The pizzas

The Chicago Tribune sent many boxes of pizza to the newsroom of The Boston Globe today in a move of great journalistic camaraderie in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing.

A touching note accompanying the delivery reads:

We can only imagine what an exhausting and heartbreaking week it's been for you and your city. But do know your newsroom colleagues here in Chicago and across the country stand in awe of your tenacious coverage. You make us all proud to be journalists.

We can't buy you lost sleep, so at least let us pick up lunch.

Your friends at the Chicago Tribune

"Classy to the core," the Globe tweeted when the pizzas arrived.

We concur.

The Boston Globe

“The Boston Globe has never had a front door on the internet,” said editor in chief Martin Baron. The Globe is owned by The New York Times Company.

Home delivery subscribers can access the site for free and a digital-only subscription will cost $3.99 a week, beginning October 1. Coldwell Banker is sponsoring a free trial through September 30. Unlike the New York Times pay wall, BostonGlobe.com will not be metered, though it will support one click when accessed through search and social media.

The spare Globe website has a responsive design that adapts to different window sizes, browsers and devices, and it has a built-in Instapaper-type feature that saves articles for reading off various devices on the subway. The overhaul has incorporated the talents of Boston design firms Filament Group, and Upstatement, as well as a large internal team, and pre-empts the need to build separate apps for each device.

“It’s designed to be read,” publisher Christopher Mayer told The Observer.

At least for a certain kind of reader. In erecting the paywall, Mr. Mayer has divided his readers into two fundamentally different camps. The Boston Globe readers who read the paper deeply each day and value journalism enough to pay for it are rewarded with a streamlined design, and the free Boston.com will continue to serve more casual news readers, as well as catch SEO traffic, on a noisier site with more display advertising and shorter articles.

The two newsrooms are integrated, and some Boston Globe content will still be published for free on Boston.com, in particular breaking news, sports, photo features, and community blogs. Boston.com editors will pick five Boston Globe stories to run at full-text each day.

As for Boston.com's makeover, it'll get underway in 2012.

Revenue from print advertising continued to decline in the second quarter, but circulation and digital advertising picked up some of the slack. Ms. Robinson said that she did not expect circulation revenues to continue to grow, attributing recent gains to a newsstand price hike at The Globe and The Times.

Revenue from print ads across the company was down 6 percent in the second quarter, a steady continuation of the first quarter's 6.1 percent drop. Revenue from digital ads —  up 21 percent — now represents 26 percent of the company's ad revenue (compared with 22 percent last year).

The mini success story at the company continues to be About.com, which saw a 23.6 percent increase in advertising revenue, bringing in $32 million. The group only costs $18.3 million to run.

The lukewarm earnings report also comes with a major caveat: costs will be "more challenging in the second half of the year, particularly in the third quarter." In the months ahead, the company faces increased prices for paper, the reinstatement of salary cuts implemented last year and costs associated with launching a paywall at the beginning of next year.

According to the Times Company's press release this morning, the company suffered an "operating loss of $61.6 million compared with operating profit of $6.2 million in the first quarter of 2008."

In the release, Ms. Robinson conceded that, "The effect of the global economic downturn, coupled with the secular changes affecting newspapers, resulted in significant declines in revenues. Advertisers pulled back on print placements in all categories – national, retail and especially classified. Digital revenues also declined, although modestly, as a result of the weakening economy."

Some cost-saving measures mentioned in the nearly hour-long call (audio here) included a consolidation of The Boston Globe's printing facilities that resulted in $9 million in savings and a staff reduction of 15% from last year.

As far as online goes, Ms. Robinson said, "Twice we have experimented with charging for Times content." She noted that nytimes.com gets got 52.3 million unique visitors in March 2009 and told investors that The Times had looked at the business models of thirty organizations to determine new opportunities for online revenue. "We continue to explore payment models." Near the end of the call, she reminded investors that, "this isn't just a print company anymore."

If Business Insider's Henry Blodget's numbers crunching is to be believed, it might not even be that!

"At the current rate of cash consumption, assuming no one-time expenses (highly unlikely), we estimate that the company will max out its current borrowing capacity in 4 quarters," Mr. Blodget wrote this morning. "At that point, it will owe about $1.2 billion in debt."

As far as the The Times Pulitzer wins go, Ms. Robinson said, "this speaks to the extraordinary work done by our journalists in a broad range of areas" and noted, "we continue to see high quality journalism is valued by readers and advertisers."

The noted television pundits were discussing Alaska Governer Sarah Palin's comments about the press as well as about bloggers from the up-coming issue of Esquire, in which she called them," Bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie annoy me."

Here's a transcript of the chat per Mr. Yglesias:

As The Atlantic's Mr. Coates quipped, "Yes that crack reporter Pat Buchanan..."

But Mr. Barnicle, on the other hand, surely knows the difference between bloggers who just "get off" and real pavement-pounding journalists. He was, according to his own Web site, a columnist for The Boston Herald, The New York Daily News, and The Boston Globe for whom wrote "4,000 columns collectively."

His bio doesn't mention, however, that he's been accused repeatedly of being a plagiarist and a fabricator. In April 1998, Salon's Tom Mashberg reported that Mr. Barnicle was busted for repurposing parts of George Carlin's book Brain Droppings in a column without crediting his source. Mr. Barnicle told reporters at the time that he was "sloppy" and "lazy" but insisted he hadn't read Mr. Carlin's book.

Mr. Mashberg recounted seven other instances of Mr. Barnicle ripping off other writers (including legends like A.J. Liebling and Mike Royko) and writing about persons whom Boston Magazine—which enlisted the help of a private investigator—could not find.

Writing about Mr. Barnicle's hiring at The Daily News in March 1999, The New York Times' Felicity Barringer quoted an anonymous News editor saying, "there is a large body of opinion that worries that having an alleged plagiarist on the staff is not the smartest thing for our paper to do."

So, hey, when it comes to knowing the rules of journalism—and how bloggers just don't play 'em—Mike Barnicle knows. Mike Barnicle wrote the book on journalistic ethics, okay.

At least we think he did.

As tough as it is for reporters, what about the distributors? That's 750 people fired in five days.

Despite gloomy buyout news from the Boston Globe in recent weeks, there's still enough staffers left to launch a new monthly magazine supplement: Fashion Boston.

Today's release after the jump.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 30, 2007--Boston Globe Media today announced the launch of Fashion Boston, a new monthly magazine about the exciting trends, people, and events that are making Boston one of the country's most vibrant fashion markets. The premiere issue is May 8, 2007.

Alexandra Hall has been named editor of Fashion Boston, which is being managed by Lucy Bartholomay, managing director/product innovation at the Globe. Ms. Hall, a native Bostonian, spent four years as senior lifestyle editor at Boston Magazine covering fashion, food, beauty, and home design. She also contributes to a host of nationally known lifestyle magazines.

Taking advantage of a unique full broadsheet format, Fashion Boston will have an elegant and bold design that showcases some of the area's best fashion photography, highlighting styles currently available at area fashion retailers as well as the work of talented local designers. The magazine will be printed on high-quality bright stock with full-color throughout every page.

"With the city getting smarter and more creative about fashion by the minute, Boston has been longing for a publication to do it justice," said Ms. Hall, "Fashion Boston will be filled with ideas and observations about what the city's wearing right now, plus incredible photos that treat fashion as sophisticated-but-fun self-expression. In other words, it's exactly what we've been waiting for."

The new publication will be distributed monthly with The Boston Globe to more than 100,000 high-income households in Boston and the Western and South Shore suburbs, reaching a targeted audience of women who have high fashion-shopping indices. It represents another advance in the New England Media Group's strategy of creating a portfolio of niche publications aimed at highly targeted audiences and advertising categories.

"Fashion Boston celebrates the growing sense of fashion in Boston and the expansion of numerous luxury retailers into the market," said Ms. Bartholomay, "Building on the successful launch of Design New England, Fashion Boston will have the same winning formula: provide a beautiful, sophisticated, full-color advertising and editorial environment with Boston Globe Media's ability to target the audience most sought after by advertisers."

About Boston Globe Media:

Boston Globe Media consists of The Boston Globe, Boston.com, Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Globe Direct. It is wholly owned by The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), a leading media company with 2006 revenues of $3.3 billion, which includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, 15 other daily newspapers, nine network-affiliated television stations, two New York City radio stations and 35 Web sites, including NYTimes.com, Boston.com and About.com. The Company's core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.

Ms. Barry responded to a phone call this morning with an email. "It's true, I am moving to the NYT after the first of the year, to work for Metro," she wrote. "I'm not going to comment beyond that, but thanks for asking."

Ms. Barry was a 2002 Pulitzer feature-writing finalist and ASNE award winner while at the Boston Globe, for a series on the relocation to America of East African young people. She was again a Pulitzer finalist in 2004, this time in the beat reporting category, for that paper for her stories on neglected patients in the Massachusetts mental health system. Formerly, she worked for the Boston Phoenix and the Moscow Times. She first joined The Los Angeles Times in January, 2004, as Atlanta bureau chief.

After the jump is the entire Sulzberger response, and a reply by Daniel Totten, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild.

-Michael Calderone

Dear _____________: (Letters were individually sent to each of the signatories)

Thank you for your letter regarding the Boston Globe. As you acknowledge, these are very challenging times for the newspaper industry and the Globe is not immune to those pressures.

We all agree that the Globe is one of the nation's leading newspapers. No one is prouder of the Globe's long history of providing quality journalism to its readers than we are. Since the Times Company purchased it in 1993, the Globe has won six Pulitzer Prizes, including the prestigious Gold Medal for Public Service in 2003 for its investigation into the widespread sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests. More recently, Globe reporter Gareth Cook won the Pulitzer for explanatory reporting for his articles on stem cell research.

At the same time that the Globe has produced great journalism, we have taken many important steps to put it on a more stable financial footing. We have expanded the scope of our New England Media Group, adding numerous new products and features, both in print and online, and building our competitive reach throughout the region. We acquired the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, invested in MetroBoston and New England Sports Ventures, and expanded its direct mail subsidiary, GlobeDirect. All of these measures help to support our quality journalism in and around Boston.

As we move ahead, we will remain focused on ensuring the long-term financial health of the Globe so that it can continue to fulfill its journalistic mission.

Sincerely,
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.

All of the achievements noted in the Sulzberger reply to the leaders who signed the letter in support of The Boston Newspaper Guild, were gained by the most valuable resource the company has : human beings, the people of The Boston Newspaper Guild.It's these people who continue to make the Boston Globe great.

The Boston Newspaper Guild helps The NY Times and The Globe achieve their journalistic "mission" each and every day and is proud to do so. We also have members across all walks of the business : advertising, circulation, production, design, production, security and more, with people working hard each and every day to achieve The Globe's business mission.

The short term and long term financial health of The Boston Globe is best served by treating Boston Newspaper Guild members with the dignity and respect they bring to their daily jobs.

The Boston Newspaper Guild appreciates and respects the dignity of the local labor and political community who showed their true integrity by standing up for what is right and signing the letter in support of the BNG.

Our goals are simple and they consist of fair and decent health care for employees and wages included from online work that is consistent with the work being done by Guild members.

Boston Newspaper Guild members have made The Boston Globe an incredible part of the fabric of Boston and remain committed to continuing this great tradition. All we ask is the same commitment to us in return.

Sincerely,
Daniel B. Totten
Boston Newspaper Guild