Boston Globe at a crossroads

Deal struck.

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/05/06/globe_and_guild_talk_into_the_night/

 

Good news. It's always hard to tell if one side is serious about playing hardball or it's just a negotiation ploy.

 

In this case it wasn't. Clearly The Times was using a cheap negotiating ploy. No way The Boston Globe would be shuttered.

 

One share of NYT stock, May 2004, $47
One share of NYT stock, May 2009, $6

 

I was referring to the language that threatened an impasse and an expensive legal fight, but I don't think it's impossible that we'll see it closed within a few years.

 

Dave:
Today's management will never be happy with an 8-percent margin. It's not a matter of their being unable to adapt to that mindset, it's that the ownership you have today just can't comprehend that kind of profit. Apples and oranges.

Like the robot on Lost in Space would say, That . . . does . . . not . . . compute.

Pretty much all of your ownership and, likewise, the management right underneath them are corporate Wall Street robots who care only about the company's nut value, appeasing the shareholders, racking up huge debt service with dumb acquisitions in the name of 'consolidation and growth' (yuk, yuk). They don't give a rat's tooth about proper journalism regardless of the platform, only manipulating the numbers on both sides of the ledger to make things look good.

Today's ownership is quite different from the ownership of 20-30 years ago, which was more personal and dare I say family-run. Yes, they made untold millions of dollars, but they stayed close to the frontlines. But then when the parents grew old and their spoiled-rotten drug-addicted kids were in no way qualified to run the company, mom and dad sold it to Wall Street Corp. to get that last big nut of a profit and get it off their hands.

Alas, that's where we are now, with the convenience of a recession to blame for these assinine things we now see going on.

 

Did I read it correctly where they said 23 percent pay cuts? That can't be right.

 

It will be interesting to see the details of the concessions and the folks in Boston should realize that this is just Round 1. Assuming they find a buyer, the buyer will want to make additional cuts. Philadelphia provides a case in point.

 

No way a newspaper recovers from this. Just no way.

 

A friend who works at a NYT paper is completely conviced that by the end of the year, every paper in the NYT chain will be sold or folded and the NYT will be online only.

 

Hey, someone even more bearish on newspapers than me!

 

Sat next to a guy on a plane who works in private equity. He said that the Minneapolis newspaper, which is owned by a private equity firm (different one from his), won't be around in a year. I said, do you mean Minneapolis or St. Paul? He said, Minneapolis, which I thought was the bigger, stronger paper.