Speculation around Ed Greenspon’s departure (sacking?) as managing editor at the Globe Monday has run the gamut in the hours and days since the word came down in an email to staff.
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The conventional wisdom: Reading between the lines, cuz no one’s responding to requests for comment, Steady Eddy was too slow to embrace the new tech realities of the publishing biz.
Why that explanaion is a little hard to swallow: Greenspon was the one to launch globeandmail.com. And he was front and centre in online video pumping the Globe’s website redesign just last week.
From the rumour mill: Greenspon got canned because he refused to make deeper cuts being asked for by shareholders in the newsroom.
After a hiring binge, and the creation of a new life and style section that saw the paper poach stars from the rival Post and the Guardian in the UK, the Globe announced plans to cut 90 jobs through buyout packages and layoffs – making it the first time the paper has had to shed jobs to meet the bottom line since the dirty recession of 1982.
The conspiracy theory: Brian Mulroney was behind the ‘Spon’s sudden demise. Stay with me a minute here.
The Globe certainly gave the former PM a rough ride in its blow-by-blow of Muldoon’s testimony last week in front of the Oliphant commission looking into that 300K in cash Mulroney accepted from the shady lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber.
Mulroney testified that the Globe spiked a story back in 2003 that would have shone a favourable light on his dealings with Schreiber. He suggested Greenspon killed the story to deliberately make him look bad.
Greenspon quickly issued an open letter denying Mulroney’s claim.
Greenspon says in the letter that there was never any discussion about a fourth part in a three-part series on the Mulroney-Shreiber affair. The PM says he offered a hot news tip on another story in return.
Could it be? True or not, it’s embarrassing for the seed to be planted in the public’s mind that the national paper of record was using the public’s trust to barter with a less than forthright former PM.
The paper was also forced to defend against another accusation made by Mulroney on the stand: that one of its reporters was visibly laughing and joking during Mulroney’s testimony.
And there would be another retreat on the Mulroney front – The Globe removing for unspecified “legal reasons” reader responses online to a piece by Margaret Wente essentially calling Mulroney a liar.
The other possible scenario: Ed was a head case. Check the veiled reference in Globe publisher Phillip Crawley’s email to staff about Greenspon’s departure and the need for more cooperation across departments. “New skills and different styles of leadership are needed,” writes Crawley.
It’s the economy, stupid: Turns out The Globe is not immune to the economic turmoil that’s already claimed some venerable dailies south of the border. After defying newspaper trends and seing criculation rise, ad revenues, are sliding in key Globe niches – advertising for jobs and careers, real estate and automotive industries – to say nothing of the upheaval on the television side of the operation at its parent CTVGlobemedia – now begging for government bailouts and jettisoning unprofitable stations for $1 a piece.
Replacement therapy: The heir to Greenspon, John Stackhouse, has come out of the box saying all of the right things about The Globe maintaining its commitment to high quality journalism – diminished somewhat in the new, faster-paced digital age some would argue.
Stackhouse isn’t forecasting the end of the printed page just yet, although other media observers say it’s only a matter of time and have pegged as early as 2014 as the date. Long established papers like the Rocky Mountain News in the U.S. have moved their entire operation to the worldwide web.
Ken Thomson, late owner of the Globe, saw the trend to web years ago when he began selling off newspaper properties and turning his attention to web-based acquisitions.
But back to the topic at hand… Clearly Stackhouse sees the future online. Already the discussion among higher ups at The Globe has turned to moving signature columns exclusively online and charging for daily web content. Tweets, blogs, here we come.
