At Not Just The News, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Not Just The News and how it is used.
Log Files
Like many other Web sites, Not Just The News makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Not Just The News does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.
DoubleClick DART Cookie
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Not Just The News.
Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Not Just The News and other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Not Just The News send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.
Not Just The News has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.
You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Not Just The News"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.
If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.
Some were born in the red zone, inheriting teams from their wealthy families. Some are lifetime businessmen who bought a franchise as a midlife vanity project. One is married to a Walmart heiress. Yet on the whole, NFL owners have one thing in common: their relative anonymity.
Here’s your chance to take your eyes off Goodell for a sec, and look at the public-financing hogs and brain-trauma deniers occupying luxury suites across America. In the vein of Major League Assholes, we took a stab at matrix-ifying NFL owners based on their political giving and their relative assholery. Look down below the chart to get the skinny on all the owners you love to hate.
AFC
Baltimore Ravens: According to the Washington Post, Steve Bisciotti “is, in many ways, a regular guy who happens to be very rich.” Like $ 1.8 billion rich. He sits courtside at University of Maryland basketball games and flies in his buddies on his private jet to join him. Bisciotti made his fortune by founding the country’s largest staffing company, Aerotek (now the Allegis Group), which in 2009 settled a class action suit with more than 1,000 former employees who claimed the company didn’t pay them for accrued leave time. (Aerotek paid out $ 1.2 million.)
When Baltimore made the Super Bowl last year, former Ravens coach Brian Billick had this to say of his old boss: “He’s a man’s man. He’ll go drink for drink, cigar for cigar.” And, apparently, arm caress for arm caress:
Buffalo Bills: When Ralph Wilsonbought an AFL franchise in 1959, he finally settled on Buffalo, New York, after meeting with a local newspaper editor who promised to cover the new team every single day. Known as much for his outspoken views on revenue sharing as he is for whisking players from practice for a midday tuna melt, Wilson has come to rely on this sort of local support: In December, Erie County and the state agreed to pony up a combined $ 226 million of the $ 271 million in future renovations to Ralph Wilson Stadium. (In return, the Bills promised not to leave Buffalo for Los Angeles or Toronto or wherever else they could possibly go for seven years.) Shortly thereafter, Wilson gave up his title as team president—at 94.
Cincinnati Bengals: The late Paul Brown was one of modern football’s major innovators, helping popularize things like the forward pass and sideline play calling. His son, current Bengals owner Mike Brown, has innovated in his own, small way. In the mid-1990s he used the old “I might move the team to Baltimore” line to put Hamilton County, Ohio, on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in financing for a new stadium—which he named after dear old dad. (As one county official told the Wall Street Journal, “It’s the monster that ate the public sector.”) That Brown would ask taxpayers to pick up the tab is no surprise; for years he ran what Sports Illustrated called “the leanest mom-and-pop shop in the league,” a nice way of saying that he didn’t employ as many scouts as other teams did. More recently, he’s been on the cutting edge of making loud-mouthed, uninformed comments about the long-term neurological effects of concussions—even after one of his ex-players, Chris Henry, was found to have degenerative brain damage after his death in a December 2009 car accident.
Cleveland Browns: Truck stop magnate Jimmy Haslam once told a reporter that he’d been approached by the TV show Undercover Boss but had to turn the producers down: Everyone at his multibillion-dollar company, Pilot Flying J, knew the hands-on CEO too well for the premise to work. NFL fans were just starting to know Haslam, who last year gave up his stake in the Pittsburgh Steelers to purchase the Browns for $ 1 billion, when Pilot Flying J came under federal investigation for allegedly defrauding its customers. Worse, a confidential informant told the FBI that Haslam knew (PDF) it was happening. It wasn’t the first time Pilot Flying J had come under legal scrutiny. From the New York Times:
In 2005, the United States Department of Labor announced an agreement in which the company would pay 110 assistant managers $ 720,000 in back wages and damages to resolve violations of the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, according to The News Sentinel. And the company settled price-gouging allegations in three states by paying fines in the wake of Hurricane Ike in 2008.
Denver Broncos: Despite his shrinking role with the Broncos, owner Pat Bowlen still makes a point to reach out to fans—last month, he actually said his team belongs to them. Back in January, he sent season ticket holders apologetic emails following Denver’s last-second playoff exit. Whether or not that excuses his greatest sin depends on your point of view.
Houston Texans: According to a 2011 story in ESPN the Magazine, Bob McNair’s “game-day mornings probably aren’t too different from yours.” Right, because you, too, leave your 12,000-plus-square-foot home each day, and head over to your 3,620-square-foot owner’s suite at the local stadium. McNair, the NFL’s biggest political donor (he’s given $ 4.2 million since 2008, including $ 2 million last fall to the pro-Mitt Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future and $ 1 million to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads), cleaned up by selling his Cogen Technologies to Enron in 1999—not long before Ken Lay & Co. imploded. Maybe it’s that kind of timing that led Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to once call McNair the best owner in football. Meanwhile, his heir apparent, son Cal, enjoys big-game hunting—lions, elephants, leopards, including one he’s got stuffed and mounted in his office. The Texans are still hunting for their own big game: They’ve never made it to the conference championships, let alone the Super Bowl, in their 12-year history.
Don’t let Irsay’s Twitter antics fool you, though: He’s a killer at the negotiating table, as evidenced by Indianapolis’ heavily subsidized Lucas Oil Stadium. And he can be quite coherent in person, like when he was asked about Rush Limbaugh’s reported bid for the St. Louis Rams: “There are certain privileges for certain things in life that you might want to pursue that may not be appropriate. I myself couldn’t be in favor of voting for him.” With a few of Irsay’s punctuation tweaks, that would easily fit within 140 characters.
Jacksonville Jaguars: In 2011, Shad Khan bought the Jaguars for $ 770 million, making him the NFL’s first ethnic minority owner. The Pakistani-born, Muslim billionaire with the epic facial hair (60 Minutes: “His rakish mustache has become a must-have accessory for any self-respecting Jags fan”) wasn’t the first choice of some racist Jacksonville fans, but his approval rating reached nearly 80 percent a year and a half ago. Khan got rich as owner of Flex-N-Gate, which manufactures bumpers for Toyota but was cited for nine serious OSHA violations and fined $ 57,000 in 2012 “for failing to monitor workers’ exposure to nickel, chromium, and [hydrochloric] and sulfuric acid.” (No word on whether star running back Maurice Jones-Drew is considering his own occupational hazard suit after years of carrying an anemic offense.)
Miami Dolphins: Even though Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria detonated the Miami-Dade budget and turned South Florida against publicly funded stadiums with the debtapalooza known as Marlins Park, Dolphins frontman Stephen Ross didn’t let that stop him from trying to get some public dollars of his own. After the cancellation of a special election involving $ 350 million in proposed stadium renovations, Ross went on the offensive, creating a PAC called Florida Jobs First to campaign against the politicians he believed sunk the project. (One attack ad featured frowning men in hardhats.) But don’t worry about Ross: He recently found $ 200 million to donate to his alma mater, the University of Michigan. In true form, he stipulated that it could only be spent on the athletic department or UM’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business.
New England Patriots: Robert Kraft has long been the suited, pocket-squared business face of the so-called Patriot Way. But he slipped back in July, when he insisted that Russian President Vladimir Putin stole his $ 25,000 Super Bowl ring from 2005—a charge a Kremlin spokesman called “weird.” Since then, Kraft has said that the ring was, in fact, a present, and invited Putin to a Patriots home game so the Russian president could present him with a ring Putin was supposedly making for Kraft. That the Patriots owner might bend the truth is no surprise to folks in Hartford, Connecticut, where Kraft had a handshake deal to move the franchise in 1998; turns out it was just a ploy to extract concessions from Massachusetts taxpayers. Even former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, who was convicted for corruption, got in a dig after the move fell through: “I am a New York Jets fan, now and possibly forever.”
New York Jets: Robert Wood Johnson IV, known to all as Woody, is the 66-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. A veteran GOP money man who earned Ranger fundraiser status in the George W. Bush days, he reportedly helped raise $ 7 million for John McCain in a single night in 2008. Johnson gave in the high five figures during the 2012 cycle—an election he called more important than a Jets winning season. All the while, he has tried to keep a low profile—even in the face of his socialite daughter’s 2010 death at age 30. According to “many of Johnson’s famous friends,” Adam Sternbergh wrote in a New York magazine profile, “he’s long been a private wild man…
Jann Wenner might tell you about the time they took a cross-country motorcycle trip with a bunch of dudes (including Michael Douglas), from the Tavern on the Green to the Golden Gate Bridge, and Johnson wore a helmet with fake black hair streaming out the back. Or Mitt Romney might relate the story of how Johnson visited his estate and, when no one else would test a rope-swing into a swimming hole, grabbed the rope and hurtled himself into the drink.
Dunno. Maybe Tim Tebow would consider that stuff wild.
Oakland Raiders: Ranking the NFL’s worst owners without Al Davis is like trying to celebrate Christmas without Santa Claus. Al’s son, Mark Davis, has been looked to as a breath of fresh air for the franchise, though earlier this year he fired the team’s PR director over an article he found unflattering. He has also threatened to move the Raiders to Los Angeles (again) as the team hunts for a new stadium. His latest proposal: Tear down the current stadium and build a new one on the exact same site.
Pittsburgh Steelers: The Rooney family has been involved with the NFL since 1933, when Art Rooney bought the newly minted Pittsburgh Pirates franchise for $ 2,500—he renamed it the Steelers in 1940. Dan Rooney, Art’s oldest son and the current team president, is best known for two things: serving as America’s ambassador to Ireland from 2009-2012 and being the driving force behind what’s known as the Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview a minority candidate for every head coach and general manager opening. (Not that it did much good this past offseason: Despite 15 open positions, no black candidates were hired.)
San Diego Chargers: Alex Spanos is a Republican heavy hitter—he hosted a Mitt Romney fundraiser in March 2012, and Rush Limbaugh wrote the foreword to his autobiography (which was titled, oddly enough, Spreading the Wealth). The biggest black mark on his reign is probably keeping team doctor David Chao around for 15 years despite dozens of accusations of malpractice, negligence, personal injury, and fraud—though Spanos’ company also had to pay a big settlement after the government sued it for not making apartments accessible to the disabled.
Tennessee Titans: Oilman Bud Adams moved his Houston Oilers into the publicly funded Astrodome in 1965. After 22 years, Adams decided that the ballyhooed stadium wasn’t all that wondrous anymore and asked Houston for $ 67 million in upgrades. When the city balked, he threatened a move to Jacksonville, Florida, which was enough to get him his renovations. Six years later, Adams started kicking the tires on a new dome. Houston rebuffed him, so Adams took his team north to Nashville, whose officials were happy to give him what he wanted. (Eventually, a shiny new stadium was built for an expansion team in Houston—with plenty of public funding.)
NFC
Arizona Cardinals: No team has gone longer without a championship than Bill Bidwill’s Cardinals; they last won in 1947 when the team shared Chicago with the Bears. And last year, the hapless Cardinals became the first NFL team to lose 700 games all told. Bidwill became known as “Dollar Bill” for his cheapness, amid rumors that he made players buy their own cleats and deducted lunch from their paychecks. Despite his fondness for screaming, Bill’s son, team president Michael Bidwill, is viewed more a bit more favorably.
Atlanta Falcons: Home Depot cofounder Arthur Blank (not to be confused with fellow cofounder and GOP megadonor Ken Langone, who was profiled by Andy Kroll in our March/April 2012 issue) has finally seen things turn around in Atlanta. Years after the Michael Vick and Bobby Petrino fiascoes, Blank has a winning team, a complimentary general manager, and a new stadium on the way—a futuristic looking thing that Deadspin‘s Barry Petchesky dubbed “The Sphincter.” All it took was moving a couple of churches off of the proposed construction site—at a cost of $ 19.5 million for one and $ 14.5 million for the other.
Carolina Panthers: When Jerry Richardson met with his fellow owners during NFL labor negotiations in 2010, he was emphatic about getting a more favorable revenue split with players. According to one witness, Richardson told the other NFL execs, “We signed a [expletive] deal last time, and we’re going to stick together and take back our league and [expletive] do something about it.” His main argument for holding the line was the unsustainability of it all—an argument Deadspin blew out of the water when it learned that Richardson’s Panthers turned a $ 112 million profit in 2010 and 2011. This year, the tattoo-hating Richardson asked taxpayers to cover about two-thirds of the cost of a proposed stadium renovation. The city of Charlotte decided to kick in some money, but the state refused.
Chicago Bears: Virginia Halas McCaskey and her kin have been taken to task for their poor business acumen. (The Bears are worth only $ 1.19 billion). McCaskey only ever wanted to be the team’s board secretary—a title she still retains—but ended up running the show after her brother died of a heart attack, setting off a public battle over the estate.
Dallas Cowboys: Long lambasted for favoring the Cowboys’ brand and massive stadium over the quality of the team (Dallas is .500 since 1997), Jerral “Jerry” Jones is one of the league’s most reviled owners, and not just outside of Texas: Last November, fans actually petitioned President Obama to oust the Cowboys’ “controlling, delusional, oppressive dictator.” If the self-appointed GM can’t field a winning team, the least he can do is make sure his gaudy scoreboard doesn’t cost Dallas any more touchdowns.
Detroit Lions: Since William Clay Ford bought the Lions in 1963, the team has won only one playoff game. Detroit capped off with the league’s first ever 0-16 season in 2008, after which Forbes declared Ford the worst owner in the NFL. His son, at least, thinks things are looking up. They won their first game this season, in any case.
Minnesota Vikings: Zygi Wilf was found guilty of racketeering this year after a New Jersey judge found that he and family members cheated business partners out of millions in revenue from an apartment complex. In the meantime, the Vikings owner has threatened to move the team in a squabble over a planned billion-dollar stadium—even though he rejected an offer in which state and local governments would pick up more than 60 percent of the tab. He claims that making his net worth public would hurt the team in those negotiations.
New Orleans Saints: How you feel about billionaire car salesman/investor/Saints owner Tom Benson basically depends on how you feel about an owner using a natural disaster (Hurricane Katrina) to flirt with moving to another city (San Antonio). Eventually, in 2006, he decided to stay in NOLA, a decision that was rewarded three years later by a Super Bowl, state approval of $ 85 million in Superdome upgrades, and a pretty sweet lease agreement.
In any case, people sure did love the way Benson second-lined on the sidelines…
New York Giants: Called “the first family of football,” the Maras have earned plenty of recent goodwill from two Giants Super Bowl wins in the past decade. On the social front, John Marapublicly admitted that the league has forsaken players with brain injuries and other game-related health problems. And in 2001, co-owner Steve Tischcut a video supporting marriage equality in New York.
Philadelphia Eagles: The Eagles’ Jeff Lurie retrofitted Philly’s Lincoln Financial Field with 80 wind turbines, 2,500 solar panels, and a 7.6-megawatt biodiesel power plant in a greening effort that drew praise from President Obama. Now he just needs to work on his high fives—for the sake of his wife.
St. Louis Rams: Sports Illustrated has called Stan Kroenke“the most powerful man in sports.” The Missouri real estate tycoon, who is married to Walmart heiress Ann Walton Kroenke, owns the Rams, the English Premier League’s Arsenal, and five other major sports teams with a combined valued of around $ 4 billion. While the notoriously tight-lipped Kroenke tends to avoid the spotlight, that may become harder to do as the team negotiates a deal for a new stadium. (The Rams’ first request, a $ 700 million monstrosity, was summarily rejected.) Let’s hope whatever deal they reach is up to Kroenke’s standards—after buying a vineyard, he once dumped $ 3.3 million worth of cabernet down the drain, deciding it was low-grade.
San Francisco 49ers: Jed York, the Niners’ youthful owner, is riding high on goodwill after the team’s recent resurgence. York is generally low-key (or as low-key as you can be surrounded by confetti at the groundbreaking of your billion-dollar stadium). While York supposedly sewed jerseys and wrapped ankles when he officially joined the team in 2005, he didn’t exactly come from humble beginnings—he spent plenty of time in the owner’s box as a kid back when his grandfather ran the team—and mom owned pro hockey’s Pittsburgh Penguins.
Seattle Seahawks: In addition to the Seahawks, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen runs basketball’s Portland Trail Blazers, and part of Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders—at least when he’s not busy sniffing out tech investments or taking credit for most of Microsoft’s breakthroughs. He’s also the NFL’s richest owner, valued at $ 15 billion—which is $ 10 billion more than the second-richest owner, Stan Kroenke. It can be nice to have an owner whose personal bottom line doesn’t hinge on reining in the team’s costs. No stranger to vanity projects, Allen donated $ 1.6 million last year to pass a ballot initiative allowing public charter schools in Washington state.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Longtime corporate raider Malcolm Glazer bought the Buccaneers in 1995. Shortly thereafter, the team was winning games and playing for packed crowds at a brand-new, taxpayer-subsidizedstadium—one that includes a $ 3 million fake pirate ship. What kind of fan wouldn’t want that? A British soccer fan, that’s who. Glazer’s 2005 takeover of Manchester United sent shock waves through the Premier League, but mostly because of the highly leveraged way he went about doing it.
The owner of the now-shuttered encrypted email service used by Edward Snowden told RT that he will continue to defend online security free of government surveillance, hopefully with success in courts or a possible move of his company overseas.
The owner of the now-shuttered encrypted email service used by Edward Snowden told RT he will continue to defend online security to ensure freedom from government surveillance, hopefully with success in courts or a possible move of his company overseas.
Ladar Levison abruptly shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, on August 8 to avoid being forced to hand over customers’ personal information and communications.
“I’m going to keep standing on my soapbox and shouting as loudly as I can for as long as people will listen. My biggest fear when I shut down the service was that nobody would notice, nobody would care and my biggest hope was that when I shut down the service it would lead to some positive change. I’m going to continue fighting for a strong precedent via the court system and I’m going to continue to lobby Congress for change in the laws,” he said.
Levison was issued a secret federal court order that he is legally barred from detailing, though experts believe the order to be a sealed subpoena or national security letter which demands he cooperate with an investigation related to Snowden.
Levison told RT he fears a bleak future for secure-data services like Lavabit should US government surveillance and strong-arming of American companies continue.
“It’s become clear to me over last couple of months that all of the major providers here in the US have provided our government with real-time access to private information of their user,” he said. “They don’t really have a choice about it and they don’t really have the ability to tell anybody about it. Fact is, if you trust your data to a company , even if they haven’t already been approached and been required to provide access, the simple fact is they could be in the future, unless that judicial precedent is set or Congress takes action.”
Levison said he hopes his case can help set such a legal precedent. In the meantime, he is entertaining the possibility of moving his service overseas, though he is not yet confident such an arrangement could achieve security for his customers free of US spying.
“As an American, if I were to continue running the service even if it was physically based in another country, I could still be required to compromise the security of that system and I could literally be put in a position where I’m forced to choose between breaking the laws of the country in which the service is hosted or breaking the laws of the United States,” he said.
Levison said last week he believes he could face criminal charges for refusing to comply with the secret order.
He said he thinks the American public has a right to know what the government’s doing and how it’s collecting information on its own citizens.
“If I had continued to operate, I felt like it would have put me in an ethically-compromising position,” he said about his service, which he believed would no longer have been a secure, private method of communication for Americans had he continued.
Levison said he doesn’t oppose keeping an investigation secret, but he does object to the covert methods the government uses to conduct surveillance. Therefore, he felt he had no choice but to protect his customers even though the previous month, following the revelations that spawned from Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency spying programs to The Guardian and Washington Post reporters, was Lavabit’s best in its 10-year history.
“When you say no to the government, they have the ability to take everything,” he said of defying the government by continuing Lavabit and not complying with the order. “They have the ability to take your business, take your money and take your freedom. And there really isn’t all that much you can do about it. I was looking at the very real possibility of an impossible debt and possibly being put in jail and still not being able to tell people why I was even in jail.”
The owner of the encrypted email service used by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden says he could face criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret federal court order issued last week.
Ladar Levison abruptly shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, last week to avoid being forced to hand over customers’ personal information and communications.
James Trump, a senior litigation counsel at the US attorney’s office in Alexandria, Virginia, contacted Levinson’s lawyer on August 8 – the day Levinson ended Lavabit’s services, NBC News reported. The attorney was told that Levison had “violated the court order,” leading to speculation that he may be charged with contempt of court.
“I would love to tell you everything that’s happened to me over the last six weeks. I’m just legally prevented from doing so,” Levison recently told RT. He is legally barred from speaking publicly about the legal order, which is believed to be a sealed subpoena or national security letter which demands that he cooperate with an investigation related to Snowden.
In a note to customers and supporters upon shutting down Lavabit, Levison wrote on the company’s website, “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.”
Levison plans to challenge the secret order in a federal appeals court. He told NBC that he has been“threatened with arrest multiple times over the past six weeks.”
He stated that he has complied with court orders for information on targeted customers in the past, but insists the latest order is vastly different in scope and scale.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
“I think the amount of information that they’re collecting on people that they have no right to collect information on is the most alarming thing,” he told RT. “I mean, the Fourth Amendment is supposed to guarantee that our government will only conduct surveillance on people in which it has a probable suspicion or evidence that they are committing some crime, and that that evidence has been reviewed by a judge and signed off by a judge before that surveillance begins. And if there’s anything alarming, it’s that now that’s all being done after the fact. Everything’s being recorded, and then a judge can after the fact say it’s okay to go look at the information.”
Following Levison’s move to shutter Lavabit, encrypted internet service provider Silent Circle has followed suit. Other encryption services have suggested that they would do the same if put in a similar position by the US government.
Riseup email service issued a statement saying, “We would rather pull the plug than submit to repressive surveillance by our government, or any government.”
Encrypted chat client Cryptocat stated, “If we receive a surveillance or backdoor order that we are unable to legally fight, we will shut down Cryptocat rather than implement it.”
Levison began a legal defense fund which raised over $ 40,000 within hours of Lavabit’s shutdown. That number had jumped to $ 100,000 by the next day, Levison told RT.
BOSTON (AP) — Businessman John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, has entered into an agreement to buy The Boston Globe for $ 70 million, a massive drop from its record $ 1.1 billion price two decades ago.
The impending purchase from The New York Times Co. marks Henry’s “first foray into the financially unsettled world of the news media,” the Globe said Saturday. The deal will give Henry the 141-year-old newspaper, its websites and affiliated companies, it said.
The Times announced in February it was putting the Globe and related assets up for sale four years after calling off a previous attempt to sell it. The company’s CEO said at the time selling the Globe would help the company focus attention on The New York Times brand.
Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy confirmed the planned sale of the Globe and other media properties to Henry. The Times said the all-cash sale, expected to close in 30 to 60 days, includes BostonGlobe.com, Boston.com, The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Telegram.com, the direct mail marketing company Globe Direct and the company’s 49 percent interest in Metro Boston, a free daily newspaper for commuters.
Henry, in a statement published by the Globe, cited the “essential role that its journalists and employees play in Boston, throughout New England, and beyond.”
“The Boston Globe’s award-winning journalism as well as its rich history and tradition of excellence have established it as one of the most well respected media companies in the country,” Henry said.
Henry, who also owns the English Premier League soccer club Liverpool F.C., said he would reveal details about his plans for the Globe in the next few days.
The Times bought the Globe from the family of former Globe executive Stephen Taylor in 1993 for what it said was the highest price paid for an American newspaper. The price Henry is paying is less than 7 percent of the 1993 price.
The Globe and other newspapers have faced difficulties in recent years as readers have fled to the Internet and advertisers have cut spending on newspapers and moved more ads online. Still, the Globe is a journalistic institution in New England and was lauded for its coverage of the deadly Boston Marathon bombings in April.
A 2009 round of cost-cutting, involving pay cuts, helped put the Globe on better financial footing and prompted the Times to call off a planned sale. In late 2011, the Globe started charging for access to its online version at BostonGlobe.com, which helped to boost circulation revenues.
The Times company doesn’t separate Globe revenue from The New York Times revenue in its financial statements. But the Globe had an average weekday circulation of 230,351 in the six months through September, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. The newspaper’s increase in digital subscriptions more than offset declines in print. But the total is still down significantly from the nearly 413,000 it boasted in September 2002.
BOSTON (AP) — Businessman John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, has entered into an agreement to buy The Boston Globe for $ 70 million, a massive drop from its record $ 1.1 billion price two decades ago.
The impending purchase from The New York Times Co. marks Henry’s “first foray into the financially unsettled world of the news media,” the Globe said Saturday. The deal will give Henry the 141-year-old newspaper, its websites and affiliated companies, it said.
The Times announced in February it was putting the Globe and related assets up for sale four years after calling off a previous attempt to sell it. The company’s CEO said at the time selling the Globe would help the company focus attention on The New York Times brand.
Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy confirmed the planned sale of the Globe and other media properties to Henry. The Times said the all-cash sale, expected to close in 30 to 60 days, includes BostonGlobe.com, Boston.com, The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Telegram.com, the direct mail marketing company Globe Direct and the company’s 49 percent interest in Metro Boston, a free daily newspaper for commuters.
Henry, in a statement published by the Globe, cited the “essential role that its journalists and employees play in Boston, throughout New England, and beyond.”
“The Boston Globe’s award-winning journalism as well as its rich history and tradition of excellence have established it as one of the most well respected media companies in the country,” Henry said.
Henry, who also owns the English Premier League soccer club Liverpool F.C., said he would reveal details about his plans for the Globe in the next few days.
The Times bought the Globe from the family of former Globe executive Stephen Taylor in 1993 for what it said was the highest price paid for an American newspaper. The price Henry is paying is less than 7 percent of the 1993 price.
The Globe and other newspapers have faced difficulties in recent years as readers have fled to the Internet and advertisers have cut spending on newspapers and moved more ads online. Still, the Globe is a journalistic institution in New England and was lauded for its coverage of the deadly Boston Marathon bombings in April.
A 2009 round of cost-cutting, involving pay cuts, helped put the Globe on better financial footing and prompted the Times to call off a planned sale. In late 2011, the Globe started charging for access to its online version at BostonGlobe.com, which helped to boost circulation revenues.
The Times company doesn’t separate Globe revenue from The New York Times revenue in its financial statements. But the Globe had an average weekday circulation of 230,351 in the six months through September, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. The newspaper’s increase in digital subscriptions more than offset declines in print. But the total is still down significantly from the nearly 413,000 it boasted in September 2002.
Last week’s collapse of a massive precious metals mine in Indonesia, which killed at least 17 workers, brought unwanted attention to the American company that owns the facility, Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold. But the company is already well-known to many here in Washington: Its top executives, as well as the company PAC, contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars each election cycle to help fuel congressional campaigns. Freeport currently employs at least one former member of Congress as a registered lobbyist, and in the past has employed at least one other.
Freeport-McMoRan, which is based in Phoenix, strongly favors Republicans over Democrats with its contributions. In the 2012 cycle, the company’s PAC and employees gave 80 percent of their $ 382,000 in donations to Republicans. The firm’s favorite lawmaker? Arizona GOP Sen. Jeff Flake. He received the maximum $ 10,000 from the company PAC and another $ 43,000 from employees, making him the largest recipient of Freeport-McMoRan money.
Another major recipient of Freeport-McMoRan cash was David Dewhurst, who was defeated by Ted Cruz in the Republican primary for Texas’ open Senate seat last year. Dewhurst, who was backed by many “establishment” Republican interests, received $ 10,000 from the company PAC and another $ 25,000 from company CEO James “Jim Bob” Moffett and members of his immediate family.
In the House, the top recipient of cash from the company is Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), to whom the company’s PAC gave the maximum of $ 10,000. Boehner is also one of eight members of Congress who owns shares in the company, according to his most recent personal financial disclosure form.
Moffett and other top executives drove a huge chunk of the contributions from company employees. Besides the money to Dewhurst, Moffett and his family were also responsible for $ 33,301 in donations to the Republican National Committee and $ 7,100 apiece to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee and Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee in the 2012 cycle.
In 2008, donations from the company PAC and employees spiked to $ 595,000. Almost one-fifth of that — $ 112,000 — was in the form of contributions from company executives to the Republican National Committee. The company’s spending on lobbying surged then, too: In 2007, it spent about $ 580,000 and in 2009, it spent $ 720,000 — but in 2008, Freeport-McMoRan spent more than $ 1.5 million pressing its views in Washington.
The company took a strong interest in two bills that were pending that year. One, the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act (H.R. 2262), would have imposed new royalties on mining operations on public lands; it passed the House but died in the Senate. The other, the Extractive Industries Transparency Disclosure Act (H.R. 6066), would have required companies to disclose to shareholders any payments made to foreign countries in exchange for the extraction of natural resources.
So far in 2013, the company has reported lobbying on legislation affecting deepwater ports and, generally, issues related to taxes. It spent $ 120,000 in the first three months of the year, and had nine lobbyists, including former Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.), on the payroll.
The owner of basketball team the Los Angeles Lakers has died at the age of 80, his assistant has confirmed.
On Friday, US media reported that Buss was in hospital for several months and had been fighting cancer.
Under the stewardship of Jerry Buss, the California basketball franchise advanced to 10 championships and became associated with Hollywood glamour.
Buss acquired the club in 1979 and was known for recruiting legendary talent, including former player Magic Johnson.
The Lakers won five championships during the 80s and another five titles during the 11 years Kobe Bryant has played with the team.
The self-made millionaire made his fortune in real estate before turning his hand to basketball.
At the time, the National Basketball Association had lost popularity and many teams faced severe financial difficulties.
In his first season, Buss recruited Magic Johnson from Michigan State University, who became a legendary player for the team.
Buss developed a reputation for spotting and attracting talented players.
He will also be remembered for his style and showmanship.
“Jerry Buss helped set the league on the course it is on today,” NBA commissioner David Stern said, according to the LA Times.
“Remember, he showed us it was about ‘showtime’, the notion that an arena can become the focal point for not just basketball, but entertainment. He made it the place to see and be seen.”
