The Boston Globe Reimagines Its Future to Forge a Sustainable Future

Last week Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory sent staff an internal memo saying the news organization needed to reinvent itself to stop “irreversible revenue

Last week Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory sent staff an internal memo saying the news organization needed to reinvent itself to stop “irreversible revenue declines,” reports Poynter. Journalism professor Dan Kennedy reproduced the memo on his Media Nation website. We’ve included excerpts from the memo, but you can read the full memo here.

The Boston Globe Reimagines Its Future to Forge a Sustainable Future

Courtesy of The Boston Globe

“There’s far too much good that goes on at this organization on a moment-by-moment basis to allow ourselves to be consumed by what’s wrong with the industry. But we can’t ignore hard realities, either, or simply wish them away,” McGrory said.

“My own strong preference is to somehow shed the annual reduction exercise that seems increasingly inevitable here and everywhere. So I’ve asked senior editors to think about how we, at the very least, might get ahead of the declines, and in the best case, work to slow or even halt them,” he added. “To help shape the discussion, consider this question: If a wealthy individual was to give us funding to launch a news organization designed to take on The Boston Globe, what would it look like?”

McGrory went on to say the newspaper needs to rethink everything it does including the technology it uses, how staff is trained, the print format they use, how beats are structured, how work flow can be improved, the seven-day-a-week publication schedule and more.

“Easy answers, as you well know, are elusive,” said McGrory. “The good news is that we’ve got an absurdly smart, dedicated collection of journalists, many of the best in the nation, that has embraced profound and meaningful change over the years, always while maintaining our values. We’ve built two of the most successful websites in the industry, first boston.com, and now bostonglobe.com. The latter site is not only thriving, but growing rapidly, up more than 15 percent in uniques and page views this year over last, and leading the league in digital-only subscribers-the most important metric. We successfully overhauled key parts of the site last year. We’re about to launch a major sports redesign this spring, all while we confidently spread our wings with a broader array of stories and topics geared first to our web audience.”

McGrory added other highlights and asked his staff if it was possible “to build something bold rather than shrink what we have?” To help him answer that question and others, McGrory has hired Tom Rosenstiel and Jeff Sonderman of the American Press Institute and Mary Kaiser, the former editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal to advise him on such issues.

“The key is to create a process that involves as many people as possible, at all levels, tapping into the wealth of creativity that is this newsroom’s trademark,” McGrory said.

Most recently, the Boston Globe has focused its efforts on STAT, a new health and life sciences news site launched in 2015. It also reluctantly released Crux, a Catholic news outlet launched in 2014, because it wasn’t financially viable. Crux has since been taken over by the Knights of Columbus.

Insider Take:

The Boston Globe isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last, news organization finding the need to reimagine its future by examining its current processes, practices and prospects. It is only the most recent. Last year we wrote about McClatchy’s attempts at reinventing itself as a digital-first media company. The New York Times, Guardian and Dallas Morning News are among others that have gone through staffing changes, business model shifts and overhauls to find a way to remain sustainable long-term.

Even when a news organization like The Globe experiences success, it finds that the decline in print advertising revenue which sustained it for so long is no longer adequate. At the same time, while digital readership grows, digital revenue is not yet enough to compensate for print losses. Aside from reducing expenses, including cutting valuable staff, incremental change does not have a big enough, or immediate enough, impact to be sufficient. Drastic reinventions are painful but necessary.

Based in Boston ourselves, we are big fans of The Boston Globe (how about those Red Sox?), and we hope it has the resources and support it needs to facilitate long-term success. If The Boston Globe figures out its own magic formula, it could serve as an example to other news organization facing similar challenges.

 

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