The Boston meat packers?

Interesting idea being played with up in Boston: Can local readers buy the paper in the same fashion as residents of Green Bay own the Packers?

“Boston is much less insular than it was 30 years ago,” said Paul S. Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation, a philanthropic group. The city has long had a chip on its collective shoulder about where it stands in the world, “especially any time you get New York into the picture,” he said, and while that trait has faded greatly, losing local institutions does not help.

Perhaps that is why, along with the desire to save The Globe, many Bostonians argue for local ownership, with a particular suspicion of answering to anyone in that bigger city on the Hudson.

One blogger advocated an arrangement similar to the community foundation that owns the Green Bay Packers football team. Several members of Boston’s business elite have been rumored to be interested in buying The Globe, but none have confirmed it and most have denied it.

At least a few local investors showed interest in buying the paper a few years ago, but that was before the newspaper business slid into its deep slump.

“You have to have local ownership that wants to buy the paper,” Mr. Menino said. “It’s questionable. I haven’t heard of anybody.”

Losing The Globe “would rock the city psychologically,” Mr. Grogan said. “It doesn’t square with the more confident, more worldly self-image that Boston has.”

But that impact would split along generational lines, as it does between Julia Quinn and James Monti, strangers who rode side by side last week on a Red Line subway train.

Ms. Quinn, a medical assistant in her 60s, said she read The Globe almost every day, though its politics were too liberal for her tastes. “Boston’s not a podunk town — it’s got to have a good paper,” she said.

Mr. Monti, an unemployed construction worker in his 20s, said he only occasionally picked up a paper, “mostly to see how the Sox are doing,” and was just as likely to find the news online. He shrugged off the prospect of losing The Globe, saying he could go elsewhere for information.

It seems hard to imagine how local ownership would work, unless investors are willing to take a stake for civic duty rather than future profits. After all, the good people of Green Bay can rely on the Packers to bring in revenue on game day and they benefit from the NFL's network TV deals.

And would you want, say, Mitt Romney or another wealthy politician to hold a major stake?

And is the Times even willing to sell?