Month / August 2013

by hereandsphere

WHAT WILL THE $ 70 MILLION BOSTON GLOBE BECOME ? OUR VIEW

Image

^ our “paper of record,” you know it is.

—- —- —-

Everybody in Here and Sphere’s Boston home region knew that the Boston Globe was for sale. The New York Times, which owned the paper, had hardly kept their intentions a secret. Everybody knew, too, that several active bidders — including members of the Taylor family that had owned the Globe and sold it to the Times — were on the case. It was even known that one of the bidders was a group led by John Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox.

Still, it surprised every observer when the two papers announced that the Globe had been sold for $ 70,000,000 — cash deal, no debt — and that the buyer was John Henry alone. No partners.

Image

^ John Henry, Globe Owner. Walking tall (with wife Linda)

In 1993 the New York Times had purchased the Boston Globe, as well as the Worcester Telegram and the Globe’s huge building on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester, for a reported $ 1.3 billion. Now, 20 years later, all of that — the Telegram and building, as well as all of the Globe’s internet presences — gets sold for $ 70,000,000. This, dear reader, is a heck of a discount, no ? It sends a message of desperation to those who see only the past. And yes, already the bears are howling : it’s the end, print media is dying, John Henry just wants to break it up and sell the pieces, then curtains.

We strongly disagree that that is going to happen.

Yes, the Globe’s circulation has declined from more than 420,000 in 1993 to about 200,000 now. Yes, the news staff has lost 180 positions, from 550 to 370. Yes, advertising revenue continues to drop — reportedly even during the period that the Times buffed it up to make the paper look most sale-able. Yes, many papers similar to the Globe have gone into bankruptcy, for example the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Tribune Companies. All of this is why the Globe properties fetched only $ 70,000,000 rather than the $ 1.3 billion, But that is the past. What the Globe WILL be lies in the future. It’s a future that begins strong:

First : Henry is buying the paper and its properties with no debt, all cash. He can use the Globe’s reveneus as he sees fit.

Second : the 200,000 circulation represents a hard core readership. What the ‘net can take, it has taken. the rest are staying. Indeed, I would submit that even that 200,000 represents a very different composition than detractors think. They are not just ‘what is left.’ Many, perhaps most, are new readers, even a new type of reader. More on this topic below.

Third : that hard core readership likely resembles the core readership of Boston magazine — an upscale fan base with much discretionary income to spend on advertisers’ wares. Boston Magazine has , of late, hired some major players in local journalism. That’s not the action of a publisher who thinks that print media is doomed. Why can’t the same reasoning apply to the current Globe’s readership ?

Fourth: as media journalist Dan Kennedy has pointed out, the Globe’s huge building on Morrissey Boulevard might pf itself be worth the $ 70,000,000 paid by Henry. Kennedy suggests that he might sell it, move the printing operation — highly profitable — to the Telegram’s Worcester area, and move the Globe’s news and business operations to smaller quarters in the heart of newly prosperous, bustling Downtown Boston.

Fifth : in 2009, when the Times first tried to sell the Globe, it had a pesky competitor for progressive, in-City news : the Boston Phoenix, then well established and, like the Globe, quartered in a building its owner owned and bolstered by a printing business. But in march of this year, the Boston Phoenix stopped publication. Such competition as it presented — circulation nearly 90,000 — is now available, in need of a voice.

A Boston Globe awash in Downtown’s high-end living is not likely to lack for well-heeled readers and advertisers. Were John Henry to make the Globe even more the voice of prosperous, progressive, mercantile Boston than it now is, he would only be doing what all successful newspapers have always been; the voice of a very definable readership, one that knows itself, identifies as a class or community, and insists on having a print voice to show itself off to all comers. Isn’t that what news media necessarily must be Information, one can get anywhere. The internet, ad fliers, gossip, word of mouth. The successful news media is one that communicates information of a defined kind, or with a defined point of view and even in a defined style of writing, to an audience similarly defined — and self-defining. Boston today has precisely such an audience. Large and growing, affluent, and highly concentrated in Downtown — and emulated by many who work and party Downtown even if they have — lacking the wherewithal — to live elsewhere.

A readership high-life living in $ 3,000 -rent apartments and $ 6,000 a month condos is a readership well worth playing to. It’s right there for John Henry to partner with. It wasn’t as obviously there in 2009 and not at all there in 1993, when the Times bought a very different Globe than now portends.

Why else would he even bother ? $ 70,000,000 to Henry is amuse-bouche money. Usually he plays ten times that amount. The only reason a mere $ 70 million can be worth hos time is that he sees an opportunity to add a zero to the seventy. And he definitely can. He can make the Globe the affluent community’s voice, as I have described, and at the same time create individualized, perhaps internet-only, neighborhood news outlets for every other part of Boston’s highly patchworked neighborhoods of long separatist memory. Into this community approach even the Worcester Telegram fits. (In the Telegram’s case, only into this sort of plan. That and resting on the profit foundations of the Globe’s world-class printing operation.)

Yes, many of Boston’s neighborhoods beyond downtown already have their own local print media. Can they fend off a well-heeled readership and a canny owner ?

What I have just laid out may not be Henry’s game plan at all. But if it is his plan, it is far from a stupid one.

—- Michael Freedberg / Here and Sphere

by hereandsphere

THE DETROIT BANKRUPTCY IS A STEP OF PROGRESS

Am re-posting our bankruptcy-law analysis of the Detroit bankruptcy. Updating it, too.

The issue of pension obligations has come to dominate the bigger picture of this bankruptcy. it shouldn’t, for the reasons given in this article. Pensioners will be treated as a separate creditor class, one whose vote to approve any reorganization plan must be given, or the plan cannot be confirmed by the Court.

There is also now a campaign going on to elect a new Mayor, as current mayor Dave Bing declined to run again. Much is being made of the new Mayor’s lack of authority over a city being run by a court-appointed manager. The much being made is beside the point.The campaign raises all sorts of vital issues ; the future of the city — toward what goal or goals / who will be involved / How long will it take ? what about race relations inside the city ? crime ?  schools ? Businesses and zoning ?

All of these will be discussed by the City;s voters, and when, eventually, the mayor to be elected does take control — and that will happen once the City gets its reorganization plan conformed by the court — the discussions and decisions made in this Mayor campaign will ground whatever city will be built thereupon.

Game on. Let the politics begin.

— Michael Freedberg / Here and Sphere

 

hereandsphere's avatarHere and Sphere

Image

^ Detroit : on the move at Movement

Three weeks ago Here and Sphere published Susan Domitrz-Sapienza’s extensively researched story on the comeback of Detroit. As she noted, the economy of “Automobile City” had already reached its bottom and was — and is now — expanding along several lines newly established. The decision of the city’s state-appointed manager to file a Chapter 9 (Municipal) bankruptcy petition would seem, at first, to contradict our reporter’s finding. In fact, the Chapter 9 filing conforms our reporter’s conclusion.

To learn why, one needs to know a bit more about bankruptcy law than the common perception. Most people think of the word “bankruptcy” as the end, a kind of giving up the ghost. This perception is false. There are two kinds of bankruptcy cases. The one that most people think of is “liquidation,” in a liquidation, yes: the petitioner is in fact giving up…

View original post 406 more words

by hereandsphere

MEEK AT THE MOVIES : Indie DIY – Two Far-flung Visions on the Cheap

Image
^ young dalliance : Michael Cera and Gaby Hoffman

For the second time this summer we find Michael Cera behaving badly in a bathroom. In “This is the End” he was effete and self-centered as he was orally pleasured by two nubile ingénues. Here, in “Crystal Fairy,” as an American in Chile on a quest for the ultimate peyote, his Jamie has some flushing complications after a number two. Normally this would be a conundrum for most, but Jamie happens to be stoned and hanging out with a few of his Chilean hommies, so what’s a little stink among friends?

The head-trip objective runs its narrative arc fairly straight up with a few scatological sprinkles and some moronic lunacy along the way. In most every scene, Jamie’s shrieking hubris consumes the screen, and it doesn’t help he can’t speak Spanish. As far as the project’s origins, you can almost see director Sebastián Silva cooking it up with Cera after coming down from an altered state: “Hey man, all we need is an investor or your Indie famous mug on Kickstarter.” One-time child star Gaby Hoffman checks in as the title character continually at odds with Jamie. She’s a true free-spirit, resoundingly exemplified as she drinks cocktails with the boys in the buff. Jamie, who sees her as an interloper raining on his parade, tells her to cover up, but no one else cares. So goes the movie. She’s tuned in, in touch and can speak the language, he’s just an ugly American. That’s the trip.

— — —

Image

^ Anwar Congo : garrote that man

“The Act of Killing” isn’t a documentary in the conventional sense, not even. Its director, Joshua Oppenheimer has described the film as a “documentary of the imagination,” which is deftly more to the point. What Oppenheimer has done is quite ingenious. The film within a film tautly sheds light on the Indonesian death squads of the ’60s (sanctioned by the nascent government that was passively green-lighted by Western powers) without being a chronicle. Back then, Anwar Congo, who looks slightly like Nelson Mandela, was a petty hood scalping movie tickets until the power shift made him the leader of a militia group that operated with autonomy, little accountability and assumed impunity. He killed thousands, mostly by garrote as he grimly demonstrates for the camera, but Oppenheimer isn’t interested in recreation or testimony, he’s after the soul of a killer and gives Congo a camera to make a movie that encapsulates his legacy.

What Congo comes up with are staged, grand military invasions replete with jeeps, gun turrets mounted, rolling into a jungle village — and surreal nightmare sequences in which he plays the victim. The production values are low, and there is plenty of baroque imagery, like the siren-esque women singing alongside a misty waterfall, the ample overuse of studio blood, and – almost in every sequence — a chubby former executioner in drag. Oppenheimer inter-cuts it starkly with some revelations from Congo and TV footage from back when Congo was revered as a national hero. The journey is amazing, but at some point Oppenheimer becomes too much of a bystander and the wonderment becomes inert. Looming questions never get answered, but you still leave with a pit in your stomach and an itch to google Anwar Congo and the whole bloody chapter on the South Pacific isle.

Crystal Fairy – 2.5 STARS

The Act of Killing – 3 STARS

—- Tom Meek / Meek at the Movies

by hereandsphere

THE BEST EVER : FRIDAY NIGHT @ PORTUGUESE FESTA – NEW BEDFORD

Image

^ Hathaway Street welcomes you

—- —- —-

“The best ever.”

That’s how The Local Vocal’s editor, Heather Cornell, described this year’s Friday night bash at the annual Madeiran Festival held in and by Blessed Sacrament Parish, the tall-spired, Iberican Gothic cathedral that sits on Acushnet Avenue north of downtown New Bedford.

Image

We were there, too; walking through the huge crowds of happy people — of all ages, skin colors, shapes, and fashion tastes — listening to the bassline humm of a strobe-lit rock band; drinking sangria and eating cacoila and pork butts at the food pavillion; tapping foot to the music of a screaming, hip-hoppy blues rock ensemble on the Madeira Avenue stage; shopping T shirts at the concessions on Hathaway Street; and — maybe best of all — walking up and down Davis Street, Whitman Street, and Madeira Avenue, past the Club Porta Delgada and St. Michael’s — vroomed by motorcycles — between rows of multi-deck houses in, on, and in front of which one met ordinary people celebrating life, tight shorts, tank tops, and the neighborhood.

Image

^ tambours and guitars led processional through the crowd. Love those caps !

This was what a Festival should be. A celebration of one’s self, one’s community, one’s tastes and enjoyments, in the heart of the neighborhood and not pushed off to some bland park on the outskirts. A Festival squeezed in among where people actually live — that’s how they do it in Europe, in cities where people live cheek by knee in buildings that hug each other; living among cooking aromas wafting past cigarette smoke, bumping on slang conversations, sliding over a multitude of immigrant dialects. Obviously it works here in Massachusetts too.

Image

^ screamy blues-based hip hop rock band. Where DID they get those caps ?

The Festival continues today and tomorrow. A schedule of events and locations can be found at the Festival website. It would be a really really unfortunate decision if you decide not to come to it and be part of it. So just come. You will be Madeiran for a day — maybe longer.

NOTE : the Festival lives outdoors. If it rains, you’ll get wet. And you won’t mind it one bit.

—- Mike Freedberg, for The Local Vocal

Image

by hereandsphere

OUR VIEW : LARRY SUMMERS FOR “FED” CHAIRMAN

Image

Larry Summers ; age 59; former Treasury Secretary. Ready to lead.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s second term is done, and he is not willing to do a third. The President therefore has a big decision to make. Whom will he choose as successor ?

Our choice, of the three names mentioned, is Larry Summers. Here’s why he’s our pick.

Summers has held almost every economic position that matters. He is blunt, brilliant, thinks outside the box. He challenges ideas, including his own. He takes no crap from anybody — and this matters. What if in 2016 a Republican were to become President on a mission to implement the deflationary and regressive — deadly — economics voiced by the Tea Party ? Summers could and would almost certainly rebuff any such move. The “Fed” chairman has that level of power. We’re not sure that the other people being vetted have the gall to exercise it.

No Presidential personnel pick matters more than “FED” boss. One can argue that even Supreme Court justice appointments don’t matter as much. Supreme Court rulings can always be modified, even reversed. Economic decisions happen in real time; once taken, they set off consequences that cannot be un-consequence’d. The Federal Reserve Board directs the entire economy. Basic monetary policy — from interest rates to open-market bond purchases to the size of the money supply and its rate of increase. The “Fed’ decides and acts on all.

Not even Congress has the level of power over the American economy that the “Fed” has. Under Ben Bernanke, the “Fed” has invested trillions of dollars to purchase mortgage bonds and maintained radically low interest rates — the rate that it charges banks with access to “fed” dollars — without overworking the money supply. Indeed, the only reason that the Tea Party in Congress has not destroyed the credit rating of America’s debt, wiped out the welfare state, and caused enormous, uncompensated unemployment and home foreclosure is that the “Fed” has performed all the economic stimuli that Congress, paralyzed by the Tea, could not.
Under the leadership of Ben Bernanke, America has seen its economy grow and watched that growth pick up speed and width. Bernanke has saved America. Simple as that.

The next “Fed” boss will have just as much authority. It was accorded the “Fed” in a 1913 law enacted, in Woodrow Wilson’s historic first term, as response to the Panic of 1907, in which the American bank and currency system were rescued from complete collapse only because key private bankers intervened, just in time, and very much in their own interest. We cannot allow our economy to face such ruin, and we should not have to put the economy at the mercy of big banks and their self-interest. The American economy belongs to all of us, all the time, and as the “Fed’ has the power — and the ability — to mitigate such crises, we should be glad that we have it.

We should have — must have — a “Fed” boss who can command, who likes to command, and who fully utilizes all the powers that the “Fed” possesses. The US economy drives the entire world’s economies. Our dollar is the world’s top reserve currency. Every decision made by the “Fed’ affects our dollar and has world-wide implications. Nearly every such decision impacts the world’s interest rates, money supply, exchange values. Making the wrong decision here visits its mistake upon every nation; every nation’s response visits itself back upon us. The “Fed’ boss cannot be intimidated by this. Larry Summers does not intimidate easily.

Image

^ consensus seeker : Fed vice-chair Janet Yellen

It is said that Janet Yellen, currently vice-chairman of the “Fed,” should be the choice because she is a woman — there has never been a female “Fed” boss — and because she works by consensus. These reasons do not move us. Money has no gender; economic decisions have no chromosomes. As for consensus, it muddles the matter — dulls the pencil. The “Fed” boss cannot seek consensus; his or her pencil must be sharp.

Larry Summers is, economically, the sharpest of pencils, and one who knows all the components of a point. He is our choice to lead the “Fed.”

—- Michael Freedberg / Here and Sphere

 

by hereandsphere

THE “TRANSPO” TAX : WHAT THE GOP’s “NO GAS TAX” REALLY MEANS

Image

^ State Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr introduces “Republican Alternative” Transpo Bill

Our Republican legislators would have you believe that Massachusetts’s new “transpo” tax just enacted into law is an outrage upon our wallets. It isn’t.

As a friend of ours posted this on his Facebook page today : “I did some math after hearing all the chatter about the 3 cent per gallon increase in the gas tax. My daily commute is about 52 miles, round trip. Based on 20 gallons of gas per week, my personal tax increase is 60 cents a week or $31.20 per year. Hardly enough to even notice, let alone impact the economy. Besides, I’ll happily pay an extra $31 to avoid potholes and falling bridges.”

More even than our friend, we go everywhere by car. It’s what you do when you’re a journalist. Probably I’ll do about 400 miles a week. My gas receipts total about 150.00 a week — almost 50 gallons. The tax ? $ 1.50 a week = $ 78.00 a year. That’s less than I spend on ice cream or on the Lottery. And yes, my travel expenses are paid for : but as I am an owner of Here and Sphere, the money still comes from me.

Sure, we already pay a gasoline tax and other state taxes besides. But the new gas tax, which is earmarked for road and bridge repair and for repairs and improvements to our public transit rail system, benefits all of us. Roads and bridges are not free, and those who depend on public transit to get to their jobs — or just to get around — would cost the rest of us a lot more if they had no public transit and thus could not work. Thus the taxes that we have enacted will positively impact the economic life of our state — in a big, big way.

What is the Republican alternative ? Just this : 1. no new transpo tax at all. 2. pay for the needed transpo upgrades and repairs by repealing the “Pacheco Law.”

Sounds good — but it isn’t.

The Pacheco Law guarantees that construction workers will be paid the prevailing wage paid on construction projects receiving Federal funds. The prevailing wage is a union-bargained, contractually agreed wage that we in Massachusetts have imported into our own, state-funded construction projects. The Pacheco wage is a high one, much higher than a non-union contractor would likely pay, given that Massachusetts construction projects are subject to a public, low-bid process.

By seeking repeal of the Pacheco Law, the GOP means to reduce the income of construction workers.

I can’t think of a more damaging economic policy than to lower the pay of people who work and consume. Well paid construction workers don’t hide their pay checks in mattresses; they spend it — big time.

Many Massachusetts people are down on construction workers because of the huge cost overruns and occasionally poor workmanship during the “Big Dig” in Boston. As poorly managed as the “Big Dig” expressway project was, it put huge amounts of money, over many years, into the wallets of thousands of construction workers, whose spending boosted our economy in all sorts of ways : houses, boats, second homes, big new trucks, tool purchases, vacations, clothes, home remodelings, and more.

The GOP’s plan would set back the state’s economy. Taking money out of the hands of workers, it takes money out of the business these workers spend at. It is bad policy, and demagogue-ing the “forever” gas tax as they are doing — calling now for a repeal referendum — only adds ignorance to injury.

—- Michael Freedberg / Here and Sphere

by hereandsphere

LOOKING FOR A JOB, ARE YOU ? PLEASE — NO RESUMES !

Image

^ no resumes, please ! just bring your baad self

—- —- —-

We at Here and Sphere will very likely be adding some core staff in August. That’s right : Here and Sphere is becoming a “job creator.” Who’d have thunk it ?

We welcome the hiring of staff. In the media world, staff come aboard with excitement, imagination, creativity, dedication. Motivation is never an issue, nor loyalty. Turnover doesn’t stop the presses.

That said, there’s one part of the hiring game that we do NOT like at all : resumes.

Resumes don’t fit well with the media rhythm. We’re about what you HAVEN’T done; what you HAVE done is…done, finished, over. We’re an adventure, not a re-run.

Sure we’d like to know where you went to school, what you studied, where you’re from, and did you graduate with honors. What jobs you’ve held since, however, matter little; the big thing is, can you WRITE ? Do you have a throat for a good story ? Do you think for yourself and outside the box ? Show us your clips.

Please do not spend money having a professional resume writer write one on you. We won’t read it. If we do read it, it’ll be for the curiosity simply.

Our disdain for resumes lost all civility when we surfed the site LINKED-IN. It’s supposed to be a connection arena for people at work. Unhappily almost every LINKED IN profile we have scanned reads “resume here!” Boring, boring. So depressing, indeed, that at our own LINKED IN profile we just had to write the following blurb :

“Yes, I have experience. So does my dog. Even my car has experience. I prefer to adventure upon that in which I have No experience — my mind can do this, my fingers can type it, my legs can chase it.

“In short, this is not a resume but the beginning of what someday will become one. A memento.

“A resume is like perfume — it makes you smell nice. By the time that you smell nice, however, you’ve already DONE what you began to do when you smelled like — skin.”

—- Michael Freedberg / Here and Sphere

 

Updated 7:12 P.m. EDT 08.01.13