Shold the Bosox buy the Boston Globe? AP Photo/MarySchalm
This is kind of an odd story from a couple of different angles. First and foremost the New York Times owns a 17.75 stake in the Boston Red Sox. The Times also happen to own the Boston Globe. For some reason John Henry, principal owner of the Fenway Sports Group, who owns the Sox, appears pretty desperate to buy back the Times company stake in his baseball team. So desperate that he has told the times that he would purchase the Boston Globe as part of the deal to get that 17.75% of the Red Sox back.
This raises some interesting questions, the first on which seems to be why Henry would want to buy a newspaper when that entire industry is failing. There doesn’t seem to be anyway to make a daily paper profitable in the era of the internet and 24/7 access to any news story one can think of.
The second question seems to be should sports franchise owners really own and by extension employ the people who are going to write about them? This would seem to lead to overly positive articles being written about the team even if they didn’t deserve it. Moves like this one could further erode the already weakened journalistic ethics in our country. I would be unwilling to write a story slamming the owner of a sports franchises if he was also signing my paycheck.
For my own journalistic ethics I should inform my readers that examiner.com is owned at least in part by Phillip Anshultz who owns The Los Angeles Galaxy and part of the Houston Dynamo of the MLS, he also owns a stake in the Los Angeles Lakers. Granted I work for a separate company then the one that holds the sports franchises, but that is a pretty fine line.
On top of that this has been tired already. Remember way back when Disney, owners of ESPN, bought NHL and MLB franchises? All that came of that were a couple of pretty bad Emilio Estevez movies and way too many stupid cracks by Sports Center anchors.
In the end though if Anshultz can own this website that features many sports writers, for many different sports, then Henry should be allowed to spend his company’s money on purchasing a failing newspaper. Hopefully he can find the right management group to get that paper turned around. The daily newspaper is large part of our daily routines and it would be sad to see them disappear for ever.
We must also remember that Henry was on of the principals in one of the ugliest scenes in MLB history. Henry was the owner of the Florida Marlins and was going to let MLB Commissioner Bud Selig contract his team, rather then spend the time and money it would have taken to rebuild that team. Instead he sold the team to the owner of the Montreal Expos and used the profits and his partnership with the New York Times to purchase the Red Sox.
Knowing that history if I were employed by the Boston Globe I would be very nervous. Not only because the entire industry is collapsing but the fact that Henry doesn’t seem to have the patience to build up a business the right way, at the very least he hasn’t shown that kind of patience with his sports business.
With that being said I think Henry has done a fine job as owner of the Red Sox, and in his partnership with Jack Roush of NASCAR when they formed Roush Fenway Racing.
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