A Taylor to the Rescue?

Stephen Taylor, scion of the Boston Globe's first family, one-time executive VP at the paper, and near-certain bidder to buy it back from the New York Times Company, teaches a course on the business of newspapers at the Yale School of Management. For students, one perk of enrolling is the pizza-and-beer outings that their instructor springs for after class. For Globe-watchers, on the other hand, the class offers something even better: a window into not just why Taylor wants the Globe back, but also what he might do with it.

Since leaving the paper in 2001, Taylor, who lives in Milton, has kept busy with angel investing and money management projects. He started teaching the Yale course three years ago. Dave Bledin, who took the class in the spring of 2008, says back then it might as well have been listed in the course catalog as the business of doomsday.

"We had speaker after speaker from the newspaper industry coming in, painting this bleak picture," he says. "It was sort of depressing." According to the syllabus, those lecturers included a Globe op-ed columnist, a Times Company senior exec, a top Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editor, and the lead Bancroft family trustee (this, less than a year after the Bancrofts had relinquished the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch). In other words, a lineup that understandably could make Taylor's three-hour lessons a serious downer.

But Bledin, who kept tabs on the class by talking with this year's students (and who even attended a session), says a funny thing happened: As the future of journalism grew more dire, the tone of the class grew more hopeful. This time around, the roster of speakers comprised online gurus from Hearst and the Globe, the CEO of citizen journalism website Helium, the founder of MinnPost.com, and an executive from the very much evolving Newsweek. John Bourne, one of Taylor's students this past spring, says the latest edition of the course was decidedly optimistic.

"A lot of it was focused on how journalism stays relevant in an increasingly digital world," Bourne says. "It was something [Taylor] was very curious to figure out. It was almost as though he was learning alongside us, as someone who knows how the world of journalism used to work and [wants] to keep it alive."
Even if, in the case of the Globe, that might mean creating a newspaper that looks very different from the one that Taylor's family once so benevolently ruled.