HOWIE CARR IS NOT IMPRESSED with the Boston Globe’s plan to go from “paper of record” to “organization of interest.” I’m not sure what that means, and neither is Howie:
In a memo to his decimated staff this week, editor Brian McGrory says the Globe will no longer be the “paper of record” (as if it ever was). Instead, he said, the Globe will be an “organization of interest.”
Sorry, not interested.
McGrory’s memo reads like it was composed by a recent graduate of an ESL program, or perhaps translated from another language, most likely consultantese. Everything is to be interesting, “relentlessly interesting.”
After all these years of printing dreary left wing agitprop, how will the Globe become interesting?
“We’ll set up an Audience Engagement team,” McGrory writes. “We will refine and refine again the Hubs system that was proposed by the Mission working group.”
Yeah, that should bring back the readers all right. The Registry of Motor Vehicles couldn’t have put it any better.
But I suspect the outcome will be reprinting Democratic Party and lefty interest group press releases with even less editing. And so does Howie:
Here’s how that will work. If you go to the website at 8 a.m., the lead story might be headlined, “Donald Trump is a terrible man.” If you come back at noon, there will be a totally different, fresh story: “Donald Trump: Threat or Menace?” And then at 3, yet another brand new piece will be posted — “Trump Linked to Cannibal Cult.” . . .
Meanwhile, the last six reporters who haven’t been laid off will have a role in the new imaginary newsroom. McGrory is having one of his deputy senior associate assistant junior managing editors send out a questionnaire asking them “what beats you’ve been dreaming of covering.”
Think of the sharp elbowing that will be going for those most coveted beats: the transgender-bathroom civil rights beat, religion (at the Globe, that’s climate change) and so on. But the prime beat at the Globe, even more prized than the get-Marty-Walsh beat, is the phobia beat. Homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, fake hate crimes — you’re guaranteed front page every day. Literally dozens of readers, some of them under the age of 85, will get to know your name!
Heh.