As noted in an earlier post, The New York Times Co. has threatened to shut the Boston Globe - winner of 20 Pulitzer Prizes - unless it wins some very serious concessions from its unions. Shortly after that story was posted - within 15 minutes, or so - on the Boston.com site, Associated Press writer, Verena Dobnik wrote a story entitled “Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is safe” and she may well be right.
When it bought the Boston Globe for a record $1.1 billion in 1993, the New York Times Co. added one of the nation’s most acclaimed and profitable newspapers to its empire.
But analysts say the 137-year-old Globe has been a money-loser since, and the Times, now $1.1 billion in debt, is threatening to shut down Boston’s pre-eminent paper unless it gets $20 million in union concessions.
Faced with the global recession and declining revenues, the newspaper business is reeling — one major paper has already folded this year and several others are seeking bankruptcy protection. But the threat to the Globe, announced Friday on the Globe’s Web site, has shocked some industry insiders, who say it shows no one is safe.
“It is a huge warning shot across the bow of the newspaper industry. If this can happen to the storied Boston Globe, pretty much nothing is safe,” said Boston University communications professor Tobe Berkovitz.
Of the major dailies that have gone down, none has the cachet of the Globe, he said.
The threat to close the paper “sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual,” said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with the research firm Outsell. “This is uncharted territory.”
Read the full article.
