Author: Dan Kennedy

Jeff Jarvis and the future of media

I took a pass on the recent dust-up between Slate columnist Ron Rosenbaum and new-media advocate Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis can drive me up a wall, and I thought Rosenbaum made some good points about Jarvis’ Web triumphalism. At the same time, Jarvis is a valuable source of ideas, and, frankly, I have no interest in pissing him off.

But I can’t recommend strongly enough a long profile of Jarvis that appears in the current New York Observer. Written by the Observer’s media columnist, John Koblin, the piece is deep as well as sympathetic to Jarvis’ point of view — yet Jarvis’ critics have their say, too.

If you are looking for a good overview on the state of the news business — and especially the struggling newspaper business — then you need to read Koblin’s article.

And by the way, I can’t help but observe, Jarvis-style, that Koblin’s article would be better still if he and his editors had made the extra effort to link to what he was writing about.

Engage with Grace

This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage with Grace team. To learn more, please go to www.engagewithgrace.org, and see this story in today’s Boston Globe.

We make choices throughout our lives — where we want to live, what types of activities will fill our days, with whom we spend our time. These choices are often a balance between our desires and our means, but at the end of the day, they are decisions made with intent. But when it comes to how we want to be treated at the end our lives, often we don’t express our intent or tell our loved ones about it.

This has real consequences. Seventy-three percent of Americans would prefer to die at home, but up to 50 percent die in hospital. More than 80 percent of Californians say their loved ones “know exactly” or have a “good idea” of what their wishes would be if they were in a persistent coma, but only 50 percent say they’ve talked to them about their preferences.

But our end-of-life experiences are about a lot more than statistics. They’re about all of us. So the first thing we need to do is start talking.

“Engage with Grace: The One Slide Project” was designed with one simple goal: to help get the conversation about end of life experience started. The idea is simple: Create a tool to help get people talking. One slide, with just five questions on it. Five questions designed to help get us talking with each other, with our loved ones, about our preferences. And we’re asking people to share this one slide wherever and whenever they can — at a presentation, at dinner, at their book club. Just one slide, just five questions.

Lets start a global discussion that, until now, most of us haven’t had.

Here is what we are asking you: Download the One Slide (PowerPoint) and share it at any opportunity — with colleagues, family, friends. Think of the slide as currency and donate just two minutes whenever you can. Commit to being able to answer these five questions about end of life experience for yourself, and for your loved ones. Then commit to helping others do the same. Get this conversation started.

Let’s start a viral movement driven by the change we as individuals can effect, and the incredibly positive impact we could have collectively. Help ensure that all of us — and the people we care for — can end our lives in the same purposeful way we live them.

Just One Slide, just one goal. Think of the enormous difference we can make together.

Taking photos in a public place

The man at the center of an alleged bribery case in Methuen wants the Eagle-Tribune to be punished for photographing him as he was leaving a hearing.

It seems that Michael Neve had managed to persuade the Civil Service Commission that no one should be allowed to photograph him during or after a hearing at which he testified to having offered a $15,000 bribe to Mayor William Manzi. (Neve says Manzi refused the bribe; Manzi says no bribe was offered. The case actually involves someone else. Never mind.)

But Neves miscalculated in his definition of the word “after.” The newspaper, logically enough, decided “after” did not pertain to taking pictures of Neve after he’d left the building.

“The press can take photographs from a public place,” Eagle-Tribune lawyer and friend of Media Nation Robert Bertsche is quoted as saying.

The fourth letter in “originality”

I would have thought the Boston Globe got the letter “g” from the ancient Romans. But the Winchester Star reports that the head of the Griffin Museum of Photography believes the Globe was inspired by the logo it uses on its own promotional material.

Even though the museum has trademarked its own “g,” the Star’s item is refreshingly free of lawsuit threats.

William Ayers reconsidered

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that the McCain-Palin campaign’s careless, ugly lies about Barack Obama and William Ayers did not merely smear Obama — they also smeared Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground movement in the 1960s.

There is no evidence that the Weather Underground ever killed or injured anyone other than themselves. For instance, despite what you may have heard, Katherine Ann Power and Susan Saxe, the radicals who were responsible for the 1970 death of Boston police officer Walter Schroeder, were not affiliated with the group.

Now, despite his McCarthyite tactics, John McCain has been welcomed back into polite society, while the Ayers family must content with death threats that Ayers himself says have only escalated since Election Day.