THIS COLUMN ISN'T SELF-REFERENTIAL

By MEDIA FARM

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WHEN PEOPLE ASK us if we think the Boston Globe will collapse in a fit of debt and in-fighting, we always say, it doesn't have to. Both New York Times Co. management and the Boston Newspaper Guild would have to possess mammoth stupidity to fuck this one up. Unfortunately, they're both up to that challenge.

And so, in a truly masturbatory exercise in self-reference, the Boston Globe ran an article last Friday about a petition from members of the Globe newsroom's union, warning that they probably wouldn't approve a renegotiated contract in a vote next week because their pay cut was too high.

You see, the Guild members responsible for the petition, like reporter Beth Daley, noticed that non-union management only took a 5-percent pay cut, while their renegotiated contract would dock union pay by 8.4 percent. So, yeah, that's unfair. The article quotes Daley saying, "Management can adjust the offer. Let's all give up the same. ... There are too many unknowns on the other side of this if the offer is rejected." And that's true, but, chances are, if the offer is rejected, she'll be losing a lot more than 8.4 percent of her pay. If things keep going this way, the paper's projected to lose $85 million this year, and the article itself notes that "it's possible that the Times Co. would impose at [sic] 23 percent across the board pay cut to achieve the $10 million in savings, should Guild employees reject the contract proposal."

The writing's on the wall, Globe. We can see it from here, and the wall's a lot further away from us and we have cataracts (... and our feet hurt). Your whole job is to digest the current reality.

The Times Co. had just announced a week before that it's creating a "Metropolitan" section, which is basically a nice way of saying that it shuttered the suburban offices and is trying to distill local flavor to a monolithic "local" section. So it's not just the Globe that's being cannibalized.

It's not just the New York Times management, either. Gatehouse Media, the force behind several town papers and the WickedLocal website, announced last week that staffers will see a 7.75-percent pay cut for the rest of the year, and that one of their biggest papers, the Patriot-Ledger, will cut its coverage of 26 cities and towns to 12, making their new motto "Gatehouse Media: cheaper in every sense of the word."

CLEARLY, THE WHOLE economic scene is shit, and it's particularly bad in Newspaperland. But, never fear! Media conglomerates to the rescue! By day, they're just a bunch of mild-mannered CEOs worth millions, but last Thursday, they donned capes and self-flagellation gear, and met in secret in Chicago's O'Hare Airport to become the League of Extraordinarily Screwed Gentlemen. (Aka the Newspaper Association of America!)

Executives from the New York Times Co., Gannett, Hearst Newspapers and the Associated Press, among others, discussed "Models to Monetize Content" (or "ways to save the written press from extinction") in a secret meeting that was immediately leaked to the written press. And according to the newspapers' sources in the newspaper industry, the execs were talking specifically about teh internets, and the best way to squeeze a dime from the very thing that's been draining their dollars. They talked aggregators and advertisers. What we're trying to say is: They might just start charging you to read papers online. For reals this time.

Well, yeah, it would suck to have to pay to get access to any national investigative news. Information wants to be free, blah, blah, blah. But this is also a potentially exciting historical moment, which would not only affect how we get our information, but how it's reported, as well. Because there's always going to be free information out there on the interbutts. So, if papers want you to buy their stories, they're going to have to start offering a peerless product ... and one that isn't simply super meta.