Whatever happens, it's already clear that the employees who remain in the Globe's downsized newsroom will be producing a paper of diminished ambitions and scope. The Globe's weekly, stand-alone Health/Science section was recently eliminated. The Boston Business Journal recently reported that the paper's City Weekly and Northwest sections, published every Sunday, may be axed. And several Globe insiders tell the Phoenix that Sunday's Ideas section — which lends the paper extra intellectual heft and also houses the work of Pulitzer-winning book reviewer Gail Caldwell and is edited by Pulitzer-winner Gareth Cook — might also be headed for extinction.
With both the physical paper and the newsroom staff dwindling, it seems foolhardy to expect the Globe to do as much as it used to. This bodes poorly for the denizens of Morrissey Boulevard. And given the Globe's long-standing status as a vital local institution, it's also bad news for Boston.
To read the "Don't Quote Me" blog, go to thePhoenix.com/medialog. Adam Reilly can be reached atareilly[a]phx.com.
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- Barbarisi assigned to the Sox; more changes coming
In a locally unorthodox move, the Providence Journal is reassigning Dan Barbarisi, its well-regarded Providence City Hall reporter, to cover the Red Sox.
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Predicting a Super Bowl winner doesn't make you a genius: after all, given a pool of 32 teams, one of them is bound to capture the trophy. But predicting the future for an industry that's been buffeted by new technologies and economic vicissitudes, and sometimes seems to have all the substance and staying power of sea foam? That's an accomplishment.
- Pols and blowhards beware: PolitiFact is coming
The Providence Journal , facing the newspaper industry's twin demons of declining circulation and plummeting advertising revenue, is in an intense period of reinvention.
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Never mind that Rupert Murdoch is shelling out better than $2 billion to buy Metromedia’s seven TV stations. Never mind that he’s then turning around and reselling Boston’s WCVB-TV, Channel 5 to the Hearst Corporation for an astounding $450 million.
- Ticket to ride
In April 1999, two weeks after I started on the job at the Providence Phoenix , the FBI raided City Hall, formally unveiling the federal investigation that would land Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci Jr., Rhode Island's rascal king, behind bars.
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When I heard this past Friday that the New York Times Company had delivered a radical ultimatum to the Boston Globe 's 13 unions I called Globe spokesman Bob Powers to check it out. He wasn't talking.
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- Will the Globe survive?
What would Boston's media landscape look like without the Boston Globe ?
- Die another day
Now that the New York Times Company and representatives of the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Boston Globe 's biggest union, have agreed to a deal that will keep the paper alive (more on that in a bit), the great unanswered question becomes: what, exactly, does the Times Co. plan to do now ?
- Making waves
Rhode Island’s upstart National Public Radio affiliate, WRNI, aims to be nothing less than a major media player here. And in the space of just a couple of years, the station has taken some impressive first steps.
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In the 1960s and 1970s, when the media sky was as expansive as the horizon of Fenway Park, Boston Globe editor Tom Winship hankered to make the Globe one of the nation's top 10 dailies. He succeeded.
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Topics:
Media -- Dont Quote Me
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