A spotlight on The Indy and the Boston Globe

Is the Boston Globe, renowned for its investigative journalism, about to go down the same route as The Independent, wonders Raymond Snoddy.

You have at least to admit that The Independent left the world of print in style.

The front page cover of its final edition, if you didn’t see it, carried a small headline – “Stop Press” with a small Indy eagle logo inside the letter “O”.

Read all about it (and enjoy four souvenir supplements) in this, our final printed edition.
1986-2016.

It was like the message on a tombstone, although perhaps black might have been more appropriate than the red ink chosen.

There was a decent final splash on a British-based dissident alleged to be involved in a Libyan plot to assassinate the former Saudi king.

All the old columnists were there, including the illustrious main founder Andreas Whittam Smith.

There was fighting talk in the main leading article under the headline: “The Thirty Years War” and with it the hope for online resurrection.

“For three decades we have combated hypocrisy, ignorance, tyranny, poverty, cliché, deceit and celebrity nonsense. If you care for what we’ve done, join us in the fight – online,” it said.

The cost of subscribing to the fight through the Independent Digital App will be free for the first two months – £12.99 thereafter, the usual monthly price.

Publisher Evgeny Lebedev said “thank you and goodbye” to his print readers and wrote about the most exciting time in the history of journalism. The Independent was becoming global, digital – and profitable.

By chance, reading the final print edition of The Independent was followed the next day by belatedly catching up with the film Spotlight, based on the Pulitzer-winning journalism of the Boston Globe newspaper.

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An investigative team worked for many months in 2001-2002 to expose the extent of the sex scandals in the Catholic Church across more than 600 articles – stories that not everyone in Catholic-Irish Boston wanted to see printed.

But is Spotlight, which won Oscars for best picture and best original screenplay, a nostalgic wallow in the former great days of the newspaper industry and is the Globe about to go the way of The Independent?

The answer seems to be yes and no.

When the Spotlight investigative team of an editor and three journalists were doing their stuff the Globe had a print circulation of around 479,000.

Since then everything has changed utterly – to echo another Easter weekend story.

The New York Times, which paid $1.1 billion for the paper in 1993, sold out for $70 million in 2013 to businessman John W. Henry, who not only owns the Boston Red Sox baseball team but also Liverpool F.C.

It’s quite difficult to spot the current circulation although some of the most recent numbers suggest 115,000 – although this may be lower by now – as paper sales continue to fall not helped by a botched attempt to find a cheaper way of delivering subscription copies which led to chaos and cancelled subscriptions.

Like most newspapers everywhere, falling paper sales have marched hand-in-hand with declining advertising revenue in a toxic brew that has led to extensive lay-offs of journalists.

On the more optimistic side the Boston Globe has more than 100,000 paying digital subscribers.

There is also one splendidly optimistic anomaly, which may have something to do with John Henry.

The Spotlight team has now got six journalists, including its editor and an ITT specialist, and corrupt officials are still going to jail as a result of their work. One of the current five Spotlight reporters is Michael Rezendes, one of the four who did the legwork on the Catholic priests and who managed to prise out some damning documents from the system.

The paper – and there still is a paper, despite everything – unsurprisingly has particularly influential baseball coverage.

Journalism, it seems, is still flourishing in Boston even if you don’t get Oscar-winning movies made about your efforts every year.

What of The Independent in its new guise? Will it be carried aloft around the world in an endless stream of digits?

The final paper claimed the record for monthly unique browsers on independent.co.uk, 69,076,511, which by any standards is one hell of a number.

It will, however, disappear from the daily newspaper review programmes on radio and television, if it hasn’t already. Programme editors don’t seem to have caught up yet with all the sophisticated chat in the media industry about newsbrands.

And anyway in a world of endless undifferentiated online publishers the concept of newsbrands, as a term encompassing both print and online offerings, is a distinction that should be preserved.

How seriously can The Independent’s current pretensions be taken?

Not very seriously.

If the decision had been taken to end the costly printing and distribution of a newspaper to save money to protect the journalism and move the operation online in a relatively intact form, then many would have understood and few would have objected.

The true nature of the cheapskate operation is revealed by the numbers, and the journalists who are now losing their jobs.

Fig leaf camouflage will come from The Independent’s big name columnists who will continue to provide their work under contract.

At least 100 of The Independent’s 175 journalistic staff will lose their jobs. Twenty will be taken on by the online Indy but at half their previous salaries.

Seventeen on the i will be transferred to Johnston Press which bought the compact daily for £24.4 million and a further 34 posts on the i will be open to former Indy staff members.

The obvious point is that the Independent online cannot replicate, in other than the bare bones, the essence of what The Independent until recently stood for.

They are not the same thing and it is cynical to talk about a new wondrous era in journalism when so many experienced journalists have been sacked and the rest face an axe being taken to their salaries and a future writing click-bait. Not much room for Spotlight-style investigations there.

Things have indeed changed utterly at The Independent but there is little sign of any terrible beauty being born.

One can only hope that a similar fate does not await the Boston Globe and its Spotlight investigators further down the line.