Looks like it is lights out for the Boston Globe:
The New York Times Co. said last night that it is notifying federal authorities of its plans to shut down the Boston Globe, raising the possibility that New England’s most storied newspaper could cease to exist within weeks.
After down-to-the-wire negotiations did not produce millions of dollars in union concessions, the Times Co. said that it will file today a required 60-day notice of the planned shutdown under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification law.
You know, I don’t cheer the demise of newspapers. I think losing something with the storied history of the Globe is objectively a bad thing. However, I am also hard pressed to think of anything the Globe has done since this blog started. Unlike a lot of other papers, I don’t even think I have ever cited it. Does anyone remember it leading the coverage of the Kerry campaign the way the ADN performed during the last election?
Maybe I am forgetting things, and maybe it really is a better paper and you all can jog my memory, but unlike the Times, the WaPo, the Chicago Sun Times, the LA Times, there just seems to be very little notable about the Boston Globe. Nothing stands out either good or bad. Am I wrong?
TR
They occasionally came through — Charlie Savage won the Pulitzer for his series on Bush’s signing statements.
Olly McPherson
I was going to say “signing statements” as well. Glenn Greenwald often pointed to Savage’s work.
bmf
Charles Savage Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Bush
signing statements, 2007
JeffH
Charlie Savage was working for the Globe when he won a Pulitzer for the story on presidential signing statements a few years ago.
cleek
they do some really good on-line photo spreads.
for example: this, and this (and many others)
Michael
Media mergers and consolidations created this. They dumped reporters and editors in localities as they bought up the papers, and tried to do things on the cheap via scaling and syndicated know-nothing punditry.
There are going to be a lot of places with no real local newspapers, and the loss of the investigative talent will have a dramatic effect. TV news just does not provide the same depth, and people will lose interest in “USA Today” style coverage.
The local underground alternative pubs will end up filling the niche, but it’ll be a slow slog, probably about 20 years.
wilfred
Well, if you only think of BIG IMPORTANT NATIONAL stuff, it probably isn’t so important. But when you think of all that a big city rag does, or has done, it borders on tragedy. All those features, coupons, human interest stories and municipal muckraking that the Globe, and others do, will be gone.
I’d hate to see papers go, really.
Chinn Romney
Beat me to it. Charles Savage is a good starting point. Gareth Cook won a Pulitzer in 2005 for his articles on Stem Cell research. I think somebody got one a couple years prior to that in breaking the Catholic Church Abuse scandal too.
This is also an important regional paper. It’s better if both the Herald and the Globe continue to operate, but if we had to pick one then the Globe is the one we really need.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
You aren’t wrong about the Globe, but as DougJ has pointed out, the real loss in story of the demise of newspapers is the loss of small town papers. In the small towns, the local papers serve a different set of purposes, acting as glue holding the community together and providing visibility into local politics and business that can’t come from larger regional papers like the Globe.
TimB
Best sports page I’ve ever read.
Ash
When I went to school in Boston the Globe was daily reading for me. This is awful. :(
Louise
As wilfred said, it’s not the Globe’s status as a national paper that matters; it’s the loss to the city and surrounding communities.
Papers have simply been too slow to figure out an online model that will work, and that means that an enterprise like the Globe is going to disappear rather than be reconfigured as an online entity. Local reporting is critical — losing a large source of it (assuming they were doing a good job) is awful.
Of course, the financial pressures that led to this have also led to a lack of solid, long-term, hold-their-feet-to-the-fire reporting, so people may not feel the loss as keenly as they might have otherwise.
Michael
Sadly, this means that once more, punditry gets magnified and may fill some of the resultant vacuum.
eldorado
cleek is correct.
the big picture is a national treasure, and one of the best things on the web.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/
bayville
Frankly, the Globe has one of the best sports sections in the country. The Sunday sports section is easily the best, especially during baseball season.
If you live in New England, it is the one newspaper to buy for its regional coverage.
As has been mentioned, Charles Savage – maybe the best daily newspaper reporter in America – won his Pullitzer while writing for them a couple of years back.
Plus, this looks like a big play by management to get the unions to “give-back” some bennies that were negotiated in good faith just two years ago.
The NYT is following the lead of the management of the Newark Star-Ledger which used the same “bargaining” technique last summer. The Star-Ledger is still around – and making a profit – only not as big a profit as it did during its salad days 10 years ago.
Warren Terra
I was going to say Charlie Savage, and signing statements, but that appears to be well covered.
The truth is that the Globe is a lousy newspaper. Its competition, the Herald, is not really a newspaper at all, with its blatantly slanted coverage of everything; its short, sensational stories written to be read by the feebleminded; and its aptitude for meaningless celebrity stories and the like; even with these glaring defects, the Herald reporting staff regularly does a better job of learning about local and state politics and other news than the Globe does, although they of course then proceed to write up what they learn in the Herald‘s patented horrible fashion. I live in Boston (well, Cambridge), and I know a heck of a lot of people that read the New York Times in preference to the Globe (none would touch the Herald except perhaps for sports coverage), because the Times is a vastly superior newspaper for everything but local news and the Globe just doesn’t add significant local news value.
J.
I second @wilfred (#7) and comment #9. I grew up on the NYT and read it while in school in Boston, though I also read the Globe. And when I lived in Chicago I read the Chicago Tribune, in addition to the NYT. I did this because I felt it was very important to read and learn about what was going on where I lived from people who lived and worked there. While I understand that running a newspaper is a business, and that many of these businesses are no longer profitable, it makes me very sad to think of all the once great local papers that are no more or soon will be.
mr. bispo
The Globe did a 7 part and not always the most friendly profile of Teddy Kennedy.
But other than that, I’d agree with the Savage point.
It’s a shame a major metropolitan will be without their flagship.
The Boston Herald is even worse than The Globe.
Plus, I still sub to the Bob Ryan rss feed.
baldheadeddork
Not a major national paper, but the Globe had solid local coverage as others have already mentioned.
I don’t understand why none of the large papers have tried putting their local content behind a subscription firewall? Locking up national and international news coverage doesn’t make sense because there are so many other sources with the same depth. But a good paper should be alone in the depth and breadth of their local coverage. It’s exclusive content, and they should be charging for it on the web.
aimai
The Times killed the Globe already. Its my local paper and I’m devastated to see it go. Charlie Savage’s work was very important. The Globe also broke the story of the Catholic Church and pedophilia. It has done some great reporting on local stories, over the years. But under the Times’ abysmal management they slowly eliminated all their own best people and also the best local coverage. Right now the paper is down to the most absurd AP reprints. That isn’t a business model–thats an anti business model. Its insane. People pay 75 cents a day for the Globe in a hard copy at the newsstand and they get nothing for it but regurgitated AP copy? This isn’t the Globe’s fault as a paper. Its a Times level business decision.
aimai
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
Just following up on my earlier post, this is an example of the kind of investigative work that can really only be done at the local level.
Without healthy newspapers to support these activities, there really isn’t any public visibility to what goes on behind the scenes.
It might be that the smaller papers can take on some of this work, but I doubt that they can do it effectively. I don’t think they have the resources to carry on this kind of investigation.
Note that the AZ Republic newspaper (and the linked website) are part of the Gannett media complex.
aimai
Hey! Warren TErra! I might have guessed you were a fellow cantabridian. Do you ever have breakfast at the Hi Rise? Maybe we should have a baloon juice in exile meeting there.
aimai
bayville
In a nutshell, here is what the NYT Co. strategy is, with regard to the Globe.
Bordo
I spent three decades in the newspaper industry, working for both family-owned and corporate publications, in small cities and very large cities. Even though I was a victim of downsizing more than five years ago, which was definitely an embittering experience, I’m not sure we all can grasp just what we lose when these papers die.
As earlier commenters have stated, it’s not just the big city papers, though they are critical components in keeping local governments and agencies honest and above board. It’s also the small dailies and weeklies, where owners have slashed coverage and trimmed staff to ensure higher profit margins. One of the papers I worked at a long, long time ago no longer covers the village council meetings because they are carried on cable access channels. WTF?? That means there is no one asking hard questions, checking records, etc. And who among us can honestly say they have watched a village council meeting from start to finish on a cable channel?
The ownerships of most media companies have shown the intelligence and foresight of a fruit fly. I shed no tears for any money these creeps lose. But I honestly lament the impact on our communities.
Johnny Pez
Yet another reason to hate the Times.
John H. Farr
Well, these days I’m not reading any newspapers, either in print or online, except by referral from various links. I read Frank Rich on the NYT site, for example, but only when someone I dig cites him — I never visit the home page. But the Internet is my only source for information now.
Newspapers are still useful for local news. That’s about it. Any other items are already stale by the time the paper comes (my wife gets the Santa Fe New Mexican for the crossword puzzles).
(No teevee news whatsoever, either. No TV!)
Life goes on somehow and is getting better in many ways, although the older I get, the more the sum of everything I’ve done is like a finger-snap.
Riggsveda
Two words: Charles Pierce.
jrosen
I lived around Boston from 1972 to 2007. I stopped reading the Globe (except for the online sports pages and the arts section in which I have a professional interest) almost 10 years ago. Everything that I got from the hard copy I could get from the NYT or the Internet. Now that I live in Northern NJ, I have even less interest…except for my continuing attachment to the Celtics and the Patriots. That part I will miss…for the rest, sic transit etc. etc.
sgwhiteinfla
Off topic but you just gotta read this email exchange between uber wingnut Cliff Kincaid of birther fame and Glenzilla
http://firedoglake.com/2009/05/04/mr-greenwald-gets-a-letterand-writes-one/
JC
@aimai: Somerville resident here. This is sad, though. I can’t imagine the city with just the Herald
Punchy
Just another lib-leaning, Democrat party-favoring worthless rag. Good riddances.
Hillary Rettig / www.lifelongactivist.com
as someone earlier noted, the Globe broke the pedophile priest story. It also broke the story of how Bush went AWOL during his military stint.
Bob In Pacifica
What sometimes happens is that when an industry collapses something rises to take its place and serve the needs that the old industry served.
I hate seeing newspapers going down. I used to read four or five newspapers a day: SF Chronicle, SF Examiner, New York Times, Oakland Tribune, and whatever else was on the news stand. Not only did I like to see how news stories evolved from the morning to the afternoon papers (and sometimes the late editions!), but I also studied the nuances of how each paper covered a story: what details were included or excluded, how was the political slant of the ownership reflected in the reporting.
I see that the overall ability to discern pure news as opposed to the bias of the reporting is getting more and more difficult.
I hope that in the future new sources of reporting, whether through the internet or some other means, replaces what newspapers used to do.
D-Chance.
I work on the periphery of a local rag. Word is that the main competition (the “big city” newspaper from nearby) is out of our local market within 3 years, tops. As for the local paper inheriting a monopoly? Well, I’ve heard the following uttered around the office more than once: “In ten years, we’ll still be in business. We may not be printing a newspaper. Right now, we don’t know what we’ll be doing. But we’ll still be around doing something.”
Despite all the “happy talk” that’s thrown out to the employees and delivery staff, the industry is on its way out. Circulation continues to decline while the average age of the readership continues to rise. As the old folk die off, the youngsters simply aren’t replacing them as customers. Plus, the local is geared almost exclusively to the elderly, white, conservative, bible-thumping red-red stater. Young, hip, progressive-minded people need not apply. The local political stories they run and the quotes they print make you think you’re reading something from the 19th century.
bayville
Right on cue. Deal cut; Paper saved.
Davis X. Machina
The Globe‘s Walter V. Robinson broke the story in the mainstream press — Martin Heldt had it first on the internet, as did Maia Cowen, and Paul Lukasiak, later — of Bush’s AWOL-from-TANG record.
He took a buyout. Most anyone decent did. If you didn’t know the pre-Times Globe, you missed something.
Zifnab
I mean, Charlie Savage has been at the NYT since ’08 and Pierce has been around the block a few times so he shouldn’t have trouble getting picked up again. I can’t see any big names getting left on the cutting room floor.
But this isn’t the end of journalism. It’s the end of the dead tree edition. The Boston Globe implodes and leaves a vacuum in its wake. So more people turn to alternate sources, possibly the internet, find their dailys of choice, and move on.
The Boston Globe doesn’t just vaporize. You just need an entrepreneur or two to sweep in and pick up the pieces. America has been historically pretty good about filling that gap.
Joshua Norton
Back in the day, Boston had powerful newspapers. The Boston Globe was huge. It was the third newspaper, after The New York Times and The Washington Post, to defy government secrecy and publish the Pentagon papers on the Vietnam War.
The pre-Murdock, pre-tabloid Boston Herald was the respectable newspaper of choice for the Back Bay “proper Bostonians” after the demise of the 100 year old Boston Evening Transcript.
The Record-American was the New York Post type tabloid you grabbed for a quick read on the train ride home at night.
Once newspapers pass out of the founding family’s ownership, they usually change for the worse, slashing staff and costs to cover the price of purchase. Watch for the San Francisco Chronicle to probably go the same route.
SadieSue
I live in WMass & as others have pointed out, the Globe has never really been a national paper the way the NYT & WaPo are – it is (or used to be – fucking NYT & all their cuts) a really good local & regional paper. They cover Massachusetts & New England news well & are an especially important source of state political news, most of which we in the west would never hear about except for their coverage. They also have one of the best sports sections in the country, important in this sports mad region. Of course, as others have also mentioned, they are a shell of themselves since the NYT took them over (which was extremely unpopular in MA; I love the NYT but I HATE that they own the Globe).
I would also argue that we have more than enough national papers & national networks & that having more local & regional media would keep us much better informed. I still miss our old local paper, the Holyoke Transcript & Telegram, which folded years ago. It let us know what the sirens we heard were responding to, who had babies, who died, what stores were opening/closing – all the sorts of news that binds a community together. Nothing has replaced it. All the other media in the area are either based in Springfield (& don’t seem to realize there’s much more to WMass than Springfield or that there is news other than shootings occuring) or just regurgitate the AP feed, which I get much more efficiently online. And as much as I love blogs, I do need local & regional non-political news & that is one of the things papers like the Globe used to do so well.
D-Chance.
@baldheadeddork:
The problem is the newspaper industry still hasn’t figured out the internet. Even if they lock up the local material, it will find its way out into the free internet world. The online ads don’t get the clicks, so revenue from that area is limited. The print edition is still the money-generating arm of the operation for most newspapers. All ideas of converting to the internet… subscription base… heavy advertising… partial firewalls… linking from paper to internet and vice versa… so far, they’ve failed.
The internet is based on the FREE and instantaneous exchange of ideas. Newspapers are based on “buy it, then read it”. Until someone can develop a consistent working model that will allow a smooth transition for old customers while appealing to young customers and still maintain a predictable and reliable income stream to replace print advertising and subscriptions, most papers will be in trouble.
Comrade Scrutinizer
The only time the Boston Globe made an impression on me was when Robert B Parker referred to it as the “Glob” in one of his Spenser novels.
scott
@John
In the list of influencial payers, do you mean the Chicago Tribute rather than the Sun Times. I think it’s by far the superior paper.
Tom Levenson
Just to add to Globe memories, hold a thought for Elizabeth “Buffy” Neuffer. Dedicated herself to conflict coverage; put herself in harm’s way to get the story for the Globe, in Rwanda, in Bosnia the former Soviet Union, and in Iraq during the first Gulf War and again in our current conflict. She died there in a Humvee wreck on on May 9, 2003.
She was a friend of mine, absolutely newspaper to the core, and committed to reporting some of the hardest stories there are in some of the worst places on earth.
When you lose newspapers, including the shadow-of-itself Times-era Globe you lose the places that support such people.
We’ll work our way to a different model, no doubt; we are doing so already. But it won’t serve us well if the next Buffy can’t find a place within it.
bayville
@Bob in Pacifica:
It is naive to think the downfall spiral of the daily newspaper can be construed as anything but a negative. The seemingly weekly reports of Daily X threatening to go out of business is primarily an American problem.
(In London, there are at least 7 dailies that are published today).
To think, that bloggers or the internet could do as good a job of covering local Planning and Council meetings, report on high school athletics or even provide a forum for the masses who still aren’t connected to the internet or cable television is absurd.
The great Charles Pierce says it much better than me.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/altercation/425880/slacker_friday
Doctor Cleveland
The Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal was especially and uniquely the Globe’s story. A Globe investigative team did that work, from the ground up, over months, digging up priests that the Boston Archdiocese had shifted from parish to parish. They dug up the pattern of abuse and the rotten culture of denial.
Eventually, that became a national story, because other reporters in other places began to do the kind of work that the Globe had started in Boston.
So they started with a local story and eventually changed the nation’s perception of a major religious denomination. I think that’s honorable work. (The Herald will never do anything like that.)
miwome
I’m from Boston, and I heartily second the photojournalism, the signing statements, the sports section (what media outlet will cover the Red Sox properly now? The answer is none. It’s not possible), and the Catholic church pedophilia story. I’d add that their local coverage of the gay marriage fight back in 2004 was really essential: I was in high school at the time and I remember rushing home to read the news stories and editorials every single day.
I, like everybody I knew, read the NYT in addition to the Globe, and now that I live in Chicago the only time I really frequent the Globe is for the photo series. My parents are still subscribers, though. I’m shocked and saddened to see it go (I thought some more small, more local papers would go before the Globe), even if it has declined as much as some commenters say in recent years.
flounder
Charlie Savage broke the stories on the Bush signing statements.
Joshua
The most important thing about the Globe is that it’s not the Herald. What a miserable rag that is. More or less what you’d expect from a Murdoch paper.
But, hey, at least we’ve still got the Metro?
John Cole
@scott: Actually, I occasionally read both, but I check the Sun Times for Ebert. I don’t go to a movie without reading his review. I keep an eye on Lynn Sweet over at the Sun-Times, too.
PK
I just cancelled my local paper. Even though it endorsed Obama I got fed up reading its right wing opinion sections (usually 3 right wingers to one moderate). The last straw was yesterday’s paper where there were 2 anti global warming pieces and one pro-torture opinion by Charles Krathammer. The anti global warming bit was subtitled “War on CO2 leaves Americans breathless”. The second bit was by a guy who claimed that he was not a scientist, nor a specialist in climate change, but was well informed because he was taught by Jesuit priests. The whole article had the usual crap about environmental extreamists, alleged climate change and political conspiracy by politicians in league with the UN to destroy the industrial way of life.
The paper prints this nonsense claiming it is offering a different perspective. I say that any paper which publishes such distortions deserves to die.
I have no problem with reading opposing points of view, but the opposition has to be grounded in facts. Our local paper has yet to figure out that climate change exists. When it does I might restart the subscription (if its around by then).
flounder
Sorry for being late the party, when I went to this story, I wasn’t initially seeing any comments.
baldheadeddork
@D-Chance.:
I agree that the newspaper industry still hasn’t figured out the internet. While we’re on the subject, the financial mismanagement of many papers has much more to do with their current crisis than online content.
I don’t think what the internet is based on should be the last word in how content is distributed, or how creators are paid for their work. What do newspapers have that is better than anything other source? It’s not national news or opinion – there are too many sources with detailed coverage for free. You can’t put that material behind a firewall and expect anyone to pay for it.
But I think newspapers have a unique advantage for local coverage. TV and radio distills everything down to thirty seconds and national outlets don’t go beyond the surface when they cover it local news at all. They spend a good deal of money to generate these stories, and I think there is an audience that would pay for it.
Look at the amazing work the Anchorage Daily News did last year on the Palin and Stevens stories. Was it worth a dollar for a day pass, or five bucks for a week? Not for everyone, but I think at least several thousand readers would have ponied up. Ditto for any paper that has really solid sports coverage, and that’s a story that never goes away.
I also like this idea because it would force publishers to focus on providing good content if they want to succeed.
Jon H
@bayville: “(In London, there are at least 7 dailies that are published today).”
Aha, that’s the key to saving American journalism: Fewer boobs on the op/ed page, more tits on Page 3.
Brachiator
As others have noted, the Globe’s Catholic Church sex scandal was among the best, most comprehensive work done anywhere. Ironically, I became aware of this via an Internet archive of the Globe stories.
This points to the other great treasure that is being lost as newspapers die, their historical archives. You can search some NY Times stories back into the 1880s, and the Times will sometimes make earlier stories available (e.g. historical obits).
What I find astounding is the insistence of some people that they get their news on the Internet. There is very little original reporting on the Intertubes, and what sometimes happens is people simple ignore the source of the story.
In short, there is a branding as well as a revenue problem. But this affects newspapers as well. A co-worker recently showed me a number of interesting stories in the physical edition of the LA Times. They were all Washington Post or AP stories, and the co-worker had simply ignored the byline or attribution information.
I saw a TV news story about the Globe, and the stoopidest quote was from a Herald reporter who noted that both papers were having problems economically, but “If the Herald lasts a day longer than the Globe, then we win.”
Joshua Norton
They don’t “win” crap. Most Murdock properties, (including the POS Faux News) stay in business because he absorbs huge annual losses to keep them going. Not exactly a “winning” strategy, by anyone’s standards.
r€nato
as others have noted, Charlie Savage has done excellent work exposing Bush’s abuse of signing statements, and the paper did excellent work exposing the Catholic church’s pedophilia and cover-up of it.
People love to use the failure of the newspaper business model to bash reporting or op-ed policies/columnists they don’t like. Including several folks here.
But newspapers are not dying because they are not doing good reporting or because they don’t have responsible op-ed policies or responsible, non-crazy op-ed columnists (though it is true that many have given up on both).
They are dying for the same reason music labels are shrinking; people can get their product for free now thanks to the internet / the web. Craigslist in particular has been deadly to newspapers who survived for years on the fat profits from classified ads.
J. Thomas Duffy
John
As numorous people have pointed out, Charlie Savage … Also, they ripped the lid off the Priest Abuse Scandal, and they’ve had the best (or certainly one of the top 2 or 3) Sports Section, for years …
If The Globe gets shut down, it will be rather ironic, that the other paper in town, The Boston Herald, and all their problems the past decade, and all their tabloid headlines, remains on their feet … You can already hear them, warming up for the “Na-Na-Na, Na-Na-Na … Hey, Hey, Hey … Goodbye” serenade …
Peace
JTD
Anonymous Academic
I had an experience with our local City newspaper recently that made me realize that their coverage of events outside the city boundaries was pretty shoddy.
I work for a university wherein about four years ago the bookstore contract was given away to one of the big corporate chains (let’s call it BCC) with incredibly stupid (and incredibly unusual) clauses about two-year minimum book adoptions and insane ordering dates (before we even schedule classes for the next semester). It was like BCC wrote the contract. Turns out the contract administrator is our Univ CFO and is also the Chair of a committee that seeks to make sure the contract works for the bookstore. Plus, the same guy sees no problem having the store managed by one of the University’s VP’s spouses, who admitted that the manager’s salary is based on sales volume and that the university gets a percentage of all sales thru the bookstore. Pay to play, I figured.
Add into this pay to play scenario the weird way that any extra funds left over in tuition waivers for almost all the first year students (i.e., tax money, since our students come out of households with average family incomes in the low 30s a year) become “book vouchers,” which can be used for anything in the store (clothes, candy, etc.) and can then be transferred, when the book voucher ostensibly “expires,” into Follett gift cards. And figure that this accounts for potentially tens of thousands of dollars being laundered through the bookstore every semester, and I thought there was a newspaper story here.
But my big city newspaper, (probably the biggest Northeast/Mid-Atlantic city paper south of NY and north of Atlanta, but not the WashPo) was not interested, and didn’t think that the fact that our University’s official travel agent shared an aol.com email address with another dean, who worked for the VP whose spouse manages the Follett bookstore.
I know this is longwinded, but our Board of Trustees is not in the business of accountability, plus I was told the Univ code of ethics doesn’t apply to committee work (along with vague threats to me about bringing it up in the first place), and without anyone else to take this to, I figured it would be of use as as story for my local big city paper, whose writer implied to me that doing a negative story on the university might not bode well for getting access to future stories. Since we’re an hour out of the city, sensation doesn’t sell as well.
So, Adios, Boston Globe, and you can take my paper with you. The city coverage is pretty good, but out here in the boonies what little local coverage they provide is often overrated and spotty. Other than the city and sports beat, as other commenters have said, the paper is filled with ads, AP pablum, and non-substantive partisan syndicated nonsense. Let’s just make the leap into technology because the dead tree alternative is not worth the crocodile tears.
JK
The Boston Globe provided great coverage of technology and the growth of the World Wide Web from Simson Garfinkel, Hiawatha Bray and other reporters.
Sometime in the late 1990’s in one of their daily editions, when the World Wide Web was a relatively new thing to me, they included a special pull-out section covering various aspects of the Internet including an explanation of search engine technology.
The Boston Globe also had a great standalone book review section.
For bibliophiles, the death knell for newspapers is especially painful.
The New York Times is now the only newspaper in the nation that still publishes a standalone book review section in its Sunday edition.
Joel
The Globe was a great paper in the nineties, and they had good local coverage and outstanding sports, particularly baseball. As things go, the quality has dropped. The best thing about the globe today is Mike Reiss.
Emma Anne
I think Eric Alterman put it best – wanting to save the newspaper business is like wanting to save the telegraph business. What we need to retain isn’t newspapers but reporting. Because yeah, you can’t get your news from the internet if no one is doing the reporting.
But reporting has been amazingly duplicative. It really seems like a lot of it could go away without any loss to the republic. Why do there have to be rows of reporters at white house briefings, for example? What is the point of paying all those very high salaries to do the same thing? It is investigative reporting that needs to be saved.
Brachiator
@baldheadeddork:
The problem is that subscriptions have never provided the bulk of newspaper revenues. Never.
Revenue has always come from display ads and classifieds, with some money coming from inserts distributed with the newspaper.
But display ad buys declined as more businesses relied on TV and radio buys, and as the economy declined. For example, a friend who works at the LA Times was responsible for increasing Circuit City’s ad presence in the Times when that company significantly increased their presence in Southern California. And now he has watched as CC has gone out of business, and the ads of course disappear.
Not only did Craigslist take away almost all the classified business of many newspapers, but the newspapers’ response has been incredibly weak. The LA Times, for example, charges too much for small ads, making it unattractive for small businesses, and their online ad service is clumsy and often crashes.
The Times has made a last ditch effort to adjust for this by devoting more classified space to auto dealerships, only to see auto dealerships drop like flies as the Southern California economy tanks and the national auto industry flounders.
The Globe, and other papers, have to be struggling with their own versions of these issues.
Oh, yeah, and increasingly people use the Intertubes to go directly to individual companies’ hiring sites, again making newspapers irrelevant.
On the journalism side, both newspapers and TV are cutting back on their local news coverage. And keep in mind that state coverage has a local impact. The local NBC affiliate in Los Angeles recently announced that they were closing their Sacramento bureau, which is absurd since what happens in the state capitol immensely affects what happens in Southern Cal and the entire region.
All the local newspapers, even the free alternative “LA Weekly, ” have laid off expensive veteran journalists and columnists, and the quality of local news coverage has suffered.
By the way, the vacuum created by the weakening of TV and newspapers have created more opportunities for people like Limbaugh and Hannity and their ilk, who substitute opinion for fact.
Things are looking pretty bleak and I don’t see the current version of the InterTubes as a remedy, but I do think that new ways of gathering, editing and presenting the news will arise, along with a viable financial model.
Bill H
Attywood says in today’s post, “It’s called a printred [sic] newspaper, and every year fewer and fewer people are buying it, because they prefer the free-flowing ways of the World Wide Web.”
Perhaps; and perhaps fewer people are buying it because it is an increasingly crappy product. The newspaper has the idea that when a reader has been lost (s)he is lost forever.The response is to cut costs, eliminate features, which creates a lesser product and drives more readers away in an ever declining death spiral.
Readership is not their revenue, but it drives advertising, which is.
Our San Diego Union-Tribune changed the weekly television magazine to a less expensive format and the result was a flood of reader complaints. Nobody liked the new format and no few of the complaints threatened cancellations. The newspaper’s response was to drop the television magazine altogether. Needless to say, there were many complaints about that, so they then discontinued weekly television listings on Sundays and now provide daily listings in the daily paper, and only for prime time.
The Circuit City model. Fire all of the experienced skilled sales staff with the high pay scale, keep all of the low paid rookies. That worked out really well for them, didn’t it. Seems to be working the same way for the newspaper industry, but they are blaming it on the Internet.
asiangrrlMN
Funny. I just blogged about this yesterday. I am an inveterate dead-tree reader (can’t get into the Kindle idea at all), and I used to read newspapers. However, with all the merging and conglomerating, investigative reporting has been left out in the cold. My local papers (StarTrib and PiPress) are both struggling, and neither is very readable any more.
I don’t read the papers, and I don’t watch TV news. I read the NYTimes for some of their columnists, but that’s it. I can’t stand the infotaining that is being passed as news these days. In addition, I haven’t trusted traditional media since the whole WMD debacle. If I could see there weren’t any WMDs, then why couldn’t the papers?
I am not sad to see papers go, but I am sad to see the steady erosion of journalism. If an on-line paper could regain that ability, it would make me feel a lot better about the trend of news media in general.
inthewoods
Not mentioned: while there are plenty of good reasons why these papers are all failing (usually in the context of old business model, don’t get the internet, recession, etc.) I don’t see many people talking about all the high-finance that has gone on with the nation’s newspapers – basically levering them up with debt. I’m not saying the reasons for failure aren’t true, but they aren’t the whole story – there is a hidden story of just piss-poor management of the assets.
Bill H
@Brachiator:
Actually, ad buys declined as the newspaper’s circulation shrank. The advertising didn’t move to television arbitrarily.
Ad buys are determined by how many eyeballs that advertisement will reach. When the tv says that “x” people will watch a show and the newspaper says it will sell “x+200,000” number of papers, the ad buy goes to the newspaper. When the newspaper sales drops by 300,000 copies, the ad buy leaves the newspaper and goes to the television show.
Blue Raven
@Anonymous Academic:
I grew up in south central MA in the 1970s. My family took the local paper and the Worcester Telegram. Wouldn’t touch the Globe or Herald. But we knew to our bones that as far as Boston was concerned, we did not exist unless we did something particularly silly. The Globe fed this belief.
Comrade Coffin
Howie Carr of the Herald shows some compassionate conservatism about the Globe‘s demise.
Calouste
@bayville:
Yes, but they are basically all national newspapers (except the Evening Standard), which makes for a rather bigger market.
Betsy
@aimai:
@JC:
Another Somervillian, ex-Cantabridgian here. Funny to have such a contingent here!
I hate the idea of there not being a strong reporting organization that can cover Beacon Hill and other local/regional politics. New England is a big region not to have a significant paper. I wonder what’ll happen to the ProJo? Any RIers here with info on that?
Michael57
I have yet to see a real, rigorous explanation of how actual reporting can survive as a profession if “dead tree” newspapers disappear or are seriously diminished. The Web wants information to be free, but reporters and editors need to feed their families.
If newspapers disappear, what will all the pundits on the Web link to? Each other? Why would that be interesting?
Rooting for the newspapers’ demise is a kind of death wish.
Name one outfit on the Web that does its own news gathering. TPM does a little. But they would be the first to admit that they couldn’t survive on their own reporting alone.
Brachiator
@Bill H:
This is not true in the case of the LA Times (and I have to note that I used to work in a couple of Times departments and still know a number of Times veterans).
LA Times circulation used to be strong, and more important, a daily issue was passed around 4 or 5 times, increasing its reach (e.g., someone holding onto a page of the paper because of a store’s sale later that week).
Ironically, the Times shot ahead of the rival Hearst paper in the 60s because the Times ended up with morning delivery while the Herald-Examiner remained an afternoon paper. Changes in work schedules and the rise of network TV squeezed afternoon dailies out of the market.
Currently, morning and afternoon commute time makes radio far more attractive to some advertisers, who know that they have a wide audience to appeal to. As with the situation in the 60s, work and commute habits determine potential readership for a newspaper, which has to compete with other media.
Similarly, some advertisers with a limited total advertising budget felt that they could get more bang for their buck by shifting more ads to TV and away from print, especially when they saw that the younger demographic was not reading the newspaper.
All of this began happening before the Times began to see significant circulation declines.
terry chay
Besides breaking the signing statements, catholic church scandal, and excellent reporting on gay marriage, I’d also like to add that I found the reporting on Barney Frank during the financial meltdown interesting.
Davis X. Machina
I’m sure the exact same sequence of events has been followed a dozen times.
The Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram is up (are up?) for sale. The Blethen family (Seattle Times, anti-estate-tax zealots) bought the paper in the ’90’s from a local selling family, paid too much, cut a bajillion corners, found themselves debt-ridden and looking at declining revenues. They’re looking for white knights while threatening a closure, too.
JoeM
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JoeM
I’ve known them to have a great sports section. Writers like Bob Ryan and Dan Shaughnessy are well respected sports analysts.
Anne Laurie
One measure of the Globe‘s importance is that the NYTimes has been explicitly trying to kill it for almost 20 years now. When the Grey Man-Whores first announced this, right after they managed to buy it, I vowed that I would never again pay money for a copy of the NYT, a vow which the Sulzbergers’ many other idiotic decisions has made ever-easier to keep. (For instance: I gave up my paid Globe subscription when the New Regime changed the delivery schedules so that I couldn’t get the paper before I left on my morning commute, but I’d still buy a copy at the train station every morning. So they stopped filling the vending boxes until after the morning rush hour. This did not sell more copies of the Times… at least to me… but it did create an opening for a local ‘free’ commuter mini-paper.) So now I am looking at having to pay for the Sunday Herald *shudder* to get the weekly sales flyers and coupons… believe me, the Herald makes Murdoch’s NYPost look like serious journamalism…
The Editors
What everyone said. It didn’t do much national reporting – my impression was it did more before the NY Times bought it and consolidated things – but it was still a very good local paper, IMO. Maybe this work will be done by other online entities, maybe Globe reporters will move seamlessly into New Media, but as of right now, no such entities exist, AFAIK. The Globe, like most papers, was imperfect and occasionally infuriating, but I don’t think a bunch of bloggers photoshopping dicks on Bush and/or Obama’s face all day is an acceptable substitute.
Present company excluded, obviously.
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
Wow! This is a great example of how stupid business practices can help kill a paper. Not filling the vending machines? Stupid.
I also understand how a company can buy a competitor in order to kill it even as they pretend to nurture it. But unfortunately for the NY Times, getting rid of the competition does not make them a more attractive alternative when the nature of the business itself is changing.
Mike G
At least we’ll be rid of the execrable Jeff Jacoby, the junior Sean Hannity of New England — until wingnut welfare finds him another lucrative perch from which to puke his sewage.
p.a.
As noted, broke some major stories over the last few years. When it was given the resources, did a fine job covering New England regional affairs.
Sports; gave the world
Leigh Montville
Peter Gammons
Bob Ryan
Will McDonough
and many more who don’t have national reps.
Oh the 1980’s. Full page Sunday on Inside MLB by Gammons, Inside the NBA by Ryan, Inside the NFL by Will McDonough.
Jay B.
Arrrgh. This wasn’t a fucking closure, it was a power play to break some unions. It worked.
Whatever the Globe’s problems they weren’t the viability problem, hell, I’ll bet money the Globe still turns a profit (Howie Carr, apparently wrong to the fucking end about everything, was, of course, wrong about its demise) — I’m sure NESN does and they’re part of that too.
But the profit wasn’t enough and COUPLED with declining revenues, I’m sure Pinch (who is underrated about how fucking bad he ruined HIS paper) saw the future being worse.
The Globe was a big enough institution in New England, even today, that it would have found some backers if the NYT wanted to put it up for sale. But they didn’t do that, did they? Instead, management said everyone has to buck up or ELSE and went through the predictable motions.
Brachiator
@Jay B.:
Sorry.
The Globe’s problems go beyond settling scores with unions. The unions should actually be commended here for co-operating in trying to save the paper and jobs, instead of holding out “on principle.”
Haven’t you been keeping up with the reporting on this? The Globe’s problems are a matter of public record.
You do realize that papers in other cities have laid off huge numbers of their staff or actually gone out of business? Why do you think that the Globe is somehow immune to the problems that have consumed other dailies?
And of course the Times probably contributed to this mess by their initial purchase of the Globe:
Instead of diversifying into other areas, or trying to adapt to changing media circumstances, the Times invested in what they thought they knew.
Nell
I lived in Boston for many years, and still go to their website for sports updates. I often end up reading another story or two, and think it is pretty decent regional newspaper. In fact, I’d sign up for a subscription right now, even though I live on the west coast, if I thought it would help save the paper.
WereBear
These are all good points. We should also remember the kinds of advertising to important to local papers, which would be local advertising. I’m talking about department stores.
Which are also dying out.
This is no coincidence. The rise of the national big boxes didn’t just kill department stores, they also killed all those ads designed to get you shopping there. A national chain is going to run ads for all their stores on tv, not a web of local papers.
TimmyB
The Globe will soon die. The subscription price is going to increase from $.75 to $2.00 per freakin day.
No one will buy it at that price.