A lightly publicized effort to buy the Boston Globe from the New York Times Co. continues to inch forward.
Casey Ross, writing in the Globe, reports that businessman Aaron Kushner is prepared to offer more than $200 million for the Globe, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester and Boston.com. That’s considerably more than the $35 million figure that was bandied about two summers ago, which the Times Co. ultimately chose to walk away from.
No one even knows if the Sulzberger family would consider selling the Globe at this point, and Kushner is just a guy with money. What makes his bid interesting is that he’s pulled into his group such people as former Globe publisher Ben Taylor, his cousin Stephen Taylor, a former Globe executive, and Ben Bradlee Jr., a former top editor. (The Taylors were also involved in one of the efforts to buy the Globe two years ago.)
As Ross notes, the Globe is doing better today than it was during the crash-and-burn summer of 2009, though it’s hardly out of the woods. A lot of us would welcome a return to local ownership as long as that wouldn’t presage either a wholesale dismantling or a diminution of news standards and values. Kushner sounds serious about wanting to reinvent the Globe, though I suspect he’s kidding himself if he thinks he’s got some secret formula.
Earlier this year, Katherine Ozment profiled Kushner for Boston magazine. He did not, shall we say, come across as the second coming of Gen. Charles H. Taylor. Nevertheless, this is an intriguing moment in the life of the region’s dominant media organization.
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Sounds like Mr. Kushner absorbed a lot of the local zeitgeist while he was getting his degrees at Stanford. I will leave it to others as to whether that is a good thing.
I’m sorry but I can’t help but remember that in the original “Get Smart”, Don Adams would tell him mother-in-law that he was a greeting card salesman because he couldn’t tell her he was a secret agent. How ironic.
“…the region’s dominant media organization.”
Isn’t that something like being the area’s most important pond ice concern?