5 Other Reasons the Boston Globe Faces Closure

[martinjwaters@yahoo.com]

--- On Sat, 4/11/09, Don A <donald_astelle@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 5 Other Reasons the Boston Globe
> Faces Closure 
> This article has been making it's way around the
> blogs.

    All the talk that the Globe is in danger because it's too liberal, etc., etc., is rubbish, usually put forth by people who have an axe to grind and/or know nothing about the newspaper business. There's no evidence of it. Don't bother looking for any, because you can't find what doesn't exist.

     The Globe's circulation decline tracks what's going on with other major metro dailies. When you add the print circulation to visitors to boston.com, the decline is less than in many markets. Boston.com is one of the most widely used and successful newspaper web sites. But, like the newspaper industry as a whole, the advertising there doesn't produce any substantial revenue within the company's overall picture.

     Now the bottom has fallen out of print advertising, same as all across the newspaper industry. That's the biggest problem for the industry right now -- not declining circulation. Classified ads, traditionally the biggest source of ad revenue, are nearly extinct. And advertising traditionally provided about 75 percent of a newspaper's revenue. 

     Each paper has its particular situation, and the Globe has the misfortune of being owned by the NYT Company, which faces its own impending financial nightmare and is trying to save itself anyway it can (How about imagining the NYT closing?). The NYT paid way, way, way too much for the Globe and hasn't, so far, been willing to take a loss and sell it.

      The Globe also is handicapped by operating in one of the slowest-growth (in population) regions in the country. A newspaper in Phoenix or Tampa or Las Vegas has seen population growth of 20 or 30 percent since 2000. Here, it's, what, 2, 3, 4 percent?

    Another particularity of the Globe is that it's expensive to put out one of the world's best newspapers and they've been too slow to make the drastic cutbacks that are being made all across the newspaper industry. If you think the Globe has thinned down and dramatically decreased in quality, you ain't seen nothing yet. But that's true everywhere.