As for their ambitions, they are certainly long-standing and long-term, and they don’t stop at the national border. The Times is well on their way to transforming the International Herald Tribune—which until a couple of years ago was jointly owned by the Washington Post—into “The Global Edition of The New York Times.”

I hope the Times makes an effort to cover local stories in a timely way, rather than the typical NYT practice of coming into these regional stories on the late side, after they have been thoroughly covered by local media. I thought the article on our new police chief did a pretty good job of summing up the challenges he faces, but it was pretty much a rehash of stuff that was covered by the local press a month ago. I was surprised to hear that the NYT’s SF bureau now has 10 staffers in it (a decade ago, I think it was about half of that—maybe one national reporter, two tech/business reporters, one stringer and an office manager, or something like that). So they certainly have enough people to do real-time coverage of local issues—it just depends whether they choose to actively compete with the local papers, or are content to sit back and cover stories in a more Timesian fashion.

Obviously the twice-a-week publication schedule makes it harder to do daily coverage of stories, but if they push their reporters to be aggressive, and use the new “Bay Area” blog in a good way, then it’s not impossible that they could actually break local news or cover some local stories as thoroughly as the local papers. (And it’s not as if the Chronicle provides comprehensive coverage of the East Bay either!)

As I said in the post, I have no idea whether this effort will be a success or not (in journalistic terms or in business terms), but I’ll definitely be following their efforts with a fair amount of interest.

I assume the Times Company wrung some big profits out of the Globe in the early years of ownership, but it seems like they’ve been having significant buyer’s remorse over the past couple of years. The Globe is better than a lot of other regional papers around the country, that’s for sure—but it’s also not necessarily saying much.

It has struck me — and a lot of others more expert in newspaper production than I, that the Globe, despite all the discouragement the NYT has dished up, has on the whole done a very good job in covering the Commonwealth, often in unexpected ways. Unfortunately too often there are too many sob stories for my appetite for this stuff, but perhaps the Globe feels a special sympathy for those folk.

In the NYT a couple of days ago (?) Peter Baker reported that Joe Biden has been joined by others in his opinions on Afghanistan. That is what the headline said. The article contained not a single name.

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