The New York Times sells the Boston Globe

Twenty years ago, my mornings began with a little excursion to the front door. With a quick bend at the waist, I reclaimed my coveted prize, a neatly folded Boston Globe. The Globe was as much an integral part of my mornings as my “big” Dunkin Donuts coffee. I would repeat my coffee and newspaper ritual seven days a week, with a special appreciation for both the size and content of the Boston Sunday Globe, packed with news, politics, sports, and usually with large real estate, property search. help, cars and classifieds. sections. On some Sundays, it seemed as if the Globe weighed five pounds when I retrieved it from its usual, customary position at the front door. And at the time, The New York Times bought the prestigious Boston Globe, for more than $ 1 billion, less than a decade before a rapid rise of brick and mortar vs. Internet paradigm shift.

Times, technology, and habits have changed, for me and for most Bostonians. As the Internet became more ubiquitous, the Globe became thinner and less substantial. Initially, I went to delivery three days a week, then only on Sundays. Some years later, I stopped the Globe altogether, opting for the Sunday Times for a few more years. I was saddened by the cancellation call, I would miss reading the Globe, and found it to be a good post that I enjoyed for decades.

Fast forward to today, when the New York Times announced that it “agreed to sell The Boston Globe and its other New England media properties to John W. Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox” for $ 70 million, a prolific drop in value. , as The Times bought the Globe in 1993 for $ 1.1 billion. The Globe, like most newspapers, has seen its advertising revenue plummet. As newspaper ads waned, they moved to the internet, providing huge revenue streams for Google and other search engines, websites, and more recently, social media.

I hope both the Globe and The Times find a model that works for them. Reporting from reputable news sources is an important check and balance in our democracy, and both organizations have provided some enthusiastic, if not revealing, investigative reports. The probability that any traditional newspaper distribution model will work well in the future appears low. After all, cutting trees, processing them to paper, printing and folding them, loading them onto trucks, and delivering them to homes seems pretty absurd nowadays, similar to the US Postal Service’s 50-cent challenges.

The only constant is change, and the Globe and The Times are trying to change with the times. As with many Bostonians and the rest of the world, widespread, immediate (and often free) Internet-based news is replacing traditional newspapers. This trend is unlikely to abate anytime soon. And while I would have bet against it, I also switched to Starbuck coffee, avoiding the weaker Dunkin Donuts coffee offered at my old coffee shop, in favor of a more robust Venti. Although in Boston many, many people still order their Dunkin Donuts coffee every morning, “Give me a lahge regular “, but then they check their news over Wi-Fi.