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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."
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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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.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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
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.
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 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...
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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