Mayer
replacing Ainsley as Boston Globe publisher
P.
Steven Ainsley, publisher of The Boston Globe and head of the New
England Media Group, owned by The New York Times Co. and including
the Globe, its Web site, boston.com, and the Telegram & Gazette
of Worcester , Mass., has announced his retirement, effective Jan.
1.
Christopher Mayer,
the Globe’s senior vice president for circulation and operations,
will replace Ainsley.
Ainsley spent 27 years with the Times Co., including as publisher
of The Santa-Barbara (Calif.) News-Press, beginning in 1993; of The
Times Daily of Florence, Ala., from 1987 to 1993; of The Sebring (Fla.)
News and The Avon Park Sun, now the News-Sun, of Sebring, from 1986
to 1987; and of the York County Coast Star of Kennebunk, Maine, from
1982 to 1986. Ainsley also was senior vice president and president
and chief operating officer of the Times’ Regional Newspaper
Group. He has been publisher of the Globe since 2006.
Mayer
joined the Globe in 1984 and has been the paper’s chief information
officer and vice president of Community Newsdealers, the paper’s
home-delivery subsidiary.
“(Ainsley) has been an exceptional representative for the Globe
and for the company,” Janet L. Robinson, president and chief executive
officer of the Times Co., said. “He will be greatly missed.”
During Ainsley’s
time as publisher of the Globe, it has undergone a substantial contraction
of its circulation and a steep decline in advertising revenue. Its
financial setbacks have resulted in the loss of scores of jobs and
the closing of the Globe’s printing plant in Billerica, Mass.
Just this year, the Globe had to wring $20 million in concessions
from its labor unions to stem what it said was a projected loss of
$85 million. Those spending cuts reportedly have righted the Globe’s
financial position to a point where the Times Co. recently withdrew
its offer to sell the Globe.
The Boston Herald
reported that Ainsley was paid $1.9 million last year, and that, according to a 2009
Times Co. proxy statement, he
is due more than $1.2 million on his retirement.
Providence
(R.I.) Journal gets a new look
The
Providence (R.I.) Journal has undergone a redesign, according to an
Oct. 28 Editor & Publisher story.
The new design includes
shorter stories with data boxes; better labeled stories, pages and
sections; consistent color use; and a new typeface.
Thomas
E. Heslin, executive editor of the Journal, said that “the look
and feel of The Providence Journal, including our unique nameplate,
has its roots in our history, and one of the guiding principles of
the redesign was that it would retain the identity, sense of tradition
and elegance of the newspaper.”
The Journal changed its
sectioning earlier this year, and now all Rhode Island stories appear
in the front of the paper.
Rob Schneider, presentation
director at The Dallas Morning News, led the redesign and said that
“the redesign is as significant for what it didn’t change,
as it is for what it did change.”
The Morning News
and the Journal are owned by A.H. Belo Corp., based in Dallas.
Sun
Chronicle redesign aims to attract impulse buyers
The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro,
Mass., has reverted to a one-line front-page masthead from the two-line
mast it has had for several years, in an effort to grab the attention
of buyers at newsstands by allowing more options for front-page teasers.
Mike Kirby, editor of the
Sun Chronicle, detailed the changes in a Nov. 1 story: masts for other
sections such as City & Town and Sports also have a new look;
“pullouts,” or larger type highlighting quotes, have been
changed; and headlines are now centered. All the designs are intended
to make the paper easier to read, he said.
Kirby said the new look
is an ongoing evolution with no drastic changes.
The transition was an effort
by Craig Borges, managing editor; Jessica Kosowski, assistant managing
editor for news; and Michael Garlick, graphics supervisor. Their focus
was to attract readers on an impulse buy when they’re at newsstands,
Kirby said.
Two other sections also
are being redesigned: the Sunday Living Well section and the Remember
When photos section, Kirby said.
Tom McAvoy, a columnist
at the Sun Chronicle, is moving to the new Nostalgia
page in the Sunday Living Well section, which will look back at what
was newsworthy in Attleboro 25 and 50 years ago.
The Remember When
photos section, overseen by Kosowski, will grow to include old photos
of the Attleboro area.
Hartford
Courant, parent company to forgo AP for a week
During the week of Nov.
8, Tribune Co. newspapers, including its only New England newspaper, The Hartford (Conn.) Courant, will use as little Associated Press content
as possible to see whether the company can survive without it, according
to the Chicago Tribune.
The Chicago-based Tribune
Co. announced last year that it might drop its AP membership effective
Oct. 15, 2010, as a cost-cutting measure.
Tribune Co. papers will
use content from other sources, including Bloomberg, Reuters, The
Washington Post, The New York Times, Agence France Press and others,
some of which are not normally available to Tribune Co. papers. Tribune
Co. papers will continue to use some AP material, such as sports statistics
and vital stories, during the week, the Tribune said.
“AP appreciates and
understands that newspapers are looking for ways to confront challenging
economic times,” Paul Colford, AP spokesman, said in an AP story
Nov. 3. “At the same time, we continue to work with our member
newspapers to make sure the AP, which is the gold standard of breaking
news, remains a vital interest to newspapers, their publishers and
their readers.”
AP said that as of April,
14 percent of AP’s U.S. newspaper membership, about 180 newspapers,
were considering dropping the service. AP announced in April $35 million
in rate reductions for members in 2010 on top of $30 million in rate
reductions introduced in 2009.
Tribune Co. television
stations and newspaper Web sites will not go without AP during the
week of Nov. 8, according to the Tribune.
Community
Magazines of Newton, Mass., closes up shop
Community
Magazines LLC, based in Newton, Mass., and publisher of Metrowest,
Brookline and Newton magazines in the suburbs of Boston, is closing
its doors, according to the Boston Herald.
Publisher Jonathan Brickman,
who founded the company in 2002 from his Newton home, said in a letter
to subscribers that a lack of money would not allow him to continue
publishing.
The three glossies were
mailed to homes monthly for free until the company began charging
annual subscriptions of $14.95. Each subscriber’s original check
was returned, along with the letter from Brickman. The letter was
also posted on I, Lamont, a blog about the media based in Boston.
Originally, Metrowest Magazine,
which served the Massachusetts communities of Wellesley, Weston, Needham,
Dover, Sherborn, Wayland, Framingham, Natick and Sudbury, had a distribution
of 50,000. Newton Magazine had a distribution of 23,000 and Brookline
Magazine had a distribution of 16,000. Those numbers reflect the company’s
pre-subscription era.
Community Magazines’
content was heavily feature-oriented, focusing on people and lifestyles
in each magazine’s respective coverage area.
According to a
Feb. 1, 2007, Boston Herald story, Brickman’s magazines were
targeting advertising in an affluent population of the Boston suburbs
that was already being served by Boston magazine, owned by Metrocorp,
based in Philadelphia, and Boston Common magazine, published by Niche
Media Holdings of Henderson, Nev.
AP
offers Stylebook on iPhones
The Associated Press has
made available its 2009 AP Stylebook on a software application for
users’ iPhone or iPod touch, AP announced in a press release.
The application is a hybrid
of the online and print versions of the Stylebook, according to Editor
& Publisher.
AP has added the terms
“Twitter” and “texting” to the Stylebook,
and redesigned its Stylebook Web site, Editor & Publisher reported.
AP has also created a Twitter
account, called APStylebook, that tweets AP Style tips to its Twitter
followers.
According to PoynterOnline,
the Stylebook Web site redesign, which took place early in 2009, now
features a revamped Ask the Editor section, among other changes. In
Ask the Editor, questions and answers are now organized by categories;
previously they were not categorized.
Another major change reported
by PoynterOnline is that there is now an audio pronunciation guide
on the Stylebook Web site, which should benefit journalists who are
working in multimedia and broadcast media.
The AP Stylebook application
for the iPhone and iPod touch is available through the App Store for
$28, or through iTunes.
The team that
developed the AP Mobile multimedia news portal also developed the
Stylebook application, the press release said.
Survey:
Most scribes favor shift to digital and like their jobs
Most journalists would
prefer to shift more of their work in the newsroom from print to digital,
a survey by the Media Management Center in Evanston, Ill., shows.
The survey found that that
inclination was not related to age or experience.
The survey also had positive
findings about journalists’ job satisfaction. Seventy-seven
percent were satisfied with their current jobs. Sixty-seven percent
of those surveyed expect to be working in the news business two years
from now, and 59 percent said they would probably remain with their
current newspaper.
For the report, “Life
beyond print: Newspaper journalists’ digital appetite,”
the Media Management Center surveyed about 3,800 journalists at 79
U.S. newspapers -- all English-language dailies publishing at least
five days a week, with a circulation of at least 10,000. All worked
in print, online, or both; most of those surveyed spent most of their
time on print-based tasks in the newsroom, however.
The Media Management Center’s
purpose for the study was to “capture opinions of a broad cross-section
of U.S. newspaper newsroom employees at all levels about the shift
from print-only to multimedia responsibilities.”
Michael
P. Smith, the center’s executive director, said conventional
assumptions are wrong; clearly journalists are not the ones keeping
newspapers from progressing into the digital age because of their
supposed resistance to change. Smith said the study shows that journalists
are ready and impatient for change.
The survey placed the journalists
into six categories:
• Digitals are the
12 percent who do most of their work online. With an average age of
38, they were the youngest surveyed.
• Major Shift are
the 11 percent who would prefer to devote most of their time online.
Those in that group are the most dissatisfied with their current work
situation. They are a mix of reporters, mid-level editors, copy editors,
designers and videographers, many of whom have been in journalism
for at least 15 years. They would like to devote at least “five
times their current effort to online work.”
• Turn Back the Clocks
include the 6 percent of journalists who prefer print and would rather
go back to the way things were.
• Moderately More,
the largest segment at 50 percent. It is made up of reporters and
mid-level editors. They would prefer a move to an equal split between
online and print duties.
• Status Quo, the
14 percent who are satisfied with the 30 percent of their effort that
they now devote to online work.
• Leaders, at 5 percent.
They are publishers, editors and managing editors, most of whom have
been in the news business for more than 20 years. The survey report
said of that group: “Most report that their roles are primarily
print-focused but want to shift to online.”
At least half of those
surveyed in the newsroom want to increase their online work to equal
the amount of time they spend on print duties.
The Media Management Center
is affiliated with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School
of Management and the Medill School, Northwestern University’s
journalism program. The center provides educational opportunities
for media executives and conducts industry research.
The items
above were written, at least in part, from published reports by Cecilia
Akuffo, Bret Silverberg, Erin Klopfenstein and Mary Catherine Adams,
graduate students at the Northeastern University School of Journalism
and members of the Bulletin staff, and by Zachary Boutin, a Northeastern
University student and Bulletin correspondent. Adams is also the Bulletin’s
news staff coordinator.
