By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Rob points out that Dave Guarino and I both missed this, at the end of Brian McGrory’s column on Sunday: “Brian McGrory’s column will appear on Wednesday and Sunday.”
In my very slight defense, I will note that I went here before I posted this morning and saw this: “Brian McGrory’s column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays in the City & Region section.”
Here’s something most of you already know, but which news reports like this one consistently miss: The digital-rights-management scheme on music sold by Apple’s iTunes Store is so weak that it’s scarcely worth mentioning.
It’s pretty simple: (1) Download a copy-protected song or an album from iTunes; (2) burn it onto a CD, which you are allowed to do. That’s it. The CD is as free of copy protection as one you would buy in a store. Thus you can re-rip it to any format you like.
Which means that I can’t see why people are so excited about the deal announced yesterday by Apple and EMI.
Former Boston Herald political reporter and Tom Reilly operative Dave Guarino has been engaging in some interesting speculation on his blog about the future of the Globe’s metro columnists now that Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen McNamara has taken early retirement.
Guarino, an unabashed fan of Brian McGrory, thinks McGrory’s rare Sunday column was a sign that he’ll be getting McNamara’s marquee Sunday slot. As for McNamara’s replacement, Guarino says it has to be a woman, and mentions metro editor Carolyn Ryan and staff reporters Yvonne Abraham and Beth Healy as leading possibilities.
Those sound about right to me. Let me toss Living/Arts writer Joanna Weiss into the mix as well. And would it be possible to pry Joan Vennochi out of her op-ed slot? She’s influential already, but she’d have more visibility if her mugshot were on page B1 twice a week.
Among the best examples of Web journalism I’ve seen recently is this special report produced by The Enterprise of Brockton. Titled “Wasted Youth,” the package offers an in-depth look at kids who are battling OxyContin and heroin addiction — a battle some of them end up losing.
The online version encompasses long-form narrative storytelling (don’t let anyone tell you that everything on the Web must be broken into bite-size chunks), narrated slide shows, discussion boards and resources for further information and for help. The paper is running follow-ups as well. A triumph.
Media Nation has been rough on Gov. Deval Patrick — though no rougher than he deserves. Still, I find myself agreeing with Charley Blandy of Blue Mass Group, who says that one positive aspect of Patrick’s victory is that we no longer have a governor standing in the way of progress, such as stem-cell research and Cape Wind.
Today, a third example: Andrea Estes and Lisa Wangsness report in the Boston Globe that Patrick has ordered the state Department of Public Health to record the marriages of 26 out-of-state gay and lesbian couples, reversing an action taken by his Republican predecessor, Mitt Romney. Good for Patrick.
And don’t miss today’s “Doonesbury,” which neatly skewers Romney for his flip-flop on gay and lesbian rights.
The Boston Herald today pokes fun at Mayor Tom Menino, who criticized the media yesterday for what he calls their overemphasis on violent crime. The Herald’s Laurel Sweet reports on Menino’s church appearance in Dorchester:
“A lot of people want to believe it’s out of control. It’s not out of control,” Menino assured a packed house at Greater Love Tabernacle in the heart of Dorchester’s shooting gallery, where he was welcomed by thunderous applause.
“This city works. The problem is you’re always seeing headlines about the bad news. I wish we had a good news newspaper. The Good News of Boston. The bad guys don’t control this city, they only control the headlines.”
But I thought there already was a Good News of Boston — the Boston City Communicator, forthrightly labeled “Mayor Menino’s ‘Communicator'” in this press release marking its January launch and immediately dubbed the Tommy Times by the Herald. The announcement sparked a wave of derision on Universal Hub, with local blogger Carpundit calling it “a cynical and horrible idea.”
I know the Tommy Times is only a quarterly — but that means it should be just about time for another edition. Suggested lead headline: “City Peaceful, Prosperous Thanks to Mayor.”
The Boston Globe also covered Menino’s remarks, but Maria Cramer’s story doesn’t mention His Honor’s media critique. Adam Reilly points out that Cramer caught up with the mayor at a different church.
It’s just one high school, so what were the odds that both the New York Times and the Boston Globe would publish two entirely different big stories on Newton North High School today? (Yeah, yeah, I know, both papers are owned by the New York Times Co. But I can’t see this as anything but a coincidence.)
The Times gives front-page, above-the-fold display to Sara Rimer’s feature on “Amazing Girls,” high-achieving young women competing for slots at the nation’s leading colleges and universities. It’s a terrific read, and I think my friend Adam Reilly misses the point — it’s less a paean to these kids’ amazingness than it is a look at the insane pressure they’re under.
I can’t believe folks at the Globe were happy to see the Times steal their lunch money with Rimer’s story. (Although Tracy Jan’s front-page piece on Sylvester Cooper, in danger of dropping out of the Boston schools with an eighth-grade education, certainly fills the paper’s daily quota of socially significant education stories.) Still, the Globe has its own Newton North piece, leading the City & Region section with an interesting look — reported by Ralph Ranalli — at how the new Newton North has managed to run up a price tag of $154.6 million.
Be sure to check out the accompanying graphic, which may be emblematic of how editors at the newly downsized Globe plan to move forward. This is the epitome of local coverage — a long story on cost overruns at one high school, along with a floor-by-floor, interactive chart. No doubt we’re going to see a lot more of this, as major metros like the Globe become more and more local in their focus. Indeed, the Globe even leads the paper today with a story on Proposition 2 1/2 overrides in the suburbs.
Nostalgia note: Nice Globe story by Geoff Edgers on the refurbished Children’s Museum. I was glad to see, in yet another interactive graphic, that the Japanese house survived. The Media Nation family spent many happy afternoons there when the kids were little.
Linguist John McWhorter, in a commentary for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” March 27:
One cannot refer to a single soldier as a troop. This means that calling 20,000 soldiers “20,000 troops” depersonalizes the soldiers as individuals, and makes a massive number of living, breathing individuals sound like some kind of mass or substance, like water or Jell-O, or some kind of freight.
President Bush, March 29:
We stand united in saying loud and clear that when we’ve got a troop in harm’s way, we expect that troop to be fully funded.
I want to try a crowdsourcing experiment today.
Lisa Wangsness reports in the Boston Globe that law-enforcement officials, community activists and the like are trying to restore $11 million in funding for an antigang program that Gov. Deval Patrick proposes to eliminate so that he can pay for the first 250 of the 1,000 new police officers he promised during his campaign. State Sen. Jarrett Barrios, D-Cambridge, whose progressive credentials are unquestioned, discusses the issue on his blog.
So far, this sounds like a classic clash of priorities, with Patrick on what is arguably the wrong side. According to Barrios, the Charles Shannon Community Safety Initiative, as the antigang program is known, helps fund “community-based outreach programs, summer jobs programs, reentry programs, after-school programs and community policing initiatives targeting gangs and youth violence.” Yes, we all want more police officers, but we also know that a comprehensive approach to crime is the only thing that works in the long run.
But wait — this isn’t just a clash of priorities. According to this March 2 Globe story by Andrea Estes and Wangsness, the 250 new police officers are largely being funded by taking other money away from police departments. Here’s what they reported back then:
According to the administration, the money to hire the additional officers would come from a new $30 million account for local police. However, $20 million of that money would be taken from the police grant program, which is traditionally distributed to local police by the Legislature. And some of it is already used for hiring police officers, raising questions about whether the Patrick plan would actually add the number of officers that he asserts.
So what, precisely, is it that I want to try crowdsourcing? I want to know if this is as bad as it looks, or if there is some explanation. What Estes and Wangsness describe sounds like a grotesquely exploitative shell game. There’s got to be more to it than this. Patrick couldn’t be this cynical. Could he?
I’m not going to be chained to my laptop all day, but I’d like to post comments and links as I’m able. I’ll point to the most informative of them right here on the front page. At best, this could be an interesting exercise in group media criticism. At worst — hey, it’s still Friday.
Update: Maybe this is as bad as it looks. One Media Nation reader points to this March 11 Globe story on the $11 million cut. Here’s an excerpt:
“We were shocked,” said Emmett Folgert, describing reaction to Patrick’s elimination of the $11 million in antigang funding. The veteran director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative, a Fields Corner outreach program, said the money not only helped Boston, which received $3 million, but began to seed new prevention efforts in New Bedford, Fall River, and other cities dealing with youth violence problems. “To abort these new programs that have already achieved success and community support is unthinkable,” said Folgert.
Another Media Nation reader wonders if Patrick is “desperate” rather than “cynical” — that is, he’s so intent on fulfilling his campaign promise to hire 1,000 new police officers that he’s doing more harm than good. An interesting theory.
Check out what Blue Mass Groupie Kate says after several days of well-documented privacy problems at DevalPatrick.com (fixed, fortunately) and concerns expressed even by the Outraged Liberal, a Patrick admirer, about soliciting campaign contributions on a site that’s supposed to be a high-minded exercise in online governance:
For those involved in Deval Patrick’s innovative, grassroots-driven, decentralized, and empowering campaign, any “controversy” about the governor’s relaunched website is much ado about nothing. It appears that those who attack this website are threatened by ordinary citizens being active and engaged.
And what is the reaction of BMG co-editor David Kravitz? “Well said, Kate!”
Priceless.