By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Click on photo for Flickr slideshowEarlier this week, I said I would post on my students’ experience in using NewsTrust, a social-networking tool that lets you share and rate news stories on qualities such as accuracy, sourcing and bias.
Well, I did — but not here. My oversight. Instead, I posted a roundup on the class Web site. And here, in a bit of post-post-modernism, is what NewsTrust had to say about what my students had to say.
Adam Gaffin presents “Quite possibly the worst column that will ever be written about Chuck Turner.” Which can only mean one thing: Joe Fitzgerald is writing again. You’ve got to love Fitz’s shoutout to Louis Farrakhan.
Recently I turned on the Blogger feature “Links to this post.” You can see it at the bottom, right next to comments.
It would be a whole lot more useful, though, if I could somehow be notified every time something pops up there. Any thoughts?
This morning I brought the Media Nationmobile, a 2007 Corolla LE, to the dealership for its 30,000-mile maintenance. I will omit the name of the dealer in order to protect the guilty.*
Anyway, on the dealer’s Web site the price for the 30,000-mile pit stop is $230. But once I arrived, the guy I handed my keys to told me it would be $575.
I canceled, and told him I’d have to think about it. I also told him that the online price was only $230. It must be a mistake, he informed me, to which I replied that it appeared to be a mistake aimed at fooling people into thinking they could actually afford to have their car worked on there.
He then made me a copy of the “Corolla Maintenance Schedule” the place uses in order to show me that I must be wrong. Well, guess what? The price was listed at $390 — $160 more than the online price, but $185 less than the price he’d quoted me. Then again, he’d also told me the dealership recommends an alignment at 30,000 miles, which wasn’t on either the online or the printed price list. So I guess that’s what brought it up to $575.
I am done with the dealer. I called Direct Tire of Peabody, which has done some pretty amazing work on our 1993 Volvo 240 station wagon, and was quoted a price of less than $200. And the dealership has lost another customer.
*Update: OK, I’ve been shamed into it by Ron and Adam. The dealership is Ira Toyota of Danvers. But let me offer a few caveats: (1) the guy I dealt with was completely upfront about the price once I got there, so I was in no danger of being ripped off; (2) there are probably more goodies on the $390 printed list than on the $230 online list, but I didn’t bother to do a comparison; (3) I should have printed out the online list, gone back and demanded to see a manager. But I didn’t.
Photo (cc) by Tracy O and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Michael Prager singles out Media Nation as one of 64 notable Boston Web sites in this Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine. There are a lot of terrific local bloggers in his roundup, and a few I don’t know about, so I’ve got some checking out to do.
Prager somehow finds the space to poke fun at my prediction that the Red Sox would fall short in the postseason this year, in large measure because of Josh Beckett’s injury. Even though they, uh, fell short, in large measure because of Beckett’s injury.
What am I giving thanks for today? Fake Rahm Emanuel.
And no, I don’t know what they are. But here’s last night’s “NewsNight” segment from NECN in which former Boston Globe reporter-turned-communications consultant Tom Palmer, host Jim Braude and I discuss tolls, gas hikes and investigations.
I’ll be on NECN‘s “NewsNight” today at 8 p.m. to discuss the Big Dig and the toll-hike/gas-tax conundrum.
I took a pass on the recent dust-up between Slate columnist Ron Rosenbaum and new-media advocate Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis can drive me up a wall, and I thought Rosenbaum made some good points about Jarvis’ Web triumphalism. At the same time, Jarvis is a valuable source of ideas, and, frankly, I have no interest in pissing him off.
But I can’t recommend strongly enough a long profile of Jarvis that appears in the current New York Observer. Written by the Observer’s media columnist, John Koblin, the piece is deep as well as sympathetic to Jarvis’ point of view — yet Jarvis’ critics have their say, too.
If you are looking for a good overview on the state of the news business — and especially the struggling newspaper business — then you need to read Koblin’s article.
And by the way, I can’t help but observe, Jarvis-style, that Koblin’s article would be better still if he and his editors had made the extra effort to link to what he was writing about.
This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage with Grace team. To learn more, please go to www.engagewithgrace.org, and see this story in today’s Boston Globe.
We make choices throughout our lives — where we want to live, what types of activities will fill our days, with whom we spend our time. These choices are often a balance between our desires and our means, but at the end of the day, they are decisions made with intent. But when it comes to how we want to be treated at the end our lives, often we don’t express our intent or tell our loved ones about it.
This has real consequences. Seventy-three percent of Americans would prefer to die at home, but up to 50 percent die in hospital. More than 80 percent of Californians say their loved ones “know exactly” or have a “good idea” of what their wishes would be if they were in a persistent coma, but only 50 percent say they’ve talked to them about their preferences.
But our end-of-life experiences are about a lot more than statistics. They’re about all of us. So the first thing we need to do is start talking.
“Engage with Grace: The One Slide Project” was designed with one simple goal: to help get the conversation about end of life experience started. The idea is simple: Create a tool to help get people talking. One slide, with just five questions on it. Five questions designed to help get us talking with each other, with our loved ones, about our preferences. And we’re asking people to share this one slide wherever and whenever they can — at a presentation, at dinner, at their book club. Just one slide, just five questions.
Lets start a global discussion that, until now, most of us haven’t had.
Here is what we are asking you: Download the One Slide (PowerPoint) and share it at any opportunity — with colleagues, family, friends. Think of the slide as currency and donate just two minutes whenever you can. Commit to being able to answer these five questions about end of life experience for yourself, and for your loved ones. Then commit to helping others do the same. Get this conversation started.
Let’s start a viral movement driven by the change we as individuals can effect, and the incredibly positive impact we could have collectively. Help ensure that all of us — and the people we care for — can end our lives in the same purposeful way we live them.
Just One Slide, just one goal. Think of the enormous difference we can make together.