Global Panic
As Boston’s Gray Baglady gets ready to sell off more jewelry. Boston Herald:
The cost-cutting continues at The Boston Globe, which yesterday announced plans for a fourth employee buyout program in just seven years.
This time, the newspaper hopes to eliminate 60 workers.
“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,” Globe Publisher P. Steven Ainsley told employees in a broadly circulated e-mail yesterday.
Globe staffers said yesterday they weren’t too surprised by Ainsley’s memo, because the newspaper industry has been struggling in recent years.
Several weeks ago, The New York Times, which owns the Globe, announced plans to eliminate 100 jobs from its news staff. And now, in addition to the Globe, the Worcester Telegraph & Gazette, another Times-owned publication, has announced plans to eliminate 20 jobs from its operations.
Ainsley acknowledges in his memo that the terms of this buyout offer are less compelling than those in years past.
A select few Globe employees may receive as much as two years’ salary if they opt to resign, but most of the employees will receive no more than one year’s pay.
Boston Newspaper Guild President Daniel Totten called the plans “disappointing” and said, “there are many, many ways” for the company to reduce costs.
“It doesn’t need to come to yet another body reduction,” he said.
This time, the company will reach deeper into its employee ranks, offering buyout packages to employees with five or more years of full-time service. They must inform the company of their intention by April 21.
But the company is not offering the buyout option to employees of its Web site.
Meanwhile, staffers say the paper’s Morrissey Boulevard headquarters are teeming with rumors of other changes, such as the possibility of shrinking the size of the paper, folding the Health and Science section into the Business pages, incorporating Sidekick into the Living section, and publishing the regional editions - such as Globe South - just once a week, instead of twice.
Al Larkin, the Globe’s executive vice president, wouldn’t confirm any of those reports.
But he did say, “There are numerous initiatives under way, where we are examining how to make the paper better, more efficient and more attractive to our readers.”
Well, they’re way behind that curve. Maybe this will jolt them into some kind of meaningful change, but I doubt it.
I don’t gloat over trouble at the competition and the loss of jobs. I would much rather see all newspapers thriving, because for all their faults, newspapers remain the greatest single daily source of news and information, the raw material that gets sliced, diced, Cuisinarted if need be, and shared around the Internet. But it isn’t just a matter of whether the tide raises or lowers all boats. It has to do with what tasks you set your crew to and which way you point your boat. The moribund Globe has been dead in the water for a long time. We’re seven years past the Globe’s last great initiative, the priest child abuse scandal that brought down a cardinal and lit an international fire, and that was initiated before the arrival of wunderkind Marty Baron, whose main accomplishment has been a relentless use of news pages to editorialize for gay marriage, coupled with a marked failure to reverse the Globe’s historic propensity for distortion, hypocrisy and getting snookered, though outright prevarication has largely been avoided.
The Globe in recent years has reportedly gone from more than 500 to fewer than 400 editorial staffers. That would include news, sports, features and copy desk, reporters, photogs, editors and columnists. The ugly step-sister on the other side of the expressway, we’ve always had about a quarter of their staff, and are currently handling news operations with fewer than 40 all together, up against maybe 150 to 200 on the side. Yet we routinely kick Globe ass on local news, and remain the agenda-setting local news source that the pols and TV news teams react to, while the Globe often splashes … lead front-page news and photo … with wire. Typically in the most aggressively boring manner the benighted Globe leadership can dream up. It then wallpapers much of its following pages with more wire, lifted straight and run entire. I’d suggest the Drudge Report is a better news source than the Boston Globe, local and otherwise.
There’s nothing written in stone that says there must always be a Boston Globe, or that it must always be the leading newspaper in town. I’d suggest it is stumbling momentum, force of habit, that keeps it in that position at present. People believe it is the biggest, best newspaper in town because it folds horizontally, and because they have always been told that it is. People have indicated they are uninterested in 40-inch bureaucratic thumbsuckers and tear-jerkers, however. They don’t have time.
There’s nothing written in stone that says there must always be a Boston Herald, or that it will always be the second newspaper in town. But then again, we’ve always known that. We have had our backs financially against the wall for 40 years or more. We are used to being there, in fact have become comfortable with it, and highly adaptable in those circumstances. For the moment, the bleeding has stopped, as our local publisher and owner, Pat Purcell, is in the black and remains a highly enterprising businessman on the lookout for partnerships or expansion possibilities that will boost our short- and long-term viability. With a quarter the Globe’s staff, with editors who looked at various sacred cows milling around the place and opted to have a barbecue, and with a highly motivated reporting staff that has risen to the challenge even amid the trauma of cutbacks, we adopted an aggressive strategy and tactics of enterprise. A counter-insurgency strategy, if you like, without the surge.
We always were the local news paper, the scrappy tab that when it did get any credit, got it for launching all ships on a news story, doing a better job of figuring out the angles and getting to the heart of the matter. We have to target those resources, staff and news space, more than we did before. But we don’t sit around waiting for news to present itself, we go out and get it, and if all we end up with at the end of any given day is the same story everyone else has, we do it differently, in a way that gets people’s attention and gives them something more. I haven’t seen much indication that the NYT-owned Globe, with its layers of traditional management, is able to do more in these difficult times than, basically … panic.
Here’s my advice. It could apply to a lot of newspapers today. You want to remain viable, relevant, alive in these difficult times, Boston Globe, when you are under orders from your corporate masters in New York to eliminate 60 jobs? Start at the top.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:13 am on Friday, February 29, 2008
3 Responses to “Global Panic”
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February 29th, 2008 at 10:51 am
All I ever asked from newspapers was to be given the news, in accurate detail, without any kind of spin or slant. Just let me make up my own mind about what it means. Our local rag couldn’t do it, so now I get everything online where I can cast around and fact check.
February 29th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
They’re a dinosaur stuck in a mental tar pit.
February 29th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Fascinating, illuminating, and inspiring. Thank you, Jules. What a great piece.
For me it’s all about the writing. If I can get access to the news through my favorite cogent, friendly human voices, why look at newspapers? Blogs point to the wires and I can skim there for details if need be.
This struck me as odd:
“It doesn’t need to come to yet another body reduction,” he said.
What, the minds are already gone?