In 1993, the New York Times Co. paid $1.1 billion for the Boston Globe. Hahaha. Ha. Whew. Sorry. The Globe's been a huge financial drag (as you'll recall from one of our least popular posts of 2009), They've been trying to unload the paper for a few years now. Now, they may have actually found a sucker buyer!

Aaron Kushner, the 37 year-old CEO of a Boston greeting card company, is leading a group of investors that's all set to offer $200 million to NYT Co. for its New England Media Group, which consists of the Globe and a few other small trinkets. He says he has a plan to make it into a successful business. We hope so.

For the New York Times Co., the sale price would be 18% of what they paid for the paper. Also today, Blackstone Group is buying the top 11 floors of the old NYT headquarters for $160 million. That's the building that the NYT Co. sold for $175 million in 2004, and which was then flipped in 2007 for $525 million. That was, of course, all because the NYT Co. decided to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new headquarters building just before the total collapse of the newspaper industry and a global recession. (They've since had to lease back their own building, for cash.)

No one ever accused the NYT Co. of being full of great business minds.

[Photo: AP]