The whispers had been growing ever louder in certain media circles in recent weeks: The Boston Globe was in deep trouble. The New York Times Co. was frantically looking for a buyer—and would even pay somebody to take the Globe off its hands. The paper's book value had fallen to $20 or $30 million—a fraction of the $1.1 billion the Times paid for it 15 years ago. These are the things I'd heard, over and over, as part of the morbid gossip of the industry.
None of this seemed possible. The Boston Globe? On the brink? Can't be.
Tonight, however, we know that there was something to those rumors: The Times Co. is threatening to close the Globe if it can't win significant cost cuts in the next, gulp, 30 days. "I am told the Times Co. is serious as a heart attack," reports analyst Dan Kennedy, whose Boston media sources are impeccable. "They're serious," says a Globe Teamsters official. Thirty days. The clock is ticking.
Maybe it's a bluff. Advance did that with the Newark Star-Ledger last year, threatening closure and then pulling back when it won major concessions and pushed through huge staff cuts. Hearst seems to be edging away from its recent threats to close the San Francisco Chronicle, again after winning big cuts. Maybe this is how you have to play hardball with the unions, as if anybody in the newspaper industry somehow still doesn't understand the trouble all big papers find themselves in.
But we've seen those problems manifest themselves in many ways in recent weeks. The parent companies of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer—peers with the Globe as great (or once-great) regional papers—are under bankruptcy protection. Ditto the Chicago Sun-Times, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Journal Register chain. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News are newly kaput. Just about everybody else in the industry is cutting back and operating under financial duress. The New York Times Co. itself seems to be in significant trouble. Whispers about papers like the Globe that once seemed outlandish are now entirely believable. We're in a deathwatch. Who's next?
There's nothing that says these papers have to survive, of course. Many of us believe that they need to go through these paroxysms in order to evolve to their next level of being, one that probably is more dominated by the Web than by paper. As painful as it is, this is a healthy cleansing, and long overdue. But it's still painful, especially to the people whose livelihoods are involved.
Journalists (and others who work at media companies) are living through one of the greatest stories they'll ever get to see. It's happening to them, and their industry. It's like having a front seat at the industrial revolution. It's not pretty, but it's fascinating as hell, especially as we start to see what comes next. Whatever happens to the Boston Globe and other papers, this drama of change and evolution continues to play itself out. It's amazing to watch.
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