Why The Boston Globe may be shutting down

The layout of their web site is a symptom of the problem, but absolutely not the problem itself. The problem is the economics of news delivery, plain and simple.

As Doc Searls put it recently (and I'm paraphrasing): If you came to me today with a business model where you would cut down lots of trees to make paper, create content to print on this paper on huge presses, and deliver this content 12 to 24 hours after it was written to its consumers at their homes once or twice a day, I'd call you crazy.

So, the longer as the Globe keeps their presses running, the more their ultimate demise is sealed.

i live in boston. other than occasionally flipping through a dead copy in a coffee shop, i never by a newspaper. i consider boston.com more or less a tabloid site, or a good place to answer "what was with the fifty police officers storming the common yesterday?" type questions.

among many others, i do read nytimes.com quite often. it's a pretty well laid-out online newspaper.

too bad they won't share with their subsidiary.

And before I got to the ad-filled Boston Globe site, I was hit with a full page ad.