Hard Drive-gate appears to have faded away. But in case you were still wondering whether former governor Mitt Romney and his staff did anything wrong by destroying most of their electronic records when Romney left office in January 2007, the Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization PolitiFact says “no.” Its ruling:
The Romney administration’s decision to erase most electronic files is neither illegal nor unusual. According to state records officials, past governors such as Weld, Cellucci and Swift have not made their electronic records available to the state archive or to the incoming administration, according to state staff. They have submitted some computer print-outs to the state archive, but Romney did that, as well.
PolitiFact is no fan of Romney. Page through its “Pants on Fire” section — that is, statements deemed to be outrageous lies — and you’ll find that Mitt is well-represented. But it seemed pretty clear from the beginning that criticizing Romney’s staff for not turning over non-public electronic records was ridiculous. And so it was.
The Times deserves a lot of credit for taking comments seriously enough to do a rethink. The centerpiece to its new policy is that “trusted commenters” — invitation-only contributors with a track record of being thoughtful and civil — will be able to post without pre-screening as long as they are willing to do so using their Facebook accounts.
Why does Facebook matter? Yes, it’s the social network that we all love to hate. But it also requires its users to provide their real names. And we’ve all become accustomed to behaving a certain way on Facebook.
We share our pictures, we wish each other a happy birthday, we send cheery messages to friends from high school whom we haven’t seen in years. All of this is the antithesis of the nutty, often racist comments that pollute many newspaper sites.
Comments matter. They can be a way for news organizations to establish a community and carry on a conversation with their audience. They haven’t worked out as we might have hoped 10 years ago. But that’s no reason not to keep trying.
A little more than two months after its launch, BostonGlobe.com has won two major awards from the trade journal Editor & Publisher: Best Daily Newspaper Website and Best Overall Website Design. The Globe’s Boston.com site also won an award, for Best Entertainment Website. All three prizes were in the category of newspaper sites with at least one million unique visitors a month.
The so-called EPPY Awards are a recognition of the Globe’s innovative approach in designing its new paid site — a reliance on “responsive design,” based on HTML5, that allowed programmers to put together one website that adjusts itself to fit a variety of devices, from computers to smartphones.
In using the site, I’ve found that I have to do more clicking and scrolling than I’d like. It’s fine for reading a few stories, but not necessarily the whole paper. I’ve even reverted to GlobeReader on occasion, despite its being somewhat long in the tooth. But BostonGlobe.com is startlingly fast, which makes the clicking easier to deal with, and the design and usability have been improved here and there since its debut.
The real story, of course, is how many readers have signed up for paid digital subscriptions. And that’s a story that, so far, has yet to be told.
In my latest for the Huffington Post, I argue that liberals should be rooting for Mitt Romney to win the nomination. If he fails, it could be disastrous for the country, for the Republican Party and even for the Obama presidency. I’ll be talking about my piece tonight between 8 and 9 p.m. with Ian Masters, host of the radio program “Background Briefing.”
Old friend Yvonne Abraham (OK, she’s not old, but I am) has a lovely story in today’s Boston Globe about a group of blind, mentally disabled friends who were rescued from the hell of the Fernald School by a caring, progressive staff member. It’s accompanied by a really nice video by Scott LaPierre. It’s a reminder that we all have much to be thankful for.
I was driving east on Route 2 last night, somewhere in the Land of the Yellow Traffic Barriers, fiddling with the CNN app on my iPhone so I could listen to the latest Republican presidential debate.
Moderator Wolf Blitzer was joking about his first name, which prompted Mitt Romney to say this: “I’m Mitt Romney and yes, Wolf, that’s also my first name.”
I nearly drove off the road.
As many of us know, Mitt is not Romney’s first name. It’s Willard. I wouldn’t quite call what Romney said a lie, because to qualify there has to be some intent to deceive. And Romney’s full name is not exactly a secret.
For some reason, I thought immediately of Richard Nixon, who beat Romney’s father, George, for the Republican nomination in 1968. A generation earlier, in 1952, Nixon was on the ropes. Shortly after having been named Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate, the Trickster was caught in some minor money-grubbing scandal, and delivered a nationally televised speech (a true rarity in those days) in an attempt to save his career. It was dubbed the “Checkers speech,” after the Nixons’ dog, which Nixon shamelessly invoked in a bid for sympathy.
Anyway, at one point Nixon said this, bringing his poor wife into the fray:
And now, finally, I know that you wonder whether or not I am going to stay on the Republican ticket or resign. Let me say this: I don’t believe that I ought to quit, because I am not a quitter. And, incidentally, Pat is not a quitter. After all, her name is Patricia Ryan and she was born on St. Patrick’s Day, and you know the Irish never quit.
In fact, Pat Nixon’s name was not Patricia. She was born Thelma Catherine Ryan. Her birthday was March 16, which, the last time I checked, was the day before St. Patrick’s Day. As with Romney last night, I don’t think it’s quite fair to call what Nixon said a lie. She reportedly used Patricia on occasion, and March 16 qualifies as close enough.
Still, Romney’s statement showed that even after running for president full-time for seven years now, he is still weirdly clueless about what people will pick up on. There’s a lot of buzz about it this morning, and it’s detracting from Romney’s more important message: That he’s so desperate to become president he’s willing to put out a television ad that flat-out lies about what Barack Obama said regarding the economy during the 2008 campaign.
As a friend observed, the documentary was heavily tilted toward men, which seems odd given that before it ends, we see the executive editor’s baton being passed from Bill Keller to Jill Abramson.
Now Jim Romenesko reports that two women on the media desk, Stephanie Clifford and Motoko Rich, were asked to take part and declined. Perhaps filmmaker Andrew Rossi could have tried a bit harder to get a female perspective, but now we know that he did make an attempt.
I am renewing my request for an advertiser or advertisers who’d be interested in the top-of-the-page banner. Would I accept political ads? Yes. In fact, the vertical Google ad slot features politics from time to time. I don’t want to be partisan — in a perfect world, for instance, I’d have ads for Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren alternating in that space. But let’s talk. My email address is dkennedy56 at gmail dot com.
Jim Romenesko has written an understated but emphatic post on his new site about what really happened between him and Poynter Online editor Julie Moos. It’s painful to read, but it’s ameliorated by the fact that he emerged with his good name intact.
I think it’s safe to say that Poynter is going to have to respond. Nevertheless, it’s clear that Moos bungled a legitimate issue over Romenesko’s sometimes-hazy use of quotation marks, conflating his method of aggregating into an absurd accusation that he was unethical.
