Will the NyTimes shut down the Boston Globe?

This is the newspaper that is dropped on my doorstep every morning. I haven't had the thrill up my leg about bringing it into my house to enjoy with my first cup of coffee for years. I read the sports page for the local sports teams and even that section gets occasionally political. Boston's heroic pitcher Curt Schilling showed up at events in New Hampshire in support of George W Bush for president in 2004. Dan Shaughnessy was given the task of berating Schilling in his sports columns ever since.

The front section is Democratic Talking Points 101. I get so angry at the bias in this section that I can only read it if I am in a self flagellating mood. The Op-Ed page is knee-slapping humor since it is written by the ghost of Saul Alinsky. The letters, always from Cambridge or the wealthy suburbs, are apoplectic missives reacting to some "cretin" who had the gall to suggest things may be getting better in Iraq or that this recession would have played itself out without bankrupting our future. I don't know what these letter writers will do if the Globe goes down, but I'd think about putting together a Western Suburbs Suicide Watch team.

I do feel sorry for the production workers at the Globe. They don't have to spill bogus rewrites about Abu Ghraib, or nucular, or Bush the chimp, onto a page each day - they have to muscle the paper out onto the streets from Midnight to 4 AM. I hope they land on their feet.

And there are still a few good writers at the Globe; Alex Beam - apolitical and outrageously clever/funny, Jeff Jacoby a brilliant conservative writer, I suspect feeling like a cashew sent down the wrong tube into a jar of peanuts, and Dan Payne and Todd Domke trading very clever opposing assessments of the political scene. I probably should have given others a chance but something told me it would be a waste of time.

If the Globe goes down I will forever have a fantasy. I will always wonder if all the great writers from that paper ever got together at a local bar over a few beers and denounced the overlords at the Globe and in the editorial departments for making them the exact opposite of the kind of good journalists they thought they could be coming out of J school.

If they ever collaborated to write a book about how journalism died at the Boston Globe it would be a best seller and probably a guide for journalism schools 10 years from now when the pendulum makes a swing back.