Pinch Sulzberger Demands More Heads in Buyouts

5 year trend of New York Times stock price vs. the S&P 500 Index

The Boston Globe is offering employee buyouts again, and seeking a reduction in force of 60. The Worcester Telegram & Gazette’s quota of heads is 20 while the flagship New York Times will reduce 100 positions.

Certainly the newspaper’s major problem is the loss of its near monopoly on local advertising revenue, but the chronic drop in circulation is a corollary. Yet the Times finds itself disrespected by a significant segment of its available market for subscribers. Rasmussen Reports this week (emphasis mine):

Just 24% of American voters have a favorable opinion of the New York Times. Forty-four percent (44%) have an unfavorable opinion and 31% are not sure. The paper’s ratings are much like a candidate’s and divide sharply along partisan and ideological lines.

By a 50% to 18% margin, liberal voters have a favorable opinion of the paper. By a 69% to 9%, conservative voters offer an unfavorable view. The newspaper earns favorable reviews from 44% of Democrats, 9% of Republicans, and 17% of those not affiliated…

I suspect opinions of the Globe are similar. John Hinderaker of Power Line blog comments:

There is a lesson here: if a newspaper devotes its resources and its inherited goodwill with the public over a period of decades to advance the interests of one of our political parties, sooner or later people will notice.

Indeed.

Granted competition from the Internet is their #1 threat, and also granted that Republicans are minorities in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. But why should struggling newspapers continue to antagonize a substantial segment of potential subscribers?

Because Pinch Sulzberger is happy to do so, I’d surmise.

That is why the Globe has seen its last circulation revenue from this household.

Audience Shaping

The story about the Comcast-paid seat-warmers at the recent FCC hearing was broken by the Save the Internet blog on Tuesday, as far as I can tell. Check it out. They really have the scoop.

The Herald had the story yesterday. Nothing yet on this story from The Pulse of Boston (as the Globe calls itself).

What is fascinating about this is how poorly this will action reflect on Comcast in the corporate world and the world of PR, though the same behavior is a common practice among politicians with close friends in organized labor, as the recent Deval Patrick episode shows.

A Comcastic Hearing

Comcast packed this week’s FCC hearing on Comcast network management practices with Comcast employees, and held the seats with paid seat-warmers so that the Comcast employees wouldn’t have to sit there all morning.

It seems to me that Comcast has borrowed a sheet from Deval Patrick’s casino playbook.

Technology Review reports:

Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice confirmed to The Associated Press that the company hired people to fill seats after the hearing room doors opened at 7 a.m. and before the 11 a.m. start. As Comcast employees arrived, they replaced the hired seat-warmers. Fitzmaurice declined to say who or how many were hired, how the company found them, or how much they were paid.

The company said it ''informed our local employees about the hearing and invited them to attend. Some employees did attend, along with many members of the general public.''

The words “invited them to attend” are deliciously euphemistic, considering that Comcast feeds their children

Discomfort = Disorder

Massachusetts convicted murderer Michelle Kosilek (formerly known as Robert), who is suing the Commonwealth for a state-funded sex-change operation claims that she has not been allowed to have court-approved hair-removal treatment or access to a specialist to discuss her testosterone levels while her case is being ejudicated.

The Globe’s story repeats what to the unenlightened seems a faux-pas by the Massachusetts Corrections Department:

lawyers for prison officials said Kosilek has continued to receive adequate treatment for gender-identity disorder.

“Gender identity disorder”? What possible gender identity is today allowed to be classified as a disorder? None I can think of offhand (being personally out-of-date in such matters), but Wikipedia explains:

The core symptom of gender identity disorders is gender dysphoria, literally being uncomfortable with one's assigned gender.

So, the shrinks explain to us, our gender identity is only a problem if it makes us uncomfortable.

To what degree?

MassBay President Berotte Joseph: "Great job, Queenie!"

Carole Berotte Joseph, president of MassBay Community College (unaffectionately known on campus as “the Queen from Duchess County”) has made the news in the Boston Globe once again today.

Joseph spent $90,000 of school funds on her own presidential inauguration. Last July the MBCC nursing program was sanctioned for understaffing. In November the MBCC faculty passed a vote of no confidence in Joseph, accusing her of creating “institutional chaos”. Today the Globe reveals that MBCC spent between $452,000 and $614,000 for consultants during the past fiscal year. The school’s total annual budget was $37M. The largest consulting engagement reported by the Globe was for a local branding consultant, Forge Worldwide.

The graph above shows per-student spending at various community colleges as reported in the Globe’s article, using the $614,000 figure for MassBay, which the Globe cited.

Ms. Joseph’s regal response is that “Criticisms about spending in the public relations and marketing areas are shortsighted.” The Globe reports:

information technology services, which had been completely outsourced, are now done in-house.

That’s bucking a global trend! If the school cannot attract and maintain enough nursing faculty to avoid censure, how well can it attract and maintain IT professionals and programs? We shall see, as Ms. Joseph continues to fly into the ground while the MBCC Board of Trustees enables her.

Of course if Joseph was a white male rather than a Haitian female, she would likely be long gone by now. But because only racism could motivate criticism of double-minorities in power who abuse their office and institutions, she remains in place.

“Doing a great job, Queenie!”, as George W. Bush might say.

The Genteel Victorian Matron

Two people were shot and wounded and a policeman was injured early Monday morning inside the Aria Boston nightclub during a melee that involved dozens of patrons. The gunman, one Damion Jamaal-Anthony Haley, was arrested at the scene and already had 6 outstanding warrants.

Boston Herald readers are told that the evening’s event was sponsored by “Girls Gone Wild” (no, I’m not linking). The Globe’s story by reporter Brian R. Ballou is yet another example of Globe journalism as “the genteel Victorian matron discreetly draping chintz over the provocative piano legs of the story” (to quote Mark Steyn ). The Globe editors apparently decided that the type of event was irrelevant to the outbreak of violence and do not report on its sponsorship.

James Carroll: "national security is bogus"

James Carroll pens an astoundingly obtuse Boston Globe column today, even by Globe standards (“The ghost story”). But Carroll does articulate his amazing assumptions about our nation’s defense. He declares that the concept of national security is “bogus” is that our military expenditures are a hopeless attempt to “escape from the existential dread that comes with life”.

Somehow, I still believe our investment in a common defense is an attempt to reduce (not eliminate) the risk posed to the United States by nations and parties that wish us ill. Carroll clearly disagrees. He insists on the concept of “security” being a binary variable, rather than a matter of degree.

OK, Democrats (including Barack and Hillary), it’s time to give your own answer. Do you agree with the James Carroll, or not?

Excerpt:

In this era, humans have been cut loose from ancient moorings of meaning and purpose. The context within which this condition is most manifest in the United States is the debate - or, more precisely, the lack thereof - over what is called "national security." The phrase is potent because it promises something that is impossible, since the human condition is by definition insecure. When candidates vie with one another over who is most qualified to be "commander in chief," and when they unanimously promise to strengthen military readiness, they together reinforce the dominant American myth - that an extravagant social investment of treasure and talent in armed power of the group offers members of the group escape from the existential dread that comes with life on a dangerous planet. That such investment only makes the planet more dangerous matters little, since the feeling of security, rather than actual security, is the goal of the entire project…

When that consensus assumes, for example, that World War II was "good," or that the United States arms build-up "won" the Cold War, it protects the militarized economy, the status of the military-industrial elite, the iron lock of incumbents on office. Any reinterpretation of this salvation history, it is feared, would undermine the economy, disempower the elite, unsettle politics - and deprive the citizenry of meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. Voters may want change, but not change at this level. Yet "national security" is bogus - part ghost story with which the nation scares itself at bedtime, part nightly prayer with which it then goes to sleep.

Does this paper need Mark Steyn or what?

No columnist would add more to the worse than mediocre Boston Globe Op Ed page than New Hampshire’s Mark Steyn. Is that why he is certain never to appear there? Such is the Globe’s complete lack of business sense. At NRO Mr. Steyn skewers both the Clintons with the same needle:

Bill Clinton understood a crude rule of show business — that, if you behave like a star, there are plenty of people who’ll treat you like one. The apotheosis of this theory was his interminable ambulatory entrance down mile after mile of corridor at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, when Slick Willie finally out-Elvised Elvis…And, worst of all for Bill and Hill, the Dems found a new star — their first in 16 years. Look at it from Hillary’s point of view: She’d expected to run against the likes of Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd — the usual mediocrities and misfits. Then Barack Obama came along, and did what the Clintons did in 1992 — saw his opportunity and seized it. All of a sudden, she’s the Bill Richardson — worthy but dull, earthbound, and joyless, lead weights round her ankles.

She has a melancholy dignity in decline. She knows she would make the better president, but every time she tries to explain why it sounds prosaic and unromantic. Bill gave the party an appetite for slick lounge acts, and this time round Barack’s the guy delivering it in buckets of gaseous uplift. Can Barbra Streisand and the Supergays get Hillary airborne again? I doubt it. Go back to that Staples Center entrance in 2000, and try to imagine Hill walking that walk. How far would she get before the applause died away and she’d be padding that endless corridor to no audible accompaniment but the clack of her heels?

Spreading Manure

Scott Lehigh unconsciously provides a superb example of media bias in his Op Ed column today:

Now, the view here is that the Republican Party's steady rightward evolution and recent political tactics are responsible for a disproportionate share of the angry divide between the parties. That said, some blame also lies on the other side, where various left-wing advocacy groups and bloggers associated with the Democrats encourage a raucous partisanship.

So while Democrat partisans may share some of the blame for our political bickering, “a disproportionate share” of partisan behavior is caused by conservatives. Simply laughable, though it represents the conventional world view in media circles.

Lehigh is blaming Newt Gingrich for this development. Gingrich’s revolution replaced conservative sounding Democrats (sounding conservative, though not voting that way) with Republicans. He not only moved the Republican party to the right, he moved the Democratic House caucus to the left. This created what the press repeatedly calls “polarization” but which could as accurately be called “ideological alignment” of the political parties. Gingrich’s revolution unwound the Democrat coalition in congress that had lasted since FDR’s era.

The title of Lehigh’s column “Getting beyond partisanship” gives the hint that Lehigh is spreading horse manure. Elections are about deciding, more than they are about uniting.

Mostly Beans

Joan Vennochi on Deval Patrick:

Expectations soared when Patrick took office as the state's first black governor. His rookie mistakes were magnified by a media that turned harsh after mostly gentle coverage of his campaign.

Mostly gentle indeed, just as pork and beans is mostly beans.

Solutions for America, or Signs of Desperation?

In today’s marketing, to use the term “solutions” is the surest way to get gonged off the stage. This tired term causes cringing among all but the thoroughly brain-injured. “Solutions” occupies the coveted center space on all of today’s Buzzword Bingo boards.

How desperate must the Clinton campaign be, then, for its co-candidate to appear behind this lamest of buzzwords in their most recent attempt to differentiate their candidacy from Barack Obama?

Pretty damn desperate, I would say.

Uncivil

From today’s Boston Globe lead story:

When it became apparent that Clinton was not going to make the customary acknowledgment of Obama's victory in her speech, Obama began his own address before she finished, in effect grabbing the national television spotlight from her and cutting her off midstride. Those breaks from the usual campaign etiquette reflected the tension between the two camps in recent days.

How can there be a lack of civility without any Republicans and their "attack machine”?

Hillary Clinton as Feminist Icon

The Boston Globe paints Hillary Clinton as a feminist icon today in a front page article by Susan Milligan (“Clinton's struggle vexes feminists”). The article begins with this gag reflex test:

As Hillary Clinton struggles to regain her momentum in the presidential race, frustrated feminists are looking at what they see as the ultimate glass ceiling: A female candidate with a hyper-substantive career is now threatened with losing the nomination to a man whose charismatic style and powerful rhetoric are trumping her decades of experience.

Nowhere in the article is there any mention of the awkward point that during Hillary’s “decades of experience” her access to power derived exclusively from her husband until 2001 (Hillary won the US Senate nomination in 2000 after her husband-patron persuaded an elected woman candidate, NY Congresswoman Nita Lowey, to 'voluntarily' step aside and give up a nomination Lowey had earned through a self-made career in politics and a party primary election).

Eva Peron is this kind of feminist icon, but Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and Angela Merkel are not. Some glass ceiling. Some feminist icon! The story has one delicious quote concerning Obama:

“If he were female, with his credentials, age, and track record, I don't think he'd be anywhere near the presidency of the United States,".

And if Hillary was merely a 2^nd term US Senator would she be a serious candidate? Apparently the Globe does not ask such impertinent questions to certified feminist spokeswomen.

Ha!

Good Intentions Paving Company

Talk about the inevitability of hope over experience, yesterday’s Globe had a sad story about how decades of “unintended consequences” of party reforms have left the Democratic party nomination process with the deadlock it now faces.

The very next day the Globe’s Editorial cloister cheerfully endorses shunting the Constitution via the National Popular Vote initiative, citing it as “One clever way to fix this problem”. The problem being the constitution’s electoral college and the tradition of all a state’s electors voting for the candidate who wins the state’s election.

No problem is perceived as intractable by the meddlesome, even when "unintended consequences "appear.

Calibrating the Clinton Character

Floyd Boring has died. He was a young US Secret Service agent who on November 1, 1950 fought off Puerto Rican nationalist assassins in a gunfight in front of Washington’s Blair House and saved the life of US President Harry Truman.

In later years other Puerto Rican terrorists were treated to cheap federal forgiveness by one of Truman's successors, who was eager to see his wife elected as a US Senator from New York.

"A Lucky String of Contests"

In its so-called news analysis today on the presidential primaries (“Race tests morale, traditional wisdom”), the Boston Globe’s Peter Canellos writes this classic “but paragraph” (emphasis mine):

But the question on the minds of many analysts yesterday was whether the traditional wisdom would hold in a race as untraditional as this one. Some debated whether Obama's victories were a sign of burgeoning support for him - a political star being born - or rather a lucky string of contests on very favorable terms: states with either caucus systems, which he dominates, or very large portions of black voters, who have rallied to his side in breathtaking numbers.

This analysis of Obama’s “luck” is not attributed specifically to any person by Canellos, nor is it articulated by any of the persons quoted in his article.

Won’t the Clinton people speak on the record?

Why doesn’t the Globe require them to be named, rather than merely printing without attribution what are clearly talking points of the Clinton campaign and calling it an “analysis”?

It Just Keeps on Springing

Apparently today the Boston Globe Op Ed worry beads have been passed from Joan Vennochi to Peter Canellos, who notes the similar market pitches of candidates Deval Patrick and Barack Obama, and how Massachusetts voters are now showing symptoms of buyer’s remorse over their outsider Governor to the extent that Obama lost the Massachusetts Democratic primary. Then Canellos ascends to this lofty observation:

But the usual ups and downs can be devastating to someone who has staked everything on bringing about change. Whether posited by a candidate for governor or for president, the politics of hope invites disappointment, simply because hope means something different to every person.

Frost wrote a far more eloquent observation (of course):

In A Glass of Cider
It seemed I was a mite of sediment
That waited for the bottom to ferment
So I could catch a bubble in ascent.
I rode up on one till the bubble burst,
And when that left me to sink back reversed
I was no worse off than I was at first.
I’d catch another bubble if I waited.
The thing was to get now and then elated.

-Robert Frost, In the Clearing, 1962

And Frost's much more celebrated Riders also concerns on the inevitability of hope.

Vennochi Keeps on Fretting

I love reading when Joan Vennochi is fretful. Sunday she frets that Obama is getting far too easy a ride from the media:

Some big media names are getting goosebumps thinking about the next Camelot. They're not shy about yearning to turn the clock back to JFK and the 1960s, rather than to the Clintons and the 1990s…He has money, momentum, and plenty of media support.…if a candidate's uplifting language makes media eyes mist up, how many tough questions will ever pass those lips?

No worries Joan, these are professional journalists! Their overwhelming political liberalism is not reflected (they assure us) in their reporting.

Right.

And those with even medium-long memories will recall 16 years ago, a time when the object of similar widespread media affection and the bearer of a new Camelot was the now-scorned husband of Hillary Clinton.

He didn’t disappoint, did he?

A Minor Correction

Joan Vennochi:

Romney won every state he lived in - Michigan, Utah, and Massachusetts. In the Bay State, he defied the local media and former governors Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift to win the primary.

A minor correction, Joan.

It wasn’t Mitt who was being defiant of the media. It was the voters.

Clinton and Clinton LLP, Counselors at (or slightly above) Law

Today’s Boston Globe matter-of-factly reports the Clinton’s new $5M loan to their own campaign. However a reader of Andrew Sullivan notes one distinction:

Whatever you think about candidates' self-funding, this has always been done with funds generated in a business career (Romney), or through marriage/inheritance. The Clintons' case is so different -- their wealth is derived in large part from those seeking access and proximity to power, and they know that whatever the outcome of this race, she will still be a Senator and he will still be an ex-President, so the sale can go on.

Yes, but it’s all done for the children.

Actually the reader understates the case. The Clinton wealth is not derived “in large part” from this value proposition, but entirely from it. The Globe article reports:

Clinton confirmed the loan yesterday, calling it a "wise investment"…

No doubt the Clintons feed that same line to donors as well as to reporters.

BTW how can such odious financing go on so shortly after we have enacted so much campaign finance reform? We must need more reform!

YouTube as Car Radio

Here is a photo of the cab I rode in today. It was a big black GMC Denali piloted by a driver from Tashkent who drove it around Orlando with a MacBook mounted next to the wheel and tuned to YouTube, playing music videos from Russia.

What a country.

Certainly that is one use for mobile broadband service that market forecasters couldn't possibly have envisioned.

Another Reason It Seems Like 1968 All Over Again

One personal recollection from 1968 is the palpable disappointment of many voters in both parties with their eventual nominees (Nixon, Humphrey) compared with the excitement that was generated by the candidates who lost (or were assassinated). The losers were Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, Gene McCarthy, and Robert Kennedy.

The prospect of a McCain vs. Clinton* election in 2008 brings similar feelings of disappointment, not only because George Romney’s son is among those who are now losing.

* buy one get two.

Great Moments in Campaign Photography

I delighted in this photo, appearing on today's Boston Globe front page. John McCain is standing on the stage in Fanueil Hall, speaking in front of the huge painting there. The reflection of the camera's flash on the painting forms an ersatz halo over the candidate, while his pose evokes that of the figure above him in the painting, Daniel Webster.

Great Moments in Headline Writing

"Today's weather may bring sun, clouds"

The pith of this inept front page headline is found in the subhead -- "Parties' rules, scenarios differ". The headline does not do justice to the article by Peter Canellos which notes that the Republican rules drive their campaign toward a single victor while the Democrat's rules can leave them deadlocked in a man-to-woman race.

The prospect of a long and increasingly bitter battle for the Democratic nomination is reminiscent of 1968, an election Republicans barely won. Both McCain and Romney are far stronger Republican candidates than Nixon was.

Despite what Clinton operatives may whisper, no outcome is inevitable.

What it takes to make a difference

“…he was a great force for good in their lives. A great and good human being only needs to walk the earth to be a help to mankind”

-- Roy Cowden
Professor of English
University of Michigan
writing of Robert Frost

Saturday’s Boston Globe contains a wonderful story about a mentally handicapped young man named Anthony Morella, who died suddenly this week in Boston’s North End. Despite his severe limitations, Anthony had become a fixture in his neighborhood and part of the glue that held his community together. Judging from the sadness of those he left behind, Anthony was a help to mankind in his corner of it.

I have seen with my own eyes how much such a person, though limited, can be a force for good in the lives of many people. Well done, Anthony.

Dysfunctional Government in Inaction

It’s bad enough that in Canton south of Boston Interstate 95 goes through a sharp 25-mile-per-hour curve as it snakes through an enlarged exit ramp meant for the never-built Southwest Expressway some 40 years ago. But our Massachusetts highway department is so slow fixing potholes that this morning one of the 2 lanes on this I-95 choke point was blocked by a State Police car so that drivers would not roll over a huge pothole that had expanded overnight (though that pothole had been a fair-sized hazard for about a week already).

Why repair something until it is broken enough to bollix up morning rush hour traffic?

News From Investor Relations

The New York Times Corporation reported quarterly and annual results yesterday.

For the full year 2007, the New York Times Corporation reported a 7.1% decrease in advertising revenue at its New England Media Group, with December 2007 being the worst month by comparison with 2006.

The Times Corporation issued a separate release that reported December revenues (emphasis mine):

Advertising revenues for the New England Media Group decreased 31.4%, and excluding the additional week, decreased 17.7%. National advertising revenues decreased due to weakness in telecommunications, pharmaceutical/packaged goods, technology and travel advertising. Retail advertising revenues decreased primarily due to weakness in the jewelry/watches, department store, records/books and computer/office supplies categories. Classified advertising revenues decreased because of softness in real estate and help-wanted advertising.

Certainly the “weakness” described above refers to the inclination to buy newspaper advertising more than weakness in those businesses. Especially since the number of residential properties on the market in New England was certainly higher during 2007 than 2006. The advertising spend was simply flowing to other channels.

"The Campaign"

Here is the beginning of the front page campaign story in today’s Boston Globe (emphasis mine):

WASHINGTON - After watching his wife lose the South Carolina primary by a 2-to-1 ratio to Senator Barack Obama last weekend, former President Bill Clinton took the campaign to an improbable location: Illinois, where Obama enjoys home-state advantage and is leading Hillary Clinton by double digits in polls.

The Clinton campaign doesn't actually hope to win Illinois, where a trove of 153 delegates is at stake. But Bill Clinton's trip there on Wednesday demonstrated how the two remaining Democratic candidates are quickly revising their campaign strategies to focus on racking up delegates, not wins.

The story calls it “the campaign”, but whose campaign?

Joe Klein, author of Primary Colors, writes in Time Magazine:

…at a moment of crisis in Hillary Clinton's campaign, Bill Clinton was suddenly back and all over the news. His reappearance made her seem weak, unable to defend herself. It raised the most fundamental question about her candidacy: If she is elected, who exactly will be President? What happens when there is a real crisis? My guess is, she'd be able to handle almost anything ... except him. I could easily see him jumping the shark, sending mixed messages when a single voice of authority is crucial—especially if the crisis involves one of his specialties, like the Middle East.

Yes, but there’s nothing that isn’t one of Bill Clinton’s specialties, except self-control.

Klein goes on:

And if she wins the nomination, you can bet the co-presidency question will be front and center in the general election. It is, therefore, vital that she address it now.

She can “address it now” all she wants, but who is going to believe her? Who could possibly believe that Bill Clinton will restrain himself if he returns to the White House for 4 more years? Is anyone, whether they support Hillary’s candidacy or not, gullible enough to believe that? I don't think so.

Like it or not, Clinton supporters are supporting not merely her candidacy but also his restoration, and the risks associated with his co-presidency. In 1993 people could claim to be surprised by Hillary’s central role in the Clinton first term. No one is entitled to be surprised again by Bill’s huge role in 2009, should Hillary win.