I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with the Red Sox. Brace yourselves: They’re not very good.
Sure, they could theoretically overcome their slow start. But I only see three players who’ve performed below expectations: Josh Beckett; Adrian Beltre defensively; and Jacoby Ellsbury, simply because he’s been hurt as a result of Beltre’s worst play of the season, if not his career.
Yes, Mike Cameron’s been out, too. But Darnell McDonald has probably been a more productive hitter.
Ortiz? Dice-K? Clay Buchholz? Ramon Ramirez? Were you really expecting more than they’ve given? If so, then you were expecting way too much.
The Sox have already shown they can be entertaining against mediocre teams. I think that’s the best we can hope for this season.
In 1989, Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, ruled that public records can cease to be public once they’ve been compiled into a computerized, easy-to-access database.
Now the Court is hearing a case with some eerie similarities involving the names of people who sign petitions to place public-policy questions on the ballot. In the Guardian this week, I compare the two cases — and hope that Stevens, as one of his final acts before retiring this summer, will help keep public records public.
Public employees are our friends, our neighbors and our family members. Police officers, firefighters and teachers are a necessary part of a well-ordered civil society. But in Massachusetts, the social compact is on the verge of breaking down because of paychecks and benefits for public employees that are grotesquely out of whack with what folks in the private sector earn.
Here are four quick examples — three from the Boston Globe:
Boston police officers are getting as much as $250,000 in salary and overtime — some of it legitimately, some of it for staying a few minutes past their shift to finish paperwork. “The salaries are excessive,” Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Globe. “Clearly the average person on the street does not make this kind of money.”
In Framingham, town employees and retirees are at loggerheads with the taxpayers who fund their health benefits, which in most cases amount to 87 percent of premiums — a far better deal than anyone in the private sector can hope to get.
An arbitrator recently awarded Boston firefighters a 19 percent raise over four years in return for agreeing to drug and alcohol tests and some limits on sick time. The Globe has called on the city council to reject the $74 million cost of the agreement, but there are no signs that the members will find the requisite backbone to do so.
There’s a new reform administration in charge of the Essex Regional Retirement Board, and it seems that every day it finds something gross crawling out from under a rock. The latest, according to the ever-vigilant Salem News: the previous board spent more than $200,000 in legal fees to advance a sleazy scheme to put 39 workers on a housing authority payroll for one day so they would be eligible for higher benefits and Social Security.
How this will play out in the fall election is anyone’s guess. You’d think it would have a significant effect on the governor’s race. But Gov. Deval Patrick has pushed harder (though not hard enough) against such abuses than his predecessors, and neither Republican candidate Charlie Baker nor Treasurer Tim Cahill, the independent, has advanced a credible case for being the change agent voters are looking for.
At the very least, though, Republicans ought to be able to make their first significant gains in the legislature since 1990.
With the Washington Post Co. having put money-losing Newsweek up for sale, you’re going to hear a lot about how we’ve gone from three weekly news magazines to one (Time) if Newsweek isn’t rescued. (U.S. News & World Report lives, but it hasn’t been a weekly for years.) Cue the dirge.
Except that it’s not true. If Newsweek goes down, we’ll simply have a new Big Three: Time, The Economist and The Week. And unlike the Time/Newsweek/U.S. News trio, which at their peak were all more or less clones of each other, the three survivors have distinctly different missions. The Economist offers a smart, analytical take on the news. The Week is a digest. And Time is — well, who knows these days? Politics, pop culture and lists of stuff, I guess.
You’ll often hear people say that Newsweek and U.S. News were the victims of larger forces, and that the weekly news-magazine genre is no longer relevant. But if that were true, why were they overtaken by competitors within that genre?
And yes, I recognize that The Economist and especially The Week are bare-bones operations compared to the American news magazines in their prime. The fact is, they’re here — and they’re thriving. Newsweek and U.S. News were not done in by cable TV and blogs. They were done in by leaner, smarter competitors who had a better idea of what a weekly news magazine should be.
After all, their various owners never figured out how to overtake Time, either.
A year ago, the biggest question at the Boston Globe was whether the New York Times Co. was serious about shutting it down if it couldn’t squeeze out $20 million in union concessions.
These days, the story is considerably more pleasant. Though no one thinks the Globe is entirely out of the woods (there is, after all, a revolution under way), the paper keeps expanding in modest but useful ways.
The latest initiative is coming tomorrow: a weekly column on the op-ed page by the Atlantic’s fine political writer, Joshua Green, who, according to Globe editorial-page editor Peter Canellos, will offer a Washington perspective from a non-ideological perspective.
“He’s a pure reporter and analyst,” Canellos says. “And I think that for somebody looking at the changing landscape of Washington these days, this is a happy meeting of a writer and subject, because it’s a fascinating time.”
This coming Sunday will mark a significant expansion of the opinion pages. For years, the Globe has published a third opinion page, reserved for letters, every other week. Now the paper will publish three and four pages on an alternating schedule.
Newish op-ed columnists Joanna Weiss and Lawrence Harmon will join standbys Joan Vennochi and Jeff Jacoby. Harmon, the Globe’s chief editorial writer on city issues, will continue to write his column once a week. Weiss will now write twice weekly, picking up Harmon’s Tuesday slot.
On weeks when there are four opinion pages, Canellos says, the extra space will be used for features such as “visual op-eds” by cartoonist Dan Wasserman and longer essays by columnist James Carroll and other writers.
Finally, Canellos says that a somewhat nebulous new online feature called “The Angle” will be beefed up with some definition and some original content as the result of a new partnership with “Radio Boston,” which WBUR (90.9 FM) is expanding from a weekly to a daily program next week.
Interesting to see that Warren Buffett’s take on Goldman Sachs is essentially the same as mine. Goldman is being investigated on charges that it did not disclose to investors that hedge-fund manager John Paulson helped put together an investment vehicle that he then bet against.
Buffett’s view, writes Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times, is that such information is irrelevant as long as investors knew what they were buying. Buffett put it this way:
For the life of me, I don’t see whether it makes any difference whether it was John Paulson on the other side of the deal, or whether it was Goldman Sachs on the other side of the deal, or whether it was Berkshire Hathaway on the other side of the deal….
It’s very strange to say, at the end of the transaction, that if the other guy is smarter than you, that you have been defrauded. It seems to me that that’s what they are saying.
The scandal that nearly brought down the entire financial system wasn’t what was illegal — it was what was legal.
The Nation, the leading left-liberal opinion journal, has launched a slick new website using Drupal, an open-source content-management system that’s free and can be tweaked by anyone. “If he understood open source, Glenn Beck might well denounce it as a socialist practice,” writes Peter Rothberg.
A bit of an exaggeration, given that Drupal is used by such diverse organizations as GateHouse Media and the White House. (Oh, wait …)
The best news for media junkies is that Greg Mitchell’s blog, Media Fix, has finally made its long-awaited debut. Mitchell, the former editor of Editor & Publisher, is a double-barreled master of the tweet, posting what seems like 18 hours a day at @GregMitch and @MediaFixBlog. His blog goes straight into my Google Reader list.
Like its more moderate counterpart, The New Republic, The Nation will reserve some of its premium content for paying customers, writes editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. A shame, since opinion journals are trafficking in influence, not revenue.
Nevertheless, I suspect TheNation.com will quickly prove to be more widely read (if it isn’t already) than the rather hidebound print edition.
John Odgren, convicted last week of killing a fellow student, James Alenson, at Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School, has been committed to Bridgewater State Hospital, reports Northeastern criminologist James Alan Fox. Someone, at least, is approaching this case with some compassion.
Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has issued a statement from the board and a personal apology for the behavior that led to a kerfuffle last week. What exactly happened remains murky, but perhaps this is all we’re entitled to know. It seems to me that he’s handled this as straightforwardly as can be expected. He remains as respected a public citizen as we have in Boston, and I hope this is the end of it.
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When I first started teaching a course called Reinventing the News a few years ago, I envisioned it mainly as a seminar. The idea was that we would look at some case studies of where the news business might be headed and blog about it.
I quickly realized that wasn’t good enough. The spark for me was a student who had just come back from her co-op job at the Patriot Ledger of Quincy. She had assumed the most complicated tool she’d have to use would be a notebook. Instead, she was tossed a point-and-shoot digital camera and told to teach herself how to capture and edit video. She liked it so much she ended up changing her career goals from print to video.
It was with some trepidation that I began adding three weeks of Web video to Reinventing a year and a half ago. First, I had to teach myself how to do it. And it required exposing some vulnerabilities. I knew some students would be starting from zero, but I also knew that others were already better at video journalism than I’d ever be. Nevertheless, it proved to be well worth it.
Last week we finished the most complex version of Reinventing I’ve offered, and my students had to pull together a variety of skills for their final project. The assignment was to use free online tools to create a multimedia story. The elements:
An 800- to 1,000-word story about a digital media project that had caught their eye, written up as a blog post with relevant links.
A slide show of six to 10 still photos, posted to Flickr and embedded in their blog.
A two- to five-minute video they shot and edited, posted to YouTube and also embedded in their blog.
An explanation of how they used social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to find sources and report their story.
At the end of it all, they were asked to note the location of their story on a Google map and link to their blog post. The result is the map I’ve embedded above. I invite you to explore. These young journalists did a terrific job, and I am very proud of them.
If you click on “View Reinventing the News: Final Projects in a larger map,” directly under the embedded map, you’ll find the list of students on the left-hand side. Click on a name to find his or her spot on the map, each one of which is linked directly to their project. Hmmm … Google could make this a little bit simpler, eh?
I’ll be teaching Reinventing again this fall, and I will continue to refine. My first thought is that I ought to dump the brief wiki exercise I offer and instead delve more deeply into how to handle comments. Any thoughts you have would be welcome.
In a humane world, John Odgren would have been institutionalized in a long-term psychiatric facility three years ago. The focus could then have turned toward how best to help the family of James Alenson, whom Odgren killed in a bathroom at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School.
Instead, Odgren, who was 16 at the time (Alenson was 15), is headed off to prison after having been convicted of first-degree murder. By most accounts, Odgren was a bullying victim who has Asperger’s syndrome and a variety of mental illnesses. Alenson was not among Odgren’s tormenters, which only compounds the tragedy.
Earlier this month, Odgren’s father, Paul, testified about the bullying to which his son had been subjected for years. The Boston Globe published a heartbreaking account[link now fixed], with the elder Odgren claiming that John had talked about committing suicide when he was only 9 years old.
My Northeastern colleague James Alan Fox, the noted criminologist, has a must-read commentary today in his Crime & Punishment blog for Boston.com. Fox writes:
Frankly, the thought of John Odgren, a boy who was bullied and ostracized repeatedly in high school, spending the remainder of his years in a prison setting is absolutely chilling. His well-documented fears and paranoid view of his world will undoubtedly become acute once he lives amongst a population of hardened criminals….
Life without parole makes sense for 25-year-old cold-blooded killers, but not for someone as immature and emotionally disturbed as John Odgren.
Finally, if folks at the Boston Herald have one shred of decency, they will delete the comments on their Odgren story as soon as someone inside the building reads this post. You can find the link on your own.
