This is probably entitled to its own post instead of being welded onto something else, as much of what follows was when I threw this out a month ago.

That was when The New York Times, its own financial distress exacerbated by the new technologies of the day demanded extraordinary concessions by the people who work at the Boston Globe with the threat to close down as great a newspaper as there has ever been in thirty days.

There appears to be room to hope that this threat may be over for now. We shall, as they say, see, but I must say that the smell of a rat is starting to float over all of this.  I am even more horrified to see the New York Times, of all things, employing these kind of tactics, but setting a deadline for Saturday, then Sunday and letting everyone know that Monday's paper could be the last one was intended to get the maximum concessions, but then, at the last minute, saying the deadline was not to shut the paper but to start some supposedly federally mandated 60 day clock (did the P-I or Rocky Mountain News have to do that?) which is subject to being withdrawn at any time, seems to be a bit of a scam.


The Newspaper Guild, seeing the "deadline" as illusory, got up and left the "negotiations" as well they should. This kind of tactic borders on an NLRA violation, I think. I would be interested in hearing what others who know more about these things and this particular situation may think.

(At the same time, the Times will win this thing: we all know that. I pray for the health of the Globe and its employees.)

I have railed about all of this for some time now  but I am certain that I cannot live without the Globe and the Times and the Washington Post and so on, and unclear that anyone else can, too.

My dad used to bring the Evening Globe home every night and I tore through it even at a very young age---mostly for the Red Sox and comics then. Today, the first thing I look at when I wake up is the Globe web site---first for the Red Sox and then other things.

But my soon to be 23 year old daughter, my doppleganger in so many ways, "reads" newspapers rarely and then almost always on line.

I am grateful for the huge amounts of information now available to me from my couch, and for the new voices I am able to read without getting newsprint on my fingers, but, with the greatest respect to all of you, I cannot rely on just your voices. I am aware of the fact that almost any newspaper article about something in which you are personally involved has radical mistakes in it which make one question how accurate the reports are where you have no personal knowledge, and the slippage in ethics, in standards, and in coverage is obvious and well known.

But we need newspapers: especially the likes of the Boston Globe. I cannot imagine how to get through the baseball season, or life itself without the Globe: without Derrick Jackson, Joan Venocchi or even Jeff Jacoby. What about the Sunday magazine? (Can you think of any other magazine that would put "brown bagging" on its cover?) Who told us about lawlessness in the Bush era? The Globe.

In the days before there was an internet, I could not walk within ten blocks of Times Square without going to the out of town newsstand to buy the paper, and when I worked downtown I browbeat a news dealer in the Trade Center into carrying the Globe, even showing disappointment over how long it took to restore his sale of the Globe after the first bombing of the Trade Center in 1993.

Those of you who find newspapers unnecessary can keep whistling past this graveyard.  I am not one of them, obviously, and hope very much that the Globe survives in the form, or close to it, that we have been used to for years.