The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT), owner of the Boston Globe, has gotten six unions to agree to concessions and is still in talks with the Guild. However, even if they get their $20 million in cost reductions, the paper is purportedly still losing fistfuls of money. Was the New York Times management trying to show potential buyers that the unions are flexible? Do they really think there is a real buyer? Is it conceivable that they really thought a buyer would come out of the woodwork after they made their veiled threat?

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At the end of the day, the New York Times Co. will still have to make some drastic moves, including, perhaps, only publishing in print certain days of the week. Maybe that was always part of the plan, as I doubt they would have really wanted to pull the trigger and actually have the ink on their hands of having closed a major metropolitan paper. At the core, the Sulzberger family is about newspapers and journalism. Yet, the stakes are greater than just the Globe: this is about the New York Times. The company needs to preserve its resources to support the core paper. It needs to eliminate losses where it can. The Times will get concessions, but it will still lose money in Boston.