Year: 2009

Sustainability and the role of smaller cities

Friend of Media Nation Catherine Tumber, with whom I worked at the Boston Phoenix, recently published an important essay in the Boston Review on how revitalizing smaller cities — think New Bedford, Lowell, Lawrence, Holyoke — could help lead to a more sustainable future. She writes:

When it comes to the urban-rural divide, small-to-intermediate-size cities may offer the best of both worlds. For all the rural romanticism of the ’70s-era homesteading movement — or for that matter, the vaunted folksiness of “small-town values,” — urban life has its allure. Smaller cities are large enough to offer the diversity, anonymity, and vibrancy of urban culture, as well as levels of density that offer efficiencies of scale. They are also small enough to maintain proximity to sustainable food production and renewable energy resources.

Well worth reading in full.

The wonderfulness of “Astral Weeks”

I was excited about the new live version of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” until I saw this video of him mumbling through “Sweet Thing” at the Hollywood Bowl. The huge band he’s assembled is terrific. Morrison, not so much. Nor does this New York Times review hold out much hope.

Though I’m not a big Morrison fan and have never seen him live, I love “Astral Weeks.” As I suspect is the case with many people, I came to it well into adulthood — it was never on the radio, either then or now, and Morrison’s numerous top-40 hits didn’t appeal to me all that much. When I finally decided to find out why critics had been raving about it for all those years, I was mesmerized.

Last Friday I listened to it straight through while driving home, the first time I’d done that in a while. What a strange, wonderful piece of work. Morrison is at his peak, both in his singing and his writing. Is it possible that he was just 23 when he recorded it? I’d listen to it just for Richard Davis’ otherworldly bass-playing. Pressed to name a favorite song (not that these are really songs), I’d probably say “Cypress Avenue.” But that’s subject to change.

Trouble is, Morrison has had a reputation for years — maybe decades? — of indifference when it comes to performing live. Don Imus scored a rare interview with Morrison last week, but didn’t succeed in drawing him out of his shell. Far better is this NPR piece, broadcast on Saturday, on the significance of “Astral Weeks.”

Bob Dylan is often lumped with Morrison in delivering uninspired, even belligerently awful live performances. But when Dylan’s engaged, he is as compelling as he’s ever been. If you don’t believe me, check out this riveting video of Bob and the boys performing the Sam Cooke classic “A Change Is Gonna Come.” (Steve Greenlee will have to take my word for it, I guess.)

Does Morrison ever rise to such heights anymore? I don’t know the answer to that. What I do know is that if you don’t have “Astral Weeks” in your collection, you should rectify that as quickly as possible. You will be entranced and amazed.

Gov. Patrick targets legal notices

Gov. Deval Patrick is repeating a threat he’s made in the past: to take legal notices out of newspapers and run them online instead, thus saving taxpayers some money.

Hillary Chabot reports in today’s Boston Herald that Patrick has included a provision in his transportation bill that “would allow public transportation projects to advertise on the Internet instead of newspapers.”

From the earliest days of American newspapers, legal notices have been an important source of revenue. During Colonial times, it wasn’t uncommon for newspapers to curry favor with the royal governor in order to get lucrative official advertising.

Has the moment come to rethink legal ads? Probably. But given the horrendous state of the newspaper business, the timing couldn’t be any worse.

What Patrick proposes isn’t unique to Massachusetts. Le Templar of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz., recently spoke with NPR’s “On the Media” about this very subject. Among other things, he said:

[A] variety of research shows that despite the current plight of the newspaper industry, people are still reading newspapers and their companion websites far more than they’re reading individual government websites. We’re talking at magnitudes of 10 to 100 times more.

Also, newspapers serve as sort of a central repository. If you’re a person who likes to know what different governments are up to around you, you can go to your local newspaper and read them all at once instead to having to go sit in a library all day and look through different minutes or, in the modern electronic era, hit individual websites.

Templar also argued that it’s far easier for the government to prove that it published a legal notice, as required by law, with a newspaper clip than with an online notice on a government site. (Thanks to O-Fish-L for calling my attention to the Herald story.)

Herald to shed 20 jobs

While everyone is focused on the looming 50-person cut in the Boston Globe’s newsroom, the Boston Herald yesterday quietly announced that it would soon shed 20 jobs.

Lisa van der Pool reports in the Boston Business Journal that the cuts won’t come exclusively from the Herald’s newsroom: publisher Pat Purcell says the reductions will involve “editorial and commercial” employees at both the paper and its Web site.

As at the Globe, the Herald will look for volunteers first.

Weld misquotes Carter

There’s a howler near the top of former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld’s op-ed in today’s Boston Globe that any sharp-eyed editor should have caught. Weld and John Stimpson write:

In 1981, the United States was in the midst of what President Jimmy Carter had labeled a “national malaise” and a “crisis in confidence.”

Trouble is, as this PBS article explains, “Though he never used the word — [political adviser Pat] Caddell had in his memo — it became known as Carter’s ‘malaise’ speech.”

Howard Owens takes over the Batavian

Big news out of little Batavia, N.Y. As I was expecting he would, Howard Owens has announced that he’s taking over the Batavian, the online-only “paper” he launched last fall when he was still working for GateHouse Media. He’s going all-in, selling his house and getting ready to start covering the news and selling ads next week. He writes:

My wife and I are listing our house in Pittsford for sale and as soon as it sells, we will rent a place in Batavia (or maybe elsewhere in Genesee County). I expect we’ll see my wife’s byline in The Batavian before too long.

Best of luck to Howard. If he can make this work, it will be a model for a business desperately in need of some good news.

A push to save City Weekly

Local media and political activist Ron Newman has written an open letter to the Boston Globe asking that it save the City Weekly section, currently targeted for elimination on March 22. Newman writes:

Dear Boston Globe folks,

As a resident of Somerville, I am distressed to read that you plan to discontinue the only section of the Globe that consistently covers news about our city (and our neighbor, Cambridge).

Your internal memo, published at Dan Kennedy’s Media Nation blog, says that “the suburban zones … are too important to readers to dramatically reduce.” Does this mean that the Globe no longer cares about readers who live in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline? How do you expect to keep readers and advertisers if you keep slashing away at the content that makes the Globe unique?

For over 50 years, I’ve lived in houses that received home delivery of at least one daily newspaper. But I’m seeing less and less reason to keep my Globe subscription.

To see the reaction that this decision is getting, I recommend you read the comments on these blog entries:

http://community.livejournal.com/davis_square/1665644.html
http://community.livejournal.com/b0st0n/6482970.html
http://www.universalhub.com/node/23506
http://www.universalhub.com/node/23389

You still have several weeks to reconsider this bad decision. Please do so.

My own take? Probably unrealistic. But I’d certainly like to see the Globe take some steps to pump up its city coverage online.