In Boston, Paper?s Peril Hits a Nerve
By RICHARD P?REZ-PE?A
Published: April 12, 2009
BOSTON ? When local bloggers rallied last week in an online forum about how to save the embattled Boston Globe, readers offered loads of sympathetic advice and surprisingly little of the ?let ?em rot? attitude that has colored so much debate over the future of newspapers.
Ever since The New York Times Company threatened 11 days ago to sell or close The Globe unless it accepted deep cost cuts, Boston has been in a state of near shock.
Civic leaders and ordinary Bostonians alike ? particularly those old enough to remember a pre-Internet age, before free access to news on the Web siphoned away so many of the paper?s readers ? have spoken out about the central role of The Globe in the life of a region that cares deeply about local culture and local politics and fashions itself as the higher education capital of the nation.
?I?ve been surprised at how well people understand that this would not be the same city without it, and not as good a city,? said Paul Levy, the chief executive of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who organized the ?blog rally? on The Globe. ?It?s the only thing that can really hold institutions accountable.?
Mayor Thomas M. Menino agrees, despite his share of run-ins with the paper.
?I have disagreements with The Globe, but what?s good for Boston?? he said in an interview. ?To have them not here would be a big hole in our life.?
There has been much hand-wringing in the last decade as one Boston institution after another has faded away or passed into the hands of out-of-towners.
BankBoston, John Hancock insurance and Gillette were swallowed by much bigger companies with faraway headquarters. A group of non-New Englanders bought the Red Sox baseball team ? an organization close to a civic religion ? with the Times Company, which already owned The Globe, as a junior partner.
In 2006, the Filene?s department store chain ceased to exist, and its owner, Federated Department Stores, turned some stores into the Macy?s banner ? another shadow cast by New York. But it did not convert the huge Filene?s flagship store, leaving a vacant, hulking shell that still stands in the heart of downtown Boston. That blow had particular resonance for The Globe; Filene?s was the paper?s biggest advertiser.
?Boston is much less insular than it was 30 years ago,? said Paul S. Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation, a philanthropic group. The city has long had a chip on its collective shoulder about where it stands in the world, ?especially any time you get New York into the picture,? he said, and while that trait has faded greatly, losing local institutions does not help.
Perhaps that is why, along with the desire to save The Globe, many Bostonians argue for local ownership, with a particular suspicion of answering to anyone in that bigger city on the Hudson.
One blogger advocated an arrangement similar to the community foundation that owns the Green Bay Packers football team. Several members of Boston?s business elite have been rumored to be interested in buying The Globe, but none have confirmed it and most have denied it.
At least a few local investors showed interest in buying the paper a few years ago, but that was before the newspaper business slid into its deep slump.
?You have to have local ownership that wants to buy the paper,? Mr. Menino said. ?It?s questionable. I haven?t heard of anybody.?
Losing The Globe ?would rock the city psychologically,? Mr. Grogan said. ?It doesn?t square with the more confident, more worldly self-image that Boston has.?
But that impact would split along generational lines, as it does between Julia Quinn and James Monti, strangers who rode side by side last week on a Red Line subway train.
Ms. Quinn, a medical assistant in her 60s, said she read The Globe almost every day, though its politics were too liberal for her tastes. ?Boston?s not a podunk town ? it?s got to have a good paper,? she said.
Mr. Monti, an unemployed construction worker in his 20s, said he only occasionally picked up a paper, ?mostly to see how the Sox are doing,? and was just as likely to find the news online. He shrugged off the prospect of losing The Globe, saying he could go elsewhere for information.
The merits of budget cutting and local ownership are debated inside The Globe itself. Some Globe employees are angry that their paper has had several rounds of staff and budget cuts, while the flagship New York Times newspaper ? which is in better financial condition ? has more often been spared and some company executives have collected large salaries and bonuses.
But there is widespread agreement that, good ownership or bad, local or faraway, no company could absorb the losses The Globe has suffered without taking drastic action. Times executives told labor leaders last week that The Globe was on pace to lose $85 million this year.
At the Times Company?s New England Media Group, comprised mostly of The Globe and its Web site, Boston.com, advertising revenue fell 18 percent last year, and executives said recently that it would drop faster this year. From 2004 to 2008, that segment of the company had a 33.7 percent decline in ad revenue, and The Globe?s circulation fell 28 percent, to 324,000 on weekdays.
Yet its news staff is still one of the largest in the country, at about 340 people, though it is down almost 40 percent from its peak, and the paper has dropped some of the sections it once printed.
The company has called for greater sacrifice by The Globe?s more than 200 mailers than other major labor groups at the paper. The Globe has reported that, according to their union, the company wants the mailers to accept a 25 percent pay cut and the elimination of a lifetime job guarantee that covers most of them.
In addition, the union said, the company would stop contributing to mailers? pensions and sharply reduce what it pays for their health care, among other cuts.
Measured by readership, Boston.com is a smashing success, with an average of 5.2 million unique visitors a month last year, according to Nielsen Online. The Globe ranks 14th in daily print circulation among American newspapers, but sixth in online audience, an imbalance that reflects how heavily wired its highly educated market is.
Dan Kennedy has spent a good part of his career analyzing The Globe, first as a media columnist for the Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly, and then as author of a blog, Media Nation. But he said no source of local news could come close to taking The Globe?s place, including its longtime rival, the much smaller Boston Herald.
Just as Boston has become less insular over the last generation, so has The Globe generally become a better paper, less cozy with the city?s political establishment, said Mr. Kennedy, an assistant professor at Northeastern University who also writes for The Guardian.
?The Globe can set the agenda for the region, bring focus on a story, in a way that nobody else can, and we need that,? he said.
But Mr. Kennedy said that last year, when he taught a freshman journalism class at Northeastern, ?one of the things that really struck me was these students had basically no experience reading a newspaper of any kind.?
