Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post is covering the apparent demise of another ancient American newspaper; the Boston Globe.

Yes, it was a liberal rag - a laughably small minded, mini-me imitation of its parent, the New York Times. But if one believes that a city's newspapers are more than mouthpieces for one political party or another, that covering art, culture, sports, fashion, and local business is an important task beyond politics that helps unite and define a metro area - then we may be suitably chastened by the demise even of a paper that thought John Kerry was the bees knees.

Kurtz reports on the resentment felt by many Bostonians toward Pinch Sulzberger and the New York Times:

Boston residents have long resented the takeover of the Globe by a company based in New York, with which the region competes in sports, banking and cultural bragging rights.

The notion that Boston, home to some of the country's top universities, could lose its major daily would have been unthinkable before the recent nationwide plunge in advertising revenue. That dive has triggered a wave of newspaper bankruptcies and the closing of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

And he quotes former columnist Eileen McNamara who lays into Sulzberger for his stupidity:

"From the moment the Times Co. purchased The Globe in 1993, it has treated New England's largest newspaper like a cheap whore," former Globe columnist Eileen McNamara wrote last month in the Herald. "It pimped her out for profit during the booming 1990s and then pillaged her when times got tough. It closed her foreign bureaus and cheapened her coverage of everything from the fine arts to the hard sciences."

McNamara, who now teaches journalism at Brandeis University, ridiculed Sulzberger as "the boy genius whose crack management skills have helped drive the parent company of two of journalism's most respected newspapers to the brink of bankruptcy."

Newspapers are dying for a variety of reasons; a perfect storm of circumstances relating to the internet, the recession, and their own towering hubris. In the case of the Globe and probably soon, the New York Times, you can also lay a large dollop of blame at the feet of a man who sought to use his media empire to affect politics rather than fulfill the traditional role of newspapers in American society of reporting what is happening in the world.

Hat Tip: Ed Lasky