New York Times Sells Boston Globe At 93% Loss

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New York Times Sells Boston Globe At 93% Loss

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday August 3, 2013 @06:22PM from the not-bad-for-a-newspaper dept.

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."

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Why read newspapers? by rsilvergun · 2013-08-03 18:33 · Score: 4, Insightful

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 :(.

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1. Re:Why read newspapers? by wiggles · 2013-08-03 18:45 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
2. Re:Why read newspapers? by Mashiki · 2013-08-03 19:25 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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3. Re:Why read newspapers? by mcgrew · 2013-08-04 00:47 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  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.
  
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4. Re:Why read newspapers? by MightyYar · 2013-08-04 01:51 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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 :)
  
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The Boston Globe was insanely left-wing.... by VinylRecords · 2013-08-03 18:47 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
1. Re:The Boston Globe was insanely left-wing.... by Tablizer · 2013-08-03 19:17 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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2. Re:The Boston Globe was insanely left-wing.... by sumdumass · 2013-08-03 20:00 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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.
  Something sneaky is going on there. Whether it is a cover up to hide incompetence (which it was all over), a cover up for political purposes, or something even more insidious, something has happened with it.
  Even the liberal CNN or the Clinton News Network as it was/is known because of how much it favored President Clinton in it's reporting, is reporting that there was dozens of CIA operatives in Libya when the attacks happened and that several of their reporters were flooded with operatives wanting to tell what happened then all the sudden they clammed up. CNN is reporting that people who were in the country the night Benghazi happened keep getting reassigned and shuffled around to new geographical locations, alias names are being issued to them making it harder for even representatives to find them, they had to re-sign nondisclosure agreements that they have already signed, and many of them are being given lie detector tests every month or two which other CIA operatives claim is very unusual to have them that frequently.
  I'm sorry, but you picked the wrong issue to gripe about there as partisan.
3. Re:The Boston Globe was insanely left-wing.... by cjsm · 2013-08-04 01:53 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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Re:There goes all the retirement plans! by 0123456 · 2013-08-03 18:49 · Score: 3, Insightful

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:There goes all the retirement plans! by khallow · 2013-08-03 18:52 · Score: 4, Informative

Well, the retirement plans stayed with the New York Times so those assets can still be applied.

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.
Re:Discount, not loss by _Sharp'r_ · 2013-08-03 18:54 · Score: 4, Informative

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....

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The Big Picture by mvar · 2013-08-03 19:35 · Score: 4, Informative

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
Re:Blogs news by sumdumass · 2013-08-03 19:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

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! by ohnocitizen · 2013-08-03 19:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
One thing I would like to see on paper web sites.. by tlambert · 2013-08-03 21:31 · Score: 4, Interesting

One thing I would like to see on paper web sites which would make me more likely to subscribe to their physical counterparts is a "suppress syndicated content" checkbox that would let me see how much actual journalism they themselves are engaged in, before I invite their paper in to clutter up my living room. I'll warn you right now, though, if that gets rid of 95% of your content, you aren't going to darken my door.
I also already get enough coupons and advertising from the direct marketing association, so it'd be nice if they didn't put ads everywhere in the paper copy of the newspaper, since the postman already brings me all the coupons and local advertising I could ever want to recycle. One of the most annoying things the San Mateo Times does periodically is "give you" a "free" copy of their Wednesday or Sunday "supertacular advertising issue" so they can claim high circulation numbers, right before the end of the circulation reporting cycle. 600 pages of crap and 20 pages of content, and 80% of those are Reuters, UPI, or AP stories.
Finally, I think color is vastly overrated; save it for "fashion week" or other special purpose spreads that get delivered in special sections, and the Sunday comics. I don't get where everyone believes the way to sell physical papers is to look as much like "USA Today" as it's possible to look, without actually putting "USA Today" on the banner. Maybe they get a higher per unit marginal profit or something, like when you go to a restaurant, and they serve you 3X the food you should be eating so they can jack up the price, and the marginal profit per hour, to maximize their profit relative to their flooring costs...
New York Times mismanaged the Globe by dpbsmith · 2013-08-03 23:32 · Score: 4, Insightful

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."

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Fox News not conservative? by sjbe · 2013-08-04 01:59 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

"Moderate"? Compared to what? There is almost endless evidence that Fox News intentionally presents a staunchly conservative viewpoint and they have an audience to match. It's not even a meaningful debate at this point.

You're just as likely to find a liberal view on a panel segment as you are a conservative one.

Just because they invite some token liberals on to some of the shows doesn't mean their coverage is remotely balanced. Fox News is basically a mouthpiece for the republican party. Name one talking head (ala Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow) on Fox News who is a clear liberal. Go ahead, I'll wait...

Fox News gets its ratings because there are enough liberals and moderates to attract a broad audience.
The audience of Fox News contains a minority of moderates and VERY few liberals. 94% of Fox News viewers self identify as republican or republican leaning. In what universe is that a "broad audience"?

Look at who is buying newspapers now. Extreme right and left wing political donators.
Really? Warren Buffet is an "extreme" political donator?