Opening Day at Fenway Park isn’t far away, and now it looks as though there will be some baseball fans in the stands to witness it.
Governor Charlie Baker announced Thursday that the state will reopen large venues on March 22, including the arenas where Boston’s pro sports teams play: Fenway Park, Gillette Stadium, and TD Garden.
The reopening comes as the state plans to shift into Phase 4, Step 1, of the plan outlined last spring during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, as long as data continue to show a trend downward in cases.
It applies to venues that can accommodate more than 5,000 people. They will be expected to operate at 12 percent capacity, and will be required to submit a plan to the state’s Department of Public Health about the precautions being implemented.
The announcement came as Baker also lifted restrictions on many other businesses, which will be able to operate at 50 percent capacity (up from 40 percent in place now) beginning Monday when the state moves to Phase 3, Step 2.
The decision, which reflects a steady decline in COVID-19 rates in the state in recent weeks, follows New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to reopen such venues in his state this month, with a 10 percent capacity limit in arenas and stadiums.
The Red Sox open the season at Fenway Park April 1 against the Orioles. The team said in a statement Thursday that season ticket-holders will have first dibs on the chance to attend games.
The Celtics’ first home game after March 22 is on the 29th, against the Pelicans. The Bruins are scheduled to face the Islanders March 23 at TD Garden. While the regular-season schedule for the Revolution hasn’t been released, the MLS club said Thursday that it is excited to welcome fans back when the season begins in mid-April.
What has yet to be addressed, Baker said, is how teams will play at venues that also host vaccination sites. Fenway and Gillette were the first mass vaccination sites opened in the state.
“They’re important players in this vaccine effort,” he said. “We’re going to try to figure that one out.”
Officials from the Red Sox are committed to the ballpark remaining a vaccination site during the regular season, and said in a statement that the club is “working closely with the state and vaccination site partners at CIC Health to develop revised operating plans” that take into account the 81-game home slate.
Gillette Stadium officials said in a statement that they are “thrilled” that fans will be allowed back into the venue. The announcement came on the same day the site at the stadium administered its 100,000th vaccination.
“This step represents the progress vaccinations are providing to minimize the risk of infection through herd immunity,” the statement reads. “It is an important step toward a return to normalcy for fans of the New England Revolution and New England Patriots and provides a sense of optimism for a much brighter future ahead.”
Stadium officials said they worked closely with the state’s reopening advisory board, along with other experts, to create a plan.
“As the region’s largest outdoor venue, we are confident in our ability to provide a safe and comfortable environment and look forward to welcoming fans back home to Gillette Stadium this spring,” the statement said.
Katie McInerney can be reached at katie.mcinerney@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter at @k8tmac. Michael Silverman can be reached at michael.silverman@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter: @MikeSilvermanBB.
battle with publishers and regulators around the world over how the social-media giant handles news is far from finished after striking an agreement this week with the Australian government to pay for content.
The agreement Facebook reached Tuesday with Australia’s government to restore news content to its platform comes as political leaders elsewhere have pledged to increase scrutiny on tech giants, and as news outlets also plan to amp up pressure on the company to cut deals. The matter also raises questions about which publishers should get paid for news content and how much.
Facebook’s deal with Australia gives it a path to avoid required payments to publishers for news content, so long as the company works toward reaching agreements with publishers on its own accord.
“We appreciate the government has created flexibility to move forward making deals with publishers, while giving us 30 days’ notice before a designation,” said
Campbell Brown,
Facebook’s vice president of global news partnerships. If Facebook’s negotiations with individual Australian publishers fail to satisfy the government, the company could reimpose its news ban rather than be forced to comply with the new law’s terms for setting payments.
“I am hopeful there will not be a need for that step,” Ms. Brown said.
The compromise as envisioned would be an alternative to the voluntary payments that Facebook has made to “partner” news outlets for its News Tab product for mobile users in the U.S. and other countries.
The payments Facebook has made to date aren’t overly costly for the company, whose ad business drove it to a record $86 billion in revenue last year. News content accounts for only 4% of what people see in their main newsfeed, Facebook said when it announced that it would remove news from the platform in Australia last week.
Facebook blocked people in Australia from viewing or sharing news articles as lawmakers debated a bill to compel social-media companies to pay for content. The legislation is being watched globally and could offer a model for other countries. Photo: Josh Edelson/Getty Images
News publishers rely on the audience that Facebook and
Alphabet Inc.’s
Google deliver. In the hours after Facebook’s decision to shut off news sharing in Australia, news publishers in the country saw traffic from readers outside Australia decrease by about 20%, data from analytics firm Chartbeat showed.
Roughly 36% of Americans get their news from Facebook, according to a fall 2020 study from Pew Research, compared with 23% who get it from Alphabet’s YouTube and 15% from
Twitter.
If Facebook were to have to pay for news content on a global basis, the cost would be significant, said Cascend Securities analyst
Eric Ross.
“Margins disappear when you have to all of a sudden pay for things that were free,” he said.
“
There is finally a much greater appreciation of the value of credible journalism. ”
— USA Today Publisher Maribel Perez Wadsworth
The brouhaha between Facebook and Australia’s news providers comes as it and Google face antitrust lawsuits in the U.S. and regulatory scrutiny elsewhere. Australia and other countries seeking payment for news content on behalf of publishers argue that Facebook is abusing its market power by trying to minimize or avoid such expenses. A 2019 Australian report deemed the large platforms threatened upstart social-media companies as well as advertisers and the news industry at large.
Both Facebook and Google say that their platforms help journalism. As Facebook itself has noted, publishers world-wide already seek to maximize the attention their work receives on social media without any promise of compensation.
One U.S. news publisher said the Facebook dispute in Australia suggested the social-media company has renewed interest in paying publishers after being previously reluctant to do so.
“We’re at a tipping point,” said
Maribel Perez Wadsworth,
publisher of USA Today, the flagship title of
Gannett Co.
, the largest newspaper chain in the U.S. “There is finally a much greater appreciation of the value of credible journalism.”
USA Today participates in the Facebook news tab offering in the U.S. via a licensing agreement.
News Corp,
owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Facebook. Last week the company reached a three-year deal with Google to license content from its publication and produce new products for Google platforms.
Australia’s efforts could prompt nontraditional media, such as independent journalists who publish articles on writing platforms like Medium, to demand payments, said Bernstein analyst
Mark Shmulik.
“The concern is, what if we no longer draw a line at media conglomerates? … That’s a pathway Facebook doesn’t want to go down,” he said.
Earlier this month Australian officials talked with their counterparts from Canada, Germany, France and Finland about those countries making similar rules on tech platforms paying news publishers, said
Steven Guilbeault,
Canada’s minister in charge of cultural policy, adding that the coalition of countries could expand over time.
Mr. Guilbeault said he’s encouraged by developments in Australia, and intends to introduce measures this spring that have the support of its global allies and relevant stakeholders. On Monday Canadian Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau
spoke with his Australian counterpart,
Scott Morrison,
about potential cooperation in pursuing regulation of online platforms, according to a summary of the conversation released by Mr. Trudeau’s office.
”We need to find a solution that is sustainable for news publishers, small and large, digital platforms, and for the health of our democracy,” Mr. Guilbeault said.
The battle over payments to news outlets has simmered—and at times boiled over—in Europe for more than a decade. A new European Union copyright law passed in 2019 and the involvement of antitrust regulators have given news media fresh leverage by, among other things, creating new copyright control for press outlets over the use of their publications on the internet by tech companies, except in the case of very short extracts and hyperlinks.
In France, the only country that so far has so far implemented the EU law, Google last November signed licensing agreements for its News Showcase product with several publications, including Le Monde. The agreements came after a French court reaffirmed an order from the country’s antitrust regulator that Google must negotiate.
Google said it has signed News Showcase deals with more than 500 publications in a dozen countries, including Germany, the U.K. and Australia. Google last October pledged $1 billion over three years to such licensing deals, but declined to say Tuesday how much of that amount has been spent.
“We have hundreds of partnerships with news publishers large and small, making us one of the biggest funders of journalism,” a Google spokeswoman said.
Facebook said that publications’ posting of their articles to its platform constitutes a license under the French law, and remains unchanged. The company currently only shows links, rather than rich previews, when users post news articles from French publications themselves, unless the publication has given Facebook explicit permission.
A Facebook spokesman said the company is in talks in France and Germany to launch its Facebook News product, which pays to license articles from news outlets. The product launched last month in the U.K. with articles from publications including the Guardian.
Facebook has previously said it provided hundreds of millions of dollars to publications through its various tools for advertising and subscriptions.
—Sam Schechner and Paul Vieira contributed to this article.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com and Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications Facebook generated a record $86 billion in revenue last year. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said Facebook generated $70.7 billion in revenue. (Corrected on Feb. 23)
NASA is teaming up with Elon Musk’s SpaceX on a two-year astrophysics mission to help better understand the birth of the universe and the development of galaxies.
NASA on Thursday revealed it has awarded a contract to SpaceX for the launch of SPHEREx, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer.
America is changing faster than ever!Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news.
The spacecraft is due to launch via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in June 2024 from Space Launch Complex-4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The total cost to launch SPHEREx is about $98.8 million.
NASA says the spacecraft will survey the sky in near-infrared light, which is not visible to the human eye, as a tool to help answer questions about the origins of the universe and how galaxies form.
“It also will search for water and organic molecules – essentials for life as we know it – in regions where stars are born from gas and dust, known as stellar nurseries, as well as disks around stars where new planets could be forming,” NASA said in a news release.
The mission will gather data from more than 300 million galaxies and more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
The contract is the latest NASA has awarded SpaceX over the past several years. SpaceX last year launched astronauts to space for the first time. It was the first privately designed and built spacecraft to launch astronauts to space and the first time NASA had launched its own astronauts since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.
READ MORE LIKE THIS FROM CHANGING AMERICA
VIRGIN HYPERLOOP TOPS 100 MPH IN SUCCESSFUL FIRST PASSENGER RIDE
ART MUSEUM USES SPECIAL CAMPAIGN BANNERS TO HELP REVERSE AIR POLLUTION
LOUISVILLE WORKING TO DECLARE RACISM A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS
ALMOST 100 PERCENT OF AMERICANS POLLED THINK POLICE REFORM IS NEEDED
GOOGLE ANNOUNCES FIRST U.S. OPERATIONS CENTER IN MISSISSIPPI
That’s partly due to trading restrictions from Robinhood and other brokers on how many shares of volatile stocks like GameStop, AMC(AMC), Express(EXPR) and Nokia(NOK) that retail investors can purchase in a single stock at a time.
But heavily shorted stocks could wind up rallying again. In fact, on Tuesday Mark Cuban urged members of Reddit’s WallStreetBets community to stay the course with stocks like GameStop.
“I have no doubt that there are funds and big players that have shorted this stock again thinking they are smarter than everyone on WSB,” the Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank investor said on a Reddit AMA. “I know you are going to hate to hear this, but the lower it goes, the more powerful WSB can be stepping up to buy the stock again.”
After all, retail investors have proven that they can push hedge funds around — and they are likely to start focusing on other stocks and commodities that they think can (and should) move higher.
“Social investing is not going away,” said Kerim Derhalli, CEO and founder of Invstr, a trading app. “This is a powerful commercial trend and we are just at the beginning of it. People have more information and power.”
Younger investors have taken control of the market
Derhalli pointed out that as younger investors increasingly start buying and selling stocks, the market will need to adapt. He said the rise of other popular stocks, such as Tesla(TSLA) and Beyond Mea(BYND)t are due partly to Millennials and Gen Zers investing in brands that they know and like.
“Younger retail investors are in touch with changes taking place. They understand consumer trends because they are the ones making and creating them,” Derhalli said. “There are some Millennials making a lot of money and there are hedge funds pissed off that retail investors have joined the game and are beating them at it.”
Yet a number of Wall Street veterans are concerned that this won’t end well for smaller investors.
They point to the dot-com/tech stock collapse in 2000 as a sign of what can happen when retail investors get too excited and lose focus of fundamentals such as sales and earnings — not to mention valuations.
Back then, the trading frenzy was built on message boards like Raging Bull and Yahoo Finance as opposed to Reddit and Twitter.
“This is troubling and disconcerting. It could be like March 2000 all over again,” said Richard Smith, CEO of The Foundation for the Study of Cycles, a research firm.
“What this has done more than anything is expose how gamified the stock market environment is, and it will hopefully have people ask questions about whether or not this is how we want markets to work,” Smith added.
If average investors wind up getting burned by stocks like GameStop, that could lead to less confidence in Wall Street and the wider market.
Some lesser experienced investors may just give up on owning stocks altogether — as many individuals did after the 2000 crash and again when Lehman Brothers imploded in 2008.
“The market is going to be destabilized. Too many people will lose money. Fewer people will participate in the stock market — not more,” said Sergey Savastiouk, founder and CEO of Tickeron, an artificial intelligence platform for traders and investors.
“What’s going on with GameStop and AMC is like driving without a license,” he added.
This time might actually be a little bit different after all
But there are some major differences between now and two decades ago — not to mention the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2009, a time when social media and free online trading weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now.
Average investors can now trade more efficiently and in a cost-effective manner thanks to no-fee brokerage firms such as Robinhood — a move that essentially forced all the other major brokerages to drop commissions.
The rise of fractional trading (i.e. owning a set dollar amount of a high-priced stock like Amazon or Alphabet) and the popularity of index ETFs also makes it easier for investors to buy small pieces of many stocks.
And Reddit’s megaphone is significantly louder and more influential than the old chat boards of the late 1990s.
“This trend will not end anytime soon. There are some investors who play in the individual stock arena just the one time. But there is a fear of missing out,” said Gust Kepler, founder and CEO of BlackBoxStocks, a trading software firm.
“That may not sound much different from the late 1990s with day traders, but now social media augments the ability for groups of investors to band together and share information in real time,” Kepler added.
Along those lines, even Smith of the Foundation of Cycles expressed begrudging admiration for the Reddit traders who figured out how to stick it to the short sellers.
“I have respect for those who saw what was going on, how it worked and exploited it,” he said. “But what value has been created?”
Stocks like GameStop and AMC aren’t increasing in value because they’re producing high revenue and profit, paying big dividends or adding significant juice to the economy by creating thousands of jobs.
But that misses the point. There is no rule that says investors should only buy large blue chip companies. Some investors are growing tired of buying safer, passively run index funds and want to gamble.
“Individual investors are often thought to be risk averse. But not all of them are,” said Josh White, a finance professor at Vanderbilt University and former SEC economist. “Some have a preference for what’s more like a lottery.”
“They may actually lose often but every now and then they will hit a home run like GameStop,” White said. “As long as there is that one big hit that takes place, people will keep gambling.”
