Twenty years ago, my mornings began with a short jaunt to the front door. With a quick bend at the waist, I retrieved my coveted prize, a neatly folded Boston Globe. The Globe was as much an integral part of my mornings, as my “large – regular” Dunkin Donuts coffee. I’d repeat my coffee and newspaper ritual seven days a week, with a special appreciation of both the size and substance of the Boston Sunday Globe, replete with news, politics, sports and typically boasting large real estate, help wanted, auto and classified sections. Some Sundays, it seemed as if the Globe weighed five pounds when retrieving it from its’ customary and usual position at the front door. And around that time, The New York Times purchased the prestigious Boston Globe, for over $1 Billion, less than a decade ahead of a rapidly emerging brick and mortar vs. Internet paradigm shift.
Times, technology and habits changed, for me and most Bostonians. As the Internet grew more pervasive, the Globe grew thinner and less substantial. Initially, I moved to delivery three days a week, then just Sundays. Some years later, I stopped the Globe completely, opting for the Sunday Times for a few more years. The cancellation call made me sad, I’d miss reading the Globe, and thought it a fine publication which I enjoyed for decades.
Fast forward to today, as the New York Times announced 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 a precipitous drop in ad revenue. As ads declined in newspapers, they shifted to the Internet, providing large revenue streams for Google and other search engines, websites and more recently, social media networks.
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 keen, if not eye opening investigative reporting. The likelihood that any traditional newspaper distribution model will work well in the future seems low. After all, cutting down trees, processing them into paper, printing and folding them, loading them onto trucks, and delivering them to houses seems rather absurd today, akin to the challenges of the US Postal Service delivering physical mail from Maine to Hawaii for under 50 cents.
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, pervasive, immediate (and often free) Internet based news is supplanting traditional newspapers. It’s unlikely this trend will ebb any time soon. And though I would have bet against it, I also changed to Starbuck’s coffee, eschewing the weaker Dunkin Donuts coffee offered at my former coffee shop venue, in favor of a more robust Venti. Though in Boston, many, many people still order their Dunkin Donuts coffee every morning, “Give me a lahge regular”, but then they check their news via Wi-Fi.