Tag Results for Globe

Our own frequent guest panelist Adam Reilly takes Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen to task for comparing Dom DiMaggio to Manny Ramirez. Cullen assigns Manny the role of soulless mercenary, particularly when compared with Dom and his contemporaries, many of whom who put their baseball careers on hold to fight in World War II.

If Cullen isn't getting old before his time, his column seems to be, Reilly writes:

"The point Cullen raises about ballplayers and war is an interesting one. To do it justice, though, you'd need to look at things like the skyrocketing salaries of professional athletes and the effect Vietnam had on popular conceptions of the military. Cullen doesn't do this, maybe because it would mess with his "Hey you kids, get off my lawn!" shtick."

Read the rest of Adam's story.

(Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment or leave Adam a message on the Guest Panelist whiteboard.)

As the deadline for $20 million in concessions grows closer, Globe managers are giving up bonuses and the unions are demanding heretofore unheard of transparency.  And a potential new buyer has stepped forward.  The latest on the Globe crisis.

With the New York Times threatening to shut down the Globe, thoughts are turning to well-heeled Boston business moguls who might step in and save the day. But with the Globe losing money hand over fist, who has an extra $50-$85 million a year to throw away?

Unionized Globe employees heard numerous New York Times Company demands at a union meeting last night. Then they heard some more demands. And some more after that.

"They pretty much asked for everything," one staffer who attended the meeting for members of the Newspaper Guild, which represents both editorial and commercial employees and is the largest of the Globe's 13 unions.

According to the staffer, officials told members that the Times wants $10 million in financial concessions from the Guild, which represents half of the $20 million that company executives in New York say they must have or else they will shut the Globe down. The silver lining - if you can call it that - is that the Times is allowing Guild members to pick their own poison.
 
If, for example, the Times says that Guild members could take a 5 percent pay cut, which would get them $2.1 million toward the $10 million, or they could take a 25 percent cut and get all the way there. Or they could let the Globe stop paying for pensions. Or give up all paid holidays. Or sick days. Or contributions to their health care fund and 401Ks.

The Times is also asking for several non-financial concessions, including an end to lifetime job guarantees held by more than 300 Globe employees, and a one-time opportunity to conduct a layoff without regard to union seniority.

"They (The Times) want to clean house," the staffer said.

Boston Globe publisher Steve Ainsley says the newspaper has a financial strategy that involves wringing concessions from unions, cost cutting in nonunion areas, and a plan to grab "additional revenue from consumers and advertisers," Beat the Press panelist Dan Kennedy reports on his Media Nation blog.

Ainsley's comments, made in a letter to employees, are the first from either the New York Times or the Globe that address - however indirectly - the threat by the Times to close the Globe unless unions there approve $20 million in concessions by the end of the month.

Ainsley's letter did not get into specifics, nor did it directly confirm the NYT Co. threat (the publisher said he pledged not to talk at last week's meeting with the unions). But he did convey some of the seriousness of the situation:

It is critical we all keep in mind our objective is to improve the financial performance of the Globe. Period. As bruising as this economic downturn has been to this institution, I believe we will accomplish that objective if all of us, every employee of the Globe, is able to keep our focus. Nothing less will prove successful.

How criticial? The Times folks reportedly told the unions that the Globe is on pace to losing $85 million this year. So even if the unions agree to $20 million in concessions, that still leaves a $65 million yearly operating deficit. That's a lot of money.

See Dan's blog for the full text of the letter.

People have believed for years that Boston would eventually be a one-newspaper town. But a controversial list of endangered newspapers published by a Wall Street blog is questioning the assumption that that one newspaper would be the Boston Globe.

Ouch. The Boston Globe has hit another pothole on the road to going hyper-local.

First there was the lawsuit and settlement with rival Gatehouse Media, in which the Globe agreed to stop automatically aggregating stories from Gatehouse's Wicked Local web sites on its rival Your Town sites. Now it appears that the Globe's local coverage will be contracting in its print editions even as the paper tries to expand online.

Globe editors held a meeting with regional staffers Thursday and broke the news that the paper may soon shutter the City Weekly and Globe Northwest sections as a cost cutting move, according to several staffers who attended.

"It was pretty depressing, but I guess not surprising. Nothing is surprising anymore," one regional staffer who was at the meeting said.

The sorts of stories that had been going in City Weekly - neighborhood-oriented news from Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville - would be absorbed into the City & Region section under the plan, staffers said. Meanwhile, the 40 cities and towns in twice-weekly Globe Northwest, including Lowell and 15 in southern New Hampshire, would be split evenly between Globe North and Globe West.

Staffers said the plan was developed in response to the Globe's ongoing effort to cut 50 newsroom positions via voluntary buyouts - for which there are apparently few takers. If the Globe is forced to resort to layoffs (which it has been able to avoid in three previous staff reductions) they would be done largely by seniority and are expected to hit the young staffers in the regional sections particularly hard.