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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."
There needs to be an immediate lawsuit to take all money from the primary sale and put it to the debt, and the primary debt is the workers/pensions.
Nope. The primary debt is lenders with collateral. There's a queue of creditors who have claim on the debt of a failed business which enters bankruptcy. Pensioners are towards the front, but there are parties ahead of them.
It gets worse... they sold it for -40 million (price minus leftover pensions), but they rejected an offer to buy it a couple of years ago for 300 million (410 million including pensions in that deal) . Apparently they're great at losing money on an investment rapidly....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
their site is home to the Big Picture, a blog with photographs from around the world regarding various events, celebrations etc..it gets updated with a new entry every couple of days, totally worth the time if you have an interest in photography
Indeed. You would think the daily rag in a state capital would be digging, but the Springfield State Journal-Register is close to worthless. From looking at it you would think that every crime, fire, and accident is reported but few actually are. They want you to pay for worthless "news" as well as being subjected to popups, popunders, animated ads and all the very worse, annoying advertising? They're insane. The local TV station, wics, does more investigative reporting. There's a police scandal right now that they uncovered; the daily paper sort of repeats their nightly news of it in the next day's paper.
Meanwhile, we have a weekly paper that even the paper edition is absolutely free, its advertising is non-intrusive, and it does do investigative reporting. It also has movie reviews, a "pub crawl" section highlighting live music, recipes, etc. The SJ-R no longer has an editorial cartoonist; he was let go in their last round of layoffs. The Illinois Times hired him after the SJ-R layed him off. There are also a couple of syndicated cartoons.
Traditional newspapers are dead. There's way too much good free news to pay for it, especially when the free is better than the paid.
Free Martian Whores!