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It's official: John Henry picks up the Globe, with enough left over for a solid third baseman
By adamg on Sat, 08/03/2013 - 10:37am
The Times reports it's selling the Globe (and the Worcester Telegram) to Sox owner John Henry for $70 million - $30 million less than Henry and partners recently agreed to pay Dustin Pedroia over eight years.
Actually, as Frank Caprio reminds us, Henry is paying less for the Globe than he agreed to pay for Carl Crawford.
Dan Kennedy raises some questions, starting with whether Henry will seek to bolster the bottom line by investing - look at what Aaron Kushner, who once wanted to buy the Globe, is doing in California - or by doing what most other publishers are doing, i.e, laying everybody off.
Can a paper owned by the main owner of the Red Sox fairly cover the Red Sox? And whither Morrissey Boulevard, where the Globe sits on a large piece of land in what is becoming a hot development area?
Michael Femia has an idea for Henry:
John Henry will make back every cent he's spending on the Globe if he makes the firing of Dan Shaughnessy a pay-per-view event.
The Outraged Liberal wonders if the announcement of the deal was delayed after midnight to screw with the Herald, adds:
To be fair, Henry and his partners have been good stewards of the Red Sox and have helped bring on an era to revitalization to the once moribund area around Fenway Park.
But the business scenario is quite different: Henry can't open his wallet and bring in high-priced free agents to staff the city desk and the Statehouse. He also has nowhere near the leverage to raise ticket prices, particularly on the every dwindling coterie of loyalists who have sustained higher costs and poorer service as home delivery customers.
Jack Sullivan notes an interesting tidbit buried in the Times story about how the Times didn't necessarily make out quite so badly on the sales price - roughly 93% less than what they'd paid for the Globe (and Worcester Telegram) back in the day:
The Times Co., like other business owners, withdrew a large stream of cash from the Globe during its ownership — a sum at least equal to the purchase price, according to several former high-ranking Globe executives.
Bonus fun fact: This is not the first time the Globe and the Sox have had the same owner. Between 1904 and 1911, the Taylor family, which owned the Globe, also owned the Sox. In fact, they're the ones who came up with the name (h/t Liam Sullivan for this).
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Comments
Meanwhile, Globe seeks young editor with no family life
Editor, Entertainment and Culture site Job:
JH and the Globe
How many of these "journalists" can WGBH pick up? If JH goes in and thins the herd there at the Globe I guess that we'll find out.
Meanwhile, for a taste of things to come, see the Globe's own coverage of JH today. How do you spell hagiography?
This isn't really just a two-paper town anymore
You mention 'GBH. They've actually bolstered their local coverage over the past couple of years (whether it's worked is another question), as has WBUR. Even Boston Magazine is moving into daily news, with hires like David Bernstein and Steve Annear. It'll be interesting to watch.
WGBH has become the full
WGBH has become the full employment warehouse for failed journalists in the Boston metro area. The panelists on Rooney's show are constantly cheer-leading people like Keith Oblerman as "a very a talented asset" which just happens to keep losing his job for not having talent and having very low ratings. These are the people which are responsible for the death of newspapers and media in general. Too happy to lecture from their ivory tower while the village burns.
The only way the Globe can survive as a paper is if it returns to doing in depth local coverage. The wire services and 24hr TV networks have international and national news cornered. There is a vast market of local stories which are only covered by a few bloggers and tiny independent newspapers.
This is without even getting into the issue of objectivity or at least balanced representation of viewpoints in the newsroom. People will still read biased garbage if it is the only coverage of events they'd like to know about.
I started reading the hub
I started reading the hub because of all the local news the Globe doesn't bother to cover.
Blessed are the Cheesemakers
Perhaps Henry can rescue the Glob from being the "country living lifestyle section" for the NYT.
Bonus?
Anyone who did not know that the Taylor family once owned both the Globe and the Red Sox turn in your Boston card.
You will be readmitted on probation if you can write a short essay on the phrase "Oh, you Red Sox!" and its place in local lore.
How can we tell
They did not just look it up on Wikipedia? John Henry could always bring a Taylor family member back on board, it would make some of us old timers feel a bit better.
OK, remind me. Just when was
OK, remind me. Just when was it that the "Taylor family" owned the Red Sox? Was that before or after the 50 plus years that the Yawkeys owned the team? Are you perhaps referring to the fact that the NY Times, which owned the Globe *after* it was sold by the Taylor family some twenty years ago, had a minority ownership interest in the Red Sox after the team was sold about ten years ago? Or, assuming that was the case (which I don't know), is there supposedly some relevance that the Taylor family might have had some ownership interest in the team in the early decades of the last century?
" The Globe was losing
" The Globe was losing $60,000 a year, a fortune in the 1870s, when its original shareholders persuaded Charles H. Taylor to take charge. The paper had been started by a group of State Street businessmen, among them Eben Jordan, cofounder of the Jordan Marsh department store, in a bid to bring some dignity to the undistinguished world of Boston journalism—and, in the process, make a tidy profit. But the $150,000 in start-up money was gone within a year, and circulation was barely 5,000, with more losses predicted as a deep depression settled in.
Taylor was a 27-year-old dockworker's son and printer's apprentice who had worked as a reporter for the Boston Traveler and Horace Greeley's New York Herald Tribune. He agreed to help out “for a few weeks” as business manager of the Globe, but on December 6, 1873, he took over as general manager and picked up 20 shares worth $100 each in the struggling company.
Taylor promptly made radical changes. Targeting Irish readers, he hired Irish reporters, including a Sunday editor active in the Irish Nationalist Party. He inaugurated help-wanted advertising to steer new immigrants to jobs at a time when workers traditionally advertised for employers, not employers for employees.
“The Globe will advocate all liberal measures which will advance the interests of the masses in their social and financial condition,” the reinvented newspaper promised in an editorial, “and will endeavor to promote their moral and intellectual welfare.” In addition to Irish causes, it championed such things as suffrage, a shorter workday, half a day off on Saturdays, and the Labor Day holiday.
Thanks to its new formula, the Globe thrived in a crowded market of 11 newspapers, and by the time Jordan died in 1895, he had named Taylor trustee of his Globe holdings. With his growing fortune, Taylor bought the Boston Pilgrims, later to become the Red Sox, and left another legacy to Boston: Fenway Park, built in 1912, while he owned the team. He challenged the establishment outside, as well as inside, the pages of his newspaper; blocked as a so-called Swamp Yankee from joining such clubs as the Somerset, the general cofounded the Algonquin Club, today the premier club for the city's leading businesspeople.
From : http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2006/05/the-times-th...
Eben and family weres like an octopus in Boston , very interesting family , and the best blueberry muffins too , the best Jerry , the best !
Taylor family and Boston Red Sox
from page A9 of today's Globe: "John I. Taylor owned the Red Sox from 1904 to 1911, while his father, Charles Taylor, was publisher of the Globe." Sounds like Taylor got Fenway Park built, but didn't stay around long enough to profit from it.
Actually...
Henry can just open up his wallet and bring in high-priced free agents. He probably won't, but there's nothing stopping him from going out and adding a million dollars a year to the Globe's newsroom budget. He could approach any reporter in the country, offer them a $25k raise, and that would be real enough money to make them seriously consider coming to Boston.
It wouldn't be profitable, but there's a long history of rich individuals owning unprofitable newspapers.
Chicago: an example to emulate or to avoid?
For many years, the Chicago Tribune company owned the Cubs. I haven't followed the result closely, but I suspect there are both positive and negative things to learn from this example.
Smart move...
I can see a whole new world opening up for Henry when he puts an apartment complex and shopping center where the Globe once stood...
Nice location
I bet the real estate is worth more than the paper.
That's my point...
it is!
Man, Howie Carr is getting old
OK, cute photo of him in a Sox jersey and holding a Globe outside Fenway, but was there a single original thought in his column today about John Henry and the Globe?
No, of course not. Can somebody let Howie know Mike Barnicle hasn't written a column for the Globe in 15 years now?
Then again, the column does at least offer some relief from the Herald's incessant whoring of its new podcast.
Old, fat and unable to keep up with the lipo
Carr is obsessed with Barnicle. Mainly, IMHO, because Barnicle has manged to reinvent himself as a pundit on MSNBC. granted not the most popular gig ratings wise, but a lot further than Carr will ever get. It must really grate Howie's last nerve to see Barnicle speaking to power players every morning on MSNBC while Howie only gets to chat with noted thinker VB on Fox25 about what? You guessed it! Whitey!
And original and Howie Carr have never met. A quick listen at any given time to his radio show and it takes him all about 5 seconds to bring up Whitey. Obama? There's a Whitey angle. Benghazi? There's a Whitey angle. And of course once Whitey goes to the can, Howie will go back to demonizing anyone with an EBT card or anyone who isn't a citizen.
Is it just me ...
Or is Howie starting to look like the wealthy useless people in Terry Gilliams 1985 movie Brazil?
