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New York Times Sells Boston Globe At 93% Loss
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times announced this morning that it has sold the Boston Globe newspaper and related assets, including the Boston.com website and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette daily paper, to John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox. The price was $70 million in cash, a small fraction of the $1.1 billion the Times paid to acquire the Globe in 1993, and does not include assumption of the Globe's pension liabilities, estimated at $110 million, which will remain with the Times. Since then the paper's weekday circulation has fallen from 507,000 to 246,000 (including digital), mirroring the declining fortunes of many other daily newspapers across the country. Henry, who also owns the Liverpool FC and various other sports- and media- related properties, made his fortune in the investment industry; however, his hedge fund company recently closed after several years of poor performance."
If your business model is anything other than "align with a particular political group and only sell to them", then keep your business (and your investor's money) FAR away from politics.
It simply makes no business sense to intentionally piss-off half of your potential customer base by shouting in their face "I HATE YOU, YOU HATERS!" and "YOU BIGOTS ALL LOOK THE SAME TO ME! DIE ALL YOU MIDDLE CLASS WHITE PEOPLE!". It's not just that having a vile attitude toward your potential customers makes them shop elsewhere, it's also that they begin to see, via your own words, that you lack any ability for self-examination, self-criticism, and self-correction.... in short they begin to see you as not just an obnoxious jerk but also as supremely stupid. The biggest and most-successful companies know this which is why they generally avoid public dives into partisan politics. It's a good line for all businesses to toe
Most of America's big media companies, however, are run by left-wing people who live in the bubbles of big left-leaning cities and therefore have a very warped view of the country to such an extreme that they do not even know how biased they are (i.e. there is no media conspiracy... there's just group-think) so they seem incapable of understanding why they are failing. When Murdoch started Fox News and put Roger Ailes in charge, they had a simple business model: Be the only media company in the US that would embrace the half of the country to which the rest of the media companies were growing actively hostile (leaving all the other companies fighting each other for the half they liked). Fox News is NOT "Right Wing" so much as it is simply the only outlet that is not "Left Wing"... Fox provides benefits to gay partners of employees, healthcare benefits that cover various "family planning" options favored by the left, etc. Many Fox contributors are Democrats or "Establishment Republicans" and indeed a number of their media personalities and regular journalists have been hired from other, liberal, outlets. Fox's most-high-profile opinion guy, Bill O'Reilly is NOT a conservative... he often disagrees with conservatives on issues and is more like a 1970 Democrat. Hannity is certainly on the Right, but this one character is hardly sufficient to offset all the Left-Wingers on all the other media outlets. The real key to the success of Fox is simply that the other media companies became hostile to half of their customers.... and many of those customers were hungry for a vendor (in this case of news) who respects them and does not heap scorn and hatred onto them.
There's a good "Business 101" lesson in there...