Author: Dan Kennedy

Why the Globe should acquire Universal Hub

The Boston Globe may be getting smaller, but it was just handed an opportunity to do something very intelligent. Let’s see if it can rise to the occasion.

Adam Gaffin, the chief impresario and co-founder of Universal Hub, just lost his day job as an online editor for the trade publication Network World. UH, if you don’t already know, is a “best of the blogs” site — an essential guide to nearly 1,000 local blogs in Greater Boston, all informed by Adam’s love of his adopted hometown and his puckish wit.

The Globe should hire Gaffin. I’ve been saying it to anyone who’d listen for quite a while now. Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix said it just last week. Yes, yes, the financially ailing Globe is in the midst of downsizing its newsroom by 50 people. But with fewer reporters, the paper is in more need than ever of someone who can intelligently aggregate content from a wide variety of sources. No one is better at it than Gaffin.

Recently, as you know, the Globe tried its hand at automated aggregation. It didn’t work out.

Gaffin’s ability to find what’s interesting, entertaining and important while holding down a demanding day job has always been awe-inspiring. If he were able to devote his full attention to it, Universal Hub would only become better. (In most respects, anyway. No doubt he would no longer offer his acidic observations about certain Globe columnists.)

Gaffin has been affiliated with the Globe in the past — for a while he wrote a roundup for the Sunday paper’s City Weekly supplement.

Do I have a conflict of interest? Yes, and thank you for asking, though it cuts the other way. Adam also runs the Boston Blogs ad network, which automatically places advertising on Media Nation and many other local blogs. Lately it’s been doing well enough to cover my Internet access fees. Were Adam to go to the Globe, I imagine we’d be left high and dry.

If the Globe is to reinvent itself, it’s going to have to act as a trusted guide to the best content out there. It should start with Gaffin.

Behind the pro-casino propaganda

The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald today are atwitter with excitement over surveys showing that support for casino gambling is on the rise. With the new Massachusetts House speaker, Robert DeLeo, in favor of expanded gambling, it looks like Gov. Deval Patrick is going to renew his ill-considered push to impose this blight on the state.

So leave it to Jon Keller of WBZ-TV (Channel 4) to dig a bit deeper into one of those surveys, put out by UMass Boston, which supposedly shows that casinos create better jobs for non-college-educated workers than other businesses.

Keller finds that the study was funded by construction-industry contractors and executives, who would stand to profit mightily from building casinos. The study also fails to mention the inconvenient fact that the huge “resort casinos” favored by Patrick are now cratering and shedding jobs. Keller writes:

Let’s face it, folks, casinos have been sleazy but lucrative money pits in the past and they may be again, but they are not anything close to a valid answer to the prayers of the working class.

The only kind of survey that matters is the one that asks people if they want a casino built in their community. Last I checked, two-thirds of Massachusetts residents are opposed. That’s not likely to change.

You’d never know it from reading the Globe, but even Middleborough residents voted overwhelmingly against a casino on the one occasion they were given a chance to express their views.

This is a loser, and Patrick’s obsession with staking his governorship on it is appalling.

A government bailout for journalism? No.

You knew this was coming. Former Providence Journal reporter David Scharfenberg writes in the Boston Globe today that there should be a $100 million government bailout for journalism.

At least he’s not proposing taxpayer money for legacy media organizations such as the Journal or the Globe. Still, his survey of successful independent projects such as Pro Publica and Voice of San Diego suggests that his idea is a solution in search of a problem.

Maybe I’m just being paranoid. But I can’t imagine anything more contrary to the idea of watchdog journalism than funding it with government money.

Tax incentives? Maybe, and I’m going to wrestle with that idea in my column for the Guardian this week. But direct government aid? Never.

If you visit Voice of San Diego, you’ll see this: “an independent nonprofit.” Not if Scharfenberg’s idea catches on.

Can Globe readers get a refund?

A few quick observations on a Saturday morning.

• Someone at the Boston Globe had a good idea for selling a few more copies of the Saturday edition: plug a Joan Vennochi column on page one. But that’s a trick you can only pull once unless you actually run a Vennochi column inside. (Apologies for the unreadable page-one teaser, but trust me. It says “Point of View: Joan Vennochi.”)

• New York Times columnist Gail Collins makes some semi-amusing fun of folks who can’t handle the switchover to digital TV. It would have been more amusing, though, if she could figure it out herself. “How could the Republicans not be worried about this?” she writes. “A disproportionate number of the endangered TV viewers are senior citizens. Bill O’Reilly’s entire audience is in danger!” Uh, Gail? O’Reilly’s entire audience has cable and won’t be affected by this — a fact you seemed to grasp earlier in the column, but I guess not.

• Bob Ryan’s got a great lede this morning: “Jason Varitek wanted to test the waters. He’s lucky he didn’t drown.” Personally, I’m glad Varitek is coming back, though I’m more than a little puzzled by the games-started incentive his contract calls for in 2010. If Tek starts more than 80 games in 2010, then the Red Sox will have a serious problem. Secondarily, it puts Terry Francona in the position of costing Varitek money. Not good.