Pagliuca In Group That May Buy Globe

I love the Globe. Read it everyday. Never could stand Shaughnessy, like everybody else.
But as an investment, the Globe has everything going wrong. The winner will be the low bidder. The high bidder will lose their shirts and the low bidder will still have their cash when the price comes down another 50%.

It still needs talented content providers but the business model is so broken it can’t afford to pay that talent. So if the cost is wrestled into surviving shape the content providers will be gone or so morale shot that the product will fail. You can see this happening little by little every day.

Jordan Marsh and Filene’s are gone. Shreve Crump Low is gone. Somebody will figure out how to deliver content, which we all want, for a price that we will pay but that isn’t going to be a newspaper.

What ails the newspaper industry is corporate ownership, plus the unrealistic profit expectations that highly-leveraged purchases necessitate. A private buyer can succeed, but only if they can get into the paper right – where they can do 10 percent in a tight advertising environment and survive. The days of pulling 30 percent a year out of newspapers are over.

Pags is a funny guy…I saw him drive home from the Celtics parade last year in a Mazda minivan. I liked that.

FYI –
Shreve, Crump & Low is certainly not gone. It’s alive and well and located at the corner of Boylston and Berkeley Streets.