• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, August 7, 2009

A few weeks after the New York Times Co. seemed to be taking The Boston Globe off the auction block, three potential buyers have emerged, per the Globe: Platinum Equity is said to be offering $35 million (as well as assuming $59 million in pension liabilities) versus unknown counteroffers from Bain Capital, and finally, a team composed of former Hill Holliday boss Jack Conners and Stephen Taylor, co-owner of the Celtics and scion of the Taylor family which sold the Boston paper to NYTCO 1993.

The current bids also include The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the other newspaper in NYTCO's New England Media Group.

The current bid from Platinum Equity, while not quite a nominal sum, is a dramatic illustration of the declining fortunes of big metro dailies. In 1993, NYTCO paid $1.1 billion for the property; adding the pension liabilities, the Platinum bid is just 8.5% of the original purchase price.

The huge decline is reminiscent of the plummeting value of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, purchased by McClatchy for $1.2 billion in 1998 and sold again in 2006 for just $530 million to Avista Capital Partners -- which recently divested itself of the bankrupt newspaper for no compensation at all.

Similarly, in 2007, Sam Zell engineered an $8.4 billion deal to take the Tribune Co. private; judging from the price of debt, the company is now worth less than $2.5 billion.

In early July, NYTCO said that Goldman Sachs, the bank in charge of The Boston Globe auction, was extending the deadline for bids; however, Goldman did not set a new deadline for bids to be received, suggesting the auction has generated little interest among potential buyers. This is despite the fact thst NYTCO management extracted concessions worth $20 million a year from unions in an effort to make the paper more marketable.

In the second quarter of 2009, NYTCO's New England Media Group saw total advertising revenue fall 31.1% compared to the same period in 2008, to about $58.7 million. That's considerably worse than the overall decline of 21.8% for the company's News Media Group.