NYT: Deal Reached to Keep Boston Globe in Print

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/business/media/07paper.html


Josh Reynolds/Associated Press

Cyn Goodenough of Cambridge, Mass., likes to read her Boston Globe in a local coffee shop.

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: May 6, 2009

The stare-down between The New York Times Company and workers at The Boston Globe reached its crucial moment Wednesday when the newspaper’s largest union agreed to vote on a package of painful wage, benefit and job security concessions that would head off the threatened closure of one of America’s premier newspapers, but could also presage significant layoffs.

The potential deal by no means resolves The Globe’s — or the company’s — problems. Globe workers said it was not clear to them that their colleagues would approve the givebacks, and even with concessions tentatively made by all the company’s unions, the paper would still be losing tens of millions of dollars a year and the company would still be struggling.

The Boston Newspaper Guild said Wednesday that it would put the deal before its members for a vote at an undetermined date, but people briefed on the union’s plans said it would not make a recommendation on how its members should vote.

The concessions would make it easier for the Times Company to sell The Globe, a prospect that has been discussed with a handful of potential buyers and their intermediaries, according to people briefed on those discussions, some of whom said the company had been actively shopping the paper around. The company declined comment, but executives have said that the company is open to selling The Globe for a small fraction of the $1.1 billion it paid for the paper in 1993.

But this tentative deal appears to forestall the imminent death of a civic institution that, even after years of cutbacks, remains the dominant news organization in New England and a local fixture as central to Boston’s self-image as white chowder and the Green Monster.

FULL story at link.

[virgogal]

1. Thank god.

[Qutzupalotl]

2. On a related note, a good use for your payroll tax cut savings

would be to subscribe to your local newspaper. They often pay reporters to watch the government, it's great.