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THE TIMES AND THE BOTTOM LINE

When the New York Times Company bought the Boston Globe a dozen years ago amid widespread belief that the Globe’s ruling Taylor family had found its white knight, a Globe story quoted then-company-chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger telling shareholders that "We have no intention of going into Boston and telling them how to run The Boston Globe.... We’re not buying something that’s broken and needs fixing."

Over the years, however, the Sulzberger family has tightened the reins around its premier New England property. The stunner came in the summer of 1999 when the Times Company, citing different management approaches, suddenly replaced publisher Ben Taylor with Gilman, then a senior vice-president of operations at the Times. Two years later, that control was cemented when Gilman hired Baron, the first Globe editor in memory with no previous experience at the paper, to replace then-editor Matt Storin.

These days, Times Company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. — whose tenure has already been tainted by the Jayson Blair scandal and by Judy Miller’s transformation from media martyr into pariah — must deal with the systemic stagnation afflicting the industry. In November, Editor & Publisher magazine reported that more than 2000 jobs had been lost at major or mid-size papers alone in 2005. Almost every day it seems, Jim Romenesko’s eagerly scoured spot on the Poynter Institute’s Web site posts another layoff memo signed by a regretful newspaper executive and another article predicting the printed page will go the way of the dodo bird and the Edsel. (This week’s grim tidings came from a Newsday story with the following lead: "If you are reading these words on a sheaf of brittle sheets, with the ink seeping into your fingerprints, you are participating in an antique ritual that may be heading toward its final act.")

Saddled with a staggering stock price, the Times Company has responded with the ax. In September, just four months after announcing 190 job cuts, the company declared that it was losing another 500 positions. While the Globe newsroom was largely spared in the first reduction, it lost 36 spots (32 buyouts and four unfilled vacancies) as part of 160 job cuts at the Times Company’s New England Media Group in this round. The Times casualty count was about 45 newsroom positions and 250 overall jobs at the New York Times Media Group.

In the midst of all this, on December 13, the Globe suddenly announced that Mary Jacobus, the 48-year-old publisher of the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, would succeed Rick Daniels — who’s been moved to a new upper-level administrative position — as president and general manager of the Globe. Among the rank-and-file, there’s much curiosity about Jacobus’s hire. (She did serve on the board of the Audit Bureau of Circulations with New York Times Company CEO Janet Robinson, and Gilman says "there’s been a longstanding knowledge, awareness, and working relationship among people in our company with her.") And there was a little disbelief — perhaps some geographic snobbery — that the Globe would go headhunting in the heartland to find a top business executive. As Jacobus started, the Globe’s chief advertising officer, Mary Jane Patrone, announced that she will be leaving after 30 years at the paper.

Certainly Globe numbers have not been pretty. Circulation for the six months ending in September 2005 showed a daily drop to 414,225 from 451,471 a year earlier, and a Sunday slide from 707,813 to 652,146 during the same period. (The Globe’s daily decline of 8.2 percent was larger than the average national drop of 2.6 percent and the paper attributes a good chunk of the decrease to a decision to cut bulk sales to third parties.) Recent year-to-date ad-revenue numbers released in December show the company’s New England Media Group revenues slumping from the previous year, while ad dollars grew at both the New York Times Media Group and the Regional Media Group. Still, the New England Media Group is an operation with double-digit profit margins.

"The Boston economy has lagged behind the rest of the country in what is already a mature market," says Gilman. "There is intense media competition in Boston. I think this is really affecting everyone."

The Globe has been involved in new enterprises this past year, most notably the partnership with the free Metro daily tabloid and the creation of Sidekick, a daily entertainment-oriented insert that has generated distinctly mixed reviews — both of which are designed to appeal to that elusive young reader who is giving newspaper executives the flop sweats. Noticeably slow to create a working relationship between its Boston.com Web site and its print journalists, the paper has now assigned several Web editors to key departments. Baron acknowledges that "we need to turn our newsroom into a multi-media operation, not just a newspaper operation."

On the key question of whether more cuts loom, Baron says "it’s very hard to predict the future on these sorts of things. The economic pressures on the business remain, they’re intense. The fact is, everybody in the media environment is facing this."

New York Times Company spokeswoman Catherine Mathis chooses her words very carefully, saying "There are no more cuts planned at the Globe at this time."