from Truthdig:
A World Without the Globe?By Eugene Robinson
Despite the whole Red Sox vs. Yankees thing, employees of The Boston Globe were mostly relieved in 1993 when the paper was bought by The New York Times Co. for an astounding $1.1 billion. If the era of local family ownership had to end, nestling beneath the wing of one of the world’s great newspapers seemed the best alternative. And if the Times was willing to pay so much, it must have been serious about putting quality ahead of the bottom line.
That was then. Now, after several rounds of painful cutbacks and layoffs at the Globe, the Times is squeezing a further $20 million in savings from the Boston newspaper’s unions—and threatening to shut the paper down if the demand is not fully met. The economics of our industry are cruel and remorseless, but still it’s alarming to witness what looks like an act of cannibalism.
To be fair, the Globe is reportedly on pace to lose about $85 million this year. The New York Times Co. is hardly in a position to swallow a loss of that magnitude, given that the company’s flagship newspaper is waging its own fight against a rising tide of red ink.
Globe partisans could respond by citing a long list of questionable—to put it mildly—moves by Times Co. management: spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy back company stock, accumulating more than $1 billion in debt, building a new “trophy” skyscraper headquarters near Times Square, borrowing $250 million from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim at what amounts to 14 percent interest.
Particularly galling to those who love the Globe, which is New England’s largest newspaper, is that The New York Times has maintained its national and international news-gathering capacity while the Globe has endured sharp reductions in staff and other resources. Eileen McNamara, a Pulitzer-prize-winning Globe columnist who left the paper and now teaches at Brandeis University, wrote this of the Times’ treatment of the Globe: “It pimped her out for profit during the booming 1990s and then pillaged her when times got tough. It closed her foreign bureaus and cheapened her coverage of everything from the fine arts to the hard sciences.” ..........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090505_a_world_without_the_globe/
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