Why the Boston Globe needs to go bankrupt

At BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis says the New York Times should force the Boston Globe into bankruptcy:

[The Globe is] losing $85 million a year. They saved only $20 with recent concessions. It could bring The New York Times down. Time for radical surgery.

Speaking of bankruptcy (and layoffs, and pay cuts and out-of-print): The Wall Street Journal maps the decline of the nation’s top newspapers since 2006.

Right-wingers, Ben Affleck and Southern girls

A few quotes to ponder as we head into the weekend:

“Oh, well. When the Feds surround my place for the big shootout, I hope my home gets described as a ‘compound’ just before it goes up in smoke. Cool.” –Mark Steyn, National Review Online, in response to a Department of Homeland Security report warning of dangerous right-wing extremist activity.

“Make no mistake, dear readers, we are living under tyranny. Especially to those who voted for Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress, you are living in denial if you believe otherwise. This is not hyperbole.” — The Sarasota Observer, in an article un-hyperbolically titled “Live Free or Die.”

“For now, though, one can’t help but note that these ‘conservatives’ seem so very angry about a federal government program designed to do nothing other than protect the glorious Homeland from Terrorists.  And we know that this is the purpose of the DHS program because that’s what the Government said its purpose is.  So what else is there to know?  That’s the lesson we all learned over the last eight years:  Bush said that all of his secret surveillance programs were only directed at Al Qaeda, so how can anyone say otherwise?” — Glenn Greenwald, Slate, in response to right-wing criticism of the Department of Homeland Security

Journalists say the darnedest things

“From the moment The Times Co. purchased The Globe in 1993 it has treated New England’s largest newspaper like a cheap whore.” — Eileen McNamara, Boston Herald

“The metaphor of content as a cascading stream means there is no unit — a stream is a stream, it has no discernible building blocks.” — Martin Langeveld, Nieman Journalism Lab. (Sixteen grafs later, he writes that a drop in the stream would be a basic unit.)

“Google and aggregators and bloggers are bringing value to you; they should be charging you for the value they bring.” — Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine (He loves Google so much, he’s written a book called What Would Google Do?) He then gets ripped by a commenter who makes a convincing case that Google isn’t bringing value; it’s bringing traffic.

“Say this much for Good Old Roy. The guy never has been afraid of heights.” — Gary Shelton, St. Petersburg Times. (The too-obviously foreshadowed punch line from the always-entertaining Shelton, after opining that UNC coach Roy Williams must have felt like he was on top of the world following his team’s basketball championship.)

Visual proof that newspapers are doomed

You’ve read the statistics. Now we have visual confirmation that newspapers are in a death spiral:

“That’s just a whirlpool,” you say? Maybe to someone without a taste for visual metaphor. But trust me — that’s a death spiral, and newspapers are floundering just below the surface.

And this stock photo? Just a pile of newspapers burning? Au contraire — it’s the symbolic loss of revenue from classified ads. There goes your main source of revenue, up in smoke. Craigslist says it smells great.

Still not convinced, given the irrefutable stock photo evidence?

Well, perhaps THIS will change your mind …

Journalists taking one for the team

Alas, these two journalists took markedly different routes to unemployment. Dave Reynolds, sports anchor, was laid off by WFLA on Monday:

“I already have some prospects, and I hope to find work soon,” he said. “I realize that I was not the only person laid off and these are difficult times for the news media. I’m just focusing on providing for my family.”

Reynolds and his wife, Holly, have a 4-year-old son.

In contrast, Nicole Wong also gave up her job — to save someone else’s:

She writes, “I was hoping I’d get to be the one who breaks the news to you that I’ve volunteered to be laid off from the Boston Globe in order to save the job of a reporter who has less seniority than me and who has greater needs to stay in the Boston area due to family commitments and other obligations. But who am I kidding? This is a newsroom!

You’re one in a million, Nicole.

Newspaper execs lack vision

So says David Mehegan, who took a buyout from the Boston Globe after 33 years of service:

There’s a lot of innovation that’s going to go on. I just don’t think it’s going to be done by the management of papers as we now know them. I don’t think they have the imagination. I shouldn’t make a sweeping statement, but so far, what I see is just cutting and cutting and hoping some kind of miracle happens. I don’t mean that that’s the character of this company more than it is the character of any other. I just think that, for the most part, most newspaper management is in a state of shock. They’re not really going to be the ones to do it.

But Mehegan is being a class act as he leaves:

Nieman ranks the top newspaper websites of 2008

Want to know what the top 15 newspaper websites were of 2008 in terms of traffic? Of course you do, and the fine folks at Nieman Journalism Lab are all over it, compiling the data.

They have the overall rankings, a closer analysis of the top five national newspapers, as well as a look at six regional newspapers that enjoyed substantial audience growth over the past year.

Journalism fund proposal incites cries of media bias

Guest columnist David Scharfenberg suggested in a column for Boston.com that the government should set aside $100 million for a journalism fund to:

seed low-cost, Internet-based news operations in cities large and small – combining vigorous, professional reporting with blogging, video posts, citizen journalism, and aggregation of stories from other sources.

I personally think competition and innovation is the best solution to the industry’s well-documented woes.

GlobalPost to unveil subscription service

GlobalPost, an Internet start-up that covers international news, plans to expand its stable of correspondents. Check out the third way the company plans to raise money (via Boston.com):

One is the advertising on the site. A second is syndication deals with newspapers and other websites that will use GlobalPost’s stories. The third is a membership program called Passport, which will ramp up next month. For a $199 annual subscription fee, Passport members can join conference calls twice a month with GlobalPost correspondents, suggest story ideas, and receive text alerts about breaking news.

GateHouse v. New York Times settled

GateHouse Media and the New York Times Co. settled their dispute over the Times Co.’s use of the headlines and ledes from GateHouse’s Wicked Local sites. Here’s the upshot, as quoted from the settlement by Joshua Benton of Nieman Journalism Lab:

GateHouse will implement one or more commercially reasonable technological solutions … intended to prevent [NYT Co.]‘ copying of any original content from GateHouse’s websites and RSS feeds … which [NYT Co.] shall not directly or indirectly circumvent. …

Defendants shall remove all GateHouse RSS feeds from the aggregation tool currently being used to copy and display GateHouse’s  original headlines and ledes on boston.com’s yourtown websites, and shall refrain from accessing such feeds so long as GateHouse maintains any Solution(s) described in paragraph (1) to this Letter Agreement.

The Times Co. must also take down any GateHouse headlines and ledes archived on the Boston Globe‘s Your Town websites by March 1. (The New York Times Co. own the Boston Globe.)

As one might have expected, the reaction to the settlement has focused on the perceived threats to “fair use.” Mathew Ingram worries that the deal sets a bad precedent for linking and quoting material on the Web: