As deadline looms, will NY Times Co shut The Globe?

By Jason Szep and Ross Kerber - Analysis

BOSTON (Reuters) - Advertisements for The Boston Globe boast that a single news story can "take you away." But after Friday, the newspaper itself may be taken away and shut down after 137 years of publication.

The New York Times Co (NYT.N), which bought the Globe for $1.1 billion in 1993, threatened at the start of April to shut the money-losing, award-winning broadsheet unless the paper's 13 unions agree by Friday to $20 million in concessions.

As the deadline approaches, the future of one of America's most acclaimed regional newspapers looks unclear, illustrating deepening problems for an industry that has few answers for an accelerating, long-term shift of advertising to the Internet.

Names of potential buyers have surfaced only to disappear nearly as quickly, some worrying about finding a profitable financial model for a newspaper that won 20 Pulitzer Prizes and dominates news coverage in the six-state New England region but has faced steep drops in circulation.

"It's like trying to catch a falling knife," said Jack Connors, the former head of Boston ad agency Hill Holliday who was part of an attempt to buy the paper several years ago.

"I'm not a buyer" because of the Globe's uncertain financial situation, he added. "I don't know whether there's an economic reason to own it."

The Globe was on track to lose $85 million this year unless changes are made, according to the Times Co. That follows losses of $50 million last year, red ink that is buffeting the Times Co, which ended 2008 with $1.1 billion in debt. When the Times bought it, the Globe was one of the most profitable newspapers in the United States.

But many U.S. newspapers have lost 20 percent or more of their advertising revenue as readership shifts to online news. The Globe's average weekday circulation, for example, fell 14 percent to 302,638 for the six months to March 31 from a year earlier, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.