Metro Smites Globe
The meltdown continues. Weeks after the Globe booted a story about the Metro‘s supposedly plummeting circulation, and days after the Globe booted another story about a Metro layoff/bloodbath that wasn’t, the Metro retaliates by running a story about how the Globe is planning to lay off “hundreds” of workers and raise the newsstand price of the paper to 75 cents. The Globe contends this is entirely false (though as the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly notes, they’re not ruling out layoffs).
(The hilarity is further elevated by the Metro‘s contention that “The Globe… owns 49 percent of Metro Boston,” which, at the risk of being nitpicky, is incorrect. The New York Times Company owns 49 percent of the Metro. Not the Globe.)
One begins to suspect a conspiracy. Was Metro editor Saul Williams, who wrote the piece yesterday, simply getting the broadsheet back for peddling damaging misinformation about his paper? Or did someone at the Globe deliberately feed him a bum tip to embarrass the commuter daily so badly that young people would throw it in the garbage in disgust and start reading adult papers again, causing the Metro‘s circ to drop to 170,000 (the number the Globe mistakenly published in the first salvo of this increasingly weird back and forth)?
Whatever went wrong here, I’d like to see more of it. In the weeks ahead, I predict reports on how the post-reorganized Metro will contain little but senile rants against youth and crude racial epithets written in crayon; that the Globe will scrap the A section altogether to make way for a triple-thick Sidekick; that the Metro‘s new publisher had so much dirt in his past that the Ella Baker House wouldn’t hire him to paint the porch; and that Globe editor Marty Barron was arrested, after (a source said) authorities found hundreds of asphyxiated golden retrievers mounded in the garage behind his home.
Now that’s a piece I’d pick up the Metro to read.
RELATED: Media Nation, Dan Kennedy’s blog, also weighs in, and notes that Saul Williams is standing by his story.
