The New York Times And Its Suicide Fart

I just got the great news today out on the golf course that the New York Times has threatened to shut down the Boston Globe without significant union concessions.

The New York Times Co. has threatened to shut The Boston Globe unless the newspaper's unions swiftly agree to $20 million in concessions, union leaders said yesterday.

Executives from the Times Co. and Globe made the demands Thursday morning in an approximately 90-minute meeting with leaders of the newspaper's 13 unions, union officials said. The possible concessions include pay cuts, the end of pension contributions by the company, and the elimination of lifetime job guarantees now enjoyed by some veteran employees, said Daniel Totten, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Globe's biggest union, which represents more than 700 editorial, advertising, and business office employees.

The newspaper industry, which had already been struggling as readers and advertisers moved to the Internet, has been hard hit by the recession, and the Globe is no exception. The newspaper's advertising revenues have declined sharply in recent years; once robustly profitable, it is now losing money.

This week, the Globe newsroom completed cutting the equivalent of 50 full-time jobs. But the deteriorating economy has made the Globe's financial outlook much worse. Management told union leaders Thursday that the Globe will lose $85 million in 2009 unless serious cutbacks are made, according to a Globe employee briefed on the discussions. Last year the paper lost an estimated $50 million, the employee said.

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now there's so much material here that I could write 50 blog pages on the matter. But why would I waste my precious time doing such a thing?

All I wanted to do was highlight one point.

As you can see in the penultimate quote above, these newpaper dinosaurs just continue to blame everyone and everything but themselves. Sure it was just the economy and internet. It had nothing to do with bad management, specifically the terrible business decision to systematically muzzle and offend half of would-be customers!!!

And the NYT/Globe's woes have NOTHING at all to do with unionization and pensions!!!

They are asking for the *elimination of lifetime job guarantees* for some employees??? Who're the Morons who allowed them in the first place?

And why the bleep are newspaper delivery truck drivers unionized....in the first place?

The thing is, their unions probably did them in as much as anything. So a paper that spews agitprop all day long, for decades, met the fate of all statist enterprises. What irony! What justice!

There's a wonderful expression describing this.

No, not schadenfreude, that characterizes my feelings.

It's *hoist on one's own petard*.

I always mistakenly assumed that this referred to *hanging oneself*.

But it actually means to *blow oneself up with one's own bomb*.

And more accurately, a petard is a fart - according to its French etymology.

So yes, the NYT/Boston Globe did *hang itself*....

But that verbiage wouldn't properly capture the aroma we've had to take in all these years.



HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!