Will Anyone Under 25 Miss the Boston Globe?

Last night was highlighted by a successful dinner party where for the first time in ages I cooked using recipes and the results were delicious. I even had to punt, skipping some unobtainable ingredients, but it was fun seeing those stuffed baby eggplants and scallops sitting on the plates.

I’ve been following the grim news out of Boston. The NY Times has thrown down the gauntlet and told their smaller sister paper the Globe that their unions have to either accept $20 million in cuts or they’ll shut the paper down. Wow! I dug into a few articles about it and found that the comments are as interesting as the sad story.

One of the biggest ‘challenges’ the Globe faces are very tough talking unions. There are some employees of the Globe who have jobs guaranteed for life. In this day and age, that’s a tough nut to swallow if you’re the NY Times and looking at losses of $50 million this year and projected $85 million next year. And the union chiefs in Boston had this to say when they were asked about their reaction to the ultimatum: “We’ve already made enough concessions and cut enough staff, now it’s time for the executives to lay off more staff and cut costs.”

The saddest thing though, is what most people under 25 think about the print edition. They don’t. One Arlington electrician said that he gets his news from the TV, and that the Globe is too heavy, too much reading for him. The heft, again and again in our streamlined go-go world, is just too much of a time suck and most of the young prefer to read it on the fly on line. A bad omen for future newsprint-based media in general.