This New England

The latest big media story hereabouts, reported in the Boston Herald and the Financial Times: That Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. might buy The Boston Globe, merge it with News Corp.'s Ottaway chain (The Cape Cod Times, et al.), then shut the Herald, which is owned and run by Murdoch's great friend and sometime business associate, Pat Purcell. Murdoch could obtain tremendous new clout running the only large daily paper in New England's leading city.

The Herald's dramatic plant site, on the Southeast Distressway at the very entrance to downtown Boston, has tremendous value, though not necessarily as a place to print and truck papers from. Indeed, it might be worth $150 million, or more, though the terrible economy might have brought that down in the past few months.

That this was reported in the Herald suggest something's really going on. But wouldn't Arthur Sulzberger, The Times's head honcho, feel humiliated in selling, for a few million, to his great adversary Mr. Murdoch the outfit his company once bought for $1.3 billion? Maybe, but there are only so many offices you can rent out to CPAs and lawyers in the oversized Times Building on the West Side of Manhattan.
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Could happen! Meanwhile, executives at The Globe must be thinking that it's past time to stop giving away their unique news content on the Web. Something's gotta give. Big metro newspapers are starting to think that suicide is not a very good business model after all.

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Think of the innumerable abandoned roads and rights of way in New England, mostly in the woods, that could be used for other things -- as public hiking trails, bike paths, even stretches of railroad or regular road.

(Picture courtesy of the New England Council, the region's leading advocacy group for business -- and a terrific source of information on our six-state empire.)

Vermont will be dealing with this issue intensely in the next few months:

Municipalities there have until July 2009 to map them or they become "unidentified corridors." That means that such corridors will revert to the surrounding landowners in 2015 unless they're reclaimed.

The Bennington Banner, a fine little paper, has reported on how this affects the tiny town of Readsboro, which may buy antique maps to try to clarify where exactly these old byways are. (Local folk often have pretty good vague ideas.)

Many New England towns old enough to have cellar holes of farmhouses in their second-growth woods have lots of these old roads, many of them partly overgrown with sumac and other dubious plants. Somebody ought to use satellite and other aerial photographic technology to show them in a coffee-table book.

It's also good news for the surveying profession.

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An ex-executive at Merrill Lynch who flew away with a $25 million golden parachute after just three months of work has purchased a $37 million Park Avenue pad. Peter Kraus got a $25 million buyout from Merrill Lynch when the company was sold to Bank of America in the financial crash in September, the New York Post reported.

Your bailout money at work!

 Tags  Boston Globe Boston Herald Merrill Lynch Murdoch Peter Kraus Purcell Readsboro Vermont's abandoned roads

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