Beloved Competition
Recently, my newspaper’s reporters forced the Boston Globe to acknowledge what it had not told its rank-and-file employees, and what Globe union leaders had neglected to tell their members, that the New York Times had demanded that the unions at its vassal property come up with $20 million in cuts or face closure within a month. I took the high road at the time and just said that I’d be sorry to see this become a one-newspaper town, an approach also followed by my newspaper, with the exception of the delightfully incorrigible columnist Howie Carr.
Since then we’ve been treated a series of self-serving stories in which the Globe approached its readers and pols, and had them whine about what would happen if the Globe failed, who would possibly keep the pols honest, what would people read, blah blah blah. No mention of the fact that there is another metro daily in town. The local NPR affiliate has chimed in with an extended rending of garments and gnashing of teeth about the fate of its beloved lefty broadsheet that I have to think would not be so gratuitously offered the local conservative tabloid in similar straits.
Yesterday, the Globe had yet another self-serving story about its financial woes. This one apparently was designed to make the Globe look less bad. It accomplished this by disparaging other newspapers. This article did include a fair amount about the Boston Herald:
The Boston Globe is not alone.
The financial troubles swamping the Globe washed into the newsrooms of other local newspapers long ago, leading to painful staff cuts and shriveling news operations at the Boston Herald and GateHouse Media Inc., owner of more than 100 daily and weekly newspapers in New England.
The Herald, which had a 265-person editorial staff about a decade ago, now has roughly half that, according to Sunday editor Tom Mashberg. With fewer reporters, the Herald has been forced to scale back coverage, gutting its arts and entertainment staff, investigative team, and business and metro desks.
There are now roughly 10 metro reporters covering the city - once the Herald’s bread and butter. In-depth stories, former staffers complain, have been replaced by short stories and news briefs. Despite all the cutbacks - including the decision last year to eliminate pressmen in Boston and outsource the printing of the newspaper - staff cuts still loom. In late March, shortly before the New York Times Co. threatened to shut down the Globe due to financial losses, the Herald shed another 24 jobs - mostly in non-newsroom functions.
Herald circulation has fallen 38 percent over the past decade to about 167,500 daily and plunged 43 percent to about 100,800 on Sunday, according to Audit Bureau of Circulations.
“How are things now? It’s tough,” Mashberg said. “We once had a newsroom filled with reporters and a commercial department filled with commercial staff. And it has definitely shrunk.”
Patrick J. Purcell, the Herald’s publisher, declined to comment on anything including the paper’s financial performance.
Actually, the Globe does stand alone, spectacularly alone. The Globe is hemorrhaging more than $1 million a week, with projected losses of $85 million this year. Reporting in the recent past has indicated the Herald operates in the black. Knock on wood. The Globe neglected to mention that. The 24 staff cuts that the Globe says “loom” at the Herald have already happened, the majority of them buyouts, which pale in comparision to the horrible bloodletting that looms at the Globe, which has failed over the years to exercise sound management. As much as the Globe would like to include us, we are simply not in the Globe’s class in this department.
The Globe not only is losing money on a massive, unsustainable scale. It has an absentee owner with similar problems. In fact, I’d suggest that if you gave a panel of accountants a blind taste test on the Globe and the Herald, they would tell you the Herald, with local ownership and no debt, is the more fiscally sound and stable company of the two. At last check, in any case, we’re not the company faced with the threat of closure in a month. Knock on wood.
The Times has put a gun to the head of its Globe unions to deal with bizarre contractual obstacles such as 435 lifetime job guarantees for do-nothings and hefty wage, benefit and severance packages that would be the envy of public employees. Our losses in revenue have been dealt with in highly cooperative fashion and an atmosphere of trust over the years, as management opened the books, and the unions voted to set aside seniority and forego contractual raises on a situational basis in order to keep our newspaper viable in a tough environment.
We also dramatically changed the way we operate to adjust to our new reality.
The Globe neglected to mention that our 10 metro news reporters, plus our handful of business and sports reporters and columnists, routinely beat and embarrass the overstaffed, underexercised Globe in coverage of local events. That we have continued, without missing a beat even in the midst of traumatic cuts, to produce a news product that is vibrant and highly competitive. That our small staff often drives the political agenda in this town. We’ve seen pols, battered by Herald revelations of their hypocrisies and ineptitude, resort to giving self-serving handoffs to the Globe, where they know they won’t be subjected to a hypercritical eye.
We learned to make the most of our diminished staff, introducing an enterprise system that encourages every reporter to be a star and lets none sit idle. We look at the day’s events for angles the others never think of. And we constantly, aggressively, examine our local government and the world around us for stories that aren’t in the news, until we put them there. Our continued competitiveness, contrary to the gloomy picture painted above, is a source of pride in the Herald staff.
We’ve always known one Herald reporter is worth two or three Globies. It was evident from the time I arrived at the Herald 16 years ago, showing up as a lone reporter at a scene to see two or three Globies lackadaiscially wandering around, literally filing their nails and yammering into the big clunky Motorola cell phones we didn’t even have then, and yet we would still beat them.
What we know now is that, given the current numbers, one Herald reporter is worth something like 5 to 10 Globies, for all their inflated sense of self-worth. (That’s in terms of news production. The actual cash value of a Globe reporter is arguably much less in the current environment.) The Globe’s lackluster news sections, often leading with wire or their own staff version of the predictable pack-journalism of the day, do not suggest this is a newspaper that cannot be easily replaced by Google News.
As for in-depth stories being replaced by shorter stories and briefs at the Herald, as former Herald staffers complained to the Globe, this is true. I happen to know some former Herald staffers who are at the Globe now and have had these kinds of complaints. I can assure you, their stories didn’t often suffer from being cut, nor would most Globe windfests on any given day. I have also heard from readers who say they like being able to get their news in quick, to-the-point hits. Including some former Globe subscribers. They don’t have time to plow through 40 inches, especially with all the violin-playing and thumb-sucking, and they can’t be bothered with jumps. But that’s a matter of style, and if the Globe thinks people have all day to read a newspaper, and the Globe has the money to produce it, I encourage them to stick with their formula. The Globe neglects to mention that the Herald’s shorter style, a punchier tabloid style, preceded the dramatic cuts in the size of the news hole as a strategic decision to accommodate people’s hectic lifestyles.
There is a lot of speculation these days about whether a white knight will come in and save the Globe. I guarantee you that person, if they find one, will have a big problem. When the Globe’s bloated staff is finally cut in half, or by two-thirds, or three-quarters, and several layers of redundant management have been eliminated, as the Globe must do to just to break even, I will be very pleasantly surprised if any of the traumatized survivors in the wreckage on Morrissey Boulevard have a clue what to do to remain relevant, given the difficulties they already face in that regard. I highly doubt the Globe will be able to find anyone in the finer corners of American journalism who knows how to do it, either. The helpless turmoil at American’s major newspapers suggests they are all too deeply mired in the past and convinced of their own importance to understand their basic survival needs.
I hate to see newspapers in this kind of trouble. I don’t think it is healthy for our society to have even bad, grossly mismanaged, intellectually dishonest newspapers failing.
I hope the newspaper I work for, which has fought hard and stayed relevant, is able to survive during this difficult time, when the finances and logistics of an electronic transition remain in question. If we don’t make it, I will always be proud of having been a Herald reporter and editor. If we go down, I’ll know we went down fighting.
As stated at the outset, I wanted to take the high road in this time of difficulties, and didn’t care to poke at another news organization when it is on the ropes. Despite the fact the Globe and its parent NYT engaged in a purposeful campaign to destroy my news organization over the past decade. Despite the fact that the Globe engaged in hypocritical, personal attacks on myself and other Herald reporters over the years, in several cases targeting reporters who had beaten them, claiming falsely that their reporting was flawed. In my case, reporting on my alleged “looting” while failing to report that one of its own reporters had encountered similar problems with US Customs, which seized loot the Globie had acquired in the invasion of Iraq.
But I will miss the Globe if it doesn’t make it. Not for the unseemly whimpering it is now engaged in. Mainly because I have so much enjoyed the many times my small, scrappy, disrespected tabloid has kicked its Global ass.
These remarks, by the way, represent my own personal opinions and in no way are intended to represent the views of the Boston Herald.
One other thing. About the Globe’s coverage of local news that didn’t even require any enterprise to notice, though it required a concerted effort to ignore.
In yesterday’s paper, the Globe ignored the fact that several thousand local citizens came out in Boston to protest tax and spend policies, and thousands more around New England, as part of a nationwide movement that drew several hundred thousand protestors to hundreds of events. The Globe ran a brief CYA wire story, a national AP roundup on a lower corner of Page 16, at the back of its world and national news section. The AP’s mention of “a few hundred protestors” in Boston refered to a lightly attended early morning event. Two afternoon events that drew several thousand from all walks of life on a work day in bluest Massachusetts, got no mention from the Globe or the AP.
In contrast, the Globe led Page 10 with an NYT story about a women’s rights protest 10,000 miles away in Afghanistan that got three times as much space as the Tea Party story.
I can assure you that if half-a-dozen people marched for transgendered rights on Boston Common, the Globe would have staffed it and found a better news hole for it. Much as the Globe was there for two well-known local mountebanks when they were shilling Hungarian pornography as evidence of American war crimes.
It will be a sad day if we find ourselves with only one newspaper in town, but not as big a loss as some people think.
If it isn’t in the Herald, then you probably didn’t miss much.
(Regarding Wednesday’s Tea Parties, the Boston Herald had a combined staff and wire report plus a columnist on Page 6, which is prime real estate in a tabloid. Our space is extremely tight, but we managed an Afghan protest wire story as well, on page 16.)
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:56 am on Friday, April 17, 2009
9 Responses to “Beloved Competition”
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April 17th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Jules,
The big difference that I see is that the Herald does it’s own work, and is it’s own paper, whereas the Globe is the poor sibling of the Grey Lady. As such, she mouths only what she is taught, and allowed to say. The kept child of a wayward lost woman.
I much prefer the Herald’s style, and it’s honest reporting. I say that not because this is your site, nor from some pandering ideal, but because I truly feel I am getting real reporting, well written and backed by research, rather than being spoon-fed the party line and the same regurgitated AP schlock that I can get through Google or any other national rag,
April 17th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
This is exactly why, here at Casa H in the Flyover Wilderness, we read our little twice-weekly county rag for local news, and the internet for everything else.
April 17th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Jules….. HELL YEAH!
I am now enjoying my rich, creamy helping of schadenfreude. Want some?
I tried, I really did, I TRIED to read the Globe over the last few years. The editorial page is bad enough. I mean, could the Globe NOT find anyone better than noted blowhard Hugh David Scott Greenway (because one name is never enough!), sophmoric Scot Lehigh, and the always logically challenged Derrick Z. Jackson? You mean there is NO ONE out there better than them?
Puh-leeeze.
I left the Globe when I noticed the “hard news” pages sounded like a Jackson column on a routine basis. That’s when I realized I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than read the Globe again.
Sure, bad managment at the Globe was a problem and a contributing factor. But I really believe that “personnel is policy” and it is personnel that is the reason the Globe is going down the tubes. If you hire people who consistently demonstrate they cannot bear an idea not in complete agreement with their own, then give them 8 column inches 3 times a week to prove it - you’re just signing your own pink slip.
In this case, the Globe’s “policy” was to mock the beliefs of a huge potential readership. They did this by totally abandoning any pretense of objectivity - all the while insisting they were objective. Yes, personnel IS policy.
To quote Dr. Phil, “So how’s that working out for you?
Good riddance to the Globe. The bonus is that Dan Shaughnessy will never write a Boston sports column again. Oh! Sweet, sweet justice….
April 17th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Ah you are too kind Jules.
Whenever I think of the Globe or the Times I always think of the scene in Tale of Two Cities where an evil doer is found with a knife driven into his chest that pins a note to his flesh. The note reads, “Drive him fast to his tomb.”
April 17th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Jules,
Every day starts with The Herald for me, and has for at least 20 years-although 20 years ago my day used to start at about 3:00PM but that’s another story…
“mountebanks ” Brilliant! (and so true)
Keep kicking their asses.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Haha, every time Jules said ‘knock on wood’, I did! Force of habit or something.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:51 am
I briefly had a Globe subscription when I first moved back to the Boston area 16 years ago. I punted the rag in less than a year, disgusted at how its editorial opinions bled into its “news.”
While I have some sympathy for the Globe printers &c. (NOT the editors or “reporters”) who will be losing their jobs soon, my overall response to the Globe’s impending demise is: Good riddance.
April 18th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Heh. The Globulists keep on telling us what they believe that we are supposed to think, and we just don’t comply, do we?
April 18th, 2009 at 9:20 am
The Globe is written by people who are convinced that they are smarter than their readers. It’s been painfully obvious for years that the puppet masters at the NY Times call all the shots at the Globe, and it shows.
As to the Herald, I find the quality of writing painful to read at times. Tabloid or not, it’s something that you folks need to work on. The mere fact that the Herald is a tabloid, does not mean that the writing should be sub standard.
Of course, unlike the Globe, the Herald never printed my credit card information and used the paper to wrap bundles of their rag. That was followed by a tepid at best effort to repair the damage by offering us a lower price, but no real protection from the potential of ID theft.