As recounted here last August, John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, bought another great Boston institution, the Boston Globe, for just $70 million. That's $1.13 billion less than the New York Times paid for it 20 years ago. The Times retained the paper's $110 million in pension liabilities, so you could say the price was negative $40 million. So grim are the economics of newspapering in the 21st Century, lots of industry watchers thought Henry was nuts. Late last month, he took to the paper's editorial page to explain what motivated him. I have been asked repeatedly in recent weeks why...

12 November, 2013

The tagline at the top of this blog, which many readers will recognize as a phrase from the 1967 Beatles song, A Day in the Life, was also the name of a column I wrote for the Boston Globe, where I worked from 1968 to 1970. It was my first job in journalism. The Globe was the most progressive big city daily in the United States, the only one to favour unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam.  It was also a great place to work. In an era of political and cultural tumult, the paper's managers reached out to rebellious young readers in a concerted...

12 August, 2013

The Boston Globe has 40 heart-wrenching photos of the Gulf oil spill. A sampling: Thirty-six more here. Hat tip: Elaine Gibson....

12 May, 2010

After Newspaper Guild members narrowly rejected a voluntary pay cut to save the financially troubled Boston Globe, the New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, announced it would unilaterally cut salaries at the paper by 23 percent. So editorial cartoonist Dan Wasserman cut 23 percent of this morning's cartoon. ...

10 June, 2009