“@MiltonValencia wrote this front page centerpiece and now he is going to deliver it” – @EvanMAllen
Does anybody know what just happened at the Boston Globe? This morning Globe union staff, including news reporters & photojournalists, have been out helping deliver papers. As Craig Douglas reports for Boston Business Journal, it comes after an apparently disastrous switch to a new delivery vendor:
In an email today to Boston Newspaper Guild members, Guild President Scott Steeves said the Globe is “in crisis mode” following a Dec. 28 transition that saw the publishing giant switch to a new delivery vendor, ACI Media Group. The move triggered a wave of criticism from subscribers who failed to receive their daily deliveries of the Globe’s print edition following the change to ACI. […]
The Globe story said approximately 115,000 papers are delivered to subscribers each weekday, with another 205,000 slated for Sundays. If accurate, those figures would suggest that roughly 5,000-to-10,000 subscribers have seen delivery interruptions since the switch to ACI Media. The Globe story did not identify its prior delivery vendor or explain why service was negatively affected after the conversion to ACI.
What neither this morning’s Globe’s story nor any of the other news coverage reveals is exactly why all this has gone down. Was the Globe having trouble with its old vendor, or was this an attempt to cut costs at the expense of subscribers? Anyone know?
UPDATE 1/4: Mark Arsenault and Dan Adams report in today’s Globe that newspaper executives were warned the switch to new distributor ACI Media Group would be wrenching, but switched anyway to cut long-term costs:
[ACI’s president and chief operating officer Jack] Klunder, however, said he warned Globe executives that the switch would be enormously difficult. Globe officials dispute his account of those conversations.
“I said ‘I cannot describe to you how painful it is,’ ” Klunder said, recounting his warning to Globe officials. “I used the expression ‘massive disruption.’ . . . You’re going to get thousands of calls, e-mails — social media is going to be blistering you. The news media is going to be blistering you. You’re going to like where you are at the end of this cycle but you’re going to go through this.”
He said the fact that ACI’s contract with the paper carries no performance penalties for the first three months is “an acknowledgment on [Globe executives’] part of some level of pain.”
Owner John Henry has made clear he didn’t buy the Globe as a break-even, philanthropic enterprise – he bought it to turn a profit, and will keep cutting until he gets it. Whether that’s good for Globe subscribers or the Boston community? That doesn’t seem to be part of the equation.
I don’t know when, exactly, but we will see an all-digital Globe in the not-too-distant future. There won’t be a print edition.
The Globe depends on paper ad revenue, particular all of the Sunday inserts. They’ll have to figure out another way to pay the bill if they are going the digital route.
However, I wonder why they haven’t considered reducing the number of weekday delivery editions like many other papers have (Detroit Free Press, for one).
It was pretty light.
Digital revenue isn’t growing remotely fast enough. Print is still where the (greatly reduced) money is:
One expense, increasing.
You tell me what happens, TGM.
I can hazard a guess what happens to the expense.
Newsprint is at or below historic prices. News reporters & delivery folks ain’t gettin’ rich. What am I missing?
I don’t know that delivery costs are increasing. Maybe they aren’t.
But when revenue goes down as dramatically as your chart shows, expenses that don’t keep pace are viewed differently.
What happened to the people who were delivering the paper before? Were they rehired by the new outsourcing company? At the same pay? What kind of benefits do they get?
The lack of curiosity displayed by the other media outlets in Boston is mind boggling.
From what I have read elsewhere — mostly in comments in the few spotty articles that have been written about this — it appears that delivery people will get less money from ACI and are not signing up. I don’t believe that these people get any benefits whatsoever and are treated as contractors.
What really pisses me off about this is that the Globe sent out a letter a few weeks ago with a coupon for the Sunday Globe saying there might be some problems when they switched over. If the Globe *knew* there were going to be problems then they clearly knew that they were not prepared for a clean switch over but did it anyway. They didn’t even beef up their customer service capability.
Didn’t get the paper at all this week, and had a horrible time trying to report the problem. Their web subscriber page kept giving errors when I tried to report the missing paper, and their standard phone number 1-888-MY-GLOBE just directed me to a busy signal and a hang up after going through their menu. I eventually was able to find their alternate help number and after waiting on hold for 40 minutes was able to talk to a person. I asked him when my paper was going to be delivered again and he couldn’t tell me, so I canceled our subscription.
I really didn’t want to do that. Although we have been dismayed at the deterioration of the content and the blatant coverage bias they have shown on certain topics (e.g. the Olympics), we still enjoy many aspects of the paper and like getting it at home. But this level of bad customer service, and outright dishonesty cannot be tolerated. The only way that the Globe will learn any lesson from this is if they lose subscribers.
John Henry, the owner of the Globe. He’s so wealthy, this is nothing to him.
But this decision to switch delivery vendors will cost the Globe organization money. And that will be visited on everyone.
I worry that the people who really need their jobs with the Globe (reporters, deliverymen, mailroom clerks, custodians) will get their hours or jobs cut because of this executive decision.
If they were having widespread failures with home delivery, whatever systems they put in place to handle tiny trickles of complaint were probably overwhelmed by the ensuing flood of phone calls. I wouldn’t take this as representative of their customer service.
They clearly know how to run a high-traffic web-site, but for some reason cannot figure out how to run a much lower traffic customer service web site. The fact that they sent everyone coupons in advance is a pretty clear indication they knew there were going to be big screw ups. It is hard to understand why they couldn’t have prepared their customer service organization better. They most logical reason, is they were too cheap and lazy to bother to do anything.
And their customer service has always been sub-par. I have frequently encountered problems with their subscriber web service in the past when trying to schedule delivery stoppage for my vacation.
Telephone “support” for customer service sucked for at least ten years before I finally cancelled all my subscriptions. Part of the issue was a multiplicity of “identities” for me — the Globe insisted on maintaining one “account” for me, based apparently on my original phone number, that pre-dated the web system. There was another that came along with their first-generation boston.com effort (for the first online version) and at least a third (perhaps more) that sprang into existence when they split off bostonglobe.com into its own site. For whatever their inscrutable reasons, they insisted on preserving all these even though it seemed clear enough that the multiplicity confused everybody. Each had its own account number, the agents STRONGLY discouraged changing the associated email address, and of course the account name (used for things like the comment page) was immutable.
There were long periods when I could comment on the bostonglobe site but not read it with the special page reader, read it with the special page reader and not comment on the regular site, read items on boston.com and not access bostonglobe.com, and so on. Meanwhile, I don’t think I was ever able to accomplish ANY changes (vacation stop, vacation start, address update, start or stop print edition, etc) from the website without at least one call to customer service.
I say all this in support of the observation that “their customer service has always been sub-par”. I imagine a boiler-room filled with earnest agents trying to hard and doing the best they can while wrestling a hydra that springs new surprises every hour. I know that “simple” things that updating my telephone number or street address were still unresolved when I finally gave up, after YEARS of effort.
Delivery stoppage? Good luck getting it started again. There’s at least a 50% chance that it will be recorded as an account termination (on one but not all of your accounts).
The Boston Globe is NOT a newspaper any longer. It is a way of making cash donations to John Henry and the Boston Red Sox.
When my Globe stopped showing up, my NY Times continued to arrive on my doorstep, but on Saturday my paper started showing up on the lawn not far from the sidewalk and today it didn’t show up at all. Presumably, the Times has now switched over to the same crappy service provider.
…does any newspaper hire kids on bikes the old fashioned way anymore?
Makes it almost impossible to use subcontractors. Telegram ando Gazette lost a lawsuit poverty this. so using young carriers got wiped out.
My Galaxy seems to be a progressive
I always assumed the kids who delivered my paper growing up worked directly FOR the Lowell Sun. In fact I think I recall the Sun running ads for carriers that directed those interested to contact the paper.
You signed up to get your route. You delivered the papers and at the end of the week you went to your route manager and paid him for the papers they gave to you. If you didn’t collect enough from your customers to cover the cost it came out of your pocket, so as a kid you had to decide how long you would “carry” people before you considered them deadbeats and stopped delivery. If you couldn’t cover the cost of your papers you would lose your route. Tips made it all worthwhile and a kid would never quit before Christmas.
It was a great life lesson for which I’m thankful today.
It’s exploitation.
Were they not paid by the hour? I can’t imagine what you describe being legal.
It was a great way for a kid to make money and there were waiting lists to get a route. Routes were often passed down from older siblings when they turned 16 and could get real jobs. You couldn’t pay by the hour, some kids are faster than others. Winter sucked but overall it was a great experience. I can still fold the paper into a triangle, that was how you threw it up on the porches.
…the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in my case(which in those days was usually too thick for a triangle fold); but I agree; it was a great experience.
FWIW, I got better tips by putting the PPG either in mail racks or inside storm doors.
One of the NYC boroughs. You weren’t charged the same as what you got from the people on your route, so there was a little profit there, and most in tips. There was a waiting list to do it because you made pretty good dough for when you’re 13. It was for an afternoon paper.
Dan Kennedy’s blog has every scrap of information.
“Union members, help us be scabs so management can OUTSOURCE jobs away from underpaid delivery people–because we’re all a big family.”
This is really a disgrace. It never would have happened if Robert Jordan were still around.
Wage Drift.
Many years ago when I was a car salesman, I noticed that whenever the dealership’s owner returned from a “20 Group” meeting, my commissions/wages would be cut; not by much, just a little, but always lower. We’d complain a bit but the owner would always reply that “Hey, we’ve got to be competitive and that means tightening our belt’s. So work harder and that will make up the difference.”
“20 Group” was a sort of club where a facilitator of some sort would invite twenty car dealership owners of similar economic and demographic profiles to gather together, exchange ideas, and compare results, all in an effort to improve their profits. Each company would provide their financial reports and the results/comparisons would be shared (I assume) anonymously.
One particular financial report would be sales commission percentage and that. I learned, would be key to the wage drift I experienced each time the owner returned from 20-Group. Here’s how it happens:
In any data set of twenty random numbers, there will be an average. Of course some individual numbers will be above average and some will be below. In the case of the car dealership owner, he or she would notice that while their particular numbers were in line with the other twenty, the commission percentage they paid their salespeople was either above average or below average.
Those who saw that they were paying below average did nothing but smile. They were getting away with paying less and getting more. However, those who were paying above average, like the owners of the dealerships that I worked at, saw that they were paying more than they needed to and so, they would see that as justification to cut commissions, which they did, under the pretense of “being competitive”.
And then a year later, they meet again. Only this time the ones who were above average have cut commissions but none of the ones who were below average raised commissions. However,there is still a collection of data and an average and a group who will be above the new average (that is lower than the old average) and the cycle continues in a downward spiral for salespeople.
I eventually left that line of work. The money was good at first and we even got a free car; a company demo that was ours to use that would be sold and replaced with a new car every few months. After a while the demos were gone, the commissions were tiny and I left, but as you can see, we still have plenty of car salespeople, only now, they are making less and the owners are making more.
This phenomenon is not unique to the car business. It’s been happening for the past 40 years in all occupations. It’s one more way that the working class it getting hammered.
…or does what you describe sound like a cartel engaging in anti-competitive practices?
It isn’t a charity. Someone is going to have to figure out a way to make a daily newspaper profitable, or else they will simply cease to be.
I get why one might think of something like the Globe as a public or charitable trust, but the reality is that if it is to continue to exist, expenses must be reduced in tandem with those declining revenues.
…but preferably not on the backs of its laborers and not in a way whereby the service quality goes so far down the toilet that they lose business, the latter of course means the opposite will happen.
but because it is a business and not a charity I simply cannot forgive the crappy way in which they have treated their customers. They are not delivering what that their customers have paid for.
In order for a hard-copy Boston Globe to continue to exist, that product must be viewed as valuable enough by its advertisers and readers to pay the costs of printing and distributing it.
I suspect that the Boston Globe has already crossed that threshold. Either the hard-copy subscription price will be raised enough to cover the costs of printing and delivery or the hard-copy product will be discontinued. I strongly doubt that online revenues are strong enough to subsidize the hard-copy side of the world.