It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

For the second straight day the Boston Herald reports on a disgruntled runner-up in the New York Times Co.’s sale of the Boston Globe to Red Sox owner John Henry.

Second Globe bidder: Fix was in

Another losing Boston Globe contender — Springfield TV station owner John J. Gormally Jr. — is crying foul and saying he also outbid John Henry, a day after a San Diego media outfit claimed The New York Times Co. brushed off its offer, even though it was higher than the Red Sox owner’s $70 million winning bid.

Gormally confirmed to the Herald that his was the highest-end $80 million offer mentioned in a July Globe story and accused the Times of wanting to create a more PR-friendly storyline around the sale, which came two decades after the Times spent $1.1 billion to acquire the broadsheet.

Gormally adds that he thinks the sale was rigged all along to go to Henry because “If they had sold it to anyone else, the story would have been, ‘Times loses 1 billion dollars of stockholder value.’ By selling it to John Henry the story then becomes, ‘Red Sox owner saves Globe.’”

Interesting.

Crosstown at the stately local broadsheet, they do the Herald one better.

3 groups say they topped Henry’s bid for Globe

Three of the groups that lost out in the bidding for The Boston Globe say their offers were higher than Red Sox owner John W. Henry’s winning $70 million bid — prompting them to question the New York Times Co.’s sales process.

John Gormally, a Springfield television station owner and publisher of BusinessWest magazine, said that after meeting the Times Co.’s final bid deadline on July 26, he heard nothing from the company until a week later, in the early hours of Saturday morning, when an e-mail around 3 a.m. from the investment bankers announced the sale to Henry.

“I was surprised. Our offer was considerably higher than Henry’s,” Gormally said, at the “upper range” of the $65 million to $80 million the Globe had previously reported for bids. He noted that the Times Co., as a public company, has a responsibility to shareholders to maximize value.

“All the bidders expended considerable time, energy, money, and the process was not transparent at the end to the bidders,’’ Gormally said.

Also disgruntled: “Robert Loring, a Massachusetts native and founder of Revolution Capital, a West Coast investment company that owns the Tampa Tribune . . . [and] John Lynch, chief executive of the U-T San Diego newspaper.”

Damn. Any more of these unhappy rejects and we’re gonna need a bigger blog.