Taxing Times may be pushing Boston Globe sale

If Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Janet Robinson are the royalty of the New York Times empire, then Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute is fast becoming the little boy who points out the emperor and the empress have no clothes.

Earlier this year, it was Edmonds - Poynter's Media Business Analyst - who bared the truth that the supposed $85 million the Times said the Globe would lose this year was a dubious figure likely padded out by paper losses in addition to real ones. At the time, the Times was negotiating with the Newspaper Guild over $10 million in givebacks, which it eventually won. OK, so Edmonds' story didn't save the Globe's unionized workforce much heartache, but hey, at least they had the satisfaction of knowing they were being scammed instead of just suspecting.

Now Edmonds has taken aim at Sulzberger and Robinson's latest bit of malarky: Their insistence that they are in no hurry to sell the Globe.

In his latest column on Poynter Online, Edmonds writes that tax considerations could be pushing the Times to sell the Globe by the end of the year. The Times' asset-dumping ways - it sold WQXR-FM for $45 million this summer and is expectecd to get rid of its 17 percent share of the Red Sox for a tidy profit as well - carry some serious tax considerations, he writes. That means writing off the huge losses the paper will incur from selling the Globe will come in handy on the other side of tax ledger.

If Edmonds is right, that means that the two surviving bidders for the Globe (Platinum Equity and the Taylor family) may have some additional leverage in forcing a quicker, cheaper sale from the Times.

File under: All the news that gives the Times fits.