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Boston Globe — news, coverage & facts — IJR

20th century

In 1912, the Globe was one of a cooperative of four newspapers, including the Chicago Daily News, The New York Globe, and the Philadelphia Bulletin, to form the Associated Newspapers syndicate.

In the early 1900s Charles H. Taylor was responsible for making the Globe the most used newspaper in New England. He went into greater details regarding social movements such as the Women's suffrage movement, while other competitors such as The Boston Post did not shine as much light on these social movements.

In the 1940 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, the Globe correctly projected the re-election of Republican incumbent Leverett Saltonstall, using methods first established by Taylor; rival The Boston Post called the race incorrectly for Democrat Paul A. Dever.

In 1955, Laurence L. Winship was named editor, ending a 75-year period of the role being held by the paper's publishers. In the next decade, the Globe rose from third to first in the competitive field of what was then eight Boston newspapers.

In 1958, the Globe moved from its original location on Washington Street in downtown Boston to Morrissey Boulevard in the Dorchester neighborhood.

In 1965, Thomas Winship succeeded his father as editor. The younger Winship transformed the Globe from a mediocre local paper into a regional paper of national distinction. He served as editor until 1984, during which time the paper won a dozen Pulitzer Prizes, the first in the paper's history.

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 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 The New York Times Company stock, but by 1999 the last Taylor family members had left management.

Boston.com, the online edition of The 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.

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.

21st century

Under two editors, Martin Baron and then Brian McGrory, the Globe shifted away from coverage of international news in favor of Boston-area news.

Globe reporters Michael Rezendes, Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer and Walter Robinson, and editor Ben Bradlee Jr. were instrumental in uncovering the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in 2001–2003, especially in relation to Massachusetts churches. The Boston Globe was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their work and the work of other staff, one of several the paper has received for its investigative journalism, and their work was dramatized in the 2015 Academy Award–winning film Spotlight, named after the paper's in-depth investigative division.

The Boston Globe was the paper that allowed Peter Gammons to start his Notes section on baseball, which has become a mainstay in many major newspapers nationwide. In 2004, Gammons became the 56th recipient of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award for outstanding baseball writing, given by the BBWAA; he 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.

On April 2, 2009, The New York Times Company threatened to close the paper if its unions did not agree to $20 million of cost savings. Some of the cost savings include reducing union employees' pay by 5%, ending pension contributions, and ending certain employees' tenures.

The Boston Globe eliminated the equivalent of 50 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, 2009, The New York Times Company announced it had reached a tentative deal with the Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents most of the 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, 2009, after The New York Times Company threatened to give the government 60 days' notice that it intended to close the paper. Despite the cuts helping to "significantly [improve]" its financial performance by October of that year, the Globe's parent company indicated that it was considering strategic alternatives for the paper, but did not plan to sell it.

As of 2010, the Globe hosted 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.

In September 2011, The Boston Globe launched a dedicated, subscription-based website at bostonglobe.com.

Starting in 2012, the Globe provided a printing and circulating service for the Boston Herald, and by 2013, was handling its rival's entire press run. This arrangement remained in place until 2018, ending after the acquisition of the Herald by Digital First Media.

In February 2013, The New York Times Company announced that it would sell its New England Media Group, which encompasses the Globe; bids were received by six parties, including John Gormally, then-owner of WGGB-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts, another group included members of former Globe publishers, the Taylor family, and Boston Red Sox principal owner John W. Henry, who bid for the paper through the New England Sports Network, which was majority owned by Fenway Sports Group and the Boston Bruins. However, after the NESN group dropped out of the running to buy the paper, Henry made his separate bid to purchase the Globe in July 2013.

On October 24, 2013, he took ownership of the Globe, at a $70 million purchase price, and renamed the venture Boston Globe Media.

On January 30, 2014, Henry named himself publisher and named Mike Sheehan, a prominent former Boston ad executive, to be CEO. As of January 2017, Doug Franklin replaced Mike Sheehan as CEO, then Franklin resigned after six months in the position, in July 2017, as a result of strategic conflicts with owner Henry.

In July 2016, the 815,000-square-foot headquarters in Dorchester was sold to an unknown buyer for an undisclosed price. The Globe moved its printing operations in June 2017 to Myles Standish Industrial Park in Taunton, Massachusetts. Also in June 2017, the Globe moved its headquarters to Exchange Place in Boston's Financial District.

In July 2022, James Dao, a senior editor with 30 years of experience at The New York Times, was named the editorial page editor, succeeding Bina Venkataraman.

In November 2022, The Boston Globe announced that NPR news chief Nancy Barnes would replace Brian McGrory as editor.

From September 1, 2022, to August 31, 2023, the Globe's combined print and digital circulation for weekdays increased by 2.7%, to 346,944, and for Sundays it rose by 1.3%, to 408,974. There are more than 245,000 digital-only subscriptions, an increase of about 10,000 since February 2022.

Incidents of fabrication and plagiarism

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. The Boston Globe editors found that Barnicle had fabricated a story about two cancer patients, and Barnicle was forced to resign. Columnist Jeff Jacoby was suspended by the Globe in 2000 for failing to fully credit non-original content used in his column. The Globe was careful not to label it plagiarism, as in fact Jacoby had explained in his emailed version that his column represented a corrected version of similar, well-known pieces which had been written on the topic for over a century. The Globe in fact received sharp criticism over what was perceived in many quarters as an over-reaction in this case.

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 from a city councilor's presentation before they were verified. The photos had already been found by other news organizations to be from an internet pornography site.

In the spring of 2005, the 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 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.

Columnist Kevin Cullen was suspended by the Globe in 2018 for embellishing claims he made on radio and in public appearances related to the Boston Marathon bombing.