San Francisco - The Boston Globe pulled back from the brink of closure Monday as its owner The New York Times Company reported progress in reaching cost-cutting deals with the paper's unions.

More talks were scheduled in an attempt to prevent the collapse of one of the more prestigious papers in the US, which is on track to lose 85 million dollars this year in the aftermath of the newspaper industry's advertising slump.

The New York Times issued an ultimatum late Sunday, saying it was poised to file a federally-required notice to close the 137-year-old newspaper unless its unions don't agree to major financial and contract concessions, such as the abolition of lifetime job guarantees for some workers.

A filing would have initiated the closing process, and could have shut down the Globe within 60 days.

But after a marathon negotiating session, Gregory Thornton, the Globe's senior vice president of human resources, pulled the company back from the brink saying that "substantial progress" had been made, the Boston Globe reported.

"We have no plans to file a notice at this moment," Thornton said as he left the negotiations.

The paper reported that the organization's largest union, the Boston Newspaper Guild, had met management's request to come up with some 10 million dollars in cost savings, but that the sides were still in dispute over the removal of lifetime job guarantees for about
190 Guild members.

Founded in 1872, the Boston Globe is the biggest paper in New England and was bought by The New York Times in 1993 for 1.1 billion dollars in a move that was controversial given the two cities' business, cultural and sporting rivalry.

However, the challenges facing the newspaper industry have put the New York publisher under threat as it seeks to navigate the industry's plunging advertising revenue and to manage the company's debt.

Earlier this year The Times Co. borrowed 250 million dollars from Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim at a 14 per cent interest rate and sold a portion of its headquarters building for 225 million dollars in a bid to shore up its finances.

The combination of competition from online advertising and newspaper availability on the internet, along with the 18-month-old recession, has seriously eroded the economic health of the nation's newspapers.

Stalwarts such as Colorado's Rocky Mountain News have closed down. In December, Detroit became the first major US city without daily newspaper deliveries, which were cut to three days a week by the publisher of the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. (dpa)