Apres Nous, le Deluge

I suspect many will say that the Times's engagement of Goldman to shop the Globe is just a stalking horse--far worse ideas have been hatched*--but many will also be thinking wishfully.

No one at present seriously believes the Times will go out of business, but the real ball in this game is whether the Sulzberger family stays in control. Their preferred share structure guaranteed them control of the Board, but the Board is fading along with the Times's cash. Instead, the key question is whether they can raise enough cash to keep the ball rolling until things improve. To do so they will have no choice but to submit their good intentions to the judgment of bankers with less interest in the social standing of the Sulzberger family.

If they fail, a cash crisis in the next 12-18 months is not merely conceivable, but very possible.

I am sure that the Sulzberger family does not relish the thought of being the Globe's executioner, or the ones who sold the horse to the glue factory. But let's look at history here--when Neville Chamberlain traded Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Churchill called him a coward, but not many years later he traded it all to a bastard nearly as bad not to save the whole British Empire, but to secure the English Isles. Besides, if the Globe were to fade into little more than a glorified version of the Metro, which paper would their loyal readers switch their allegiance to?

* Imprimis, the Times's rejection of Jack Welch & co.'s circa-$500m bid to buy the paper in 2006, which, had they done it, would now be

How 'Bout That Boston Globe?

Last week my head of marketing told me that her husband was passing through the Detroit airport as GM announced its filing for bankruptcy, and he told her it was reminiscent of 9/11 and the Challenger disaster: people glued to televisions, quiet sobbing, general feelings of shock and disbelief, etc. But how? To those of us less emotionally-invested in this long-flailing behemoth, its death came as about as much of a surprise as, say, the arrival of Thanksgiving in late November.

The same can be said with increasing intensity about the newspaper business, a fact which seems to have eluded roughly 277 of the Guild members who voted against the cost-cutting concessions proposed by the Times company. We live in what are fortean times across much of the board (save for government, which toddles on like an obese vacationer at an Orlando buffet), and few corners of business are more apocalyptic than newspapers. They will not soon improve.

Those who sit at their desks off of Morrissey Boulevard and cannot imagine the Times company making the decision to close or otherwise divest themselves of the Globe should consider LSD, or other imagination-enhancing substances. Should they decide to sell it off, in this market the top bids will likely come from search-engine optimization firms and spam-blog advertising companies eager to leach off the traffic of a century of content.

My advice, to those who still wish to make a career in this business, is to go get a job with a publication owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you ask him what the fundamental purpose of the News corporation is, I would bet a Benjamin that he'd say "to make money." That is the sort of general you want to follow into battle.