Boston.com has been a free news site from the time that The Boston Globe launched it in 1995. Today, after experimenting with a soft paywall for the past year, the site will be converting to a mostly paid outlet. The change is indicative of how digital advertising has lost much of its value and of how the rise of AI search has deprived news organizations of click-throughs.
“It’s going to be a lower-price option,” Boston Globe Media chief executive Linda Henry told me in an interview. “It [Boston.com] is a much smaller newsroom than the Globe, but we still think it provides an important service to our community, and we want to continue providing it. And without consumer revenue, the numbers don’t work.”
Current Globe subscribers will be charged $32 a month if they opt for digital access to the Globe, Boston.com and Boston magazine, which Globe Media acquired in January 2025. Boston.com will cost $10 a month as a standalone product. And if readers are looking only for digital access to BoMag, the price will be $24 a year, although that’s in the process of being raised to $30.
Seth Moulton, left, and Ed Markey at Thursday’s Senate debate, sponsored by WCVB-TV, The Boston Globe and WBUR. Photo via YouTube.
As I wrote on Wednesday, The Boston Globe’s endorsement of U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton over incumbent Ed Markey in the Democratic Senate primary was a bit of a surprise, although it fits within a tradition of counterintuitive endorsements dating back through several different ownership groups.
Now, though, longtime Democratic political figure George Bachrach is claiming that Globe owners John and Linda Henry may have been motivated by an undisclosed conflict of interest: Since September 2023, Seth Moulton’s wife, Elizabeth Moulton, has been the chief talent and people officer at Elevate, a sports and entertainment consulting firm. In April 2024, Elevate acquired Fenway Sports Management’s Consulting Group. John Henry is the principal owner of FSM as well as the Boston Red Sox.
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton. Photo (cc) 2019 by Marc Nozell.
Endorsements matter in lower-profile races because voters might genuinely be looking for guidance.
Follow-up: A longtime politico alleges the Globe had a conflict in its Seth Moulton endorsement.
For instance, The Boston Globe’s endorsement of Lori Trahan and Jake Auchincloss might have been key factors in their first congressional victories, given that there was no incumbent and there were multiple candidates running. On the other hand, The New York Times’ double endorsement of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries stands out as an exercise in futility.
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In two weeks we’ll know which category the Globe’s endorsement of U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton (sub. req., but this is free) in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate fits into. The incumbent, Ed Markey, remains popular despite his advanced age: he leads Moulton by a 28-point margin, according to the latest WCVB-TV/UMass Amherst poll, and the Globe/Suffolk University poll (sub. req.) has Markey up by 14. Moreover, endorsements matter less in high-profile contests — president, governor, senator — than they do when voters are less familiar with the candidates.
I started teaching full-time in 2005. Back then, large piles of The Boston Globe were distributed across Northeastern’s campus. Because students were able to pick up a free Globe on the way to class, I could ask them to bring the paper and be familiar with the main stories of the day.
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Those stacks disappeared years ago. Northeastern worked out a deal for discounted digital subscriptions for students, and I and most of my colleagues in our journalism school required them. But free distribution didn’t return until earlier this year, when Northeastern renegotiated its arrangement with the Globe. Now Northeastern picks up the cost of a digital subscription, and it is free to students, faculty and staff. I actually canceled the paid subscription we’d had since the mid-’80s (digital-only in recent years) and made the switch.
Eight years after my book “The Return of the Moguls” was published, what is the state of newspaper ownership by civic-minded billionaires? Jon Keller of WBZ-TV (Channel 4) put that question to me on his “Keller at Large” program, which was broadcast Sunday morning.
My answer: not what I had hoped. John and Linda Henry have proved to be good stewards of The Boston Globe, and another billionaire sports owner, Glen Taylor, has similarly revived The Minnesota Star Tribune. But Jeff Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post has taken a disastrous turn after 10 good years, and other masters of the universe have failed to step up.
Jon and I talked about some other media-related topics as well, including:
◘ The rise of independent local-news projects, especially in affluent suburbs. News deserts, unfortunately, persist in rural areas and urban communities of color.
◘ A New England Muzzle Award I recently gave Gov. Maura Healey for proposing to prevent public access to birth, death and marriage records for many decades — overturning a tradition of openness that dates back Puritan times.
◘ A crisis at the Internet Archive, as more than 300 local newspapers have blocked access in order to prevent AI companies from scraping their content without compensation.
Portrait of Jeff Bezos (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
If The Washington Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, ever decides he wants to take journalism seriously again, then he might take a look at a handful of large regional papers that have charted a route to sustainability against the strong headwinds that continue to buffet the news business.
Perhaps the most important difference between these papers and the Post — and the hundreds of other shrinking media outlets owned by corporate chains and hedge funds — is that they are rooted in the communities they cover. Whether owned by wealthy people or run by nonprofits, they place service to their city and region above extracting the last smidgen of revenue they can squeeze out.
Although I could add a few to this list, I am mentioning five large regional newspapers as examples of how it’s possible to succeed despite the long-term decline in the economics of journalism.
You can count on one hand the number of independently owned large metro newspapers that are doing reasonably well and continuing to grow. Among them is The Boston Globe. Today’s print edition features a full-page ad consisting of a year-end message from Linda Henry, the CEO of Boston Globe Media, in which she lays out a few intriguing hints about what’s to come in 2026. (I have not seen it online or in an email, at least not yet.)
Among the goals she lays out for the coming year: “Deepening coverage of Boston’s neighborhoods and expanding our presence across New England.” More city coverage would certainly be welcome. But I’m especially interested in her focus on New England.
The Globe’s Rhode Island and New Hampshire coverage have been valuable additions to the paper’s mission. Its reporting on the recent mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was not only comprehensive and well-executed, but it also helped inform its coverage of what turned out to be a related killing in Brookline. So what’s next?
John Henry on the Jumbotron after the Red Sox won the 2007 World Series. Photo (cc) 2007 by Patrick Mannion.
Brian McGrory’s return to The Boston Globe represents just the latest chapter in his relationship with the paper’s owners, John and Linda Henry. The once-and-future editor actually recruited John Henry, the principal owner of the Red Sox, to purchase the Globe after it was put on the market by the New York Times Co. in 2013. I reported on that in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.” GBH News published an excerpt, and I’m bringing it back for an encore this morning.
How John Henry Overcame His Doubts And Decided To Buy The Boston Globe
GBH News | May 18, 2018
Rumors that The Boston Globe might be for sale began circulating as far back as 2006, when a group headed by retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch, who was a Boston-area native, and local advertising executive Jack Connors was reported to be nosing around. At the time, the Globe was said to be valued at somewhere between $550 million and $600 million, vastly more than the price John Henry paid seven years later.
But the New York Times Co. wasn’t selling — at least not yet. The following year, Ben Taylor, a former publisher of the Globe and a member of the family that had owned it from 1873 until selling it to the Times Co. 80 years later, told me in an interview for CommonWealthmagazine that he might be interested in returning to ownership in some capacity if the Globe were put on the market. But he added that he thought such a development was unlikely. “I can’t imagine a scenario where that would be an opportunity,” he said, “but you never know, I guess. Stranger things have happened.”
Ben Taylor and his cousin Stephen Taylor, also a former Globe executive, became involved in a bid to buy the paper in 2009 when the Times Co. finally put the paper on the market. So did a Beverly Hills, California-based outfit known as Platinum Equity. With the Taylors thought to be undercapitalized and with Platinum having gutted the first newspaper it bought, the San Diego Union-Tribune, Globe employees were understandably nervous about their future.
Although it was not a matter of public knowledge at the time, there was also a third possibility. After the Times Co. put up the Globe for sale, Brian McGrory, a popular columnist who was then serving a stint as the paper’s metro editor, decided to call around town to see if any public-spirited business executives might be interested. Among those he contacted was John Henry.
“I asked him at that time why he wouldn’t flip the paradigm,” McGrory told me. “It used to be that newspapers would own sports franchises. Why not have a sports franchise owner own a newspaper? Because without a healthy Boston Globe, which causes community discussion about a sports team — I made the argument, right or wrong; I have no idea if it was right — the value of a sports team might be diminished. And I did it because I thought he would be a very thoughtful, steady owner.”
I’ve now received a copy of a statement that Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry has sent to the staff. She splits the difference on the “interim” issue: Brian McGrory will be fully back as the Globe’s editor, but he’ll also be on an “extended leave of absence” from Boston University. (Here’s my earlier post.) Her full statement follows.
We are thrilled that Brian McGrory will be rejoining our organization as editor of the Globe, starting January 5th, 2026.
Brian, as many of you know, brings a strong record of leadership and innovation from his prior time at the Globe, and will return with an enhanced set of experiences from his current work in academia and from the increasingly vital sector of nonprofit news. His career reflects a deep commitment to this institution and the city and region that we cover.
Brian spent 34 years with the Globe in his prior run. He started in 1989 as a reporter in the then-South Weekly section, rising to general assignment, a roving national reporter role, White House correspondent, signature metro columnist, editor of our metro department, and then Editor from 2012 to early 2023. During his tenure as Editor, he successfully navigated dramatic industry change while overseeing coverage of massive regional and national stories. He worked with the entire organization to position the Globe as the paper of interest rather than a conventional paper of record, always pressing the newsroom to be relentlessly interesting. During this stretch, the Globe essentially reinvented its coverage, with new beats, a new outlook, and a far stronger emphasis on its digital report, while winning multiple Pulitzer Prizes and rapidly growing its base of digital subscribers.
Brian’s post-Globe life has been very active. As the chair of the Journalism Department at Boston University and a professor of the practice, he has launched the Local News Initiative, an ambitious effort designed to foster collaboration among local nonprofit and independent news organizations across New England. A key component of this work is the BU Newsroom, which Brian launched last year. That newsroom, with a newly hired editor in chief, has produced more than 400 student-written stories published with local nonprofit and independent news organizations, each story professionally edited before it leaves BU. Brian plans to keep his hand in this initiative going forward.
We’re especially enthused about Brian’s extensive experience from multiple leadership roles at The Baltimore Banner, which has quickly become one of the country’s largest nonprofit news organizations since its launch just a few years ago. Brian has served as a board member, strategic adviser, interim CEO, and as interim editor this past summer. The Banner won its first Pulitzer Prize in May and has rapidly grown its subscriber base.
It’s worth noting that Brian is returning to the Globe as the Editor, not in an interim role, and we are grateful to the leadership of Boston University for granting him an extended leave of absence.
We know well of Brian’s passion for the Globe and his love of Boston, and how the two fit together. We are excited to welcome Brian back, and I look forward to the work that our world-class newsroom will continue to do to help our community thrive.
The Boston Globe just published the news that Brian McGrory will be returning as editor. McGrory left in early 2023 to become chair of Boston University’s journalism department. His return means that he’ll replace Nancy Barnes, who announced last week that she’d be stepping aside.
“Brian’s passion for the Globe and his love of Boston are deeply intertwined,” Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry said in a statement quoted by the Globe story. “We are thrilled to welcome Brian back and look forward to the work our world-class newsroom will continue to do under his leadership.”
What is most interesting about the article is that it contains not one word about this being an interim move. It sounds like McGrory is back at the helm. (Follow-up: In a statement to her employees, Linda Henry says that McGrory will be the permanent, not the “interim,” editor of the Globe, and that he has taken an extended leave from BU.)
McGrory was editor of the Globe from 2012 to 2023. The paper produced extraordinarily good work during those years, and McGrory was well-liked by the staff. He takes over at a time when the Globe’s strong growth in digital subscriptions has fizzled out.
I would attribute that more to the Globe’s mediocre UX than to its journalism, but this is a time when the paper needs inspirational leadership. Barnes got mixed reviews on that front, although I know that she had both supporters and detractors in the newsroom.
