The hardreading staff is not sure what, but something’s going on at the Boston Globe regarding its Saturday edition.
Exhibit A: The Globe has apparently ditched its five-year-old Saturday format, which at its debut we dubbed WSJr, since it was so clearly a Weekend Wall Street Journal wannabe.
Representative sample from three weeks ago.
The whole thing was front-loaded – Metro, Nation, World, Business, Opinion all smushed together in the A section. That apparently was meant to clear the decks for a new section – Good Life – which was a thin gruel of lifestyle, arts, and culture.
Coronavirusly or not, the Globe has dumped that Saturday setup and returned to its default format the past two weeks.
Yesterday’s front page:
Metro and Business now get their own sections (B and D if you’re keeping score at home) and everything seems back to normal.
But there’s more.
Exhibit B: The hardreading staff received a call the other day from the Globe sales department offering us a couple of bucks off our outrageously expensive Sunday print/all access digital subscription for the next three months (which still costs half of our old seven-day print subscription) – plus the Saturday print edition at no extra charge for the next three months and beyond. Plus plus a buck a month thereafter off our old subscription price.
We were supposed to get our first bonus Saturday paper yesterday. We didn’t.
Regardless, we’re wondering why the Globe is doubling down on the Saturday print edition, since you’d think it might be the first to go if the Globeniks decided to scale back.
Actually, since we didn’t get the paper yesterday, maybe they already have.
It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town 
In today’s Sunday paper, the Arts section (long-ago merged with Movies), is down to 10 pages and merged with a 4 page Travel section. The suburban weekly sections, already merged with the same content, now are merged with Metro and just 5 pages. Auto section, gone. Business is now a single page. This is actually pretty good compared to most newspapers in the country. You could access PressReader through the Boston Public Library and see what I mean. But I give the Globe a lot of credit for continuing to publish as good a product as they do even when the headwinds against newspapers have turned into a tornado. We need their service more than ever, and if that means sacrificing Good Life, I’ll take it.
Agree with pretty much everything you say, Mark. As for the death of Good Life – no great loss there.
Is this the same John Carroll who makes ignorant comments like the one quoted below ? As if MSNBC, CNN, A.P., CBS and the rest of the Democrat party propagandist lot, are “fair & balanced” , in their coverage ? Hypocrites like John. Well read i’m sure. but ignorant just the same. What wastes of oxygen. –
“Right-wing media is pretty much an etch-a-sketch at this point,” said John Carroll, a former journalist and longtime media analyst. “They mirror whatever position Donald Trump takes, and there’s no sense of inconsistency, there’s no sense of contradictions in their coverage, there’s no sense of yesterday in their coverage.”
It is indeed, Steve – the very one who made no comments whatsoever concerning those other news organizations. Then again, WhatAboutism is always in season, isn’t it?
[…] the hardreading staff noted the other week, there’s something up with the Boston Globe’s Saturday edition. First there was the […]