The Boston Globe vs. The New York Times—vs. the internet

The Boston Globe reports on its own stay of execution. The decision about its fate has been postponed till midnight tomorrow.

One of the Globe’s many problems is that it seems to have made an error in calculating the value of the employee benefits it is willing to give up:

In calculating the value of potential concessions, management had mistakenly included 80 Guild [union] employees who have left the Globe through buyouts, layoffs, and resignations since January, according to union officials. Once the wages and benefits of those employees were factored out, it reduced the value of the potential concessions available to the Guild. When negotiations began a month ago, the company provided a menu of possible salary and benefit cuts that it valued at $14 million, but now that same menu is valued at about $10 million. There has been no clear public explanation of how 80 people could have such a dramatic impact.

Globe employees are having trouble believing the paper’s officials are that incompetent:

“Jaws were dropping when news of the ‘mistake’ swept through the newsroom and the rest of the building,” said Sean P. Murphy, a Globe reporter since 1987…Marguerite Courage, who has worked 44 years in advertising, said it was hard to believe the company could make such a mistake.

“It’s a sad commentary,” said Courage. “You kind of hope you’re going in the right direction and then you take a step back.”

It’s easy to be snarky about the Globe, a newspaper that is typical of the worst biases of the MSM. And of course, the specter of a Red Sox vs. Yankees type of confrontation between the Globe and the equally abominable Times, its parent company, is somehow satisfying.

But, as the article points out, the human costs are large. The paper employs 2,100 people, a large number of whom are on the technical end and have nothing to do with the editorial product. Many are long-term employees who know no other jobs, and the newspaper business generally is not doing a whole lot of hiring these days.

The fate of the Globe seems to rest on concessions that management insists need to be made by the unions. The Globe (like the automakers) is a highly unionized operation: there are thirteen separate ones involved in putting out the paper. The pressmen have a union, the mailers another, and the delivery truck drivers still another, while negotiations with the union known as the Boston Newspaper Guild (a group that includes both white-collar and blue-collar workers in its mix) appear to be the main sticking point.

I’m not privy to the details of the benefits provided by the Globe unions, or whether they seem to include unreasonable salaries or perks. It’s a good guess that they might (especially if you consider that the average figure for the concessions in salary and benefits—not the salaries themselves—that the Globe was factoring in for each of those 80 employees would have been 52K per person), but I really don’t know. I’ve read quite a few articles about the paper’s negotiations, but they don’t include those particulars.

At any rate, unions might not be as big a factor as they seem: it’s not just the Globe that’s in trouble; most newspapers are, be they liberal or conservative or in-between, and they’ve been killed by the internet. The old saying about premarital sex—why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?—appears to apply to the newspaper world as well. As this Globe column points out, the paper (like so many others) is following a “self-defeating business model” by “selling the paper with one hand and giving it away on Boston.com with the other.”

True enough. That, combined with the recession, has caused revenues to plummet. Readership online is good, but that doesn’t generate much money, as most bloggers (and Pajamas Media, which had to get out of the online ad business) could have told you.

Scott Lehigh, the author of the column, wants to know whether Globe readers would pay for web content, a gambit that failed when the Times tried it but seems to be working okay for the Wall Street Journal. Lehigh writes that the problem is not the ultra-liberal stance of the Globe—fewer than 10% of its readers cited problems with content as a reason for dropping their subscriptions. But that’s a pretty hefty group, and there are probably more who felt that way but didn’t see fit to share that information with the Globe on their way out the door.

If you look at the comments on Lehigh’s piece, you’ll find that reactions are many and varied. Some say they would pay for the online version, some say that the paper’s extreme liberalism has turned them off, and some say the quality of the writing itself has declined.

My guess is that to survive, it may be best for newspapers to find a particular and unique niche and then charge for online content. The only thing special right now about the Globe that might make a person willing to pay for it when other papers can be read online for free is the local coverage, especially sports. Who wants to fork over hard-earned cash for AP stories with a Globe URL? Nobody.