In a 60-person capacity room, 120 people registered to hear from Linda Henry, CEO of Boston Globe Media and co-owner of Fenway Sports Group April 1.
The event, which was the sixth talk in the Questrom Summit Series, gave attendees the opportunity to hear first-hand about Linda’s business expertise.
College of Arts and Sciences junior Yash Seth, the president and founder of the Questrom Summit Series, said his goal is to create an intimate environment for speakers to connect with the audience.
“We like small spaces, smaller groups of people, [so] the speaker can just point out to someone that’s asking a question,” he said.
During the event, which covered Linda’s experience in real estate, sports ownership and media, the prevailing topic was her and husband John Henry’s experience as co-owners of Boston Globe Media.
Reed Keller, a graduate student at Questrom School of Business, said the event was a “really valuable” opportunity and there was “absolutely nothing [he] could pass up about it.”
The Henrys purchased the company in 2013 from The New York Times, with Linda later becoming CEO in 2020.
Linda said the Boston Globe faced “all the challenges” in bringing the paper, a legacy news organization with a 153-year history, into the digital age.
The Globe strives to not be “the paper of record” but “the paper of interest,” she said. Instead, her focus is on having “taste” on how they capture talent and produce content.
Linda said she does not exercise extensive control over the Globe’s news coverage — which she framed in contrast to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and his announcement that the Post’s opinion column would only publish stories that supported “free markets” and “personal liberties.”
While the Globe publishes more than 150 stories a day, Linda’s role on the editorial board is limited to editorial opinion pieces.
Linda described how different types of media have different standards for integrity and what she is doing to bring journalistic integrity into other forms of media in the current age of misinformation.
“There’s an incredible self-correcting ethics that exists in journalism,” Linda said. “There’s no sort of journalism police. It’s all self-governing.”
Inspired by the Pulitzer Prize, Linda described how she worked with Harvard University to create the Henry Award for Public Interest Documentary, to encourage a standard of ethics and excellence in the field of documentary filmmaking.
Even though Linda’s involvement in the fields of journalism, sports and real estate may seem unrelated, she said the line that connects them all is “community commitment.”
“They’re all serving and convening the community in different ways,” she said. “So I think that taking lessons from each side in terms of how they convene, how they serve, how they inform, [and] how they bring people together is something that I carry from across all of them.”
While Linda is a part of 10 philanthropic organizations, she said newsrooms can be more effective in creating social change through holding businesses, institutions and people accountable for their actions.
“The best thing for a city to thrive is a strong, independent, respected newsroom at its core because if you have that, then everything else in the city works,” she said. “You know that every organization around town works in a way that they don’t want their emails on the front cover of the Boston Globe.”
