In case you forgotten midnight tonight is supposed to be the deadline for the union workers at The Boston Globe to accept massive cuts or the New York Times corp. will close the place down.  The latest news has the union asking for more time to fudge the numbers, but there’s no doubt the biggest newspaper in the city for the last century and a half is doing the Brad Wesley death scene from “Road House” and there’s the very real possibility it won’t be on anyone’s doorstep tomorrow or Sunday.

But should we care?  Of course we all feel bad for the guys who run the printing press and the truck drivers and the paper boys who’ll be out of work.  But without question the Globe in a lot of ways is a victim of it’s own hubris and institutional arrogance.   Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and since your grandfather’s day, the people running the Globe have used their power to shape opinion, carry out their own agendas and the agendas of the people they’re in bed with, attack those they don’t like, tolerate plagiarists and flat out lie about stuff to suit their purposes.

No one has made it clear what the plan is if the paper shuts down.  Boston.com is the colossus of local web sites, and nobody’s saying if it will survive in some form without the printed edition.  I mean, can it make a profit on it’s own?  Who stays and who goes if it does?  And will the publishers be forced to spend six hours a day in their squalid apartments mailing out “Wade Boggs 64 Beers” t-shirts?

Anyway, assuming this is the final death spasm for Boston’s most important media outlet, the things we’ll miss and the things we won’t miss about The Boston Globe:

Bob Ryan
For all his “smartest man in the room” arrogance and his intolerance for guys like Bill Belichick for not playing grabass with the press, Ryan is a pretty damned good writer.  He’s one of the few columnists in town who isn’t stuck in the 80s when it comes to the Celtics, can write intelligently about college hoops or something like the Olympics and can actually talk knowledgeably about stuff that happens beyond Rte 128.
Will Miss

Writing fiction as fact
The Globe fired Patricia Smith for making up stories about kids in cancer wards that never existed, apparently because she felt she couldn’t find any interesting stories among actual, real life sick children.  But for years they tolerated Mike Barnicle, who’s fabricated stories were obvious to everyone.  Like the one he used to write every Christmas about the GI coming home to Boston from the war in Korea.  Each year the details would change.  The guy would have a different name, a different address, and a little brother who one year would have polio, but the next would be retarded or have cancer or something.  But neither the people nor the street they lived on ever existed anywhere except in Barnicle’s head.  Oh, and then there was the last straw that made me cancel my Globe subscription for the last time: when they reported Bill Clinton shot an 80 at Farm Neck on the Vineyard.  If a newspaper will lie about a 50 year old fat guy with a swing like a guy fighting with nunchuks breaking 80 at that course, they’ll lie about anything.
Won’t Miss
The Sunday notes columns

The format for these… a long feature article followed by a random collection of factoids, stats, tidbits and rumors… has been imitated by every paper and sports media guy in the country from the lowliest basement-dwelling blogger to Peter King and it was invented by Peter Gammons when he was the Globe’s baseball writer.
Will Miss

Kevin Paul Dupont
No one can claim the guy doesn’t know hockey or that he can’t write.  But they way he allowed himself to become a house man for Harry Sinden and the Jacobses all these years was a travesty.  Any time a someone’s contract was up or the Bruins had an early playoff exit, Dupont’s hatchet job on the team’s best player was assured.  As was his excuse making for Sinden’s 30+ years of futility.
Won’t Miss

Amalie Benjamin
I never read her and she’s not really all that attractive, but there’s something about her that makes the whole greater than the sum of her parts.  It might just be the glasses and “I’m one Michelob Ultra away from bringing you back to my place” look about her, but I like this chick.
Will Miss

Anti-Irish Catholic bias
You could count on it.  Every year, without fail, the Monday after the St. Patrick’s Day parade the opening sentence in the Globe story would be how many people were arrested.  It didn’t matter that there’d be a million plus people showing up for the event, the 4-8 douchebags who got pinched for disorderly conduct were always the lead.  And how many trees died to provide space for the weekly “Many Catholics Disagree With Church on Birth Control” articles?  Because of course no one in any other religion has their own ideas on anything, just us stupid, mackerel-snapping Papists.  You see how good a job all the other faiths of the world have done at putting an end to coveting your neighbor’s wife, using the Lord’s name in vain and the sinful blow job.
Won’t Miss

Mike Reiss

Quite simply the best pure sports reporter in Boston.  All Reiss does is give you news and information without one word of whining about how mean and paranoid the Patriots are.
Will Miss

Plagiarism

Not only was Barnicle famous for fabricating stories, he was a notorious sponge long before he got caught lifting stuff from George Carlin.  And Ron Borges, who should’ve been fired just for using his column to carry out a personal vendetta against Bill Belichick, got nabbed for stealing from a Seattle reporter not by his bosses, but just from some Seahawks fan who stumbled onto something Borges wrote and figured out why it sounded so familiar.  Fortunately, the paper had Reiss on the bench who became the best upgrade at a position since Tom Brady replaced Borges’ boytoy, Drew Bledsoe.
Won’t Miss

Kennedy fetish

Regardless of your politics, the way the paper has carried water for the Kennedy family all these years is embarrassing.  When Ted got kicked out of Harvard for cheating, they buried the story next to the obituaries.  When he was a national laughingstock for the Palm Beach rape case, they threw a picture of him on the front page pushing Rose’s wheelchair through the streets of Hyannisport on Mother’s Day, like they just so happened to have a photographer standing on the street corner.  A couple of years back the Globe ran a piece on Mary Jo Kopechne saying if she were still alive, she’d appreciate all the work Ted does for the elderly, without mentioning the slight fact that her unalive condition is due to the fact that he drowned her.
Won’t Miss

Photos

Notably Bill Brett and Jim Davis, the Globe’s photographers are indispensable to a shiftless, lazy Boston blogger.
Will Miss

Dan Shaughnessy

I catch some grief for harping on the Curly Haired Boyfriend, which is ironic because the people who defend him are the very same Boston sports fans that he’s spent his career lampooning as a collection of pathetic wretches, agonizing our way through life and wallowing in our own misery.  Unlike Ryan, he stopped paying attention 20 years ago and still can’t make a reference that isn’t mired in 1986.  Shank made a cottage industry out of the Curse, and still hasn’t adjusted to the fact that this is the Golden Age of Boston sports and we all know it.  It’s hard to lay off a target this big and this slow-moving.
Won’t Miss, but kind of Will Miss