'Boston Globe' Will Drop Two Sections, Add New Tab
By Jennifer Saba
Published: October 17, 2008 4:55 PM ET
NEW YORK Just like its sister paper in New York, The Boston Globe is in the midst of reworking its section make-up, effective with the Oct. 24 edition. The Globe is dropping two sections while introducing a new tabloid called "g" that will run in the paper.
While other newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, are hot to fold metro into the A section, the Globe opted to keep it as a stand-alone.
The paper will continue to carry the A section and sports along with metro. Business will become part of metro. Features and arts and entertainment-related items that ran in Sidekick, will be incorporated in the new tab, "g."Of course, part of the reason for the move is to trim newsprint use and cut down on rising material costs. The Globe is saving 24 pages a week with the new section formats. Martin Baron, editor of the Globe, said while some newshole will be lost, the pages lost include house ads and event listings."Fundamentally, people are changing the way they use the newspaper," Baron said, adding the Globe intends to transform to the taste of people's reading habits.
The Globe has been working on this since March through a handful of town hall meetings with the employees, focus groups, outside consultants, and an e-panel made up of frequent Globe readers who agree to be sounding boards.Baron said they are gearing the changes to meet the needs of the Globe's loyal readers. "They are the ones that stay with you and they are the ones likely to stay with you," he said.What they found is that readers value local news first but that national and international news figure highly as well. "Our readers are not parochial at all," Baron said.
Prominent local news will make it in the A section, but Baron said that since it was such a high priority, the paper wanted to keep metro too. Pulling that section is seen as a de-emphasis on local news, Baron added.
The Globe has suffered newsroom cutbacks including the closing of foreign bureaus. But Baron said readers are willing to get their national and international stories from other sources. The Globe draws from several, including Reuters, AP, Bloomberg and the New York Times. As for local news, readers "expect to get that from the Globe," Baron said.
Jennifer Saba (jsaba@editorandpublisher.com) is E&P's associate editor.
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