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."

Comments

Why read newspapers?

[rsilvergun]

Seriously. What information do they have that is at all useful? In the old days we had muckrakers telling us all the awful things our politicians were doing. These days since they're all owned by big corps they don't want to step on any toes. After all, you won't last long if you say bad things about the boss. It feels like all they have left is sports news I can get from the source, some 30 year old comics and classifieds full of H1-B bait :(.

Re:Why read newspapers?

[wiggles]

Because nobody else pays people to do serious investigative journalism on a municipal level.

Newspapers serve a vital public function - they employ journalists to expose malfeasance and corruption in city governments.

You should subscribe to your local paper - even if you don't read it. Think of it as a voluntary tax, your civic responsibility to pay someone to make sure your elected officials aren't screwing you as a taxpayer.

Re:Why read newspapers?

[Mashiki]

Haha.

Yeah, that's nice, except very few papers do investigative journalism anymore. They all use stringer stories from one of the large media companies, which you can read on *insert dozen other newspapers*. There's a reason why it's dying, and it's because it's become a monoculture.

Re:Why read newspapers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha.

Yeah, that's nice, except very few papers do investigative journalism anymore. They all use stringer stories from one of the large media companies, which you can read on *insert dozen other newspapers*. There's a reason why it's dying, and it's because it's become a monoculture.

Don't be a prick. This doesn't mean that the local expert journalists aren't needed. The fact is right now that newspapers went corporate, fell under Wall St. control, and then went to the Wall St model of short term profits model. The newspapers cut staff and used those stringer stories to increase their profit margin. But eventually the customers realized it was bullshit and bailed. Now the product is soiled. By listening to Wall St. the newspaper companies caused their own demise and a major safeguard to political and corporate corruption was lost.

In my opinion, there is only one solution: go non-profit or pseudo-non-profit where a LOCAL supervising company runs the newspaper for the purpose of maintaining it into perpetuity (similar to what The Guardian's parent company does on a national level in the UK). And if necessary, they can ask for donations to build up the fund (or investments of tax dollars--which is fine for stadiums but is never considered for something more vital like a newspaper). Additionally, newspapers need to collude. This means that the law needs to be changed to give them a special exemption. For example, they need to form a model where people have to pay for the news.

Re:Why read newspapers?

[MightyYar]

The NY Times does some pretty good journalism. Yes, in aggregate they have a liberal view of the world, and their stories are written with a narrative that reflects this. But most of the time they get their facts right, and they have things like an internal investigation team to "prosecute" their own reporters. Read another liberal-leaning (more like propaganda) site like the Huff Post and you will see how far down journalism can go. The scary part is that many people get their news from the Huffington Post and think they just read something educational. I don't mean to pick on the Huff Post - it is just one example. There are conservative propaganda sites, natural food propaganda sites, etc - but none as polished and well disguised as a news site IMHO.

Another thing that I've noticed is that the motivation for propaganda sites has changed. It used to be that you would see obvious propaganda, and you would know that some interest was behind it. A site sponsored by some trade association, or with some corporate, political, or religious backing, for instance. But now, these sites are just playing on our propensity to seek out self-affirming worldviews to sell ads. If you think that kale can cure cancer, some enterprising soul has set up a site with a cut-and-paste of every positive article about kale they can find. And of course, Fox News figured this out years ago on cable :)

The Boston Globe was insanely left-wing....

[VinylRecords]

When your entire news slant is to the extreme left you tend to alienate anyone who is on the right, anyone who is centrist or moderate, and anyone who is center-left. You end up with an audience that is composed of one single viewpoint politically. An extreme viewpoint at that. The NYTimes, another extreme left paper, had control over the Globe and ran it into the ground. Everyone saw this coming.

Of course you're looking at a 93% loss of value. You're only talking to less than 10% of the population. What was once a newspaper that examined all of society with a fair eye it now only caters to a small minority of zealots. There was no investigative journalism at all. No honesty or insight to anyone with a (D) next to their name. Just nonstop bias and pandering to a single narrow viewpoint. Of course you're dooming your paper to obscurity.

I know that bashing Fox News is a popular opinion. But of the mainstream papers, websites, and news TV stations, it's actually rather moderate. The panels and editorials are filled with a strong selection of liberals, conservatives, and moderates. And the ratings reflect that because Fox News national brings in the viewers. You're just as likely to find a liberal view on a panel segment as you are a conservative one. And the conservative commentators don't hide their bias. Whereas the Boston Globe would pretend that it was 'progressive' and refuse to at all accept the reality that it was practically a propaganda newspaper for liberal Democratic operatives. Fox News gets its ratings because there are enough liberals and moderates to attract a broad audience.

They can blame it on the internet. On the economy. On low advertising revenue. But a newspaper is supposed to objectively report the news. And stand as the Fourth Estate against political corruption. They are not supposed to maintain the political status quo and effectively serve as a PR firm for politicians. The Globe was failure all over.

Ultimately this is a win for John Henry. He'll spend $75 million on a busted arm for a pitcher that gives him no return for the Red Sox. But $70 million is almost worth it alone for some of the Boston Globe's web domains that it owns. Now John Henry (who is a major Democratic Party donator, in the millions) has a liberal PR institution to output his views. He has the ability to shut down all negative conversation about the Red Sox from current Globe employees. And he can use the Globe and Boston.com to heavily market Red Sox tickets and jerseys. This will pay for itself within a few years with the boost to Red Sox branding.

Look at who is buying newspapers now. Extreme right and left wing political donators. As if newspapers aren't PR machines for the politicians enough. Now they are literally being run by GOP and DNC donors.

Re:The Boston Globe was insanely left-wing....

[Tablizer]

The [Foxnews] panels and editorials are filled with a strong selection of liberals, conservatives, and moderates.

Fox just gives the appearance of objectivity. The host picks the topics, not the liberal counter-point guy, and the topics tend to be those that make Democrats look bad such that the counter point person is always on the defensive.

Benghazi is an example: there's still no evidence of specific wrong-doing, yet they keep talking about it with speculation up the whazoo and word-play to make it sound like something sneaky is going on.

And the hosts often do a "rehearsal" with the guests such that they know the questions in advance and prepare answers, but the guests don't have the same privilege.

Fox has relatively high ratings because they cater to the older white rural families who are paranoid of minorities and exaggerated "government intrusion" with regard to guns and religion. I hate to say, but yes, old "rednecks" who don't know how to use the Internet. They are essentially milking the last vestiges of the TV age. Many of their ads are for elder-care stuff, as evidence. Rural is about the only place that such an audience exists, and rural leans right.

The rest of the US is moving to Internet news and the traditional news outlets cannot compete with the more nimble Internet sources because they didn't have to be nimble for many decades and forgot how.

Re:The Boston Globe was insanely left-wing....

[Totenglocke]

It's funny, in order to support your claim that Fox News and it's viewers are dumb racists who only want their prejudices confirmed, your entire post is nothing but prejudiced and racist comments towards anyone who disagrees with you.

Re:The Boston Globe was insanely left-wing....

[cjsm]

The New York Times isn't extreme left wing, in fact on many issues it's center right. It supported the war in Iraq, it overall supports the war on terror, it falls in line with the government propaganda 98% of the time. I guess you think their extreme left wing because they have a liberal columnist like Paul Krugman, but they also have right wing columnists like David Brooks. Or maybe its because they had an article exposing the labor abuse at the Foxcomm factory in China making Apple products, I guess stories like that really upset you right wingers, it might hurt the stock price. But for the most part, they supports the capitalist system, they just point out some of the more pernicious abuses. I guess if they stopped doing that you right wingers would like it more.

The New York Times also supports the bulk of American Foreign policy. I know you right wingers don't give a fuck about the millions of innocent people killed by the U.S. government over the years, and have never shed a tear over innocents killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Viet Nam, etc, so if anyone like the NYT voices the mildest criticism of the massive crimes committed by the U.S. government, they are extreme left wing in your view. In my view, they are center right for supporting the bulk of it.

Re:There goes all the retirement plans!

[0123456]

If you trust something a company promises to do for you decades in the future, you're a fool.

Pensions have been a collosal ponzi scheme, and are about to collapse.

Re:Blogs news

[sumdumass]

Most blogs are opinions about news, not news in and of itself. A few insider blogs might drum out some news, but the vast majority of them do no such thing.

Re:There goes all the retirement plans!

[ohnocitizen]

I don't envy fools, but I do wish we'd move beyond victim blaming and focus on predator jailing. Companies get away with far too much shit.

New York Times mismanaged the Globe

[dpbsmith]

After saying how much they respected and admired the Globe, the New York Times made it clear that they regarded Boston as the sticks and just wanted to milk the cash cow.

I was a subscriber for decades and might still be if they had basically not driven me away.

They gradually cut out all my favorite columnists and started to use wire services for national stories they would once have covered themselves.

Royal Ford, their auto writer, always talked about things like how the tested car did during a snowy ski trip to New Hampshire. So one day I open the paper to find that he's been replaced by a syndicated column written by someone in California.

The last straw was billing. They screwed up the billing. We were on quarterly billing, and when the New York Times took over, we continued to receive quarterly bills--but EVERY bill we got was accompanied with a 90-day late notice and threats to send it to collection.

We got that straightened out--went to automatic monthly payments by credit card--and THEN someone at the Globe decided it would be cool to wrap all of their newspaper bundles in computer printouts of customer credit card information.

My wife says to me, "Well, I hate the work of mailing a check every month, but should we do that?" And I say "Honey, didn't you read the rest of the story? They wrapped the Globe in credit card printouts, but they were wrapping the Worcester Telegram in customer checking account information printouts!

What can you say to a company that does a thing like that? Except "goodbye."