Media Watch

Globe, Gatehouse, battle online; Murdoch says "Newspapers will survive!"; Globe losing $1M a week; Community sites replacing old media; Globe, Gatehouse offer discounts

Thoughts on the Globe's Newton project

The battle between the Boston Globe and GateHouse Media over the Globe's hyperlocal Newton site isn't really about the possibility that the Globe will grab more content from the Newton Tab than fair use — or fair play — should allow.

Rather, it's over a more fundamental issue that will likely be a key to survival as struggling news organizations seek to reinvent themselves: Who will control the virtual front door to Newton, as well as to other cities and towns?

At first glance, Boston.com Newton strikes me as attractive, well-organized and generous. By generous, I mean the blog-like feature that fills the center well is a nice mix of content from the Globe, the Tab and local blogs. Just as important, the items give you just a bare taste of the story — if you have any interest at all, you'll click through. So it seems likely that Boston.com will drive some traffic to the Tab, not to mention the blogs.

By combining content from different sources so seamlessly, Boston.com, at least for the moment, has leapfrogged ahead of the Tab's Wicked Local Newton site. GateHouse's Wicked Local sites, which debuted in Plymouth a few years ago, before there even was a GateHouse, were supposed to combine content from the local GateHouse paper with blogs and citizen journalism in order to be a one-stop community guide. That never quite panned out, although Wicked Local is stronger in some towns than in others.

Probably the least generous item on Boston.com Newton right now involves my friends at the Boston Phoenix. There's a big photo of a plate of food, along with a headline that says, "Foodies: Phoenix reviews Hotel Indigo." Follow the link, though, and you find a Globe blog item that summarizes the Phoenix review. You have to click again to get to the actual Phoenix review.

There's a lot more to Boston.com Newton than the news blog. Readers can contribute to a wiki, discuss issues and send in photos. There's a calendar of events, real-estate listings and local school data.

At the moment, at least, there is no RSS feed. That may change, though the site strikes me as ill-suited to reading via RSS, as it consists of many little items that require you to go off-site if you want to learn more. (Boston.com's director of community publishing, Teresa Hanafin, makes exactly that point in a comment to the Garden City blog. And don't miss GateHouse editor Greg Reibman's hilarious retort.)

The Globe and GateHouse face different challenges.
The Globe, like all big regional papers, is caught in a squeeze. People who are interested mainly in national and international news are now getting it elsewhere, online. And though it's often said that local is the future, it's difficult for a big paper that covers all of Eastern Massachusetts to become local enough. Boston.com Newton, which is clearly intended as a prototype (note the "yourtown" in the URL), is an interesting way of overcoming the disadvantage of being a regional paper — and of attracting local advertisers who could never afford to buy space in the paper.

GateHouse, which publishes about 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts, is all about local, so it doesn't have to reorient its mission. But its natural advantage in print doesn't necessarily hold up online, because players as large as the Globe and as small as a few passionate activists can play on the same turf.

What's going on in Newton will tell us a lot about the future of the newspaper business over the next few years. I hope both sides find a way to win.

Gatehouse's Cape Cod newspapers discounted 25%, Oracle 33¢ each

The three largest weeklies owned here by Gatehouse Media are offering subscibers a 25% discount which lowers the yearly cost of The Harwich Oracle to $17.21 or 33 cents an issue. The Cape Codder is now $31.50 (down from $42.00) and The Register is $21.71 (down from $28.95).
Globe offers 50% off
The Boston Globe is also discounting, and you can get it delivered for $4.75 a week including Sunday for the next three months. That's 68 cents an issue.

Globe losing nearly $1 Million a week?

That's what Boston Globe executives have been telling union members, according to this story by Boston Business Journal reporter Craig Douglas. That number comes from the summer, before the paper reorganized its sections and saved itself some money. On the other hand, the economy is much worse now than it was then.

As for the possibility that the Globe will soon be sold, Douglas offers this:

"Who wants to catch a falling safe?" said a source familiar with the Globe's financials. "Nobody's going to fund a $50 million hole in the ground."

A falling safe with no money in it, apparently.

Bad as things may be, so far the New York Times Co. has spared Boston the chaos that has rocked other large regional papers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. At some point, though, something's got to give. (Via Universal Hub.)  The two items above are from Dan Kennedy's MediaNation.
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Rupert Murdoch to 'Cynics':
Newspapers Will Survive

Global media magnate Rupert Murdoch says doomsayers who are predicting the Internet will kill off newspapers are "misguided cynics" who fail to grasp that the online world is potentially a huge new market of information-hungry consumers...
Murdoch, the Australian-born chairman and chief executive of News Corp. which owns The Cape Cod Times, said in a speech broadcast Sunday titled "The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees" that the Internet offered opportunities as well as challenges and that newspapers would always be around in some form or other.
   "Too many journalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise," Murdoch said in a speech, recorded in the United States and relayed nationally by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. It was the latest in an annual ABC series of lectures by a prominent Australian.
   "Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights" in the 21st century, Murdoch said... Editor & Publisher. or The Guardian.

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs

Over the last two years, some of this city's darkest secrets have been dragged into the light - city officials with conflicts of interest and hidden pay raises, affordable housing that was not affordable, misleading crime statistics.

Investigations ensued. The chiefs of two redevelopment agencies were forced out. One of them faces criminal charges. Yet the main revelations came not from any of San Diego's television and radio stations or its dominant newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, but from a handful of young journalists at a nonprofit Web site run out of a converted military base far from downtown's glass towers - a site that did not exist four years ago.

As America's newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover...  The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets... NY Times.
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The newspaper summit: Lots of lines, all going the wrong way

Some 50 newspaper executives met in Reston, Va., Friday for the American Press Institute’s “Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis.” McClatchy, Hearst, E.W. Scripps, and The New York Times Co. were there, along with many others. Did anything come of it? Well, they agreed to reconvene in six months, but media blogger Steve Outing doesn’t think they have that long... Perhaps, as Mark Potts said while the summit was still in progress, “the wrong people are in the room"... Nieman Journalism Lab.