Posted on 06/24/2008 1:53:09 PM PDT by abb
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2008/06/24/herald_announces_layoffs/
Boston Herald announces layoffs
By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff | June 24, 2008
The Boston Herald plans to lay off 130 to 160 employees this summer and outsource its printing to presses in Chicopee and Norwood.
Herald president and publisher Patrick J. Purcell announced the decision after meeting today with union leaders. The move is subject to a 90-day negotiation period; Purcell said he wants to devote three months to negotiating severance settlements with affected employees and hopes to move production off-site by the end of September. He also said the Herald had considered other options, including purchasing a new printing press or reconfiguing the existing press, which is 50 years old.
A Dow Jones Co. plant in Chicopee will print the paper every day except Friday, when a Norwood press owned by Boston Offset will produce it.
Characterizing this morning’s union meetings as “somber,” Purcell noted that rumors of the outsourcing arrangement had been in circulation for a year or so. The Boston Globe confirmed on Friday that it had met with Purcell but ultimately decided not to print the Herald.
snip
http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/26624/open_systems_closed_systems_and_trauma_in_the_press
Open Systems, Closed Systems and Trauma in the Press
By Jay Rosen, 06/23/2008 - 7:22pm
We’re thrilled to have Jay offer his thoughts inspired by this afternoon’s PdF ‘08 panel on “The Rise of Semi-pro Journalism.”
We’re early in the rise of of semi-pro journalism but we’re well into the decline and of an old way of life within the tribe of professional journalists. I call them a tribe because they share a culture and a sense of destiny, and because they think they own the press— that is theirs somehow because they dominate the practice.
The First Amendment says to all Americans: you have a right to publish what you know, what you think. That right used to be abstractly held. Now it is concretely held because the power to publish has been distributed. Projects that cause people to exercise their right to a free press strengthen the press, whether or not these projects strengthen the professional journalist’s “hold” on the press.
The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land they were living on—also called their business model—no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to live on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on a new ground, or as we sometimes call it, a new platform.
Migration, which is easily sentimentalized by Americans, is a community trauma. Pulling up stakes and leaving a familiar place is hard. Within the news tribe some people don’t want to go. These are the newsroom curmudgeons. Others are in denial still, or they are quietly drifting away from journalism, or they are being shed as the tribe contracts and its economy convulses.
And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life, and which parts were well adapted to the old world but may be unnecessary or a handicap in the new. They have to ask if what they know is portable. What life will be like across the digital sea is of course an unknown to the migrant. This creates an immediate crisis for the elders of the tribe, who have always known how to live.
That’s hard enough. But even more difficult—more challenging to the political wisdom of the tribe—is that on the terrain where the press has to be re-built, there are people already there, like Jane Hamsher and Chuck Defeo and Arianna Huffington and Glenn Reynolds. And they’re busy. Building a kind of alternative civilization to professionalized news and commentary, which nonetheless makes use of the old press and its industry.
One of the most perplexing questions journalists today face is what to make of these determined settlers and their ways, how to stand toward them.
Across the digital divide the conditions for doing journalism are actually different. I’ll give you the highlights. Communication is two way, and many-to-many. Horizontal sharing is as important as top down messaging. Readers have become writers and the people formerly know as the audience are flourishing as content producers, expert sharers and self-guided consumers.
Conditions for doing journalism on the new continent are different! This is something the news tribe did not understand went it first went online around 1996. It saw the Web as a good way to re-purpose its content from the old platform; and while the Web can do that, the idea of re-purposing news content had a huge intellectual cost. It did not help the tribe understand the ground on which it had to rebuild. It permitted the press to delay the date of migration.
Today, the press is shared territory. It has pro and amateur zones. This is appropriate because press freedom is shared territory. It belongs equally to the amateur and the pro. Online the two zones connect, and flow together. (Go to Memeorandum to see how.) It still works vertically: press to public. It also works horizontally: peer to peer. Part of it is a closed system—and closed systems are good at enforcing editorial controls—the other part is an open system.
Open systems are good at participation, community formation, and locating intelligence anywhere in the network. They are good at sharing, and getting good at surfacing the good stuff. The two editorial systems don’t work the same way. One does not replace the other. They are not enemies, either. We need to understand a lot better how they can work together.
And that is where the idea of pro-am journalism comes from. I think the hybrid forms will be the strongest—openness with some controls, amateurs with some pros—but that means we have to figure out how these hybrid forms work. Arianna Huffington, Amanda Michel, Mayhill Fowler, Marc Cooper and myself, along with 3,000 signed-up members are in the midst of one attempt, OfftheBus. During discussion I will be glad to share what we learned so far.
Arianna and I wanted to join forces for the election, but we didn’t have a clear idea for how to do that until we had the name, OffTheBus. We felt the on-the-bus press had failed to innovate and wasn’t going to open itself very far. We wanted to extend the powers of the campaign press to people outside the professional club, without credentials but with convictions and a participant’s pride in politics. What Huffington Post did to column writing by signing up thousands of bloggers we wanted to do to campaign journalism by signing up thousands of helpers.
Our idea: you can report on politics from wherever you are within it. You do not have to be located in the “press” zone to be part of the campaign press. We would filter their best stuff to the front page. From there we could inject it into the national conversation via Huff Post. We would try a distributed reporting model for campaign coverage. Toward the horse race narrative, we would “begin anew,” as Zephyr Teachout said first thing today, something “off” the usual path. As Clay Shirky told us this morning: “Group action just got easier.” We wanted to put that insight into practice, for somewhere in there is a new press.
Finally, I think it’s time we expanded the press, don’t you? This means we have to expand our ideas about it, as well.
ping
More and more of the editor class of mediot are leaving their sinking and burning ships.
“None of that makes this easier, now that the announcement is upon me. What seemed intellectually rational a few weeks ago now is filled with emotion for me”
A nice payout will ease the pain. Maybe the laid off workers will toss a few bucks into a hat for a going away gift. (But I really doubt it.)
I doesn’t matter.
The “Urinal-Constipation” will be the same old race-baiting rag that it has always been...
...no matter who the editor is.
When Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer for her reactionary, left-wing rhetoric, I knew the paper was past the point of no return.
Translation: "I have more socialist lies to publish, but I had better get to it before the MSM is completely and utterly discredited!"
Dropping like flies...
Who wants to bet that management told this guy who sends his shirts out to have them stuffed, that they couldn't afford him any more, and he should hit the bricks? Ya think?
Congressman Billybob
You're known for "good news", abb. Thanks.
A finely drawn assessment.
All frosting, no cake.
More room for tuckers broom in the parking garage.
Hey, AJ-Constipation: Your people gloat over helping do in the Bush Administration and business interests—reap what you sow in honor, not in pity. If you are going to be losers, at least take it with your twisted sense of pride.
You are otherwise losers, twice-over.
Rush has been mentioning an article for the Urinal for the past two days. Is this the reason?
Note to the editors of the Urinal - NO MORE STORIES ABOUT RAP MUSICIANS!
Wasn’t this jamoke a classmate of How-weird Dean?
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