Leigh Montville on John Henry buying the Globe:

The news last week that The Boston Globe was sold was not a great surprise. The New York Times had been shopping the newspaper for a couple of years and various bidders had been mentioned in a number of stories. The news that John Henry, principal owner of the Red Sox, was the winning bidder also was not a great surprise. He has become part of the fabric of the city, a 63-year-old rich man about town, a close-lipped maker and shaker, lives in a mansion, is married (again) to a younger local woman. This was another addition to an interesting business portfolio.

The price that he paid for this addition was the great surprise.

“I can’t believe he bought our newspaper for $70 million,” I, a one-time sportswriter at The Globe, said to another one-time sportswriter at The Globe. “He gets all that real estate. He gets all of those trucks. He gets the rights to all of the stories, all of the pictures, the 22 Pulitzers, all of the past, plus the computer present and future of the pre-eminent voice in all of New England. The Times paid $1.1 billion for The Globe 20 years ago. He gets it for $70 million? The stories say that’s about four percent of whatThe Times paid.”

“He just gave Dustin Pedroia a $110 million contract extension for eight years,” the other one-time sportswriter said. “So he’s paying $50 million more for the starting Red Sox second baseman than he is for the pre-eminent voice in New England…”

This fact made the two of us feel very old.

John Henry buys the Boston Globe and the Graham’s sell the Washington Post.

Here’s David Remnick:

After talking with the board of directors, Donald Graham quietly began looking for a potential buyer around Christmas of 2012. “We were in our seventh consecutive year of declining revenues, and there was the question of, What could we do?” Graham told me. The company had bought Slate and Foreign Policy (and is holding on to them) and sold Newsweek (which changed hands again this weekend). “Our strategy had been to innovate like hell in digital and other businesses and offset the declines in print revenues. But Katharine said the declines were going to go on, for the eighth and ninth straight years. And so …”

The trends were violent and undeniable. Graham and Weymouth saw circulation drop from 832,332 average subscribers, in 1993, to 474,767. The newsroom staff was once more than a thousand; it is now around six hundred and forty. The paper is still capable of extraordinary journalism—in June, it broke the Edward Snowden-National Security Agency surveillance story, along with the Guardian, and, only last Sunday, scored the first interview with the leader of the Egyptian military coup, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, in which the general said, nervily, “you have turned your back on the Egyptians and they won’t forget it.” But the Post is clearly a diminished version of its old self. It is still serious and grounded, but not quite essential in the way its rival, the Times, remains.

And our pal Peter Richmond.

[Photo Credit: Lisa Provence]