Two Months Notice for Globe

With the Boston Globe in negotiations to save the paper over the weekend, The Washington Post reports on Monday "the Times Co. said that it will file today a required 60-day notice of the planned shutdown" of the Globe. The article notes that the move could be a negotiating ploy, but adds that the Times is also under pressure: "It recently mortgaged its new Manhattan headquarters, borrowed $250 million from a Mexican billionaire at 14 percent interest, laid off 100 newsroom staffers and cut salaries by 5 percent."

(UPDATE: WBUR reports that later in the day the Globe released a statement saying that having "reached agreement with six of the seven unions" involved, the paper would not be "making a filing today under the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.")

Given that and the reported $85 million the Globe is expected to lose this year, it seems remarkable that the paper could survive even if it does extract $20 million in cuts from the staff.

The Globe reports more hopefully "Globe negotiations continue" and the Times sits on the fence with "At Deadline, No Deal Yet on Boston Globe’s Future".

Sree Sreenivasan tweets "AM STUNNED: Howard Kurtz reports NYT preparing to shut down Boston Globe. Was a possibility, of course, but still..." and links to the Post story, amid a flurry of Boston Globe activity on Twitter.

The Chicago Tribune (four paragraphs), the Los Angeles Times and the Philly.com (the story doesn't appear to have made it into the Inquirer) run stories from the Associated Press, which must make Bostonians wonder when this story will create the sort of national outcry that last year's collapse of the Tribune brought about.