The paper is in a state of flux as The New York Times Company announced last month that it is selling the paper. There are no buyers as of yet.

“We don't know what the future holds. We know there's a lot of interest from the community. There's been interest locally, and from New York,” said McGrory on Thursday.

Before being appointed editor in December, McGrory was a columnist and former metro editor for the Globe.

McGrory said the problem for newspapers lies in the decrease in revenue from classified ads. He said The Globe once made $160-180 million a year on ads, but is now losing to sites like Monster.com and Craigslist. It launched a paywall in 2011 and now has about 28,000 paid digital subscribers.

Globe spokesperson Ellen Clegg told Dan Kennedy of The Neiman Lab, “We have been trying to find the right balance between the free-sharing culture of the Internet and paid access to premium Globe content.”

However, according to McGrory the Globe and the city of Boston are seeing growth. McGrory hopes the paper will mirror Boston’s changes.

 "I aim to make the sure the Globe captures the moment for what it is and helps spread this prosperity to places where it doesn't normally go."

He sites the paper’s investigative or “accountability” reporting as a key point in the paper’s success, some of which include: 

Are we talking science fiction, outer space? Nah, Augmented Reality ("AR") in this context refers to smart phone apps from news sources and their inspired direction toward interactive graphics and illustrations, a kind of layered, enhanced reality made for the user, in this case the news source's demographic.

While journalists might not always be considered "in the know" about what is techy and marketable, The Boston Globe showed last weekend that the use of AR for phone apps can be done "quickly and cheaply, making it an experiment worth trying in the newsroom" according to Poynter.

A perfect test of this was the newspaper's annual Winter Arts Guide, which has schedules and previews of upcoming arts and entertainment events. The idea was to try something more animated this year, where the season comes alive. And so this became the theme of this year's section, and Dan Zedek, The Globe's assistant managing editor for design, asked, "What if we made the page come alive?"

Roy Greene, senior assistant metro editor at the Boston Globe, explained in an article on Poynter.org how the paper used crowdsourcing to complement its World Cup coverage.

He described the four steps the Globe took, starting with creating a simple, web-based questionnaire, to identify Boston.com readers who were travelling to South Africa. The questionnaire asked for information including full name, hometown, email address, job, plans for the tournament and favourite team, and asked whether respondents would be willing to speak to a reporter. The form was posted on the home page and the soccer page just before the launch of the World Cup, and Greene saved the responses that he thought could be valuable: about a dozen, he specified.

He emailed these people to confirm details and seek photos, and then invited those who "showed potential" to contribute dispatches from South Africa. He explained what the Globe was looking for, "an interesting vignette or encounter during a game or with fans, something compelling about where they were staying or visiting."