To understand what might happen to the Boston Globe in the very near future, it’s instructive to look at two episodes from the New York Times Company’s ownership of the paper.

Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger Sr., the former Times Company chairman, loves the Globe. The $1.1 billion purchase of the paper in 1993 was one of his finest moments. In their book The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times, Alex Jones and Susan Tifft write that Punch was positively "giddy" about the prospect of buying the Globe. When negotiations temporarily fell apart, he sent a case of French wine to everybody in New York and Boston who had worked on the proposal. An enclosed note read: "This would have tasted better with Boston baked beans."

Punch’s son, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., the company’s current chairman, says he shares that zeal for the Globe. But he’s expressed the sentiment in odd and contradictory ways. Before the Taylor family sold the Globe to the Times Company, they extracted a promise from the Sulzbergers to not meddle in the paper’s management for five years. The Times Company also made what Jones and Tifft describe as a "moral commitment" that the Taylors—who had owned the paper for more than a century—would continue to operate the Globe long after that. The first pledge was kept, but not the second. (The Times Company, when contacted for this story, said it was "not aware" of any such understanding.)

In July 1999, Pinch Sulzberger fired Ben Taylor, who was then the Globe‘s publisher. Members of the remaining Globe brass were not pleased, and so, five months later, looking to explain himself, Sulzberger called a staff retreat at Blantyre, a resort in the Berkshires. At the meeting, Sulzberger strode into a room in which roughly 25 Globe executives had gathered. He carried with him a stuffed moose, which he then tossed onto the floor. Sulzberger explained that this was a Times tradition (one he would repeat years later at the height of the Jayson Blair scandal). Now that the moose was out of the bag, so to speak, the Globe people were free to say whatever was on their minds.

Many Globe executives had never seen management by stuffed animal before; it was regarded then, as it was during the Blair saga, as a ham-handed gesture. The meeting quickly became emotional. Nervous editors pressed Sulzberger: How could he have ousted the last Taylor so callously? Sulzberger grew exasperated and cut them off. According to then–Globe editors Gregory Moore and Tom Mulvoy, Sulzberger said, "The problem is, you guys thought this was a merger. It was an acquisition."

He paused. "It was an acquisition."

After that, things changed rapidly at the Globe. The Times Company replaced the paper’s finance executives with its own people. It did the same with the circulation department. Then the company started paring down the Globe‘s news division. In 2001, the Globe boasted 552 full-time newsroom employees; there have been five rounds of buyouts since. The most recent, to be finalized this month, aims to eliminate another 50 staffers. Only 329 newsroom employees will remain. In fairness, Sulzberger has called for four rounds of editorial buyouts at the flagship Times. Yet even after that bloodletting, nearly 1,300 reporters and editors still cover the day’s events for the paper of record.

Sulzberger has shown time and again that he values the New York Times far more than any other asset in the company. Beginning next year, as he does what’s needed to save his marquee property, the 18 other newspapers his company owns—the Globe included—will face a reckoning.