Nieman Journalism Lab

Split in two: How The Boston Globe, up for sale, is navigating its free/paid strategy

Posted: 22 Feb 2013 10:00 AM PST

Sitting in his office last week, Brian McGrory, the new editor of The Boston Globe, described the relationship between the two websites — similarly named, often confused, one free, one paid — that his newspaper offers.

“I’ve always thought that the success of BostonGlobe.com was inhibited in a couple of ways by Boston.com,” McGrory said. “One, is this sense that people don’t need to pay for our journalism because they were getting enough of it for free on Boston.com. Two, we haven’t used Boston.com to its fullest potential to let people know what they are missing when they don’t pay.”

That was Thursday. Six days later, the Globe’s parent company, The New York Times Co., announced it was putting the newspaper, both websites, and the rest of the New England Media Group up for sale. Following years of rumor and speculation, the Globe and its New England siblings will be the final parts of the Times Company’s non-Times assets to be sold off. In a statement, Times CEO Mark Thompson said:

We are very proud of our association with the Globe and the Telegram & Gazette, but given the differences between these businesses and The New York Times, we believe that a sale is in the best long-term interests of these properties and the employees who work for them as well as in the best interests of our shareholders.

The Globe that is for sale today is a different paper than the one that was on the block in 2009. Former Globe editor Martin Baron said the paper has continued its deep history of investigative journalism and is making the right bets in multimedia and innovation. “It’s a great group of people and I’m sorry they have to go through this disruption and tumult once again,” said Baron, now executive editor of The Washington Post. “They went through it once already.”

The Globe has produced Emmy-winning online video, was an early adopter of responsive design, and is seeing growth in its digital subscriptions. “It’s a group of superior journalists, they work very hard and they’re totally dedicated,” he said. “They’ve made themselves vital to the conversation in the greater Boston area.”

Perhaps the biggest change to come since 2009 — and perhaps the biggest new factor for potential buyers to consider — is its digital circulation strategy. It’s been more than a year since the paper digitally split itself in two, with the popular and longstanding Boston.com remaining free and a new BostonGlobe.com launching as a paid destination that echoes the print product in form and content.

The digital subscription piece of that model has been a slow climb for the Globe — each quarter has brought additional growth, but totaling just 28,000 paid digital subscribers at year’s end. Whether that’s a good or bad number is up for debate, but it’s hasn’t been enough to generate the kind of new circulation revenue that can make up for the ongoing print advertising decline. At the New England Media Group, of which the Globe is by far the biggest part, advertising dollars have continued to drop, to the point that, in 2012, ad revenue made up only 47 percent of total revenue.

The future of the Globe was already changing before the announcement of the sale, as the company juggled innovation in print and online to find new revenue. Boston.com has become a launch pad for new products, including the creation of an online radio station and selling event tickets. More recently, they’ve begun tinkering with how much Globe content to give away in order to entice new digital subscribers.

In a series of interviews from the last several months, a picture emerges of a newspaper with a strong tradition and local identity that is trying hard to find its footing in the new business of journalism. Now there’s more urgency to that mission. When I spoke with McGrory last week, he argued in very plain terms the past and future of the paper and its city are tied together.

“Think of Boston without the Globe,” he began, “Boston without the Globe is a place where Whitey Bulger is still dealing drugs and committing murders in Southie. It’s a place where pedophiliac priests are still getting transferred from one town, one parish to another. It’s a place where the probation department is still being run like a criminal enterprise. It’s a place where the Democratic speaker of the house is still trading influence. Time and again, the Globe has broke the biggest stories, every day, that are vital to this community.”

Two sites, two personalities

A big key to figuring out the Globe’s future will be to determine the right relationship between Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com. It’ll be from those sites, along with the print paper, that the Globe will expand its brand and its audience, said publisher Chris Mayer. “Diversifying the revenue streams is just creating more of an ability to continue to be steadfast in the way in which we want to support the mission and deliver the core value of The Boston Globe,” said Mayer. “Expanding the number of products is really a part of that.”

“Perhaps we have been a little bit too cautious in terms of making sure we don't harm Boston.com. Perhaps by being cautious, we haven't fulfilled the great potential of both websites.”

The state of play between the two sites is shifting. Boston.com is set to be redesigned, and it’s already seen a broad reduction in the amount of Globe content it carries. “I’ll be blunt: Right now, it’s a bit of a muddle between the two sites. There’s not enough of a distinction between what is BostonGlobe.com and what is Boston.com,” McGrory said.

McGrory’s only been on the job since December, when Baron departed for the Post. He said untying Boston.com from BostonGlobe.com and creating a clearer identity for the sites will help make a stronger case for paid content. “There are lessons to be learned there. Perhaps we have been a little bit too cautious in terms of making sure we don’t harm Boston.com. Perhaps by being cautious, we haven’t fulfilled the great potential of both websites,” McGrory said.

Boston.com — which draws around 6 million unique visitors per month, quite high for a regional news site — was always going to play a prominent role in supporting and marketing the new site. With that much traffic pouring through Boston.com, peeling off any of those visits would be beneficial to BostonGlobe.com. At launch, the newsroom allowed five free stories from BostonGlobe.com to go to Boston.com, along with any breaking news and sports coverage. Now that number has been reduced to four, and Globe sports columnists have been cut back. They’ve also tinkered with the free offerings from social media, dropping the number of free links to BostonGlobe.com to two per month, down from five. It’s a move reminiscent of when The New York Times reduced the free stories allowed through its metered paywall from 20 to 10.

McGrory said drawing a line between the two sites means changing the content. The new Boston.com will still have a share of community voices, entertainment, and social media, but the news content will be less Globe-sourced and shorter, with stories rounding out around 100 to 150 words. “There’s a perception that Boston.com is Globe Lite, and a fear on our part that people are saying, ‘Why do we have to subscribe to the Globe if we get Boston.com for free?’” he said. The new framing of the sites would have Boston.com being the “front page of Boston,” McGrory said, while BostonGlobe.com would be a reflection of the paper’s reporting. (That’s actually quite similar to the old framing, but the lines are being drawn more firmly now.)

BostonGlobe.com’s responsive design was ahead of the game, a move that is becoming more and more popular with news publishers. But inside the Globe, the move to two websites meant adapting their workflow for stories, graphics, and multimedia. Jason Tuohey, editor of BostonGlobe.com, said that’s meant taking a less print-centric approach for graphics team: “They’re really pushing the boundaries with multimedia, I think, because they’re creating these interactive graphics from mobile up,” he said. “They’re creating something that works on any device, which is not how a lot of other news outlets operate.”

One example would be the recent 68 Blocks series, where a team of Globe reporters lived in the Bowdoin-Geneva part of Dorchester to tell the story of the neighborhood. The paper amplified that reporting through data visualizations, video, and other multimedia only available on BostonGlobe.com. The series is now available as an ebook, free to subscribers or $2.99 in various formats.

Growing the local audience

“The things that we can deliver that differentiates the reading experience is going to be either what’s happening geographically, or what is happening in this geography that is relevant above and beyond,” Mayer said. The Globe divided the audience for that into two buckets: people willing to pay for a newspaper and those who want news, information, and entertainment mixed with a little social engagement. Mayer said he’s happy with the traffic to both sites, but sees it as the foundation to continued growth. For Boston.com, that means finding new ways to engage with people, on mobile devices, new apps, and social media, he said. For BostonGlobe.com, the goal is exposing more people to the local coverage and unique reading experience of the site. “The product’s a year old,” he said. “What works — in the first year, it’s a way to build awareness and to get people to sample and then subscribe — is going to evolve over time.”

“They’re creating something that works on any device, which is not how a lot of other news outlets operate.”

Another area Mayer wants improvement on BostonGlobe.com is advertising. Part of the sales pitch to readers is its clean, distraction-free reading experience. By limiting the number of ad positions on section fronts and article pages, the Globe hoped to get premium rates for its online ads. Mayer said many advertisers are now looking for more granular audience data as well as tools to evaluate the effectiveness of ads. The fenced-in nature of BostonGlobe.com does provide for some data, as users are required to register to use the site.

But Mayer said they need to improve their ability for targeted advertising and offer new advertising experiences in different products. Jeff Moriarty, vice president for digital products at the Globe and general manager of Boston.com, said the company is developing responsive ads for BostonGlobe.com that would adapt to screen size just like any other piece of content on the site.

As happy as they are with the responsive design, plans are in the works to launch a native BostonGlobe.com news app for smartphones in 2013. Moriarty said they wanted to create native apps that feel built for mobile from a design and utility standpoint, not just a desktop site stuffed into a smaller package. That could mean shorter stories and customization not available in the responsive site, but also using device-based features like geofencing and background downloading of stories, Moriarty said. “It’s really about not dumping the newspaper into an app, which a lot of people do, but rethinking it,” he said. “The other reason for that obviously is to get access to the frictionless commerce of the [app] store.”

Managing the Boston.com brand

For its part in the two-site plan, Boston.com was supposed to play the role of infotainment provider. It’s not exactly a new job for the site, which was one of the early local newspaper portals when it was created 17 years ago. In the new plan, news updates would be short, slide shows, listings, and entertainment would be front and center.

“We're going to try a lot of new things and see what sticks.”

Boston.com has also taken on the role of experimental money maker. Now visitors to Boston.com can buy tickets to Patriots games, watch live video shows, listen to streaming radio, or find town- or neighborhood-specific news. Another plan in the works is for the site to sell .boston domain names to area businesses. And, thanks to a recent grant from the Knight Foundation, they’re partnering with MIT’s Center for Civic Media to build tools to help connect with readers and report the news.

By experimenting in the open, Boston.com has become even more important to the Globe’s future by becoming a laboratory for new ideas to reach audiences, but also a pipeline for new products. “We’re going to try a lot of new things and see what sticks,” Moriarty said.

They’re also trying new forms of advertising, like the recently launched Insights, which allows local businesses to create blog-like posts that are published on the site. Part Yellow Pages, part BuzzFeed branded content (though the posts don’t appear in-stream with other stories), Insights is another way Boston.com is trying move past traditional forms of advertising to pay the bills.

“As we look at Boston.com moving forward, the advertising opportunities are going to change,” Moriarty said. “The traditional banner positions — though they’re valuable and they work — we need to go above and beyond to really set ourselves apart.”

“Except for the people who want every last bit of The Boston Globe, you’ve got a very robust, free website to this day. Which may explain why the success of the paid site has been relatively modest.”

Even as the sites become more distinct, it’s clear BostonGlobe.com will still rely on Boston.com as a source of both traffic and new subscribers. BostonGlobe.com gets a prominent slot on the Boston.com homepage to promote subscriber-only content.

“Right from the beginning, it struck me as an unusual and creative approach, but I was skeptical as to how well it would work,” said Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy. “They have had some success, but the skepticism hasn’t entirely vanished.” Boston.com’s news offerings, while lacking the range or depth of the Globe’s, might be good enough for many. If you can get your fill of breaking headlines and Red Sox news on Boston.com, why would you pay for BostonGlobe.com? “Except for the people who want every last bit of The Boston Globe, you’ve got a very robust, free website to this day,” Kennedy said. “Which may explain why the success of the paid site has been relatively modest.”

Kennedy said pulling more news content away from Boston.com could, rather than strengthening BostonGlobe.com, instead send readers to local competitors like NPR affiliate WBUR or The Boston Herald. Overall, Kennedy said it may be too early to judge whether the Globe’s strategy is working.

But the state of the Globe’s double down will likely be a big consideration for any potential owner. Particularly, a new owner will have to determine how much time, and capital, they are willing to invest to see if the two-site approach can succeed long term. McGrory says he believes the paper’s digital strategy is headed in the right direction — even if the mechanics of the sites need tweaking. “I’ve always had strong opinions over the years about Boston.com and, in the last year and a half, the byplay between BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com. Now I’m in a position to exercise some influence on that and its been quite gratifying,” he said. The new Globe, he said, needs to be able to reach people no matter where they are, even if they “are reading us as they stand in line at a Dunkin Donuts.”

“None of this works — none of what we’re talking about works — if we don’t continue here to produce really high-quality journalism that people want to read. We can talk about digital ’til the cows go home. But unless we’re producing material that people feel they need to read, want to read, then we’re screwed on much of the rest of it.”

Photo of Globe presses by Scott LaPierre used under a Creative Commons license.

This Week in Review: Negotiating the press’s presidential access, and does Yahoo’s redesign matter?

Posted: 22 Feb 2013 05:17 AM PST

Power, the president, and the press: The political press’s frustrations with their treatment by President Obama became a lot more public this week, after Fox News’ Ed Henry issued a statement on behalf of the White House Correspondents Association complaining that no reporters got access to Obama’s golfing trip last weekend. Henry clarified the next day that the complaint wasn’t about golf specifically, but about the broader principle of transparency and access.

Politico’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen then published a long piece detailing Obama’s efforts at “limiting, shaping and manipulating” the press’s coverage of him, largely by limiting press access and releasing plenty of information directly to the public instead. The reaction was quick and critical — not of Obama, but of the Washington press corps. The gentlest critique came from former White House reporter Matthew Cooper at The Atlantic, who noted that the White House press has always complained about the press tactics of whichever administration is in office, adding that the access they’re losing isn’t that crucial anyway.

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum was perplexed at journalists’ anger over Obama’s releasing information directly to the public, writing, ”why is this a problem? It’s 2013, guys. Why shouldn’t a president communicate with the public using whatever mediums the public happens to consume?” Gawker’s Tom Scocca argued that if Obama weren’t managing the press so thoroughly, the press would criticize him for that, too. Gawker editor John Cook (via Greg Mitchell) pointed out that Allen’s questions the last time he got full access to President Bush weren’t exactly hard-hitting.

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple broke down the golf grievance and noted the theme of powerlessness in the press’s clashes with the president: “It's all another way of saying that the White House is obligated to do essentially whatever it pleases when it comes to media access.” The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman also emphasized the White House’s structural power over the press corps, describing the White House press as working “in a gilded cage.” And The Post’s Carter Eskew proposed that the press fight back against that equality by sending interns or using pool feeds to cover staged White House events, refusing to be used by the president.

marissa-mayer-cc

A quixotic redesign?: Seven months after former Google exec Marissa Mayer came on as Yahoo’s CEO, she unveiled her first significant change — a redesign of the site’s homepage. As The New York Times explained, the new design does away with low-quality ads and focuses on its most popular properties, rather than trying to jam everything onto the page. It also includes a Twitter-like news feed and a stream of content recommendation from friends. Bloomberg went deeper into the rationale behind that news feed and the integral role sharing is playing in the company’s strategy.

The initial reviews were mixed. Wired’s Mat Honan was impressed with the news feed, particularly its personalization. “For a company that developed a reputation for moribund products, the re-engineered newsfeed is one of the smarter news delivery systems in recent memory,” he said. Others, such as CNET’s Dan Farber and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram, said the redesign was superficial change that wasn’t going to alter much of significance. Ingram likened it to “adding a new coat of paint and some racing stripes to your old Chevy.”

Quartz’s Christopher Mims argued that homepages just don’t matter anymore, because browsing has changed from the days when Yahoo ruled the web. (As he pointed out, Mims’ own site has no real homepage.) Others pushed back against that idea: ReadWrite’s Taylor Hatmaker said Yahoo’s homepage still draws in loads of traffic, and Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily said the crucial importance of every inch of space on Yahoo’s homepage is what makes Mayer’s overhaul so important — and what makes it so sad, because it’s taken all her might just to catch up to what everyone else has been doing for a while now. “Even making Yahoo current is a monumental task, but still one that solves nothing at the end of the day,” she wrote.

The Times tries to unload the Globe: The New York Times Co. announced this week that it’s planning to sell The Boston Globe, which it bought in 1993. As the Globe reported, the Times also tried to sell the Globe in 2009 after first threatening to shut down. Since then, it’s sold its other newspapers, its stake in the Boston Red Sox, and About.com, as it attempts to narrow its focus to its core newspaper. Bloomberg also noted that where the Times has tried (with a good deal of success) to shift its revenue toward circulation, the Globe still makes most of its money from advertisers.

The Lab’s Ken Doctor had the most thorough breakdown of the situation, listing the Globe’s strengths (strong leadership, paid digital content innovation, big newsroom) and weaknesses (dropping revenue, entanglement with the Times). He saw the Times Co.’s sale as the final step of seizing the global opportunity that the Times has become. Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review saw an additional significance: “By putting the New England group up for sale, the Times is drawing a bright line between the prospects it sees for a national paper and for regional papers.” Chittum put some of the blame on the Globe’s two-site paywall design, which its editor told Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon it would try to untangle.

Both Poynter’s Rick Edmonds (in an Andrew Beaujon post) and Northeastern j-prof Dan Kennedy (in addition to Doctor) brought up Aaron Kushner as a potential buyer. Kushner attempted to buy the Globe the last time around and later bought the Orange County Register, for which, as Kennedy noted, he’s drawn some attention for a counterintuitive approach built around print.

Hacking on several fronts: There were several developments in the ongoing hacks against American companies this week: Two weeks after Twitter announced that it had been hacked, Facebook said it, too, had been hit by a sophisticated attack. Then, a few days later, Apple said some of its employees’ computers had been infected with the same malware that infiltrated Twitter and Facebook’s systems, reportedly by hackers who may have been looking for access to apps on Apple smartphones (unsuccessfully, thus far). All Things D’s Mike Isaac found the site that had been the source of the malware.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported on a new study that reveals the identity and location of the Chinese group that is carrying out hacking attacks against numerous other American companies (not including the attacks on The Times — those are believed to be by a different Chinese group). The group was reported to be a military unit, though the U.S. government won’t formally tie it to the Chinese military for diplomatic reasons. The Chinese government denied the report, while All Things D’s Arik Hesseldahl and ReadWrite’s Dan Lyons both looked at the political and practical realities of this relentless Chinese hacking.

Reading roundup: A few other stories to catch up on this week:

— An update to last week’s Tesla-New York Times snafu: Times public editor Margaret Sullivan issued her ruling, with censure for both the Times’ John Broder and Tesla’s Elon Musk. CNN and a group of Tesla owners recreated the Times’ trip to show it could be done, and several commentators weighed in with thoughtful takes — The Tow Center’s Taylor Owen on the importance of trust and context with data, Dave Winer on handling public integrity in journalism, PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie on wielding data like a hammer, and paidContent’s Mathew Ingram on the shift in the media balance of power.

— The popular conservative rumor that Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel gave a speech to a nonexistent “Friends of Hamas” group was revealed as false, as New York Daily News reporter Dan Friedman explained how he accidentally started it, and Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro, who first reported it, insisted that the story as he reported it was correct. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple asked a few critical questions about the episode, and The Daily Beast’s Ali Gharib chastised Shapiro for not doing any actual journalism. The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf and The New Yorker’s Alex Koppelman both called for more self-criticism on the part of the conservative media, but Wemple countered that this screwup was just abnormally bad.

— Twitter introduced an advertising API, which lets its advertisers (just a handful at launch) to allow adverisers to manage their own ads within the platform. Ad Age explained what it means for advertisers, and PandoDaily looked at the implications for other social networks.

— Reuters reported that the tech blog All Things D and its owner, News Corp., are considering parting ways at the end of the year. In an insightful post, j-prof Jay Rosen took the opportunity to list some of the shifts in power in contemporary journalism.

— Three final recommended pieces on online media: Reuters’ Felix Salmon on the economics of online advertising and media use, The Financial Times’ Robert Cottrell on what makes for valuable blogging and how to capitalize on it, and French digital media exec Frederic Filloux on the need for a rethink on how newspapers are written in the digital era.

Photos of the White House Press Briefing Room by Jennifer Boyer, Marissa Mayer by J.D. Lasica, and a Globe box by Wayne Marshall all used under a Creative Commons license.

YULI AHMADA

Sabtu, 23 Februari 2013