The Boston Globe - History

History

The Boston Globe was founded in 1872 by six Boston businessmen, led by Eben Jordan, who jointly invested $150,000. The first issue was published on March 4, 1872 and cost four cents. Originally a morning daily, it began Sunday publication in 1877. In 1878, The Boston Globe started an afternoon edition called The Boston Evening Globe, which ceased publication in 1979.

The Boston Globe was a private company until 1973 when it went public under the name Affiliated Publications. It continued to be managed by the descendants of Charles H. Taylor.

In 1993, The New York Times Company purchased Affiliated Publications for US$1.1 billion, making The Boston Globe a wholly owned subsidiary of The New York Times' parent. The Jordan and Taylor families received substantial New York Times Company stock, but the last Taylor family members left management in 2000–2001.

Boston.com, the online edition of Boston Globe was launched on the World Wide Web in 1995. Consistently ranked among the top ten newspaper websites in America, it has won numerous national awards and took two regional Emmy Awards in 2009 for its video work. On August 6, 2009, several media outlets in Boston reported that Boston.com might start charging for its services.

In 1998, columnist Patricia Smith was forced to resign after it was discovered that she had fabricated people and quotations in several of her columns. In August of that year, columnist Mike Barnicle was discovered to have copied material for a column from a George Carlin book, Brain Droppings. He was suspended for this offense, and his past columns were reviewed. In their review, The Boston Globe editors found that Barnicle had fabricated a story about two cancer patients, and Barnicle was forced to resign.

Boston Globe reporters Mike Rezendes, Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer and Walter Robinson were an instrumental part of uncovering the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in 2001–2003, especially in relation to Massachusetts churches. They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their work, one of several the paper has received for its investigative journalism.

In 2004, the Globe apologized for printing graphic photographs that the article represented as showing U.S. soldiers raping Iraqi women during the Iraq war. The photos had already been found by other news organizations to be to be from an internet pornography site.

In the spring of 2005, The Boston Globe retracted a story describing the events of a seal hunt near Halifax, Nova Scotia that took place on April 12, 2005. Written by freelancer Barbara Stewart, a former The New York Times staffer, the article described the specific number of boats involved in the hunt and graphically described the killing of seals and the protests that accompanied it. In reality, weather had delayed the hunt, which had not yet begun the day the story had been filed, proving that the details were fabricated.

The Boston Globe is also credited with allowing Peter Gammons to start his Notes section on baseball, which has become a mainstay in all major newspapers nationwide. In 2004, Gammons was selected as the 56th recipient of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award for outstanding baseball writing, given by the BBWAA, and was honored at the Baseball Hall of Fame on July 31, 2005.

In 2007, Charlie Savage, whose reports on President Bush's use of signing statements made national news, won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

The Boston Globe has consistently been ranked in the forefront of American journalism. Time magazine listed it as one of the ten best US daily newspapers in 1974 and 1984, and the Globe tied for sixth in a national survey of top editors who chose "America's Best Newspapers" in the Columbia Journalism Review in 1999.

The Boston Globe hosts 28 blogs covering a variety of topics including Boston sports, local politics and a blog made up of posts from the paper's opinion writers.

On April 2, 2009, The New York Times Company, which owns The Boston Globe, said it would close The Boston Globe if its unions do not agree to $20,000,000 of cost savings. Some of the cost savings include reducing union employees' pay by 5%, ending pension contributions, ending certain employees' tenures. The Boston Globe eliminated the equivalent of fifty full-time jobs; among buy-outs and layoffs, it swept out most of the part-time employees in the editorial sections. However, early on the morning of May 5, The New York Times Company announced it had reached a tentative deal with the Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents most of The Boston Globe's editorial staff, that allowed it to get the concessions it demanded. The paper's other three major unions had agreed to concessions on May 3, after The New York Times Company threatened to give the government 60 days notice that it intended to close the paper.

On October 14, 2009, The New York Times Company announced it was terminating the sale of The Boston Globe saying the paper "has significantly improved its financial footing ..."

In September 2011, The Boston Globe launched a separate pay-walled website that used responsive design to work across mobile, e-readers and desktop web browsers. The design was created by Filament Group, Upstatement and Ethan Marcotte. In 2012, the Society for News Design selected BostonGlobe.com as the world's best-designed news website.