Tag Archives: newspapers

June 19, 2013 · 1:04 pm

Who will buy the Boston Globe?

By Christopher B. Daly 

imgresThe Boston Globe carries a story today about the impending sale of the newspaper by its owner of the past two decades — the NYTimes Co. Bids are due by June 27. As a regular reader, I hope, of course, that the new owners will be very, very rich people with very, very high standards of journalistic integrity. I hope they will be innovators who have a clue about how to make a business out of quality journalism. I also hope they really care about Boston and New England. I hope they have the nerve to stand up to people like Whitey Bulger (and Billy Bulger, for that matter) and an appreciation for why this is a special place. (Yes, every place is special, but I am looking for someone who gets the particular special-ness of this particular place; in other words, no Sam Zells, please.) I hope they have wit, and style, and grace.

Know anyone?

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April 21, 2013 · 6:17 pm

Conservatives may buy some big U.S. newspapers

By Christopher B. Daly 

The wonder is that they have not done this already.

According to today’s Times, the Koch brothers are thinking about making a bid to buy the ailing Tribune company, which would give the billionaires ownership of the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Courant. (It should be noted that for most of their existences, the LAT and the Tribune had editorial views that the Koch brothers would have envied.)

This sounds like a page from the Murdoch playbook: buy prominent American newspapers and use them to advance conservative views. Nothing could be simpler, really, and many conservatives founded U.S. newspapers to do just that.

I would be a little more concerned if they were buying up digital media properties with growing circulations, ad revenues, and staffs.

Shhh: don’t tell the Kochs!

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March 25, 2013 · 11:31 am

Another Newspaper Landmark Closes

By Christopher B. Daly 

Of course, there are sad stories about the closing of the landmark building on Biscayne Bay that has housed the Miami Herald for the past 50 years. 

HERALD-1-articleLarge

BUT, it should also be noted that the hulking Herald building was essentially a factory — a walled-off manufacturing plant. First and foremost, it was designed to receive raw materials (newsprint arrived in barges; hence, the dock) and turn them into finished products (i.e., each day’s paper, which left the plant on trucks).

What is the purpose of such a building in the digital age? Newspapers should be thinking of themselves as being in the information-processing business, not the paper-processing business. They should be in cool, glass offices right in the centers of their cities. They should look like Apple stores, not like power plants or auto factories.

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March 3, 2013 · 10:17 pm

Classic “cute” story: A 93-year-old “newsie”

By Christopher B. Daly

This would just be a silly (possibly exploitive, age-ist, etc) piece, but for one thing: I got my start in journalism delivering newspapers. I had a paper route for 8 years, six days a week, delivering the Boston Globe in my neighborhood in West Medford, Mass.

Started when I was 10 and finished when I graduated from high school. As I recall, I managed to save a significant chunk of college tuition in the process. And, I saw a lifetime of sunrises. Still hate to get up early and get going in the morning.

I still think newspapers made a mistake by getting of paperboys and (-girls) and replacing them with adults who drive around in cars. I have tried for 20 years to get my adult paper-delivery person to get my paper up onto my front porch. No luck. When I was a kid delivering papers, I had to ring every doorbell on my route every week — talk about staying in touch with your customers. It was the original social network. If they were unhappy about my service, they let me know.

Come to think of it, I learned most of what I know from doing that paper route. Kids should have the chance. Down with grown-ups!

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May 31, 2012 · 10:31 am

The glass is half-empty AND half-full

By Christopher B. Daly 

In light of the recent announcement that the New Orleans Times-Picayune will scale back the frequency of its print editions, the following chart bears studying:

This chart was part of a recent presentation by Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins. (I got hold of it through Poynter.)

So, what’s the takeaway? If you extend those trend lines any further, you can see that the revenue won’t be there in the future to support a printed newspaper. If newspapers want to stay in the news business, they better have a plan to get out of the paper business.

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May 25, 2012 · 11:58 am

Buffett on newspapers

By Chris Daly

Guess what super-investor Warren Buffett thinks about the future of newspapers?

Hint: he’s buying them. (And not just copies of papers; he’s buying whole newspaper companies.)

 Via Omaha.com

Warren Buffett’s letter to publishers and editors

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AP Photo

AP Photo

 

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May 25, 2012 · 11:41 am

Glass half full?

By Chris Daly

The latest American newspaper to take a step back from daily print publication is the venerable Times-Picayune of New Orleans. Today’s New York Times reports that the 175-year-old newspaper is scaling back to printing three days a week. By doing so, the managers hope to capture the bulk of the advertising revenue they get from display ads in the print version, while reducing some of the “legacy” costs that go along with printing: the extra salaries for full-time printers and drivers; the cost of the newsprint paper; the overhead, etc.

The good news: the folks at the Times-Picayune have taken the first steps along the narrow, rickety, wobbly, rope bridge to the digital future. The Times-Picayune is not going out of business. Far from it. The cutback in printing is part of a larger strategy to save the paper, not destroy it. Just about every newspaper in the country is somewhere along that same timeline, whether they recognize it or not. They are all groping their way into the future — without a map (such as the map of New Orleans below, which was created by the Times-Picayune).

Bonus question: What does picayune mean? (answer below)

 

Picayune

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the obsolete Spanish coin. For other uses, see Picayune (disambiguation).

A picayune was a Spanish coin, worth half a real. Its name derives from the French picaillon, which is itself from the Provençal picaioun, meaning “small coin.” By extension, picayune can mean “trivial” or “of little value.”

Aside from being used in Spanish territories, the picayune and other Spanish currency was used throughout colonial America. Spanish dollars were made legal tender in the United States by an act on February 9, 1793 until it was demonetized on February 21, 1857.[1] The coin’s name first appeared in Florida and Louisiana where its value was worth approximately six and a quarter cents, and whose name was sometimes used in place of the U.S. nickel.[2][3]

A daily newspaper published in the New Orleans market, the Times-Picayune, is named after the picayune.[4]

[edit]References

Wikisource has the text of the1911 Encyclopædia Britannicaarticle Picayune.
Look up picayune in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
  1. ^ Spanish Silver: General Introduction Coin and Currency Collections – University of Notre Dame, Retrieved on April 7, 2008
  2. ^ Picayune, Probert Encyclopedia, Retrieved on April 10, 2008
  3. ^ Picayune, World Wide Words, Retrieved on April 8, 2008
  4. ^ McLeary, Paul (2005-09-12). “The Times-Picayune: How They Did It.”. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 2010-07-27.

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November 3, 2011 · 9:12 am

Another one bites the dust

By Chris Daly

This is not another nostalgic piece about the demise of Filene’s Basement, prompted by today’s stories about the closing of the “legendary” discount retailer. (Fact is: I never really liked the place that much; in order to take full advantage of Filene’s Basement, you had to go there a lot, and I hate shopping, so it was not for me.) For people who care about the news business, the thorn on this withered rose is that there goes another source of display advertising for Boston-area newspapers.

When I was a kid delivering those newspapers in the 1960s, Filene’s department store (and not just the basement) did battle with Jordan Marsh from their proud flagship stores facing each other across Summer Street, and they competed with a slew of other department stores as well, including Gilchrist’s and some others I have forgotten. Back then, when those stores had “white sales” or wanted to tout their new fall fashions, or get ride of some extra mattresses, they took full-page ads in the big dailies.

Now, the area known as Downtown Crossing is literally a hole in the ground, from which no advertising dollars escape.

 

 

 

 

 

This is part of the reason that the Globe and the Herald are shells of their former selves. One of their most important revenue streams simply dried up — and shows no signs of ever gushing again.

Footnote: a whimper-out to Globe staff photographer Suzanne Kreiter for having her photo chosen to illustrate today’s story. The last-century photo dates from the heyday: 1988.

 

 

 

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October 24, 2011 · 10:34 am

David Carr is right again

By Chris Daly

In his column today, the New York Times media columnist does a brutal take-down of Craig Dubow, the value-destroying former head of the Gannett newspaper chain. (It gives me great pleasure to describe Gannett as a “chain,” because for all the years that I worked at the AP, we were forbidden to refer to any of the big newspaper chains as chains, because they carried such clout on the AP Board that they has succeed in banning the term chain in connection with their own businesses.)

Long story short: Dubow eviscerated the company, then walked off with a $37 million “bonus” package. What a racket.

 

BTW. . . Here is the company’s updated logo. (To my mind, it carries a kind of creepy aftertaste: What exactly is within reach? Whose reach? Sheesh.)

 

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