Rieder: Red Sox owner takes another plunge into journalism
Boston Red Sox owner John Henry really must like this journalism thing.
Two years and change after buying The Boston Globe, Henry on Wednesday is launching Stat, a high-powered digital news operation focused on health, medicine and life sciences.
It's an ambitious start-up. At the helm is Rick Berke, a former assistant managing editor of The New York Times and onetime executive editor of Politico. It debuts with 40 editorial staffers, including alumni of many of the nation's top news outlets, as well as 10 business-side staffers.
The goal, Henry says, is to be "the country's go-to news source for the life sciences."
And the mission is to appeal both to the masses and the experts.
"No one is covering this world in a high-end journalistic way," Berke told me in a telephone interview. While there is plenty of good work being done on the vitally important topic, "no one in a sustained way is covering it day after day in a way that breaks through to a general audience while earning credibility with scientists and doctors.
"We're trying to do it all."
Stat, which has a 10-member multimedia team, will place a heavy emphasis on mobile. The name is an abbreviation of statim, the Latin word for immediately, often used in medical situations to denote urgency.
In an article published Wednesday on the open platform Medium, Henry recalled that the idea for Stat took shape at a dinner convened by Google's Eric Schmidt in the summer of 2014 to discuss why Boston had been eclipsed by Silicon Valley as the epicenter of the tech world. The talk turned to the pre-eminent role of Boston and Cambridge when it came to life sciences, and the light bulb went on: There was no stand-alone news outlet giving the topic the in-depth scrutiny it deserved. Suddenly Henry was a man on a mission.
The next day he talked to top people at the Globe, and the consensus emerged that Berke was the ideal man to head the venture.
Berke, who had just left Politico, picks up the story: "Our first meeting went on for hours," he says. "It was flattering to get a call from out of the blue. John and I really bonded."
Months and months of discussions ensued. And while Berke stresses that he's "not a science geek," every conversation led to a long list of stories he wanted to see. Berke went on the payroll in February.
Since then, Berke has gone on a hiring spree, attracting such talent as Stephanie Simon, Stat's managing editor for news, an alum of the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and Politico. The editor has been impressed that journalists would leave jobs at top publications to take a chance on a start-up. Some of the new hires even took pay cuts.
"People want to be part of something new and ambitious," Berke says.
Henry, who is deeply interested in the search for new models for journalism in the digital age, decided Stat should be a separate company from the Globe. That, he wrote on Medium, is because he believes "that a news organization can be most nimble when it is built organically for the digital age."
But the two news outlets will work closely together. The Globe will be able to showcase Stat's stories, and in fact ran about 60 of them before the site's formal launch. And Stat will be able to use Globe content.
So how will Stat pay the bills, not to mention the salaries of that large, high-powered staff? It will rely at first on ads, and will make a big push for native advertising, which mimics the tone and feel of the host publication. It is launching without a paywall. Down the line Stat plans to charge for some content, but not for everything on the site. It also hopes to put together some revenue-sharing partnerships.
After all of the months of planning and preparing, Berke is glad that game time has finally arrived.
"Everyone," he says, "is buzzing with excitement."
Follow Paste BN columnist Rem Rieder on Twitter @remrieder