Imagine one morning, you wake up from your troubled dreams and find yourself transformed in your bed into a horrible vermin… No, no, wait! Imagine you wake up and find yourself holding the keys to the Boston Globe. And Arthur Sulzberger is standing beside your bed, ready to hand you $20 million or so if you will please, please, just take it off his hands.
This scenario could well play out — well, not quite like that of course — since the value of the paper is essentially zero. The Times Company has put it up for sale, and the question is really whether the buyer will pay some token sum to the Times, or whether the Times will subsidize the buyers by spotting them some working capital.
The folks nibbling at this opportunity (some of whom have been mentioned in the Globe and elsewhere) have to be asking themselves whether this white elephant of a newspaper can be made profitable once again. A key part of that question is whether Boston can remain a two-newspaper town.
My prediction is that, ironic as it may seem, Pat Purcell’s Boston Herald will be left as the only daily paper in Boston, and that the Globe will evolve into something different. That doesn’t mean the Herald wins, because in the long run, daily print is just not a sustainable business model anywhere. Or almost anywhere, if we want to hedge that bet a little.
If Denver, Tucson, Albuquerque and Seattle, all with populations in the same ballpark as Boston’s, couldn’t sustain two newspapers, then neither can Boston.
Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.
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