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New York Times Company Sells Boston Globe

August 3, 2013 by

Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, confirmed that Mr. Henry would pay $70 million for the paper. That would represent a staggering drop in value for the Globe, which The Times bought in 1993 for $1.1 billion, the highest price paid for an American newspaper. At the time, The Globe was one of the nation’s most prestigious papers in a far more robust newspaper environment. But like other newspapers, it began to lose readers and advertisers to the Internet, and revenue plummeted. The Times Company has taken several write-downs related to the New England Media Group, and in February it said it was putting The Globe and other assets in the group up for sale.

For The Globe, the planned sale restores a Boston connection that prevailed for 120 years under the Taylor family, which owned the paper from 1873 until its sale 20 years ago. While not from Boston, Mr. Henry has for the last decade been active in local sports, and his Fenway Sports Group owns the Red Sox, Fenway Park and 80 percent of the New England Sports Network. It also owns the soccer club Liverpool F.C. in the English Premier League.

“This is a thriving, dynamic region that needs a strong, sustainable Boston Globe playing an integral role in the community’s long-term future,” Mr. Henry said in a statement about the sale. “In coming days there will be announcements concerning those joining me in this community commitment and effort.”

In addition to The Globe, the sale includes BostonGlobe.com; Boston.com; The Worcester Telegram Gazette; Telegram.com; the direct mail marketing company Globe Direct; and the company’s 49 percent interest in Metro Boston, a free daily paper. Mr. Henry is buying the media group without partners through his acquisition company; under terms of the sale, he does not have to assume the Globe’s pension liabilities.

The all-cash sale is expected to close in 30-60 days.

The Globe is not the only paper to sell for a heavily discounted price. In April 2012, Philadelphia’s newspapers sold for $55 million after selling for $515 million in 2006. In October, The Tampa Tribune sold for $9.5 million. During recent talks about the sale of the Tribune Company’s portfolio of newspapers, analysts estimated that the entire newspaper company, including The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, was worth only $623 million.

For the Times Company, the New England Media Group was the last big asset in a portfolio it had been downsizing for several years. The acquisition of The Globe in 1993 was part of the company’s strategy to solidify its grip on the eastern corridor advertising sector and to have a presence that stretched from Maine to the District of Columbia. At the time, in addition to its flagship New York newspaper, the Times Company owned 31 regional newspapers, 20 magazines, 5 television stations, 2 radio stations and other businesses. It also had a half-interest, with the Washington Post Company, in The International Herald Tribune.

But in recent years, the Times Company has been divesting itself of its noncore assets to focus on developing its primary brand, The New York Times. In 2012, the company sold its 16 regional newspapers. Last year, it sold the About Group to IAC/InterActiveCorp for $300 million. This year, The Times announced plans to expand its global presence by changing the name of The International Herald Tribune to The International New York Times and attracting a new global audience of readers to become subscribers.

The Globe attracted a range of prospective buyers. Among those who expressed interest were Douglas F. Manchester, owner of the U-T San Diego; and a group led by Jack Griffin, the former chief executive of Time Inc., that included Ben and Steve Taylor, whose family sold The Globe to the Times Company.

Eric Bishop contributed reporting from New York and Gerry Mullany contributed from Hong Kong.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/business/media/new-york-times-company-sells-boston-globe.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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InsideClimate News Hopes to Build on Pulitzer

April 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

When three reporters for InsideClimate News found out they won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on Monday, none were in the same city — Elizabeth McGowan was in Washington, Lisa Song was in Boston and David Hasemyer was in New York.

“We’re a virtual organization,” said the publisher of the six-year-old Web site, David Sassoon, from his office in New York. So the celebration took place in a telephone conference call; whatever Champagne flowed, flowed in separate locations.

InsideClimate News may be the leanest news start-up ever to be presented with a Pulitzer, journalism’s highest honor, a prize that is typically awarded to regional and national newspapers. It beat out 50 other entrants and two finalists, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, for the prize.

With a full-time staff of just seven and a nonprofit business model, InsideClimate News exemplifies a new breed of news organization that depends on donations, both from rich charitable foundations and a handful of ordinary readers.

“Because of our name, some people think we’re an advocacy organization,” said Ms. Song, one of the three winners, in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “I hope the award will get people to stop making that mistake.”

Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzers, which are under the auspices of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said the Web site’s win “indicates the way journalism as we’ve always known it and loved it is being reconfigured.”

Another news operation reliant on donations, the Center for Investigative Reporting’s four-year-old California Watch, was a finalist for a Pulitzer this year (and last year, too). It and InsideClimate News bear some similarities to ProPublica, the pioneering nonprofit newsroom that shared a Pulitzer in 2010 for a collaboration with The New York Times, and won one of its own in 2011, becoming the first such Web winner.

All three distribute their work free on the Web and team up with for-profit news organizations that republish some of it with credit. All three say they try to tackle topics that bigger, better-known news organizations are not equipped or inclined to do.

“We are a climate and energy news organization, out to cover the issues that aren’t being covered by the mainstream,” said Mr. Sassoon. “The gap keeps getting bigger, so there’s more and more for us to do.”

Dan Fagin, a science journalism professor at New York University, said, “There are a lot of these experiments under way.”

A member of the InsideClimate News advisory board, Professor Fagin praised the site. “They’re relentless,” he said, when it comes to following up articles about pipelines and spills.

Mr. Sassoon said he was perplexed by the relative dearth of environmental coverage by other outlets.

InsideClimate News was the first to report on The Times’s decision last winter to close its small environment desk and assign its reporters and editors to other departments. While The Times said it was not shirking from coverage of climate change and other issues, and has continued to publish articles about those issues, the move made some people in journalism and environmental circles uneasy.

“The dismantling of the environment desk was, in some ways, a good argument to take to our funders, to say we need more money, but it didn’t make us feel good,” Mr. Sassoon said.

InsideClimate News has an annual budget of roughly $550,000, four-fifths of which goes to staff. The rest pays for travel, Internet services and other expenses.

The organization is an outgrowth of Mr. Sassoon’s consulting work for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that emphasizes climate policy. Initially, it was a blog called Solve Climate News, which collected news links from elsewhere and added a bit of commentary — a tried and true formula for many new blogs. For a while “we were chasing traffic,” Mr. Sassoon said, sheepishly, but the site soon got serious.

“We started to do our own original journalism rather than derivative stuff,” he said, and eventually renamed it InsideClimate News.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/business/media/insideclimate-news-hopes-to-build-on-pulitzer.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: Instagram in Retreat, and ‘Jersey Shore’ Signs Off

December 21, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The photo-sharing app Instagram on Thursday completed a full retreat from its proposed new terms of service that led to instant outcry from users, Nicole Perlroth and Jenna Wortham reported. The question, however, was whether the move came too late from Instagram, which was acquired this year by Facebook and is under the same pressure as its parent company to generate advertising revenue. The proposed changes included a clause that suggested Instagram would share users’ data — like their favorite places, bands, restaurants and hobbies — with Facebook and its advertisers to direct ads more precisely. In the interim, other services, including Flickr, which coincidentally has just introduced a new app, appeared to be gaining followers.

The Boston Globe on Thursday appointed a new editor, Brian McGrory, a Boston-area native who began his connection to the newspaper as a paperboy, Christine Haughney reports. He has been a columnist, White House correspondent and metro editor in his 23 years there, yet was something of an unexpected choice. Mr. McGrory succeeds Martin Baron, who was picked to be the next editor of The Washington Post. “After Marty Baron’s extremely successful tenure here, we don’t need any overhaul,” said Christopher M. Mayer, the publisher of The Globe, which is owned by The New York Times Company.

Gil Friesen, who helped establish AM Records with the band leader Herb Alpert and music promoter Jerry Moss, in the 1960s, died in Los Angeles on Dec. 13 at age 75, Paul Vitello writes. He was one of the first employees at the record company, which took the A from Alpert, and the M from Moss — Mr. Friesen, Mr. Alpert said, was the ampersand in the middle. He encouraged the company to produce movies too, and later became a founding partner of the Classic Sports cable channel, which was sold to ESPN in 1997 for $175 million. Thus, Mr. Vitello writes, he became known in Hollywood as one of the few executives with entrepreneurial successes in music, film and TV.

On Thursday night, the MTV series “Jersey Shore” signed off after a six-season run that introduced characters like the Situation and Snooki. The real Jersey Shore has been in people’s thoughts because of the destruction there from Hurricane Sandy; expect the show and its cast to quickly fade away, never to return, Ken Tucker writes for Entertainment Weekly. At the top of the piece, he frames his question: “What is ‘Jersey Shore’ ’s lasting significance, its enduring impact?” His answer: “Absolutely none.” You would be forgiven for stopping right there, but he continues:

But by any measure, there is nothing about Jersey Shore that merits enshrining it in any category of TV history other than “Time Killer.” As I can attest in preparing to write this piece, it doesn’t hold up as entertaining in reruns; it already plays like one of those ancient artifacts of papyrus — a newspaper, I believe they were called — that has been crumpled and tossed to the air.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/the-breakfast-meeting-instagram-in-retreat-and-jersey-shore-signs-off/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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