By Sherene Tagharobi
Voices
The Boston Globe has gone up for sale by The New York Times Co., which has hired an investment bank to manage the deal with potential buyers.
The Boston Globe has gone up for sale by The New York Times Co., which has hired an investment bank to manage the deal with potential buyers.
In these tough times of newspaper closures and media layoffs, Boston news organizations have been struggling to survive. Many news professionals believe perfecting a business model that capitalizes on the industry’s increasing Web traffic could be the answer.
The Boston media market, where some newspapers have ceased publication and others have had a flurry of layoffs, is a slightly exaggerated example of a nationwide trend. According to the Newspaper Association of America, print advertising, which accounts for the majority of newspaper revenue, dropped 17.7 percent in 2008; online advertising dropped 1.8 percent in that year.
Mitchell Zuckoff, a journalism professor at Boston University, said niche media should be in a better position than their mainstream counterparts given that “scarcity breeds success.” But that hasn’t been the case in Boston.
The Bay State Banner, a weekly paper that served Boston’s African American community for 44 years, announced July 6 it would suspend publication because of “severe reduction of advertising during this recession,” according to a statement by former publisher Mel Miller.
Miller said the loss in revenue had placed an impossible burden on the paper’s resources.
The Banner has since resumed publication, but only after it received a $200,000 loan from the city.
Even The Boston Globe, the city’s most widely circulated publication, has suffered.
On April 2, The New York Times Company, which owns the Globe, threatened to shut the newspaper down unless labor unions agreed to concessions such as staff and pension reduction.
The company asked the Globe for $20 million in savings after the paper had already gone through several rounds of cost-cutting measures. The New York Times reported that management said the Globe would lose $85 million this year if the paper didn’t cut staff and pensions.
Broadcast outlets have recently undergone layoffs as well, but on a lesser scale than their print counterparts. CBS News went through nation-wide cuts last year, laying off employees in several major markets. Boston’s WBZ-TV was one of the hardest hit. The CBS affiliate lost 30 jobs last year, or about three to five percent of its work force.
“It’s going to be painful, though I do think there’s always going to be an appetite for news,” said Shirley Leung, the assistant managing editor at the Globe.
“Right now, we’re going through a lot of restructuring as more readers and advertising move to the Internet,” added Leung, who also serves as co-chair for the AAJA Boston convention and co-president of AAJA’s New England chapter.
Leung says though the paper has a smaller staff, it also has fewer pages to fill because of a drop in advertising.
“There’s a little more work for everyone, but it kind of evens out,” Leung said. “We do have more to do online. Everyone’s really busy.”
Globe copy editor Shirley Goh said various departments at the newspaper have consolidated since layoffs began.
While the Globe has kept up the quality of its local reporting, its foreign reporting has taken a serious blow, said Goh, co-president of the New England chapter. The majority of the paper’s foreign stories are from wire services, she said.
“That’s definitely been a change from the past. We used to have correspondents in Africa, Asia, South America, the UK,” Goh said.
Zuckoff, who was a special assignments reporter for the newspaper several years ago, said he traveled on assignments to Aruba, Germany, Africa and the Far East.
“The limits were self-imposed,” he said. “If you came up with a great story idea, there was the money and the will for you to do it.”
Goh said layoffs have forced the newsroom to prioritize.
“We used to edit wire copy as much as everything else,” Goh said, “but now we’re told to run spell check on it, slap a headline on there, and run it ahead.”
Zuckoff said as newspaper readers migrate online, where “they get a tremendous bargain,” print media struggle to make up the loss of ad revenue. He said media outlets have not yet figured out how to make money from their Web operations.
Print and broadcast media outlets have started focusing more on their Web sites to meet readers’ multimedia demands.
Goh said at the Globe, reporters use Flip cams – small, easy-to-use camcorders – to capture video in the field; copy editors write headlines for the Web as well as for print; and readers can comment on stories online.
Mark Valentine, operations manager at Bay Windows, Boston’s gay publication, said there’s a team effort in the newsroom to post everything online as soon as possible.
Sangita Chandra, a producer for ABC affiliate WCVB’s “Chronicle” news program and AAJA Boston convention co-chair, said that broadcast media are in a better position to make the transition to multimedia, given they can simply post aired video segments online. WCVB had more than 400,000 unique visitors in June.
But Zuckoff remains optimistic. He says maybe tough times will inspire creativity and innovation, citing globalpost.com, a new source for foreign news, as an example.
“I kind of feel like this is a terrible forest fire,” he said, “and a lot of great old trees are going to go down, and it’s not going to look the same. But if you ever go back to a forest fire site, there’s a lot of new growth. There might be 1,000 new trees that could never have grown under the shade of the old trees.”
