For starters, the Globe will now be asking readers to pay the same amount of money for a product with less original content. That’s counterintuitive. (Of course, so is charging for the newspaper but providing it free online.) Another concern is more subtle: given its diminished foreign and national interests — the Globe’s national desk closed in 2005, during the last round of job-cutting — will management find it harder to attract and keep talented young reporters? “When you thought before about coming to the Globe, you knew that there were only a few foreign correspondent jobs at the paper,” says one staffer. “But they were there — and it made it more than a regular paper.” However, from a managerial standpoint, there’s a possible upside here, too: if a reporter dreams of reporting from Jerusalem — to the detriment of his or her coverage of the Boston Public Schools, say — his or her wanderlust might be curtailed. Then again, that person might just quit. And potential placements who dream of one day reporting from Europe or Africa might not apply to the paper in the future.
The most ominous aspect of the do-what-others-can’t argument, though, is this: it doesn’t stop here. Take the Globe’s Washington, DC, bureau — which, for now, has eight reporters, a bureau chief, and a deputy bureau chief. When I asked bureau chief Peter Canellos if he was concerned about possible cutbacks in DC, he replied: “We’ve received full assurances that the leadership of the Globe is completely committed to the bureau. In addition, they’ll be adding a substantial amount of people from Boston to cover the presidential campaign” — up to 10 at any given time, he said. Canellos also stressed that the Globe’s DC bureau works to cover several issues with intimate connections to Boston, including health care, law, education, global health, and development.
Tailoring coverage of the capitol to issues near and dear to Boston makes sense, of course. Hypothetically speaking, though, Canellos could probably find a way to do this with half the staff he has today — especially if some of the gaps in Washington coverage were filled in by similar coverage drawn from the Times. For that matter, once Mitt Romney’s done running for president, what’s keeping the Globe from getting nearly all of its DC coverage from the Times? After all, Boston-based reporters specializing in health care or higher education or other subjects with acute local relevance could simply localize the Times’ stories as necessary.
And the argument goes beyond Washington, too. Does the Globe sports section need reporters at the Super Bowl when the Patriots aren’t playing? At the World Series when the Red Sox are absent? For that matter, take the paper’s talented film reviewers, Ty Burr and Wesley Morris. Personally, I’d rather read their stuff than the material written by Times counterparts. Then again, there’s nothing inherently local about what Burr and Morris do. Does that make them a luxury the Globe can do without?
