Posted on 04/06/2009 6:00:24 AM PDT by outpostinmass2
No matter how serious the New York Times [NYT] Co. is in threatening to close the Boston Globe, media analysts don’t believe such a dire scenario will become reality on Morrissey Boulevard.
“This is a typical bargaining tactic,” said John Morton, a Silver Spring, Md., newspaper analyst who believes the Times was bluffing in delivering an ultimatum Thursday to Globe representatives, demanding that the paper make $20 million in additional cuts by May 1 or face closure.
The global economic crisis appears to be pushing newspapers over the cliff. Earlier this year, Hearst Corp. threatened to sell or shut down the San Francisco Chronicle if the publication didn’t slash its work force. The Chronicle’s staff took 120 buyouts last week.
The Hub-based Christian Science Monitor stopped daily publication in favor of online news, as did the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last month. And earlier this year, Scripps Co. closed Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. But few believe the Globe will suffer a similar fate.
“Clearly they’re in trouble, but I don’t believe there’s an imminent threat (of closure),” said a top national newspaper mogul, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The executive added that there is virtually no chance a buyer will emerge for the ailing broadsheet by the Times’ deadline for cutbacks, making dramatic reductions the more likely scenario.
“No one will buy it unless the unfunded liabilities are made to go away and the union contracts are voided,” wrote former Globe op-ed columnist and venture capitalist John Ellis on his blog.
New York Times management will be in Boston over the next two weeks asking each of the paper’s 13 unions to renegotiate their contracts. Meetings could begin as soon as tomorrow.
“My gut tells me an agreement will be reached by management and the union,” said local media watcher Dan Kennedy, who said he thinks the Globe should scale back its print edition several days per week to save money.
Boston Newspaper Guild president Daniel Totten did not return calls. The Times bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion. The 137-year-old Hub broadsheet has bled money for years, analysts said.
The Globe, which has printed some of the worst of the AP (”reporting” that Pentecostal Christians were acting like Hitler’s socialist party, and choosing as “best quote” one that equated the Bible with toilet paper, etc.) and pictures and cartoons such as likened creationists to apes, etc., while evidently refusing to print intelligent conservative letters, has long ago gone out of the business of being an objective reporting medium, which it presents itself as. Instead, it regularly evidences its overall objective is that of propagating left wing propaganda, masquerading as news.
As this is important to the NY Times, it is highly doubtful that they would close it down, even if it operated at a loss.
Death spiral. Boston has enough papers. The Boston Herald for normal people, and Communist Daily Worker for state workers, Harvard, Bwarny Fwanks types...
It’s a win win. If the Globe stays open and costs the NY Times money, Good. If it Closes, Good! There is no way this becomes a money maker.
“The global economic crisis appears to be pushing newspapers over the cliff”
No it’s this kind of inaccurate, misleading and false statement being accepted as “the facts” that is doing it.
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