2006_08_01_archive

A mountain of debt

Not that it should be any surprise, but Christopher Rowland's take on

Greater Boston's newest newspaper behemoth is pretty chilling for

anyone who cares about community journalism.

Writing in the Boston Globe, Rowland reports that Fairport, N.Y-based

GateHouse Media -- which, earlier this year, paid $410 million for the

Boston Herald's Community Newspaper Co. (CNC) as well as the Patriot

Ledger of Quincy, the Enterprise of Brockton and those two papers'

affiliated MPG weeklies -- has been built on a mountain of debt.

Boston University's Lou Ureneck tells Rowland:

They've been piling up debt in order to grow. The danger from a

public point of view is that the debt burden gets so high that the

company begins to drastically reduce its expenditures on the

coverage of news.

On Saturday, the Herald's Jesse Noyes reported that GateHouse would

likely cut jobs as it consolidates operations on the South Shore. (The

Herald continues to have a content-sharing arrangement with its former

CNC subsidiary.)

There have been suggestions that Kirk Davis, the chief executive for

GateHouse's 100-plus papers in Eastern Massachusetts, sees Web-based

community journalism as the future. Wicked Local, a Plymouth site

started by the Ledger/Enterprise chain before its acquisition by

GateHouse, is seen as a model.

Wicked Local is indeed pretty intriguing. But there is no substitute

for investing in local reporting.

To be sure, no one can blame GateHouse for paring down its overlapping

operations on the South Shore, where in some towns the company now

finds itself owning competing weeklies. Nothing terrible has happened

yet. The company is also going public, which will allow it to raise

investment money.

But this is an experiment in corporate giantism at the local level

that bears close scrutiny.

posted by Dan Kennedy @ 9:35 AM 2 comments

Tiresome buzz

Nicholas Lemann writes a thoughtful, measured article in the New

Yorker this week on the rise of citizen journalism. He quotes the

self-promoting buzz machine himself, Jeff Jarvis, at his most

ludicrously nasty. And, naturally, Jarvis responds with a variation of

his favorite theme: Lemann just doesn't get it.

That said, I'm going to assign Lemann's piece and Jarvis' response to

my "Journalism of the Web" students this fall. Lemann, a veteran

journalist, is dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and

what he has to say is therefore by definition important, even when