Talking online local news at MIT

Please mark this on your calendar — it should be a good one. Next Thursday, Sept. 22, I’ll be moderating a panel on “Local News in the Digital Age,” part of the MIT Communications Forum.

We will have an all-star cast: David Dahl, the Boston Globe’s regional editor, who’s in charge of the paper’s regional editions and the hyperlocal Your Town sites; Callie Crossley, host of “The Callie Crossley Show” on WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) and a fellow panelist on “Beat the Press” (WGBH-TV, Channel 2); and Adam Gaffin, the co-founder, editor and publisher of Universal Hub, Greater Boston’s one essential hyperlocal news site.

The free event will take place from 5o to 7 p.m. in the MIT Media Lab’s Bartos Theater, at 20 Ames St. in Cambridge. It’s being held at the same time that the Online News Association’s annual conference gets under way in Boston, and we’re hoping a few attendees decide to wander over as well.

This morning’s BostonGlobe.com report

The next few weeks should be interesting as the folks at the Boston Globe work out the bugs at BostonGlobe.com.

Starting last night, the site stopped working on my almost-four-year-old MacBook using Chrome and Safari. (Might be just my set-up, though I did reboot.) On the other hand, it still works fine with Firefox, for which I’ve recently been developing a new appreciation, as it seems to be the most stable of the three major Mac browsers. No problems on my iPhone or on Mrs. Media Nation’s iPad, either.

I’m glad to see Dan Wasserman’s editorial cartoon made it to the site today, and I hope syndicated cartoons will be included on days that Wasserman isn’t drawing. The comics are online today, too. Maybe they were yesterday, but I couldn’t find them.

Other observations: clean as the site is, the organizational scheme is a bit bewildering, with many different options. I feel as though I’m missing stuff. The “Today’s Paper” option doesn’t seem to be quite that. It would be nice to have a clearly delineated separate section of everything that’s in that day’s print edition.

Also, how about combining all the little “Names” tidbits into one column? Other “g” shorts could be combined, too. I don’t want to keep clicking to read 90-word items. It’s one of my main peeves about GlobeReader, too, and I’ll bet I’m not alone.

Real Paper alumni get together this Thursday

Veterans of the Real Paper, a Boston-based alternative weekly in the 1970s, will get together in a Ford Hall Forum event this Thursday to discuss what they learned and what lessons that might hold for the future of journalism. The event will take place in Suffolk University’s C. Walsh Theatre from 6:30 to 8 p.m. You can find out more here.

As we old-timers well remember, the rivalry between the Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix was intense during the decade or so that they both published. The Real Paper was formed in 1972 after Stephen Mindich, the founder of Boston After Dark, bought the Phoenix, which was sometimes known in that earlier incarnation as the Cambridge Phoenix. Mindich called his new paper the Boston Phoenix.

The former staff of the Cambridge Phoenix, rather than going away, founded the Real Paper, which during its first few years operated as an employee-run collective. The paper ceased publication in 1981.

This Wikipedia article on the Real Paper strikes me as an accurate summary of those years.

The Ford Hall Forum event brings together a number of well-known former Real Paper staff members: Harper Barnes, Jan Freeman, Mark Zanger, Laura Shapiro and Paul Solman, assembled by Monica Collins, herself a Real Paper alumna who’s also vice president of the Ford Hall Forum.

Pierce leaves Globe to blog on politics for Esquire

Anyone who follows Charlie Pierce on Facebook knows the guy was born to be a political blogger. Few combine snark, outrage and an eye for interesting links better than he.

Well, now Jim Romenesko reports that Pierce is leaving the Boston Globe Magazine to become the lead writer for Esquire magazine’s “Politics Blog.” (Pierce was already a contributing editor for Esquire.) Editor-in-chief David Granger says:

Charlie is going to make Esquire.com’s “The Politics Blog” one of the very few political blogs one has to read every day, all day. He is one of the great American voices, and we’re confident that he will lead a national conversation during what should be the most entertaining political season of our lifetimes.

The timing is a bit awkward for the Globe. While you still can, check out a video of Pierce talking about his favorite writers, which he made as part of a Globe ad campaign.

In 2009 I wrote about Pierce’s book “Idiot America” for the Guardian. Pierce is a longtime friend of Media Nation, and I wish him the best.

Update: Turns out there was more to Pierce’s departure from the Globe. Jack Sullivan of CommonWealth Magazine reports that Pierce was disciplined  for writing an “intemperate and intolerant” blog post about Tea Party Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell for Esquire last year. Among other things, he called her a “sideshow freak” and a “crackpot,” observations that might seem unremarkable to anyone familiar with Pierce’s writing style, O’Donnell’s bona fides or both.

Pierce currently has a union grievance pending against management. Pierce told Sullivan, “You could probably safely say ‘yes’” as to whether the dispute was among the factors that persuaded him to leave.

It would be easy to rip Globe managers for letting one of their most original writers walk over such a minor matter. But I understand why a paper like the Globe prohibits its writers from going postal for other publications, much as that policy might seem archaic in the Internet era. So I’ll leave it at this: What Pierce wrote for Esquire was precisely what the Globe could have anticipated he would write — it was standard-issue Pierce, neither more nor less caustic than his political writing in general. (Good Lord, have they read “Idiot America”?)

And the Globe is losing a lot more than it’s gaining.

Subscriber-based BostonGlobe.com debuts

Readers turning to Boston.com this morning and clicking on “Today’s Globe” found something new — an invitation to register for the new BostonGlobe.com, a paid site that will be getting a free trial for the rest of September. After that, it will cost $3.99 a week, which makes it among the more ambitious attempts to persuade online news consumers to pay for content.

I was among a number of media observers who were given a sneak preview last month by Globe publisher Chris Mayer and editor Marty Baron. I’ve got a longer take on the new site up at the Nieman Journalism Lab, focusing mainly on the site’s use of HTML5, which enables the Globe to offer a standalone app for the iPad and iPhone and avoid paying Apple its 30 percent cut.

Also, Nieman’s Joshua Benton offers four observations and asks lots of questions. Jeff Sonderman has a rundown at Poynter. Staci D. Kramer covers the launch for paidContent. And there’s plenty of coverage at BostonGlobe.com itself, starting here.

Access to BostonGlobe.com is included with any type of print subscription, including Sundays-only. Since the Sunday-paper-plus-GlobeReader has been our solution of choice for a while now, this is nothing but a plus here in Media Nation.

Remembering 9/11

The Manhattan skyline from Hoboken, N.J.

Ten years ago, on a cool and cloudless morning very much like this one, I ran into an old friend on Brookline Avenue in front of the Boston Phoenix. She told me there had been a terrible accident — a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

I headed up to the newsroom, and in a few moments, it was clear that there had been no accident. As there was no television set, I barreled home. On NPR, as I was on the loop ramp connecting Storrow Drive with the Tobin Bridge, I heard the shocked description of the first building collapsing. Not long after, I turned on the TV and watched the rest of the day and well into the evening. I stayed up all night and wrote this.

The following April, I was in Hoboken, N.J. — another clear, sunny day, though unseasonably hot and humid. I was early, so I made my way to Frank Sinatra Drive and took in the Manhattan skyline — looking to the right, the south, where the World Trade Center should have been.

That evening, City Council president Anthony Soares, whom I had come to interview for my book “Little People,” told me that Hoboken had been hit unusually hard by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Indeed, according to this account in the Hudson Reporter, Hoboken lost 57 people — “the most of any ZIP code in the United States.”

Personally, I was very lucky. We lost no family members, no friends. The attack remains the most stunning event of my lifetime. My heart goes out to those who did lose someone on that terrible day.

Photo (cc) by cornfusion and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

What does “Digital First” really mean?

New Haven’s final pre-primary mayoral debate in what has been a spirited campaign was held Thursday — and the New Haven Register, the Journal Register Co.’s flagship, didn’t bother to cover it. Instead, the Register linked to a story in the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit news site.

It was a curious decision, to say the least, and it comes at a time when JRC chief executive John Paton is the toast of the newspaper business for espousing a “Digital First” strategy.

In late August I had a chance to interview Matt DeRienzo, the new editor of the Register (as well as of two other Connecticut dailies). He struck me as a nice guy and genuinely committed to Paton’s goal of reinventing the daily-newspaper business online. But even though this particular debate was not as high-profile as previous ones, it still seems strange to outsource a story about an important city election to another news organization.

Among the Journal Register Co.’s high-profile advisers is Jeff Jarvis, well known for saying, “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” Good advice. But if covering a mayoral debate is not among the things a city newspaper does best, then I think we have to ask why.

Maybe someone got sick — though I’d hate to think the Register is so thinly staffed that no one else was available to send into battle.

Update. Paton responds via Twitter: “NHR doesn’t cover one event and you think that calls into question Digital First as a strategy? Ridiculous.”

Update II. DeRienzo responds in the comments. And makes some good points.

Media Nation seeks sponsorship

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Changing of the guard at ArchitectureBoston

Renée Loth

Congratulations to former Boston Globe editorial-page editor Renée Loth, who’s been named the new editor of ArchitectureBoston, published by the Boston Society of Architects.

Loth, who still writes a column for the Globe, will replace Elizabeth Padjen, a professional architect who’s been running the magazine for the past 14 years. (I had the pleasure of writing an essay for Padjen a few years ago.)

Loth is one of the city’s most accomplished journalists, and this fall will be a Goldsmith Fellow at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy. She’ll assume her new post at ArchitectureBoston in January.

WEEI gets back in the game

Much as I prefer the Sports Hub to the bitter old men of WEEI, I suspect John Dennis, Gerry Callahan and company are going to make up a lot of ratings ground very quickly once they start simulcasting on WMKK (93.7 FM) this coming Monday (Boston Globe story here; Boston Herald story here).

I don’t think anyone should underestimate how badly ‘EEI has been hurt by its miserable signal (AM 850) in the face of sports-talk competition from the Sports Hub, officially WBZ-FM (98.5). Yes, the programming on the Sports Hub is better, younger and funnier. But ‘EEI has been at a huge disadvantage. And it’s not without assets, principally Michael Holley plus Red Sox and Celtics games.

It’s not just that AM is fading from the scene — no worries, I suspect, at news-and-talk station WBZ (AM 1030), which has a nice, strong signal that can be heard in most places east of the Mississippi River after sundown. It’s that 850, weak and full of static, is almost unlistenable.

As for the simulcast, I give it a few months so that WEEI can promote 93.7. Once everyone has gotten the message, Entercom will probably do something else with 850 — although, frankly, it’s not good for much more than leasing it to a foreign-language religious broadcaster.