‘Boston Globe’ to be sold to Red Sox owner Henry for $70 million

New York: New York Times Co., which put its Boston Globe newspaper up for sale earlier this year, has agreed to sell the publication to John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, for $70 million in cash.

add_main_imageThe deal, which also includes the Globe’s website, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and its website, Boston.com, a 49% stake in Metro Boston, and the Globe’s direct mail marketing company GlobeDirect, is expected to close in 30 to 60 days, the New York Times said in a statement.

Times Co. put the Boston Globe up for sale in February and hired Evercore Partners Inc. to manage the process, part of an effort to focus on its flagship New York Times media brand. Bids for the Globe were expected to be in the range of $100 million, people familiar with the matter said earlier this year.NextMAds

As a result of this agreement, we will be able to sharpen our company focus on and investments in The New York Times brand and its journalism, New York Times chief executive officer Mark Thompson said in the statement.

Interested parties included Rick Daniels, a former president of the Globe, and ex-Time Inc. chief executive officer Jack Griffin, in partnership with cousins Steven and Ben Taylor, whose family once owned the newspaper, the people said.

Advertising decline

New York Times, which bought the Globe for $1.1 billion 20 years ago, mostly in stock, is coping with an industrywide decline in advertising that has caused a drop in sales and stock prices.

The publisher, controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, has been working on a plan to sell the Globe since 2012 when it received an unsolicited bid from Daniels, the former Globe president, along with Heberden Ryan, a managing director of private-equity firm Boston Post Partners LLC, a person familiar with the matter has said. While their bid was about $100 million, it included contingencies that made it less attractive, the person said.

New York Times has rebuffed proposals that exceeded $100 million in the past. In 2011, Freedom Communications Inc. CEO Aaron Kushner, publisher of the Orange County Register and other California papers, offered more than $300 million, according to another person familiar with the deal who asked not to be identified because the matter was private. His offer included the assumption of both qualified and unqualified pensions. Times Co. turned down the offer because it didn’t include enough cash up front, according to another person, who also requested not to be named because the talks weren’t public. BLOOMBERGsixthMAds