Month: February 2010

A tale of two — uh, one poll

From the Boston Herald:

Gov. Deval Patrick’s standing with voters is so weak that this year’s race for governor is shaping up as a contest between his two rivals, a new Suffolk University-7News poll shows.

From the Associated Press:

Gov. Deval Patrick is leading Republican Charles Baker and independent Timothy Cahill in the latest public Massachusetts gubernatorial poll.

So who’s right? One answer is that the poll shows Patrick leading with 33 percent. Baker gets 25 percent and Cahill 23 percent. Score one for the AP.

Yet the Herald’s lede does accurately reflect the analysis of pollster David Paleologos, who says, “This race is really between Charlie Baker and Tim Cahill. Whoever emerges between the Baker-Cahill race is likely to be the winner.”

My gut tells me that Paleologos is being way too aggressive in reading the numbers, even if they are his numbers. It’s early. My suspicion is that Cahill will fade away, leaving Baker as Patrick’s principal challenger. Patrick’s political standing is pretty weak at the moment, but he’s a formidable campaigner.

Let’s see where this race stands on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day.

Adam Reilly is leaving the Phoenix

Adam Reilly

My friend and former (and future!) colleague Adam Reilly is leaving the Boston Phoenix to become an associate producer for “Greater Boston,” at WGBH-TV (Channels 2 and 44).

Adam has ably handled the media beat since 2006, writing the “Don’t Quote Me” column and the media blog. Before that, he’d served as the paper’s political columnist.

Since the late 1980s, just three people have covered the media for the Phoenix — Mark Jurkowitz, now associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington; yours truly; Mark again; and then Adam. For a press critic, it’s one of just a handful of jobs in the country where you really get a chance to make a difference. No doubt a long line of applicants will form outside the Phoenix’s door.

Good luck and best wishes to Adam, a transplant from Minnesota who’s managed the difficult trick of establishing himself as a true Bostonian.

Paul Krugman, cat person

If you’re a fan of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, as I am, then you really have to read Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of him in the current New Yorker.

I love the Tina Barney photo of Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, posing with their cats. You don’t really get the full effect unless you see it in the print edition, but there’s something hilariously incongruous about Krugman holding a cat while looking like he’s about to bite the head off a political adversary.

I was also interested to learn that Wells has had a strong hand in sharpening and toughening Krugman’s prose. For instance:

Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.”

Recently I heard someone describe the columnist divide this way: you’re either a Krugman person or a David Brooks person. Go figure: they’re my two favorite columnists, though I’ll confess I find fault with Brooks’ cautious conservatism far more often than I do with Krugman’s fire-breathing liberalism.

Crowdsource my class mapping project

Sometime next month, my students in Reinventing the News will be doing a Google map project. The last time I taught the course, I had everyone visit a coffee shop near campus, take a picture, plot it on a map and link to their own blogs for more. Here’s how it turned out.

It was OK, and we might do it again. But I’d be curious to know if anyone had something meatier to suggest. For instance, what if I sent each of them (there are 18) to a different MBTA station? What would you have them do once they got there?

Dylan at twilight

Dylan meets the Obamas (White House photo; click on image for larger size)

There are so many Bob Dylans that I don’t want to read too much into this. For all we know, Dylan will hit the road with Pearl Jam next year and play a couple hundred hard-rock shows. But two lovely videos suggest that he is settling into the twilight of his career following his unexpected triumphs of the past dozen or so years.

I’ll deal with the better-known example first: his recent performance at the White House of “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Backed by just Tony Garnier on upright bass and pianist Patrick Warren, Dylan offers an interesting contrast. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his guitar (in fact, he’s spent most of his time on stage in recent years randomly stabbing at an electronic keyboard), and he stops and starts several times. Yet he’s right on top of it vocally, singing a downbeat version of what was once a confident anthem. It bears repeated viewing — and listening.

The second is a live-in-the-studio version of Woodie Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi” (it’s the second video here). Dylan plays guitar, accompanied by Ry Cooder on electric guitar and Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks, of all people, on piano. As with the White House performance, Dylan’s singing combines his characteristic ragged edges with a softness and sweetness that I’ve rarely heard from him before.

I’m struck by what an effective, evocative singer Dylan can still be when his quiet rasp isn’t being overwhelmed by a full band. I’m also struck by the humility of these performances. The elderly-Western-gunslinger persona that he adopted during the past decade has been replaced by something more natural, more human.

None of us knows how much Dylan’s got left to give. His collaboration last year with Grateful Dead lyricist Rob Hunter, “Together Through Life,” was fun, but hardly up to his recent standards. His Christmas album was largely a joke, though I like the video for “Must Be Santa.” He is 68 years old and has a lot of miles on his odometer.

But he’s still capable of surprising us — and moving us.

Roger Ebert, Esquire and the paid-versus-free debate

Here’s something I don’t think I would have said five, three or even one year ago: the editors at Esquire made a mistake when they posted Chris Jones’ and Ethan Hill’s wonderful profile of movie critic Roger Ebert on their Web site last week. Ebert, as you may know, is slowly dying of cancer* and is writing, literally, like there’s no tomorrow.

We are in the midst of an endless debate over free versus paid content. I generally come down on the side of free Web access. Most news is a commodity, and if you can’t get it from one place, you’ll get it from another.

But the flip side is that when you’ve got something that isn’t a mere commodity, you shouldn’t just give it away. Jones’ story about Ebert, and Hill’s photography, comprise anything but a commodity. This is exclusive, important, heart-breaking, inspirational journalism. And it’s something that Esquire should have used to drive sales of the magazine.

Increasingly I’m coming around to the idea that a newspaper or magazine’s Web site should be different from its print edition. The Web should be about blogs, community, interaction and extra features that aren’t available in print. The print edition should drive traffic to the Web site, and the Web site ought to drive sales of the print edition.

Esquire does offer some online extras with its Ebert story, but it could have offered more (a slide show, a video, a podcast of Jones and Hill talking about the piece) — and less (not the entire story, at least not for a few weeks).

As I look at the Ebert story online, I see just one non-house ad — a banner at the top of the page, currently selling Dockers pants. I’ve read the story, looked at the pictures and have no particular incentive now to buy the magazine. The idea, I think, should be print and online working together. What Esquire has given us is a Web-first approach with the hope that, someday, someone may figure out a business model. How 2005 is that?

*Further thoughts: A Media Nation reader has asked me to rethink my “dying of cancer” construction. I didn’t write it carelessly. The story is replete with references to the limited time Ebert has left (“Ebert is dying in increments, and he is aware of it”), and his health is precarious because of repeated bouts of cancer. Nevertheless, the story also makes it clear that Ebert is, at the moment, cancer-free. Perhaps Ebert will be with us for many years to come. I hope he is.

Competing on the Amy Bishop story

Who could have reasonably hoped during last year’s angst over the future of the Boston Globe that it would still be allowed to spend money and compete with its dominant corporate sibling, the New York Times? Yet here we are, and the Globe and the Times both have long, all-known-facts takeouts today on the bizarre case of Amy Bishop.

The Times is better at explaining why Bishop didn’t get tenure at the University of Alabama at Huntsville: apparently she just wasn’t that good. The Times, though, doesn’t mention Bishop’s years in Ipswich, an episode in her life on which the Globe is strong. The Globe quotes a neighbor named Arthur Kerr: “When she moved out everyone said, ‘Those poor people in Alabama.’ Little did we know.”

The Boston Herald runs a shorter piece focused on the immediate aftermath of Bishop’s fatal shooting of her brother, Seth, in 1986. It ends with a rather astonishing piece of information: Thomas Pettigrew — whose tale of having been ignored by authorities after Bishop allegedly pointed a gun at him 24 years ago has emerged as a key element — is being ignored once again.

Decoding the Times’ Haig obituary

Tim Weiner of the New York Times weighs in with a harsh obituary of Alexander Haig. You should check out his description of Haig’s behavior after Ronald Reagan had been shot — he comes off as a power-mad general intent on staging a coup.

No, Haig did not speak with great precision that day. But do former Reagan aides like Richard Allen, who clearly hated Haig, really believe that Haig didn’t understand the vice president was next in line if Reagan were incapacitated?

The key to Weiner’s piece is this paragraph:

“His tenure as secretary of state was very traumatic,” John M. Poindexter, later Mr. Reagan’s national security adviser, recalled in the oral history “Reagan: The Man and His Presidency” (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). “As a result of this constant tension that existed between the White House and the State Department about who was going to be responsible for national security and foreign policy, we got very little done.”

Amazingly, Weiner does not identify Poindexter as (1) a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, which nearly brought Reagan’s presidency down, and which unfolded years after Haig left the Reagan administration; and (2) the mastermind of a surveillance system during the George W. Bush years called, in a nice Orwellian touch, the Total Information Awareness System, or TIAS.

Getting trashed by the likes of John Poindexter is a good thing. Too bad Weiner didn’t make that clear.

More: It gets worse. BP Myers notes in the comments that Weiner claims the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, which cost the lives of 241 marines, took place in “the immediate aftermath” of Haig’s dismissal, as though his policies were somehow responsible. In fact, the date of the bombing was Oct. 23, 1983, a year and a half after Haig’s departure.