The Boston Globe

• 1. Introduction

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  The Boston Globe hit the streets for the first time on the 4th of March, 1872, priced at four cents. Six Boston businessmen had pooled $150,000 to launch it, and among them were figures whose names would become woven into the fabric of New England: Eben Dyer Jordan, founder of the Jordan Marsh department store, and Cyrus Wakefield, whose rattan company made him wealthy enough that an entire Massachusetts town was named after him. What those founders could not have known was that this modest local morning paper would one day topple a corrupt federal judicial nomination, expose the most consequential clerical abuse scandal in American history, and be bought and sold for sums that would have seemed fantastical to anyone paying four cents on that first March morning. How did a Boston newspaper become one of the most cited papers in the country? The answer runs through one family's grip on the presses, a series of editors who pushed harder than anyone expected, and a few reporters who refused to let powerful institutions off the hook.

• 2. The Taylor Dynasty

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  Charles H. Taylor arrived at the Globe in August 1873, hired by Eben Jordan as a temporary business manager. By December of that year he had signed a contract as general manager, and he never really left. Taylor served as the paper's first publisher until his death in 1921, a tenure of nearly five decades, and four of his descendants held the reins after him until 1999. That unbroken family stewardship shaped the Globe in ways that went beyond mere ownership. In the early 1900s, Taylor pushed the paper to cover social movements that competitors like The Boston Post barely acknowledged. He paid particular attention to the women's suffrage movement at a time when many editors considered it a fringe cause. The approach paid off practically as well as editorially. In the 1940 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, the Globe correctly projected the re-election of Republican Leverett Saltonstall using methods Taylor had pioneered, while the Post called the race for the wrong candidate. By 1955, when publisher William Davis Taylor named Laurence L. Winship as editor, it ended a 75-year stretch during which the publisher and editor had always been the same person. That shift opened the door to editorial leadership that did not answer to family interests in quite the same way, and the paper climbed from third to first among the eight Boston daily newspapers within a decade.

• 3. The Editor Who Transformed the Globe

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  Thomas Winship took over from his father in 1965 and held the editor's post until 1984. The younger Winship is credited with turning what was then a mediocre local paper into a regional paper of national distinction. One of his most consequential decisions came in 1967, when he made the Globe the first major American paper to editorially oppose the Vietnam War. That same year the paper made its first political endorsement, backing Kevin White in the Boston mayoral race. Winship also ended a long-running editorial tradition: starting with the Sunday edition in 1891, and extending to weekday editions in 1913, every lead editorial had been signed not by its author but by a fictional character named "Uncle Dudley." Winship dropped the practice in 1966. During his time as editor, the Globe won a dozen Pulitzer Prizes, the first in the paper's history. Time magazine placed the Globe among the ten best American daily newspapers in both 1974 and 1984. A 1999 national survey by the Columbia Journalism Review, in which top editors selected "America's Best Newspapers," put the Globe in a tie for sixth. By the time Winship stepped down, the paper had fundamentally changed its standing in American journalism.

• 4. Ownership, Money, and the New York Times

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  The Globe had been a private company for its entire first century. In 1973 it went public under the name Affiliated Publications, though the Taylor family kept its hands on the controls. The real break came in 1993, when The New York Times Company purchased Affiliated Publications for $1.1 billion, making it one of the most expensive print acquisitions in American history. The Jordan and Taylor families received substantial New York Times Company stock as part of the deal, but by 1999 the last Taylor family members had left management entirely. Twenty years after that $1.1 billion purchase, the value had collapsed. On the 2nd of April, 2009, The New York Times Company threatened to close the paper outright unless its unions agreed to $20 million in cost savings, including a 5% pay cut for union employees, an end to pension contributions, and the elimination of certain jobs. The paper cut the equivalent of 50 full-time positions. On the morning of the 5th of May, 2009, the company announced a deal with the Boston Newspaper Guild. By October of that year, the cuts had significantly improved the Globe's financial performance, but the parent company was already weighing its options. In February 2013, The New York Times Company announced it would sell. Six parties placed bids. John W. Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, eventually purchased the paper for $70 million on the 24th of October, 2013, a price that represented a loss of more than 90% of the 1993 purchase value.

• 5. Spotlight and the Church Scandal

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  In 2001, a Globe reporting team began work on what would become one of the most consequential pieces of American investigative journalism. Reporters Michael Rezendes, Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Walter Robinson, together with editor Ben Bradlee Jr., spent two years documenting systematic sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests, with a particular focus on Massachusetts churches. The investigation ran from 2001 through 2003 and drew international media attention. The Globe's entire staff, including the Spotlight investigative division that gave the project its name, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The work was dramatized in the 2015 film Spotlight, which won the Academy Award. That was not the Globe's first confrontation with powerful institutions. In 1966, it had won a Meritorious Public Service Pulitzer for campaigning against the confirmation of Francis X. Morrissey as a federal district judge. In 1975, it won the same prize for its coverage of the Boston school desegregation crisis. In 1972, the Spotlight Team had won for exposing political favoritism in Somerville, Massachusetts. The church investigation was the continuation of a long-standing institutional instinct toward accountability journalism, and it brought that instinct to a global audience.

• 6. Controversy and Self-Correction

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  The Globe's record includes significant failures of its own. In 1998, columnist Patricia Smith was forced to resign after editors discovered she had fabricated people and quotations across multiple columns. That same year, columnist Mike Barnicle was found to have copied material from a George Carlin book called Brain Droppings; a subsequent review of his past work revealed that he had also fabricated a story about two cancer patients, and he too resigned. In 2000, columnist Jeff Jacoby was suspended for using material without credit. In 2004, the paper apologized for printing unverified photographs that a city councilor had presented as showing American soldiers committing crimes in Iraq; the photos had already been identified by other outlets as coming from an internet pornography site. In the spring of 2005, the Globe retracted a freelance article about a seal hunt near Halifax, Nova Scotia, that was supposed to have taken place on the 12th of April, 2005. Weather had delayed the hunt, which had not yet begun when the writer filed the piece. In 2018, columnist Kevin Cullen was suspended for embellishing claims about the Boston Marathon bombing in radio appearances and public talks. The paper's willingness to force out or discipline its own writers did not immunize it from criticism, but it established a pattern of institutional response that acknowledged failure rather than defending it.

• 7. Press Freedom and the 2018 Campaign

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  In August 2018, the Globe's editorial board organized one of the most unusual coordinated responses in the recent history of American journalism. The board invited newspapers across the country to publish locally written editorials on the 16th of August, pushing back against President Donald Trump's characterization of the press as the "enemy of the people." Within days, more than 100 newspapers had pledged to participate. That number climbed to roughly 200, and by the day of the event, 350 papers published editorials. The Radio Television Digital News Association and its Voice of the First Amendment Task Force, representing 1,200 member organizations, encouraged their members to join. The campaign did not go uncontested. From the 10th through the 22nd of August, approximately 14 threatening phone calls were made to Globe offices, with the caller repeating the "enemy of the people" language and threatening to kill employees. On the 30th of August, the FBI arrested California resident Robert Chain in connection with the calls. In May 2019, Chain pleaded guilty in federal court to seven counts of making threatening communications in interstate commerce.

• 8. Digital Transition and the Globe Today

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  Boston.com, the Globe's online edition, went live on the World Wide Web in 1995. By 2009, it had won two regional Emmy Awards for video work. In September 2011, the Globe launched a separate subscriber-supported site, BostonGlobe.com, behind a paywall. The site was among the first major news websites to use responsive design, automatically adjusting its layout for different screen sizes. In 2012, the Society for News Design named it the world's best-designed news website. By December 2021, the Globe had 226,000 digital subscribers, among the highest for any metro newspaper in the country. From September 2022 through August 2023, combined print and digital weekday circulation rose 2.7% to 346,944, and Sunday circulation rose 1.3% to 408,974. The Globe has also expanded its media holdings. In January 2025, Boston Globe Media acquired Boston magazine from Philadelphia-based Metrocorp Publishing, a title known for its "Best of Boston" franchise and its long-form journalism over five decades. As of early 2026, Brian McGrory returned as editor, a role he had previously held from 2012 to 2023, bringing the paper's editorial stewardship back to a figure who had guided it through some of its most competitive years in the digital era.