Phoebe Prince
The tragic South Hadley bullying case has led to a federal lawsuit charging that a town official denied a local resident his First Amendment right to speak at a public meeting. Luke Gelinas, the father of two kids in the school system, was tossed out of an emotional South Hadley School Committee meeting on April 14. He has now filed a civil-rights lawsuit in U.S. District Court. The Republican of Springfield reports on the suit here, and the Boston Globe here.
Then-School Committee chairman Edward Boisselle reportedly ordered Gelinas to leave after Gelinas invoked the name of 15-year-old suicide victim Phoebe Prince, violating a ground rule Boisselle had set. Gelinas was escorted out of the meeting room by two police officers.
The offending statement (pdf) that Gelinas delivered that night is a model of respectful decorum. In it, he called for the removal, resignation or censure of Boisselle, school superintendent Gus Sayer and high school principal Daniel Smith.
According to The Republican, at the April 28 School Committee meeting Gelinas was back, and apparently none too happy about his treatment two weeks earlier. He compared Boisselle — no longer the chairman — to Joseph Goebbels and Joseph Stalin. Shortly thereafter the ACLU sent a letter to the committee complaining Gelinas’ First Amendment rights had been violated at the April 14 meeting.
In June, Luke and Lorraine Gelinas and a third parent, Darby O’Brien sued the School Committee in Hampshire Superior Court, claiming the committee broke the state’s open-meeting law by approving a two-year contract extension for superintendent Sayer in executive session on Feb. 24.
The newly filed federal suit names Boisselle and the two police officers as defendants, but not the School Committee itself.
It’s hard to pass judgment on this without knowing the personalities involved and what, if any, attempts were made to settle this beforehand. But if Boisselle and company could have made this go away with a public apology, then they missed an opportunity that may not come around again.
And if Gelinas had simply been allowed to read his statement on April 14, it may never have occurred to him to compare Boisselle to a couple of genocidal monsters.
Just because Richard Nixon was paranoid doesn’t mean they weren’t out to get him.
There is a surprising (to say the least) passage near the top of the New York Times’ obit of movie director Arthur Penn this morning:
Mr. Penn’s direction may have also changed American history. He advised Senator John F. Kennedy during his watershed television debates with Richard M. Nixon in 1960 (and directed the broadcast of the third debate). Mr. Penn’s instructions to Kennedy — to look directly into the camera and keep his responses brief and pithy — helped give Kennedy an aura of confidence and calm that created a vivid contrast to Nixon, his more experienced but less telegenic Republican rival.
George Will, eat your heart out.
I couldn’t find anything amplifying on the Times’ parenthetical aside. But it stands as yet another battle in the decades-long war between Nixon and the media.
Update: Steve Stein solves the mystery.
Dave Beard
Over the past few years, we’ve grown accustomed to watching talented people leave the Boston Globe. But this one hurts more than most: David Beard, the editor of Boston.com, has accepted a top editing job with the Washington-based National Journal Group.
According to this announcement, posted at Romenesko, Beard will be deputy editor-in-chief and online editor of the group, which is adding a number of free online services to its subscription site in order to compete with Politico. Though there’s no mention of it in the announcement, the Journal is a sister publication of the Atlantic, which owner David Bradley yanked out of Boston, its ancestral home, in 2005.
Beard has done a great job of positioning Boston.com as something different from the Globe. Perhaps even more important, he has been a huge presence for the Globe outside 135 Morrissey Blvd., evangelizing not just on behalf of the Globe, but for new forms of journalism in general. Plus, he’s a great guy.
The Globe’s ability to replace key people and reinvent itself is impressive, but Dave is going to be a hard act to follow. Subscribe to his Twitter feed here.
What follows is a memo that Globe editor Marty Baron and deputy managing editor for multimedia Bennie DiNardo sent to the staff a little while ago, a copy of which was obtained by Media Nation:
To all:
David Beard has been many things for us since arriving at the Globe in 1998 — online evangelist, deputy foreign editor, tweeter-in-chief, Facebook promoter, soccer fan, zones chief, recruiter, community liaison, reader advocate, teacher, valued adviser, friend. Sadly for us, he is about to add another title to his portfolio — former colleague.
David is taking his unlimited energy and his enthusiasm for news to Washington, where he will become deputy editor-in-chief and online editor for the National Journal Group, which includes National Journal, CongressDaily, The Hotline, NationalJournal.com, and The Almanac of American Politics.
In a building full of amazing Rolodexes, no one has a more extensive list of contacts than Dave. He’s a human version of LinkedIn. Whether you are writing about Belmont or Bogota, David inevitably knows someone and connects you. Before coming to Boston to be our deputy foreign editor, Dave reported from South America, the Caribbean, the US South, and the Cleveland area for the Plain Dealer, Associated Press, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. He also served as Caribbean editor for the AP for three years, overseeing coverage of the US intervention to restore an elected president in Haiti. After his three-year stint on the Globe’s foreign desk, he immersed himself in local coverage, overseeing the regional editions.
Four years ago, he again staked out new territory, becoming editor of Boston.com. Since then, the website has grown from 150 million page views a month to almost 200 million, and our mobile traffic has gone from nonexistent to almost 13 million page views. In his recent digital years, he supervised online coverage of Barack Obama’s presidential election victory and the death of Senator Kennedy, cultivated a growing network of community bloggers, and helped launch “Secret Spaces,” an online project that turned into a book.
With Dave leaving us in two weeks, a search for the next editor of Boston.com begins immediately, but first things first: Please offer your thanks to Dave for the invaluable creativity and collegiality he brought to this organization for the past 12 years, and wish him well as he pursues a promising opportunity in Washington.
Marty and Bennie
Jay Rosen
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, a major thinker in our field, often writes about himself, but usually with a serious purpose in mind. So I was delighted to find him writing a personal essay about his youth, and a rather evocative one at that.
One similarity we share: we edited our college newspapers during the same time period, in the late 1970s, he at the Spectrum, at SUNY Buffalo, I at the Northeastern News (now the Huntington News).
Rosen’s story of how he wound up not working for the Buffalo Courier-Express is both amusing and a little sad, conjuring up as it does a newspaper world that no longer exists.
Rosen’s piece is shooting all around the tubes this morning. I found it on David Carr’s Twitter feed.
No doubt the best coding brains at the New York Times Co. are focused on iPad development these days. But as a paid subscriber to the Reader editions of the New York Times and the Boston Globe, I have a few suggestions for how they could be better. I’d want to see these ideas incorporated into the iPad app as well, so please consider this a two-fer:
1. A front-page image of the print edition should be included, just as it is on the papers’ websites. We Reader readers, to coin a phrase, exist in a sort of electronic halfway house: we still read the paper as the paper, but we don’t mind giving up ink on dead trees. So we, of all customers, want to get a sense of what the front looks like.
2. The Reader organizational scheme should be as clear and easy-to-follow as the simple list format the papers use on their websites for that day’s edition (Globe here; Times here). Yes, I can skim through every Reader story very quickly, but sometimes I’d like to select a section front, then pick and choose.
3. Mega-dittoes for the Globe’s “g” section, which is just a mess in Reader. Way too many short items are just thrown up there. It needs a complete rethink.
4. Folks at the Globe need to take photos more seriously when putting together the Reader edition. There are too many instances of context-free pictures with no captions.
5. Reader editions should always link to multimedia extras such as videos. I know of a few occasions when I’ve found out hours after reading the paper that I missed on a terrific video.
My fear is that the Reader platform hasn’t attracted enough users to make further development worthwhile. I almost never see an ad other than a house ad, for instance. I still think it’s a promising idea, though, and perhaps development can take place in parallel with the iPad.
Click on image for larger view
WRKO Radio talk-show host and Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr is back at it. On Saturday morning he served as the host of the Plymouth County GOP and Cape Cod Republican Club Unity Breakfast at the Radisson Hotel in Plymouth.
I obtained the e-mail (at left) announcing the event from a trusted, non-partisan source.
As I’ve argued before, Carr is not an outside contributor who happens to write for the Herald op-ed page. He is a news columnist. Though the Herald pays him to be opinionated, he is also a longtime working reporter who has no business offering his assistance to the Republican Party or any other partisan political organization. And I don’t care if Carr is a freelancer these days — the same rules apply.
By forfeiting his independence, Carr has made himself less valuable to the Herald and especially to its readers. Here’s Howie trashing Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick. And here he is urging independent gubernatorial candidate Tim Cahill to quit the race and make life easier for Republican Charlie Baker. No doubt those are his actual beliefs. But now he’s writing as a Republican operative, not as a snarky political columnist.
Is that cheese? Or SpongeBob SquarePants?
Just want to write a brief, one-handed update for those who don’t follow me on Facebook or Twitter.
This morning I had surgery at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington to repair my shattered right elbow. It went well, and I’m home and pretty much pain-free. (Nothing like Percoset.) Unfortunately, they had to put in a plate and some screws, and the road to recovery is looking a lot longer than I’d thought.
The crazy yellow foam concoction that you see is meant to keep my elbow protected and elevated, and I’ve got to wear it for at least a week. I’ll be out of work for at least two weeks.
I really do think I’m done riding my bicycle. I’ve taken two or three pretty hard spills over the past few years. The only difference on those occasions was that I wasn’t seriously hurt. I’d like to get back to running, but at my age (54) the nagging injuries have me not doing it as much as I do it. I’d hate to join a gym, but it may come to that.
Finally — all hail Lahey. I couldn’t be more impressed with the quality of care I received, both in the emergency room in Peabody on Sunday and in the surgical unit today. I chose the Lahey E.R. almost at random, and I’m really glad that I did.
Media Nation is built with the endlessly customizable WordPress.org. Yet I find that the more limited WordPress.com makes certain key tools more readily available.
A few days ago I posted an item about the New Haven Independent’s fifth-birthday party that included an audio clip of founder and editor Paul Bass. When you click, it takes you away from the post and to a blank page. Yucko.
In WordPress.com, there is a simple command that embeds an audio player on your page. For instance, take a look at the Sermons page of our church’s website, which I maintain using WordPress.com. All it takes is a simple line of code that looks like this: . For URL, of course, you substitute the actual URL of the MP3 file.
I’m thinking that if I could just find the right plug-in, I’d have the same capability in WordPress.org. Anyone know what it is?
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