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Globe to reduce newsroom head count in bid to become modestly profitable
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Shirley?
Will she be safe? I'm sure she's dying to make her way out to LA.
Surely Shirley shouldn't see
Surely Shirley shouldn't see stars surrounding shrinkage at the Globe!
Full names, please
It's Shirley Leung, and she's (at best) out of touch for a columnist, but that doesn't mean the Internet is on a first-name basis with her.
Sure thing, anon
Sorry, "anon (not verified)".
We call Shaughnessy "CHB". We call Howie Carr "Howie". Mike Barnicle is "Barnicle". If we call Shirley "Shirley", so be it. She's a public figure. If we want to be on a first-name basis with her, that's our druthers not yours nor hers.
Surely, you can't be serious!
Surely, you can't be serious!
(No subject)
Who is let go could tell you something
The Globe could use layoffs as an excuse to get rid of some of the worst staff (like Shirley Leung appears to be). That would be a good sign.
Or the Globe could lay off the wrong people. That would be a bad sign. And that's bad for productivity and retention of the remaining good people.
Buyouts first
It's in the memo. They're only going to go to layoffs if not enough people sign up for a buyout.
Based on McGrory's reaction to the pom-pom incident, I don't think Leung has anything to worry about.
Modest proposal
Why not have the Boston Chamber of Commerce pay for their sock puppet? She can still a 'brave' columnist as championed by McGrory but the Globe gets their costs covered. Win/win (not including the readers.
That's bad news
Buyouts can be a time to get rid of people who deserve to be fired.
Indicate to individuals that their performance is unacceptable, send the buyout offers to everyone, and hopefully the problem is solved.
But if an editor is bizarrely protective of one of the worst journalists, I don't know what to do with that.
Jacoby?
Jacoby?
Wait, what?
The Globe has copy editors???
Why yes -- illiterate 20
Why yes -- illiterate 20-something interns who can barely spell, use proper grammar or figure out if Brighton is a part of Boston or not!
We're so damn smart
The Globe could show Shank, Shirley and Jacoby the door and save a ton of money right there; why isn't this occurring to them?
Oh, right, because it's 2015 and viral Internet hits > reputation as one of America's top newspapers
Leaving aside whether CHB
Leaving aside whether CHB drives Web traffic or is good for their reputation or not-- it's possible, I guess-- I highly doubt that either Shirl and Twofer do much of anything either.
Really?
"We have set the agenda with our even-handed yet penetrating coverage of the Olympics bid"
Writing has taken a hit.
Text was the work horse forever with an image as an enhancement.
But now it is being displaced by a kind of content synthesia where video, still pics, links, sound clips and text work in tandem to make far more robust coverage of something than sentences alone.
I call it content craft and much turns on finding nice ratios of the elements.
Text will always reign for things like analysis, conversation and abstractions that don't work with video, but a lot of the heavy lifting it once did for description is over.
I have an eye for it and people are finding interesting approaches. But it will hasten the value decline for those whose only tool is text.
Except that their videos are almost always
poorly produced and even at best add extremely little to the content of a story.
It's like they got sold a vision of how digital gadgets would make print journalists more effective, but have no idea about what to actually do with them.
That happens.
Writing is a very different skill set from clip making. Material doesn't have to be broadcast grade but it has to be coherent.
I usually ignore both city dailies and Boston.com due to the mediocrity in general. I'm ever so grateful that Adam sorts through it with this skilled curated aggregation model he has.
The Glob has copy-editors? It
The Glob has copy-editors? It's been a long, long time since I read an (online) Glob article that didn't have at least one glaring typo in it.