The plight of print media–trumped by technology and popular culture–is a familiar one. But how sobering, even to insiders, in seeing what the Boston Globe, one of America’s iconic dailies, sold for the other day. The Globe, which was purchased by the New York Times in the 1990s for $1.1 billion, was sold this month for $70 million.
So much for all those kudos that came the Globe’s way in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing. In the midst of a CNN meltdown, a talking-head frenzy and a blogging food fight, the Globe comported itself as real journalists covering real breaking news as real professionals. But it obviously didn’t really matter enough.
Interesting, of course, that the new owner is John Henry, who owns the Boston Red Sox, a different form of Boston icon, the news-making kind. But the Sox do more than play baseball. As Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy recently noted, ironically, on The Huffington Post: “The real issue is … how it manages the tricky task of reporting on a major business and civic organization that’s run by the paper’s new owner.”