Boston Globe Threatened
Many of us woke up this weekend to the realization that our city could become a one paper town in a matter of weeks, after the New York Times Company made it clear that it is prepared to shut down the award winning Boston Globe, if unions and management don’t come up with $20 million in cost savings soon. What would the end of the Boston Globe mean for Boston?Are we content to have one tabloid paper, and a lot of subscribers to the New York Times? Would the closing of the Globe signal a diminution in the “world class” nature of Boston? Click to comment, and join us on Friday at 1 to participate in the conversation on the air.
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Here is one of the reasons I see for the Globe failing, not just now but for years. I would suspect that the majority of readers and advertisers in the paper would be local business owners. But today’s paper is a prime example of the type of business coverage that makes it into the paper: Rob Weisman’s article on how Google employees are playing Ping Pong. This type of article hurts the Globe in two ways:
1. Boston is a hotbed of tech activity and is full of entrepreneurs in a range of industries. But as this article seems to indicate, there is little interest in covering what is happening that is based in Boston. VMWare, Google and Yahoo! (all mentioned in the piece) may have offices here, but they are not Boston-based businesses, despite their contribution to the local economy. And the company that distributes Ping Pong equipment that gets mentioned in the article is based in New York.
2. It is just too cute. I am an adult and I do not care if they play Ping Pong.
I ended my subscription after reading a two-piece article on a NY-based matchmaker coming to Boston to look for prospective bachelorettes (an article that also was not about Boston and was too cute). However, this was after years of noticing that if you were a Boston company, your chances of getting covered in the Globe were very limited, and if you were going to be covered, it would likely be for something like Ping Pong.
I’m still confused as to whether this means Boston Globe would just be folding the print version of the paper, or whether Boston.com’s news would also disappear. It seems that if they are really desperate, a logical solution is to turn this into an opportunity to be of the first major newspapers to go paperless.
I could have sworn I’d read just 1-2 years ago how well Boston.com was doing, hiring new writers, etc., even as the Globe was tanking, so hopefully this will be a matter of shapeshifting, not disintegration.