By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Within days of Janet Robinson’s sudden retirement as chief executive of the New York Times Co., word leaked that the company was looking to sell its smaller papers in the South and the West.
Which raises a question: Is the Times Co. finally ready to sell the Boston Globe? I review the rocky history of Times Co. ownership in my latest for the Huffington Post.
What will the apparently less-than-pleasant departure of New York Times Co. chief executive Janet Robinson mean for the Boston Globe, its second-largest newspaper?
Obviously it’s way too early to say. But no sooner had the word gone out last night than Globe editor Marty Baron tweeted, “Grateful for her support of the @bostonglobe: New York Times CEO Janet Robinson to retire.” Not that it’s possible to read too much meaning into that.
On the other hand, Financial Times columnist John Gapper read plenty of meaning into the Times’ own account of Robinson’s retirement, tweeting, “Sulzberger fired Robinson, according to NYT (in ninth para)” (via the inestimable Jack Shafer). And what does that ninth paragraph say?
Last Friday, Mr. Sulzberger called a meeting with Ms. Robinson on the 15th floor of the company’s Manhattan headquarters. He raised the issue of installing a different type of leadership at the company, according to people familiar with the meeting who declined to be identified discussing confidential company business.
The Times Co. has done a far better job than most newspaper companies of transitioning to the digital age. The Times and the Globe have pioneered the introduction of flexible paid digital editions. Moreover, both papers are performing financially much more strongly than they were when the bottom nearly fell out of the entire industry back in 2009. So you’d think Robinson would be on the plus side on those two key issues.
Nor do I think it’s credible to believe she was ousted because of the Times Co.’s collapsing stock price. As Ira Stoll notes at Future of Capitalism (via Romenesko), $10,000 worth of stock in 2004, the year she took over, would be worth $1,855 today. But that’s an industry-wide trend, and, seen in the context of major newspaper companies like Tribune falling into bankruptcy, the Times Co. seems to have done rather well.
So it will be very interesting to see what the real reason is for her abrupt, well-compensated ($4.5 million next year) departure.
Unrelated observation: Given their travails of recent months, how cool is it that I’m able to credit both Jack Shafer (now with Reuters) and Jim Romenesko in the same blog post? The natural order has been restored.
Looks like it’s been a pretty lackluster 2011 so far for the Boston Globe, according to the latest financial results from the New York Times Co. Revenues at the New England Media Group, which consists of the Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Boston.com, were down 3.6 percent for the second quarter compared to 2010, and down 4.3 percent for the first six months.
That includes a 2.7 percent decline in advertising revenue for the quarter (3.8 percent for the first six months) and a 5.4 percent drop in circulation revenue for the quarter (6 percent for the first six months). Total revenue for the second quarter was reported at $102.5 million. The circulation decline suggests that the higher prices instituted for the print edition a couple of years ago have now worked their way through the system, and that revenues are sliding as the number of papers sold continues to shrink, as is the case at most daily newspapers.
Business has stabilized at the Globe — certainly compared to 2009, when the Times Co. was threatening to close the company if it couldn’t extract painful union concessions in the face of huge operating losses. But neither the Globe nor the newspaper business in general is close to being out of the woods.
Next stop is the Globe’s experiment in charging for online distribution, scheduled to be unveiled later this year. The Times itself has apparently had some success with its own pay model. The delicate state of the Globe’s finances shows how important it is that its own experiment doesn’t blow up in the lab.
Also: News business analyst Alan Mutter recently analyzed the unexpectedly steep drop in newspaper advertising revenue.
I’m just catching up to this excellent analysis by Poynter’s Rick Edmonds of the Aaron Kushner group’s ongoing efforts to buy the Boston Globe from the New York Times Co. Edmonds’ bottom line: a sale is possible but unlikely.
With the Globe’s business having stabilized and the Times Co.’s debt burden eased, Edmonds writes, “It looks to me like a keeper for the company — unless someone comes forward with cash and is prepared to way overpay.”
Last week the Globe’s Brian McGrory reported that local advertising executive Jack Connors has joined the Kushner group, which already includes former Globe publisher Ben Taylor and his cousin Steve Taylor, himself a former top Globe executive. This isn’t the first time Connors has tried to become part of the Globe’s ownership.
It also raises the intriguing question of whether the specter of former Globe columnist Mike Barnicle can be far behind. Barnicle was involved in a bid by retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch and Connors to buy the Globe several years ago, a bid that Barnicle told Boston magazine was “very serious.” In a 2007 Boston Globe Magazine piece by the legendary Steve Bailey, Barnicle’s wife, Bank of America executive Anne Finucane, was described as one of Connors’ “closest friends.”
It’s hard to know what to make of the Barnicle connection, but my guess is that it diminishes the likelihood that the Times Co. will sell the Globe. It would be the ultimate revenge for Barnicle. It’s also a victory that I suspect Times Co. chief executive Arthur Sulzberger Jr. would rather not let him have, given that Barnicle was let go by the Globe in 1998 — possibly with a push from New York — over a series of ethical transgressions.
William Taylor, the former Boston Globe publisher who died Sunday, was both lucky and good.
Lucky because his time as publisher coincided with an era of enormous prosperity in the newspaper industry. Good because he used that prosperity to transform the Globe into one of the best papers in the country. Under Taylor and the late editor Tom Winship, the Globe grew into a national-class paper with its own correspondents overseas and around the country.
For those who needed reminding, today’s obituary, by Bryan Marquard, explains why Taylor had to sell. With the paper on the verge of devolving to about 120 heirs, the only way Taylor could preserve the Globe’s legacy was to leave it in the hands of a good steward. He chose the New York Times Co., which paid an astounding $1.1 billion — half the Times Co.’s stock-market valuation at the time.
And if the Sulzbergers haven’t been quite the magnanimous owners Bill Taylor might have hoped for (especially when his second cousin Ben Taylor was sacked as publisher in 1999), they still have maintained the Globe’s quality to a far greater degree than a bottom-feeding chain like Gannett or a bankrupt behemoth like Tribune would have.
Bill Taylor’s death comes at a time when Ben Taylor and his cousin Steve, himself a former Globe executive, are seeking to return to some sort of ownership role as part of a group put together by local businessman Aaron Kushner.
The Taylor brand gives Kushner instant credibility — and it was Bill Taylor who was largely responsible for creating that brand.
Also: The Nieman Foundation pays tribute to Taylor.
A lightly publicized effort to buy the Boston Globe from the New York Times Co. continues to inch forward.
Casey Ross, writing in the Globe, reports that businessman Aaron Kushner is prepared to offer more than $200 million for the Globe, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester and Boston.com. That’s considerably more than the $35 million figure that was bandied about two summers ago, which the Times Co. ultimately chose to walk away from.
No one even knows if the Sulzberger family would consider selling the Globe at this point, and Kushner is just a guy with money. What makes his bid interesting is that he’s pulled into his group such people as former Globe publisher Ben Taylor, his cousin Stephen Taylor, a former Globe executive, and Ben Bradlee Jr., a former top editor. (The Taylors were also involved in one of the efforts to buy the Globe two years ago.)
As Ross notes, the Globe is doing better today than it was during the crash-and-burn summer of 2009, though it’s hardly out of the woods. A lot of us would welcome a return to local ownership as long as that wouldn’t presage either a wholesale dismantling or a diminution of news standards and values. Kushner sounds serious about wanting to reinvent the Globe, though I suspect he’s kidding himself if he thinks he’s got some secret formula.
Earlier this year, Katherine Ozment profiled Kushner for Boston magazine. He did not, shall we say, come across as the second coming of Gen. Charles H. Taylor. Nevertheless, this is an intriguing moment in the life of the region’s dominant media organization.
News that Ben and Steve Taylor have signed on to businessman Aaron Kushner’s bid to buy the Boston Globe has changed the dynamic. The Taylors, of course, are prominent members of the family that owned and ran the Globe for more than 100 years. Ben was the publisher before he was ousted in 1999. Steve was executive vice president.
The Taylors, who are cousins, fell short in a bid to buy the paper back from the New York Times Co. in 2009. The reason was never announced, but the buzz was that their group was undercapitalized, and that the Times Co. would have had to accept a ridiculously low price in that year of economic crisis. The Globe would undoubtedly be worth more now, but how much more is hard to say.
The significance of the Taylors’ involvement is that there now will be support within influential circles for the Times Co. to return the Globe to local ownership.
Would Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger sell the Globe? By placing the Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and their associated websites on the block in 2009, he made it clear that he would if the price was right and if he and other Times Co. executives were comfortable with the buyers.
I suspect the big question they’ll now have to answer is whether they can get the price they want — or if, instead, they think they can get more by hanging on to their New England properties for another few years.
The Globe first reported Kushner’s interest last October.
Is the Boston Globe for sale? For the right price — maybe. An investment group headed by a 37-year-old greeting-card entrepreneur named Aaron Kushner emerged this afternoon as a possible buyer for the Globe, Boston.com and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester.
But the New York Times Co., which wanted to sell the properties in 2009, may no longer be interested. No doubt that would change if Kushner’s group is prepared to fork over some serious money. But we don’t know that yet.
Another caution: Kushner says he wants to beef up the newsroom. Well, wouldn’t we all? He may be well-intentioned, but no one is going to bolster the Globe’s staff unless his intention is to operate the paper at a loss.
Ralph Ranalli is gathering links at Beat the Press.
(Note: If the top of Media Nation looks mangled, please hit reload.)
I’m skeptical, but I’m impressed. Yesterday’s announcement that the Boston Globe will move most of its content to a subscription-based website sometime in the second half of 2011 shows that Globe executives know where their strengths are and that they’re prepared to think innovatively to protect those strengths.
The Globe’s dilemma is that it has an enormously successful free website, Boston.com, that is quite different from the paper itself. Start charging for access to Boston.com, and many of those 5 million unique visitors a month would vanish.
The solution: keep Boston.com free, but split off the Globe’s content into a separate, paid site called BostonGlobe.com, currently a free subsite. The decision raises lots of questions. Perhaps the biggest is how much free Globe content will be posted on Boston.com, and whether Boston.com will remain as popular once it has to stand on its own.
Still, it’s a far more interesting idea than the metered model embraced by the Globe’s parent company, the New York Times Co., which rolled it out at the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester recently and which will give it a go at the flagship paper sometime next year. Under the metered model, readers can access so many articles for free each month, after which they have to pay. It might work for the T&G and the Times, but it would have been deadly for Boston.com.
Yesterday I conducted an e-mail interview with Globe publisher Christopher Mayer, which he graciously agreed to do because I still can’t take notes. (Although it’s getting better. I’ve got a pillow propped up and am typing two-handed now for the first time since my accident.) Our unedited conversation follows. I’ve got a few closing thoughts after the jump.
Q: The metered model seemed to be the way the New York Times Co. was going. Why did you choose something different?
A: We’ve said all along that each organization would need to come up with a custom-made approach that takes into account unique market factors. We felt this was the best course for us, given the fact that we have two strong brands and essentially two different types of users of our Boston.com site. We have the opportunity to build a free site and a subscription-based site, and based upon extensive research, that emerged as the best option for us.
Q: The advantage of the metered model is that you’re not entirely cut off from the great conversation that’s taking place on blogs and in social media. Are you concerned about breaking a big story and not having as much impact as you should because people can’t link to you? Please address what Clay Shirky said about the importance of online sharing with respect to the Globe’s reporting on the pedophile-priest story.
A: We don’t intend to be cut off from the conversation. We haven’t announced, or even worked out, all the details of what will be on which site. But we can envision that some full-text Globe stories will be available on the free site. I suspect we would have put many of the initial priest sex-abuse stories on the free site because that Spotlight Team investigation was viewed as clear public service reporting. In the future, we’ll make those judgments as appropriate. Continue reading “Publisher Chris Mayer on the Globe’s new pay model”
No doubt the best coding brains at the New York Times Co. are focused on iPad development these days. But as a paid subscriber to the Reader editions of the New York Times and the Boston Globe, I have a few suggestions for how they could be better. I’d want to see these ideas incorporated into the iPad app as well, so please consider this a two-fer:
1. A front-page image of the print edition should be included, just as it is on the papers’ websites. We Reader readers, to coin a phrase, exist in a sort of electronic halfway house: we still read the paper as the paper, but we don’t mind giving up ink on dead trees. So we, of all customers, want to get a sense of what the front looks like.
2. The Reader organizational scheme should be as clear and easy-to-follow as the simple list format the papers use on their websites for that day’s edition (Globe here; Times here). Yes, I can skim through every Reader story very quickly, but sometimes I’d like to select a section front, then pick and choose.
3. Mega-dittoes for the Globe’s “g” section, which is just a mess in Reader. Way too many short items are just thrown up there. It needs a complete rethink.
4. Folks at the Globe need to take photos more seriously when putting together the Reader edition. There are too many instances of context-free pictures with no captions.
5. Reader editions should always link to multimedia extras such as videos. I know of a few occasions when I’ve found out hours after reading the paper that I missed on a terrific video.
My fear is that the Reader platform hasn’t attracted enough users to make further development worthwhile. I almost never see an ad other than a house ad, for instance. I still think it’s a promising idea, though, and perhaps development can take place in parallel with the iPad.
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