make an important decision about their careers. Our Human Resources and Employee Relations departments are on hand to help you with any questions you may have about this offer.

I’d like to thank everyone for their continued dedication while we redirect our business to future success.

— Steve

These are very ugly times in the newspaper business. What this tells me is that Ainsley and company are merely trying to keep up with the deteriorating revenue picture, and are making no pretense of knowing where the bottom is.

It’s also interesting — and smart — that Boston.com is being spared. When you add print and online readership together, you can make a case that the Globe isn’t losing readers at all. It’s the business model that’s falling apart. What the Globe and every other paper need to do is hang on to those readers while figuring out what comes next.

Is the anvil ready to drop?

This is depressing, but not unexpected. The Phoenix’s Adam Reilly hears that 60 jobs will be eliminated at the Boston Globe, as well as another 80 20 at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. (Both papers are owned by the New York Times Co.) An announcement could come as soon as tomorrow.

Reilly notes that the cuts, which would shrink the Globe’s newsroom by 16 positions, would leave the paper with 75 fewer journalists than it had a little more than two years ago. Since we can expect the Globe to focus more and more on what it can uniquely offer, as opposed to what readers can find on other Web sites, look for the paper to accelerate its move toward almost exclusively local coverage.

Photo (cc) by Steve Garfield, and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

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.

Not the end of the world

Toward the end of a gloomy assessment of the newspaper business in today’s New York Times comes this:

The paradox is that more people than ever read newspapers, now that some major papers have several times as many readers online as in print. And papers sell more ads than ever, when online ads are included.

That’s more than a paradox. It’s salvation. The consensus view within the business, Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña writes, is that “it could take five to 10 years for the industry’s finances to stabilize and that many of the papers that survive will be smaller and will practice less ambitious journalism.”

I think he’s right on the five- to 10-year time frame, but wrong that news sites (let’s not call them newspapers) will be less ambitious. Perhaps by “less ambitious” he means more focused on local news. That’s true. With a dozens of national and international news sites just a click away, major metropolitan newspapers are going to have to concentrate almost exclusively on local news, sports, business and the arts. But that’s not less ambitious — it’s just different.

The news business has been through several paradigm shifts since taking on a form we’d recognize beginning in the 1830s. The current one may be unusually wrenching. But it only looks like the end of the world because it happens to be the one we’re living through.

Microsoft’s Yahoo bet

The headline at Wired.com says it all: “Microsoft Bids for Yahoo: Do Two Losers Make a Winner?” And if you read Betsy Schiffman’s article, the answer would appear to be “no.”

Microsoft’s proposed $44.6 billion acquisition of Yahoo is the biggest media story of the still-new year. Yet news organizations seem to be straining to imbue this with the excitement they think it deserves. When it comes to the “what does it mean?” graf, everyone is coming up short. In fact, it may not mean all that much.

Carolyn Johnson writes in the Boston Globe today that this may be all about the coming cell-phone wars, where Google doesn’t have anywhere near the head start that it does on the desktop. Even here, though, Google’s efforts to develop cell-phone software — the so-called Google phone, a.k.a. the “Android” — is the subject of much excitement. Everyone wants to know if Android-enabled phones will be cooler/ cheaper/ faster than the Apple iPhone. So even if Google’s cell-phone efforts are not that far along, they’re still considerably ahead of where Microsoft and Yahoo are.

I’m hard-pressed to say how this could affect the financially struggling news business except to note that this is all about online advertising. If competition between Google and Microsoft/Yahoo somehow helps the pie grow, then that can only be good. At the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles is asking whether Microsoft should buy Yahoo. Only 19 people had responded by this morning, and they were evenly split.

Microsoft has not been an interesting company for many years. Its success is built almost entirely on two monopoly products, Windows and Office, which have their roots in the 1980s and which came to full fruition in the mid-’90s. The company has done a nice job in recent years with its Xbox video-game systems, but that’s essentially a side project. Contrast that with the iPod, which Apple used to rekindle interest in its Macintosh computers.

Yahoo? Enormous numbers of people go there, so I guess the company is doing something worth saving. But it’s fallen way, way behind Google in online advertising, and I don’t find what it offers to be particularly innovative or compelling. (I do like Flickr, the social network for photography that Yahoo bought a couple of years ago. But Flickr users are already protesting the Microsoft takeover, which could provide a shot in the arm to Picasa, Google’s own underdeveloped photo service.) I don’t use Yahoo Mail for anything more than diverting stuff I don’t want to a mailbox I never check. By contrast, I like Google’s Gmail so much that I now use it for everything. I also use Google Calendar, Google Documents, Blogger (of course), Google Earth and several other Google services. The company’s “cloud computing” concept is taking over my life.

As Robert Guth emphasizes (sub. req.) in the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft has not been Bill Gates’ company for some time. Steve Ballmer is firmly in charge, and that will become clearer later this year, when Gates retires. Ballmer is fiercely competitive, but if he shares Gates’ vision for how to shape technology markets, he’s never really demonstrated it. (Even Gates never had much vision regarding how good software should work, a shortcoming with which tens of millions of us must contend every day.)

Let’s not forget, too, that though Yahoo and Google have both been criticized for helping the Chinese government with its efforts to censor the Internet, Yahoo went quite a bit farther — actually providing information that helped the government arrest dissidents. Its fierce competitive culture aside, Microsoft has a reputation for being socially conscious. So maybe Microsoft will curb Yahoo’s excesses. But that has nothing to do with catching up to Google, either.

This John Markoff piece in the New York Times seems to get it directionally right. Google isn’t perfect by any means. Someday, someone will come along and knock it off its pedestal. But that challenge is not likely to come from two of yesterday’s giants. Microsoft still makes a ton of money, and will for years to come. That should keep Yahoo afloat.

Still, when Google one day feels the heat, in all likelihood it’s going to come from people who today are still in college or even high school. At the Guardian, Jack Schofield offers some sound advice to Microsoft, arguing that the deal might make sense if Ballmer and company transform Yahoo into their consumer division. His conclusion: “But is Microsoft ready to take that step? I think not.”

Photo (cc) by Erwin Boogert. Some rights reserved.

The multimedia journalist

It wasn’t long ago that a local reporter could head out on an assignment with nothing more than a notebook and a pen. Maybe a camera, but only if there were no photographers available. But those days are rapidly drawing to a close.

Take, for instance, Cathryn Keefe O’Hare, a longtime print and radio reporter who’s been editor of the Danvers Herald since 2000. The Herald is part of the GateHouse Media chain, which is pushing its journalists to supplement their stories with videos for its Wicked Local sites. O’Hare shot video for the first time last Memorial Day. Now she does it regularly.

For a Flickr slideshow of O’Hare shooting and editing her story, click on the photo above.

Last Monday I met her at the Danversport Yacht Club for the eighth annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Awards Dinner. It was a routine assignment — take some notes, write it up. It was also a good opportunity for her to put together a video package. And for me to tag along and watch how she does it.

O’Hare wielded a Casio Exilim ex5600, a tiny, relatively inexpensive piece of technology that shoots still photos, video and audio. She had a simple goal: to ask some of the 450 people who were on hand why they had chosen to attend and what King’s message meant to them. She shot in ambient light, which, as you’ll see, was good enough, if not perfect. Audio is recorded through a microphone in the front of the camera.

O’Hare still finds being a multimedia journalist a challenge. She stands on her tip-toes when interviewing people taller than she. A couple of interviews proved to be unusable. “It’s more stressful than just taking notes,” she says. But she got sufficient material to put together a nice video supplement to her print story.

Three days later I met her in the local GateHouse newsroom in Beverly, where she was editing her clips into a news video. She used Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker, a free program that lets you cut extraneous material out of the clips, piece them together in any order you like, and add transitions, titles and an extra soundtrack. (The Macintosh equivalent is iMovie.) O’Hare spliced in music from the Follow Hymn Interfaith Choir, which had performed on Monday, to supplement the interviews.

To read O’Hare’s story and watch her video, click on the YouTube graphic above.

Finished videos are uploaded to YouTube and then embedded on the Danvers Herald site. O’Hare still hasn’t figured out how to do that, so she leaves it to one of the regional managing editors, Peter Chianca.

“The thing that remains true, whether it’s in print journalism or the Internet or video, you have to tell a story,” says O’Hare. “And you have to tell it as true as you can make it. And you have to try to speak for those people who can’t tell their story.”

To listen to an audio interview with O’Hare, click here.

To watch other videos from the Danvers Herald, click here.

Globe denies layoff story

Globe spokesman Al Larkin calls the Metro report “factually incorrect,” according to accounts by the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly and the Herald’s Christine McConville, although he doesn’t rule out the possibility of some layoffs.

Credit where it’s due: Looks like Lisa van der Pool of the Boston Business Journal was the first to report the Globe’s denial. Meanwhile, in today’s Metro, Saul Williams says he stands by his story. (9:40 a.m.)