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| New York Times not to sell Boston Globe |
| Lalit K Jha/PTI / Washington Oct 15, 2009, 14:36 IST |
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The New York Times announced that it has scrapped plans to sell The Boston Globe, which it was earlier trying to dispose off due to deep financial crisis, after significant improvement in its revenue.
NYT Chairman Arthur O Sulzberger Jr and chief executive Janet Robinson in a memo sent to its employees said the Globe's finances had improved after aggressive cost cuttings in recent months.
Prominent among these included new union contracts that saved $20 million, cuts in management compensation, and consolidation of printing plants. The Globe also increased revenue by significantly raising the price of newsstand and home delivery copies of the paper.
"With these strategic steps, the Globe is on track to achieve substantial savings and is on a path to a more secure financial future," Sulzberger and Robinson wrote yesterday.
"We know this has been a long and painful process, and we deeply appreciate the focus and dedication that you have all displayed over the past several months," they wrote.
The New York Times had put 137-year-old The Boston Globe – one of the prestigious and popular news papers in the US – on the market early this year as it went into a deep financial crisis. It even had to raise money from its new building in mid-town Manhattan, New York.
The decision to take the paper off the market, comes a week before the bids for the daily were due. The Boston Globe reported that this might be because the offers were too low.
"It was unknown what the final bids were but in a preliminary round each suitor offered about $35 million for the Globe and the T&G, plus the assumption of $59 million in pension liabilities. The Times Co had purchased the Globe for $1.1 billion in 1993, and the T&G for $296 million in 2000," it said.
The New York Times had announced to put the daily for sale after recession and migration of readers and advertisers to the Internet deeply hurt the Globe's advertising revenues.
"The once robustly profitable paper lost $50 million last year and was at one point on track to lose $85 million this year. By June, the Times Co had hired Goldman Sachs to manage a possible sale of the Globe and the T&G," the daily said.
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