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The Boston Globe’s newscast has reportedly reached the end of the line

I’m getting multiple messages that The Boston Globe is shutting down its TV/digital newscast, “Boston Globe Today.” There’s also a bit of an uproar from the newsroom that a message from a staff member who’s been laid off was removed from the Globe’s Slack channel. More later, I’m sure.

Here is the somewhat skeptical post I wrote when the newscast made its debut a little more than two years ago. As I said at the time, the producers needed to find ways of breaking the newscast down into stories that could be consumed by younger viewers on their phones.

And here’s what I wrote last fall when newscast host Segun Oduolowu popped up on a Kamala Harris fundraising call and explicitly endorsed her presidential campaign, creating an ethical dilemma for Globe management.

Is he still talking? Making sense of Trump’s nonsense address to Congress

My evening began at church with a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. From there, it was all downhill.

The early moments of Donald Trump’s endless address to Congress (is he still talking?) made me think about Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address last March. It was, perhaps, Biden’s last really good public moment. Seated behind him, Kamala Harris was thoroughly enjoying herself while Mike Johnson looked glum.

Please become a supporter of Media Nation. For just $5 a month, you’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive commentary and other goodies. Tomorrow I’ll take a look back at the first week of COVID and a news conference I attended in Mendocino County, California.

Now we are in the midst of chaos, all of it self-inflicted by Trump and his prime minister, Elon Musk. Authoritarianism, Three Stooges-style (who is the third Stooge?), is on the rise.

I don’t really have a coherent take on Tuesday night’s ugly proceedings, but here are a few thoughts. I’m curious to know what you thought, too.

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We’re back online

Media Nation was down for about eight hours Friday, and my apologies if you were trying to access the site but couldn’t. The explanation is a cliché: I was messing around in places where I shouldn’t have been and our son, Tim, bailed me out.

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Arthur Fiedler says: Become a supporter of Media Nation today!

It’s time for your occasional reminder that though Media Nation is a free source of news and commentary, it takes a lot of work to produce. I’d appreciate it if you would consider becoming a supporter for just $5 a month. Supporters receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.

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How a drive through Vermont introduced me to a remarkable and offbeat book

A great bookstore is one that introduces you to books that you didn’t know you wanted to read. Amazon doesn’t do that. Most physical bookstores succeed only partially.

Over the summer, though, our travels took us through Manchester, Vermont, where we visited the Northshire Bookstore, an independent outlet that has the advantage of being both enormous and lovingly curated and thus well-stocked with books I might not have heard of. That’s where I discovered Caleb Carr’s “My Beloved Monster,” a memoir about his life with a Siberian cat named Masha.

This is a supporters-only post available in the weekly Media Nation newsletter at Patreon. To read the rest of this post and to get a wrap-up of the week’s content, photography and a song of the week, please sign up here.

A new look for Media Nation

After several weeks of thinking about it, I’ve switched to a new theme for Media Nation. (“Theme” is WordPress-speak for “design.”) I’m still on the lookout for something better, but for now I think this will be an improvement. Why did I do this?

• My previous theme, Lovecraft, struck me as a bit too artsy for what I was looking for. The new theme, Twenty Sixteen, is more straightforward and newsier.

• As one of WordPress’ official themes, Twenty Sixteen receives regular maintenance updates. Lovecraft hadn’t been updated since 2022.

• With Lovecraft, you couldn’t see a link for commenting unless you clicked through to the individual post. As a result, I had to add “Leave a comment | Read comments” by hand to each post. Twenty Sixteen not only handles that automatically, but it gives you a count of how many people have commented. That way, you’ll know whether it’s worth clicking or not.

• Change is good.

Let me know what you think. If you have any suggestions for a better theme, I’m all ears.

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Boats along the Charles River in Waltham Center

The idea behind having a weekly newsletter for paid supporters is to offer something extra. Today, though, I thought I would unlock my most recent newsletter so that you can see what you’ll get if you join for $5 a month. Every Thursday I send out a collection of commentary, photography, a round-up of the week’s posts and a song. I hope you’ll consider joining. To become a paid supporter, just click here.

Why you should become a paid supporter of Media Nation

Three and a half years ago, I decided to try something new. Although Media Nation is and always will be a free source of news and commentary, I added a paid tier for readers who wanted to support my work. At the time, Substack was going through a major growth period, and the historian Heather Cox Richardson had signed up enough paid subscribers to bring in more than $1 million a year even though access to her newsletter was free. I thought: Why not?

Well, I’m not making $1 million a year, but I did recently fulfill the extremely modest goal I’d had right from the start. It was the result of a small but unexpected surge, and I’m hoping that I can build on that.

Unfortunately, because I started doing this way back in 2005, I’m somewhat constrained in terms of the UX. In order to become a paid supporter, you need to sign up at a different site, Patreon, where you’ll be asked to pay $5 a month. The terminology is more confusing than it should be, too. You can subscribe to Media Nation for free, and if you do that, you’ll receive new posts to this blog in your inbox. But that’s not the same as becoming a paid supporter, which will get you a weekly newsletter with exclusive early content, a round-up of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.

I began blogging about the media since February 2002, which puts me in either the late first wave or early second wave of media bloggers, not all that far behind the legendary Jim Romenesko. He’s retired; I’m still at it. I hope you value what I do enough to become a supporter. All you need to do is click here. Thank you.

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Please become a supporter of Media Nation. You’ll get a newsletter with extra goodies.

Every Thursday I post a newsletter that’s exclusively for supporters of Media Nation. I’m especially proud of the new one — a look at how critics of Jeff Bezos’ stewardship of The Washington Post and John Henry’s ownership of the Red Sox have converged into a miasma of resentment and envy. Each newsletter also includes photography, a round-up of the week’s posts and a Song of the Week. I’m especially pleased with what I dug up this week, and I think you’ll be, too.

I launched Media Nation as a source of news and commentary in 2005. It’s free and will remain so. But I hope you’ll consider becoming a supporter for $5 a month. Just click here.

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Guilty x 34

Some notable front pages reporting Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to cover up payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels — payments aimed at keeping their sexual encounter out of the headlines just before the 2016 election.

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