Author: Dan Kennedy

GateHouse and New York Times Co. settle

As I had been hoping, GateHouse Media and the New York Times Co. have settled a lawsuit GateHouse brought over Boston.com’s Your Town sites, which, GateHouse alleged, violate its copyright by lifting headlines and ledes en masse from its Wicked Local sites.

No details yet.

Instant update: It might be more accurate to say that the two sides are moving toward a settlement. The case has been dismissed, and thus the trial, scheduled to begin today in U.S. District Court, has been canceled.

But here’s what Judge William Young has to say in his written order: “IT IS ORDERED that this action is hereby dismissed without cost and without prejudice to the right of any party, upon good cause shown, to reopen the action within thirty (30) days if settlement is not consummated.”

So it’s possible that this isn’t over yet.

Jack Driscoll, citizen journalist

Henry Jenkins of MIT interviews retired Boston Globe editor Jack Driscoll, who’s been editor-in-residence at the MIT Media Lab since 1995. When it comes to technology and change, Driscoll is an early adopter. I recall his being a significant presence at a digital-media seminar I attended at Columbia University during the early 1990s.

So what’s Driscoll up to now? He’s a founder of Rye Reflections, a citizen-journalism site in his adopted community of Rye, N.H. (check out his story on a leash-law proposal), and the author of “Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism.” Here’s what he tells Jenkins about the impetus behind projects such Rye Reflections and similar sites:

[T]here seems to be a feeling that their communities are not being covered in the media. Newspaper staff cutbacks have exacerbated the problem. It’s not just the institutional news, but the stories about the fabric of the community, the personalities, the achievements of groups of individuals, the problems, the culture.

Sounds like Driscoll has done more during his retirement than most of us manage to do during our careers.

A wistful farewell to Sal DiMasi

Many of you will miss Sal DiMasi before too long. Not me. I miss him already.

Mr. Speaker, as Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham notes while kicking him to the side of the curb, saved us from casino gambling, pushed the idea of a higher gas tax as an alternative to toll hikes, was a stalwart on preserving same-sex marriage and much more.

We are almost certainly going to get less good government with DiMasi’s successor, whoever that may be. Do you really think we’re going to get cleaner government? Please.

Look — the Globe did terrific work on exposing DiMasi’s less-than-wonderful side, and prosecutors can hardly ignore the possibility of criminal wrongdoing. I understand that. But we are going to miss him.

More: The casino forces are celebrating already, as you can see from this post at Casino Gambling Web. It begins with a falsehood — “Governor Duval [sic] Patrick ran for office in Massachusetts on a platform of expanded casino gambling” — and ends with this:

Lobbyists who have already been working hard to have casino legislation are relieved that a major roadblock is now out of their way. When DiMasi won re-election, casino proponents felt deflated, but now that door has swung wide open.

Look out below.

Still more: Jon Keller has similar thoughts.

Gov. Patrick’s weird putdown

I was appalled yesterday when I read Boston Globe reporter Matt Viser’s account of how Gov. Deval Patrick had publicly put down Worcester Mayor Konstantina Lukes at a speech before the Massachusetts Muncipal Association on Friday. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

At one point, the governor had a frosty exchange with Worcester Mayor Konstantina B. Lukes, after she appeared to smirk while the governor answered her question.

“Before you make a face, mayor, let me finish my answer, all right?” Patrick snapped.

Once he finished his response, he glanced over at her again and said, “Is that clear? OK. Now you can make your face.”

Later, WBZ-TV (Channel 4) posted video of the exchange. And though Viser got Patrick’s words right, I’m not sure about “frosty” — it seems more light-hearted than that. As Jon Keller suggests, it’s hard to know what to make of it.

Given that Patrick was announcing a $128 million cut in local aid, maybe the governor ought to work on his timing if he had intended his remarks as a joke.

Fun with math

New York Times columnist David Brooks used phony numbers yesterday to raise questions about the proposed stimulus package. “A study by the Congressional Budget Office found that less than half of the money for infrastructure and discretionary programs would be spent by Oct. 1, 2010,” he wrote.

Trouble is, Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post learned that the study Brooks cites does not exist. (Via Talking Points Memo.)

Social networking and the news

Social Networking and the News

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: twitter socialnetworking)

On Thursday I had a chance to take part in a panel on “Getting Started with Social Media: Lessons from the Front Lines,” sponsored by the Mass Technology Leadership Council.

It was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot from the other panelists — Perry Allison of EONS.com, Pam Johnston of Gather.com and Brian Halligan of HubSpot. The moderator was Debi Kleiman of Communispace in Watertown, whose Fenway Park-theme meeting room was where we held our presentation.

I’ve posted the slideshow that accompanied my talk. Slideshare appeared to choke on embedded links, so I’ve listed them below in case you’d like to check any of them out.

Imagine if he weren’t reluctant

Ron Rosenbaum is a first-rate writer, but he’s really outdone himself in his shredding of Billy Joel. (I know. Why bother? Still.) The best part is near the top, where he pulls off a hilarious 180:

Which brings me to Billy Joel — the Andrew Wyeth of contemporary pop music — and the continuing irritation I feel whenever I hear his tunes, whether in the original or in the multitude of elevator-Muzak versions. It is a kind of mystery: Why does his music make my skin crawl in a way that other bad music doesn’t? Why is it that so many of us feel it is possible to say Billy Joel is — well — just bad, a blight upon pop music, a plague upon the airwaves more contagious than West Nile virus, a dire threat to the peacefulness of any given elevator ride, not rock ‘n’ roll but schlock ‘n’ roll?

I’m reluctant to pick on Billy Joel.

Oh, yeah, it’s just killing him.

Invitation to an assassination

Check out this entry from the Conservapedia on Democratic senators from states with Republican governors. See, the governors could replace those senators with Republicans if anything were to, uh, happen to any of them, hint, hint.

Via Wonkette, which you should check out if the link to the Conservapedia has changed by the time you click. Wow. Does the Secret Service know about this?

Conservative wistfulness over Obama

At Human Events, D.R. Tucker posts a thoughtful reaction to my Guardian commentary on conservatives who are willing to give President Obama a chance.

Tucker detects wistfulness on the part of conservatives who wonder how things might have turned out differently if the Republican Party hadn’t spent two generations driving away African-American voters. He writes:

Obama and other post-civil-rights-movement black leaders came of age in a time when they were told, in ways direct and subtle, that the GOP wasn’t really interested in them. Perhaps if the GOP had attempted to attract black support in those days, charismatic and gifted figures like Obama would have become conservative Republicans instead of liberal Democrats.

There’s a missing ingredient here. The Republican flight from empiricism, embodied in such divisive figures as Sarah Palin and George W. Bush himself, has at least as much to do as race when it comes to the GOP’s failure to attract people who like their politics reality-based.

But there’s no doubt that the Republicans have finally shrunk their tent to such an extent that it can no longer hold a majority — at least not as presently constituted.