And at the risk of moving from one can of worms to another, the uncertainty about the success of a new industry business model will promote caution amone buyers an sellers.

And the latest is that the Times if talking about the possibility of more cuts at the Globe. Just when you thought…

In this case, the buyers were certainly able to buy (enough cash available) and ready (they were prepared to buy.) The willing part usually rises and falls on the terms, of which money is but one.

If you don’t recognize that then you need to do a lot more research about the marketplace before you throw the buzz words around.

Qualified buyers walk away from deals for a LOT of reasons, many of which do not include the ability to put up the cash.

Their walking away does not make them any less qualified.

It is clear that the bids did not satisy NYTimesCo’s needs. That’s the bottom line.

I suspect the buyers were willing to pay a significantly higher price if there were fewer unpriced strings attached.

Let me offer some informed speculation: I’ll bet that if we were able to find out what Platinum bid in the end, we’d learn that it failed to match the $35 million plus $59 million in assumed retirement obligations that it had offered earlier. And I’ll bet that the Taylor group couldn’t come up with guarantees that it would have the dough on closing day.

There are qualified buyers…it’s just that no one wants to pony up the asking price or in a way that King Arthur is willing to accept.

Each of the “bidders” in the last round WAS qualified…otherwise the NYT Co. would not have requested bids.

If it weren’t for so many siblings, first cousins, second cousins, third cousins, endowments, aunts and uncles and the IRS, a lone Taylor descendant might otherwise be able to make an acceptable offer to buy the Globe without any other financial backing.

Today it is said the Globe is not for sale. John Henry said he would take it off their hands. He is a smart and successful investor.

If someone visited the Arthur and Janet team tomorrow with some number of millions beyond $35 million it would momentarily be for sale and agreement quickly reached. It it really is for sale at some price.

The current Mr. Taylor’s grandfather and great uncle years ago had met up at association meetings with other daily newspaper owners and back then the Taylors raised the concept of joining together in a corporate holding company.

It turned out that Affiliated then owned two newspapers, the giant Boston Globe and the tiny North Adamas Transcript. The Globe flourished and continued to grow in value, at least in the minds of investors, and the Transcript didn’t. It was also observed that because of the disparity in size, there really were no, or too few synergies.

During that relatively short time, the Transcript had not increased in market value but the former owner’s stock in Affiliated had grown enormously.

The Taylors offered to pay them back the $5 million or thereabouts purchase price, but the original owners instead chose to instead retain their much more valuable stock in Affiliated and the Transcript was sold to Ingersoll.

A bad economy means ad sales are down… but it also means the real estate market is putrid, so the dreams of vast fortunes from the redevelopment of Wingo Square are on hold.. The ever-shrinking Herald has to hang on a while longer, continuing to print its meager but increasingly strident offerings far outside the city limits. Now, however, it is without the chance dream that its only hope of survival — suspension of Globe publication — will happen before the paper is bled dry.

One larger question that’s interesting to me is: What does this episode say about the viability of out-of-town ownership of newspapers?

When local daily print papers (like ours in New Haven) get in trouble, and people start speculating about possible buyers, the NYT is the gold standard. People figure (with good reason) that it might make the local paper a lot better to have the best newspaper in the business own it.

I wonder if the Globe saga dispels that idea. Maybe there are inherent barriers to even good companies, not just rapacious companies that look to milk local communities, come into town. Maybe corporate chain ownership destroyed local journalism more than the Internet ever did.

And just maybe (not sure about this one), the whole for-profit, consumer-oriented model of daily journalism no longer works at the local level. (I have a self-interested stake in that wild assertion.)

One place to watch that assertion being tested: the NYT’s interesting experiment in San Francisco and possibly other cities, combining a national edition with not just a local bureau, but with a partnership with genuinely locally rooted, mission-driven news organization. Will that fill the gap in cities losing their dailies? Will it create a new kind of hybrid business model? Or will it devolve, after an initial flourish, into the same old out-of-town model milking a distant city with a backwater bureau?