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Man with ink in his blood finally has enough; cancels Globe after latest price increase
By adamg on Sun, 05/31/2015 - 8:12am
Mike Ball is a reporter type going way back, grew up in a household that had several papers delivered and is married to another reporter type, but notice from the Globe that it's raising home-delivery rates finally pushed him over the edge:
The short of it is that the greed of the Globe publisher, John Henry, piled on us and broke our will. He exceeded my chokepoint a couple of days ago. There are far better things I can do or buy with $750 a year than make a billionaire richer. ...
By my long term habit as well as age, I should be the subscriber the Globe wants to keep. They certainly don’t understand how to do that.
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The lack of quality content,
The lack of quality content, scarcity of original local reporting, and obvious biases on various subjects are better reasons to stop subscribing to that so called newspaper.
Today's Globe provides further evidence of its decline
It's not just the price. It's the fact that, despite pockets of good reporting, the paper's become a shell of itself. Today's version provides a perfect example.
Now I am, admittedly, commenting on the electronic version, as opposed to the paper version as Mark is in his post, but third headline from the top at the time I was scrolling the home page was an article on the bridge prowess of the wife of one of Fidelity's most successful hedge fund managers. Really?
Further, though there is much that is good in the story on the Scholar Athletes program in the city's public schools, I find it difficult to believe that it's a coincidence that this article, which paints John Fish in such a charitable light, is running during the heat of the Olympics controversy.
Even further, this little tidbit is dropped into the middle of it without question:
And, lastly, this from the same article:
As if Dorchester were a war zone.
I'm tired of reporters, who only venture to our corner of the city to visit the mother ship (if any of them still do), casually treating it as if it were beyond the pale. (And, yes, I use that term in full knowledge of its historical roots.)
Bridge Champion is now top of bostonglobe.com
And oh yeah, some kids got stabbed at Tufts last night.
Burke
The area around the Burke does have the reputation as one of the roughest parts of the city. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the kids who go to school there (or their parents/teachers) worry about safety after school. It's not a war zone but I wouldn't dismiss people's perception of a lack of safety.
I'm not dismissing people's perceptions
I'm dismissing the reporter's description, which, I'm going to go out on a limb, was based less on deep reporting than on the stereotype of the neighborhood.
Yes, there are significant concerns about public safety in the neighborhoods around the Burke and around Ronan Park. The 7 year-old boy who was shot last weekend alone attests to that.
But I have lived, worked and played in and near Ronan Park off and on for 20 years. I'll walk down Adams Street on my way to the Blarney Stone for quiz night. When I worked at the Boys and Girls Club, I would give some of the kids who lived on Topliff and Homes Ave. and other streets around the park rides home at night during the summer. I have, maybe, heard gun shots 3 or 4 times.
Is that too many? Yes. Is it less rare than, say, Lexington? Probably. But it still doesn't merit the reporter's casual description.
Print layout- front page
Under the masthead is the story of stock buybacks, as part of the "DividedNation" series.
Below and taking up the bulk of the page is Nadia Alawa building an aid organization for Syrians out of her Nashua, NH home while raising and homeschooling 8 kids.
Above the file in the rightmost column is the article on BPS scholar athletes.
Below that is the bridge article.
An ad for Century Bank takes up the bottom, about the size of the masthead.
My guess is that online layout is user driven, which is why print (or printish) is better. On the other hand, if one were to go to the store everyday to get the paper, it would be much cheaper than being a dedicated Globe reader. The business plan of driving away subscribers is pretty bad, IMHO.
Homepage vs. "Today's Paper"
In fairness the Globe has a homepage which updates throughout the day as news breaks and stories trend. They have a "Today's Paper" link to show a particular issue in more or less it's printed form:
Today for example:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/todayspaper/2015/05/31
That said, I'm probably going to cancel in the next few weeks. I have Sunday delivery and could probably do with just online access for a $1 less per week. But learning that the NYT is even cheaper for online-only might mean I don't bother with the Globe at all.
It's not so much the price increase as it is the lack of original reporting. Shaughnessy and Leung write a Deflategate/Brady or Olympic fluff piece in a slight different form every other day. The real estate news is just a reprint of the single family housing numbers which have little impact on cities and towns right around Boston. The occasional great piece is just diluted away. I really want to support a great local news outlet, but I just can't see the value anymore.
Advertising vs Newstand & Subscription revenue
Adam- wondering if you have any knowledge, regarding the % of revenue newspapers receive from advertising vs hard copy (subscription + newstand)? I'm curious from a historical perspective, as well as current.
I enjoy a hard copy of the paper now and then. I used to buy often from machines/stores when it was $0.50, because I could easily carry the 2 quarters. Now, they're harder to find and cost a lot more than pocket change. I read online too, but hate it when the pizza grease gets on my phone...
I was wondering something similar
Is the net revenue of printed papers way lower than the net revenue of online subscriptions, due to the cost of print and delivery, such that they're trying to force everyone into digital subscriptions by making the print pricing unaffordable?
They know their customers
I don't think that they are trying to herd their customers to digital. There may be a thought that the hold-outs who still want to hold a paper in their hands are older, more affluent, and would rather pay more money than deal with change this far down the line.
Being informed is far more interesting now.
I don't understand why anyone still puts up with this legacy dead wood.
We have news aggregation now. I'm keeping an eye on the battle at Ramadi and I'm not relying on the globe. I use Al Arabiya, Juan Cole, CNN, Reuters, BBC, the Iraqi news site Rudaw and so on.
News aggregation is a breakthrough. I use Google News and even design custom sections like "Land Conservation" and insert my own keyword set. The local section is a bit weak but I made a "Wicked Local' section that just serves an array of stuff from that syndicate.
And you can shitcan media you can't stand like Fox so it is low in the mix. The algorithm further enhances things and I keep it busy with omnivorous interests. It is a stunning information cornucopia with a synthesia of well blended elements. It may take a bit of work to avoid echo chamber formation, but it is well worth it.
It totally undermines the whole point of archaic top down media cobbled together by a third rate Kane wannabe and his half haggard gaggle of shills and shells always haunted by the immanence of collapse from a model at the end of its shelf life.
750 Bucks???
I mainly filter the globe out of my stuff and the herald cause it's crap. You'll quickly notice this when you make your own information cornucopia.
You'll wonder why you ever relied on the various blowsy windbags spilling ink and yapping on broadcasts around here.
Adam replaces them very well and is a gotta have source that is like curated aggregation with lots of insight and dedication to the sense of place.
Still around?
The Globe is like MSNBC. Few people pay any attention to it and even fewer take it seriously. Like most leftist rags it is shedding readers and advertisers with each passing week..
Let's not make this a political stance issue.....
..... Because certainly the Globe still has far more readers than the Herald, in this town, as does its on-line edition have more readers than the Heralds.
This is simply new media versus old media and both sides are still trying to figure out what the reading public wants...and that seems to change daily, in these times....
dingbat chimes in
when you figure out the difference between weather and climate, let us know
Oooh, ooh, I know!
Oooh, ooh, I know!
It's weather when it's colder than average, it's climate when it's warmer than average.
All you Globe haters
Two things:
1. Where in the US or anywhere else is there a better quality regional paper than the Globe? You can read them all online of course, so take a look: the Tribune-drained papers from Chicago and LA, the sold-and-resold Philadelphia Inquirer, the always-weak Chronicle from San Francisco. You can't expect the Globe to equal the NY Times, but who else is better? Maybe the Washington Post, that's all. We're damn lucky to have a newspaper as good as the Globe. OK, you don't like Shaughnessy or Leung, don't read them. There are a couple of dozen other good writers you'll enjoy if you look.
2. How much of the "free" news you enjoy so much originates in the Globe? Many nights the TV newscasts are full of the morning stories in the paper. Most of the rest is live-shot police news. How much of the blog news you enjoy is a reaction to the Globe's original reporting? Take them out of the picture and Boston will be a far lesser place.
I'm as troubled by their prices as anybody. $60/month is far more than I'd ever imagine for a daily paper, and $5 for a Sunday Globe is at the outer reaches of affordability. But it's no longer the advertising-supported cash cow of the 80s and 90s. If newspapers go away, what will replace them? There are very few internet institutions supporting even one salaried reporter to tell you what's going on in your city.
You're kidding, right?
Oh Mark, you really need to get out more....The Globe is a bogus, ancient fossil of a rag and all the new tech they try to bring in to rescue it wont save it.
Oh, really?
Top story about how giant mutinational corporations are screwing over their middle class employees (or ex-employees) by putting their cash into buying their own stock. Next up: how the shoddy Boston school system continues to break promises and disappoint some of its most promising students. An ordinary NH mother builds a Middle East aid organization in her home. That's today's front page. And it's not anywhere near the best product of recent Sunday Globes. Who in Boston is doing better work than this? I'm all ears for your worldly enlightened answer.
Problem is...that wasn't a good article
I was really interested in that topic, read the article, and was left with a gaping hole: What were the business decisions involved in making those layoffs? There was nothing in the article that may have explained why Cisco decided to give up the business that led to the layoffs. They didn't even say what the business was. At the end, it was a very one-sided story and it appears you took the bait.
FWIW, I'm a Sunday Globe subscriber which gives me online access to the everyday Globe, which I regularly read.
$750 for a year? Yikes.
Globe haters delude themselves
Yes, there are a few outlets online that actually go out and research and report stories, but most of the "citizens" involved with citizens' journalism work full time jobs, thus giving them little time to do the work professional journalists do.
I hate to do it, but let's look at our very own Universal Hub as an example. What "reporting" is done here, honestly. Adam does get out to the occasional meeting, but mostly he looks around for stories and links to them. He does a good job at it, mostly because his vocation for the longest time was writing for one of those dead tree using old media outlets people disdain so much. That gives him an idea of what news, and good news reporting, is all about.
The Globe does two things well. First, it has reporters track down stories. Heck, one of the most valid complaints about some of the reporters is that they tend to want to do their jobs from their desks, not going to far beyond whatever press release someone sent out. Second, and this I give only the print version, it alerts me to things I would not normally be interested in. To put all into one, consider this- the Globe sent Billy Baker out to Anchorage to show the counterpoint to our snowy winter. A snowless winter in Alaska- who was going to write about that?
Between the TV news and the internet, the Globe is directly or indirectly responsible for a lot of content. Just because you don't see it doesn't make it any less than true.
It depends on what you know.
And what you want to know.
Eastern Mass is just not that news worthy at a globular level as much of it is a groundhog day rehash of the same contending bunch of grifters and ditzes doing their public pirouettes and kabuki rituals in pursuit of money and power.
To make it worse, the aditorial disease has made the thing mangy.
2024 is aditorial and you could probably find quite a lot more that is either directly aditorial like 2024 or indirectly like... "what cute fluff can we dream up to make desired demographics like us"?
I've had 50 years to decide what is newsworthy and whether the globe is any good. It was a contender in the 60s and 70s but became the nations best lousy newspaper or worst good one by the 80s when the aditorial disease really began.
The purchase by NYT all but destroyed it and the disparity between NYT's buying price and its selling price to Henry speaks volumes. By now it is all but worthless.
Content making is as different from archaic journalism as a quill pen is from a smart phone.
The curating side that Adam handles mainly entails coming up with a mix of information sources and items that work for your constituents and it can be data driven. There is feedback like these comment threads.
It may use the same premises as the older system but it is more nimble. The original journalism started out as amateurs keeping journals. Then it became a profession of amateurs mainly trained in packaging information.
It has declined to a state of amateur professionals to an extent that it is all but worthless and the best reporting I find on eyeglaze things like legislature issues comes from bloggers like "Hester Prynne".
She is a very sharp attorney who knows the state house and its characters cold and has first rate analytical skills as well as a very well thought out presentation. And she does it for free.
She is formidable enough that the mayor and his adviser, Joyce, gave her and several others more than an hour of their time to try and sell 2024. She was unmoved and the only one who wasn't impressed by the trappings of office.
And the Globe has who... Shirley the airhead?
I can smell defeat already
I tried their 99 cent one month trial. Three weeks later they were already charging me at the regular rate, hoping that I would forget about it and let them charge my credit card indefinitely.I called them on it.
"Oops, did we do that?"
"Yes, you did. Now I want to cancel."
"Oh, OK. Hold for the cancellation department".(Ten minutes, nobody picks up.)
If this is what you have to do to preserve subscribers, what does it say about the product you are putting out?
If I want to learn every permutation of the GLBT community in granular detail, I'll buy a copy of Bay Windows.
I understand papers are entitled to an editorial opinion. However, no less an authority than the estimable Dan Kennedy has admitted that they do a lousy job of keeping their slant out of the news hole.They have every right to become a flack for John Walsh, Tom McGee and the State Committee. However, I have no interest in paying to be insulted while they do it.
Cleveland and Columbus
The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Columbus Dispatch are also both complete shite, in terms of quality of stories, reporting, and writing. Hell, even of terms of layout. (As of a couple years ago when I was living in Ohio, at least. They may have improved, or more likely, gotten even worse.) The Globe, for all its faults, feels like it fulfills the multiple roles it has in being a newspaper of national importance, the biggest newspaper in the region, and being the home-city newspaper as well.
No offense, but so are
No offense, but so are Cleveland and Columbus.
Agreed
But they're somewhat peer cities to Boston, in terms of size and regional dominance.
Just to clarify
Just to clarify (and I mostly agree with Mike Ball and other commenters). The Boston Globe website is not the same thing as the day's paper. It's a separate (mostly user unfriendly) website with pieces plucked from the paper and not every story in the paper appears on the website. To read the actual paper, use the E-Paper, which is an exact replica of the day's newspaper, including ads, comics, etc. You can also get a much better feel for the paper because the layout, story placement, etc are all identical to the print version. When the Globe finally pushed me to discontinue daily delivery I went with Sunday delivery and free E-Paper access. At least it's easy to read on the train every day.
Call in to cancel
I got the email that our Sunday only subscription was going up to $5 a week. There's not enough coupons to make that worth it so we decided to cancel. The only option on the website was to "upgrade" to more issues per week so I gave up and called.
And lo and behold, they offered a rate (for the usual 12 weeks) that's less than I'm paying now and about half the proposed increase. Advertising rates are based on circulation numbers so you can bet they'd rather discount some subs than have a drop in their numbers.
Does Mike Barnacle still
write his crappola for them? I haven't read the globe in years and don't ever intend to in the future.
Bye Bye Boston Globe...
Just was told my ePaper subscription has gone from $99.99 a year to $311 a year (only if I pre-pay...otherwise, $27.72 a month for yearly sum of $332.64!) In addition, woman I spoke to was not only difficult to understand, but was very rude when I questioned her about this increase. I am 65 and retired and cannot afford such an increase! The Globe will go under soon by dealing with longtime loyal customers this way. I guess John Henry needs more $$$ to pay for Rick Porcello, Hanley Ramirez, etc, as well as his Liverpool soccer team! I'm done with The Globe and the Red Sox...go back to wear you came from John Henry! You really are putting the screws to us seniors!