Month: November 2008

Chuck Turner (allegedly) joins the 90 percent

Best stretch of Howie Carr I’ve heard since — oh, since Dianne Wilkerson was arrested. I haven’t had a chance to read the affidavit yet, but Amy Derjue offers highlights at Boston Daily.

Most outstanding quote from the soon-to-be-ex-councilor: “If you took out all corrupt politicians, you’d take out 90 percent and be left with us 10 percent.”

Us? Well, he is innocent unless proven guilty.

Here’s what I don’t understand. I always thought Turner was one of those hard-core ideologues who would never take a dime. The only way this would make sense is if we learned he donated the money to the North Korean government, or to Cynthia McKinney’s presidential campaign.

Let’s hear it for DiMasi (again)

I shouldn’t be blogging, because I’ve got an interview to prepare for. But I didn’t want the shift away from a toll hike and toward an increase in the gasoline tax to get by me without saying anything.

This could turn out to have been choreographed. But assuming everything is as it appears on the surface, it’s hard not to notice that, for the second time, House Speaker Sal DiMasi — invariably described as “embattled” these days — has stood up on the right side of a major public policy issue, and Gov. Deval Patrick hasn’t.

Without DiMasi, we might very well be sliding toward Patrick’s disastrous proposal to build three gambling casinos. And Patrick is reportedly still reluctant to support “broad-based tax increases,” as his spokesman, Kyle Sullivan, puts it.

If DiMasi’s enemies succeed in driving him from office, where is that going to leave us?

How the right went wrong

Brilliant essay in the Wall Street Journal on how conservatives squandered their authority by embracing know-nothing populism — culminating in their fatal embrace of Sarah Palin. Mark Lilla says of the right’s anti-intellectual intellectuals:

They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

You should definitely read the whole thing. (Via Hub Blog.)

Linking and journalistic credibility

One of the great journalistic advances enabled by the Internet is that reporters can now link to the background information that underlies their work. All too often, though, news organizations don’t take advantage of it. They should, because it would enhance their credibility.

Case in point this morning is Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham’s call for an increased gasoline tax. (She’s right on the merits, by the way.) She bolsters her call, in part, with several statistical assertions, including this: “that whole ‘Taxachusetts’ thing is so 1978. Our state currently ranks 35th in the nation for taxes as a proportion of income.”

Columnists can’t attribute every fact, or their 600- to 700-word essays would double in size, and we’d all fall into a stupor from boredom. But they could link. There are no links in the online version of Abraham’s column, though.

The most widely circulated number I’ve seen is the Tax Foundation’s estimate that Massachusetts’ state and local tax burden as a percentage of personal income is 23rd. That’s the difference between Massachusetts being a low-tax state, as Abraham claims, or somewhere in the middle of the pack. And it’s something we’d all have to think about before pushing a gas-tax hike, or in deciding how large that hike should be.

Abraham, a former Boston Phoenix colleague of mine, is a fine reporter, and I know she could back up her assertion that Massachusetts is 35th, at least by someone’s measure. But the Internet enables all of us to show our work. The practice should be more routine than it is.

And kudos to Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby and the editorial-page crew. Jacoby’s column has been fully linked for quite some time. Whether you agree with him or not, linking makes him more a part of the online, multi-level conversation into which journalism is evolving.

The ghosts of James Michael Curley

In my latest for the Guardian, I report that Massachusetts has returned to normal since Election Day. Which is to say that corrupt politicians are running wild, tolls are going up and the traffic jams the Big Dig were supposed to alleviate are now worse than ever. James Michael Curley’s statues — yes, both of them — are laughing at us.

Thoughts on the Globe’s Newton project

The battle between the Boston Globe and GateHouse Media over the Globe’s hyperlocal Newton site isn’t really about the possibility that the Globe will grab more content from the Newton Tab than fair use — or fair play — should allow.

Rather, it’s over a more fundamental issue that will likely be a key to survival as struggling news organizations seek to reinvent themselves: Who will control the virtual front door to Newton, as well as to other cities and towns?

At first glance, Boston.com Newton strikes me as attractive, well-organized and generous. By generous, I mean the blog-like feature that fills the center well is a nice mix of content from the Globe, the Tab and local blogs. Just as important, the items give you just a bare taste of the story — if you have any interest at all, you’ll click through. So it seems likely that Boston.com will drive some traffic to the Tab, not to mention the blogs.

By combining content from different sources so seamlessly, Boston.com, at least for the moment, has leapfrogged ahead of the Tab’s Wicked Local Newton site. GateHouse’s Wicked Local sites, which debuted in Plymouth a few years ago, before there even was a GateHouse, were supposed to combine content from the local GateHouse paper with blogs and citizen journalism in order to be a one-stop community guide. That never quite panned out, although Wicked Local is stronger in some towns than in others.

Probably the least generous item on Boston.com Newton right now involves my friends at the Boston Phoenix. There’s a big photo of a plate of food, along with a headline that says, “Foodies: Phoenix reviews Hotel Indigo.” Follow the link, though, and you find a Globe blog item that summarizes the Phoenix review. You have to click again to get to the actual Phoenix review.

There’s a lot more to Boston.com Newton than the news blog. Readers can contribute to a wiki, discuss issues and send in photos. There’s a calendar of events, real-estate listings and local school data.

At the moment, at least, there is no RSS feed. That may change, though the site strikes me as ill-suited to reading via RSS, as it consists of many little items that require you to go off-site if you want to learn more. (Boston.com’s director of community publishing, Teresa Hanafin, makes exactly that point in a comment to the Garden City blog. And don’t miss GateHouse editor Greg Reibman’s hilarious retort.)

The Globe and GateHouse face different challenges.

The Globe, like all big regional papers, is caught in a squeeze. People who are interested mainly in national and international news are now getting it elsewhere, online. And though it’s often said that local is the future, it’s difficult for a big paper that covers all of Eastern Massachusetts to become local enough. Boston.com Newton, which is clearly intended as a prototype (note the “yourtown” in the URL), is an interesting way of overcoming the disadvantage of being a regional paper — and of attracting local advertisers who could never afford to buy space in the paper.

GateHouse, which publishes about 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts, is all about local, so it doesn’t have to reorient its mission. But its natural advantage in print doesn’t necessarily hold up online, because players as large as the Globe and as small as a few passionate activists can play on the same turf.

What’s going on in Newton will tell us a lot about the future of the newspaper business over the next few years. I hope both sides find a way to win.

Boston.com versus GateHouse redux

Boston.com’s Newton site debuted today. I’ll try to offer at least a quick assessment tomorrow. At first glance, it strikes me as an attractive mix of content from the Boston Globe, GateHouse Media’s Newton Tab, the Boston Phoenix and local bloggers.

Meanwhile, take a look at this video, posted on Boston.com’s Green Blog. Be sure to watch the closing credits. Pretty aggressive, don’t you think?

More: It’s only fair to point out it’s virtually impossible to learn that the video is from the GateHouse’s Belmont Citizen-Herald unless you watch all the way to the end. Even if you go directly to the YouTube site, you’ll find nothing unless you click on “more info.” And even then, it’s pretty cryptic.

So I can believe it’s an innocent mistake — but one that should be corrected soon.

Still more: Now fixed — see fourth paragraph.

Obama job-seekers beware

Ari Herzog, who’d like to work for the Obama administration, is put off by the 63-question, privacy-invading survey that all applicants must fill out.

That, at least, you might have already heard about. But Herzog also discovers that the data you provide to Team Obama’s Change.gov site is stored not on a government server, but with a private contractor, Cluen Corp.

Here we go again

Doesn’t President-elect Obama have a problem on his hands if Sen. Hillary Clinton turns him down for the secretary of state’s post? Wouldn’t anyone else now be seen as second-best?

Obama got lucky with Rahm Emanuel. But the name-floating that’s going on right now strikes me as a significant breakdown in discipline on the part of the Obama camp.