By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
I’m heading to Hartford, Conn., later this morning to interview and follow around Christine Stuart, the editor of CT News Junkie, which covers the Connecticut politics at a time when mainstream news organizations are cutting back. Her site is affiliated with a better-known community site, the New Haven Independent.
Stuart is not waiting for a new business model — she’s just doing it.
In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at George Will’s error-riddled column on global warming — and at how his arrogance, combined with the Washington Post’s defensiveness, succeeded in turning a one-day story into a two-week (and counting) siege.
I have turned on comment moderation, as Media Nation was hit with comment spam overnight. Unfortunately, I’m going to be offline a good part of the day. Will try to approve comments later, as well as take down the spam.
Friend of Media Nation Catherine Tumber, with whom I worked at the Boston Phoenix, recently published an important essay in the Boston Review on how revitalizing smaller cities — think New Bedford, Lowell, Lawrence, Holyoke — could help lead to a more sustainable future. She writes:
When it comes to the urban-rural divide, small-to-intermediate-size cities may offer the best of both worlds. For all the rural romanticism of the ’70s-era homesteading movement — or for that matter, the vaunted folksiness of “small-town values,” — urban life has its allure. Smaller cities are large enough to offer the diversity, anonymity, and vibrancy of urban culture, as well as levels of density that offer efficiencies of scale. They are also small enough to maintain proximity to sustainable food production and renewable energy resources.
Well worth reading in full.
I was excited about the new live version of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” until I saw this video of him mumbling through “Sweet Thing” at the Hollywood Bowl. The huge band he’s assembled is terrific. Morrison, not so much. Nor does this New York Times review hold out much hope.
Though I’m not a big Morrison fan and have never seen him live, I love “Astral Weeks.” As I suspect is the case with many people, I came to it well into adulthood — it was never on the radio, either then or now, and Morrison’s numerous top-40 hits didn’t appeal to me all that much. When I finally decided to find out why critics had been raving about it for all those years, I was mesmerized.
Last Friday I listened to it straight through while driving home, the first time I’d done that in a while. What a strange, wonderful piece of work. Morrison is at his peak, both in his singing and his writing. Is it possible that he was just 23 when he recorded it? I’d listen to it just for Richard Davis’ otherworldly bass-playing. Pressed to name a favorite song (not that these are really songs), I’d probably say “Cypress Avenue.” But that’s subject to change.
Trouble is, Morrison has had a reputation for years — maybe decades? — of indifference when it comes to performing live. Don Imus scored a rare interview with Morrison last week, but didn’t succeed in drawing him out of his shell. Far better is this NPR piece, broadcast on Saturday, on the significance of “Astral Weeks.”
Bob Dylan is often lumped with Morrison in delivering uninspired, even belligerently awful live performances. But when Dylan’s engaged, he is as compelling as he’s ever been. If you don’t believe me, check out this riveting video of Bob and the boys performing the Sam Cooke classic “A Change Is Gonna Come.” (Steve Greenlee will have to take my word for it, I guess.)
Does Morrison ever rise to such heights anymore? I don’t know the answer to that. What I do know is that if you don’t have “Astral Weeks” in your collection, you should rectify that as quickly as possible. You will be entranced and amazed.
But he refuses to pay for content.
Loving “Globe 10.0” with Bob Ryan.
Gov. Deval Patrick is repeating a threat he’s made in the past: to take legal notices out of newspapers and run them online instead, thus saving taxpayers some money.
Hillary Chabot reports in today’s Boston Herald that Patrick has included a provision in his transportation bill that “would allow public transportation projects to advertise on the Internet instead of newspapers.”
From the earliest days of American newspapers, legal notices have been an important source of revenue. During Colonial times, it wasn’t uncommon for newspapers to curry favor with the royal governor in order to get lucrative official advertising.
Has the moment come to rethink legal ads? Probably. But given the horrendous state of the newspaper business, the timing couldn’t be any worse.
What Patrick proposes isn’t unique to Massachusetts. Le Templar of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz., recently spoke with NPR’s “On the Media” about this very subject. Among other things, he said:
[A] variety of research shows that despite the current plight of the newspaper industry, people are still reading newspapers and their companion websites far more than they’re reading individual government websites. We’re talking at magnitudes of 10 to 100 times more.
Also, newspapers serve as sort of a central repository. If you’re a person who likes to know what different governments are up to around you, you can go to your local newspaper and read them all at once instead to having to go sit in a library all day and look through different minutes or, in the modern electronic era, hit individual websites.
Templar also argued that it’s far easier for the government to prove that it published a legal notice, as required by law, with a newspaper clip than with an online notice on a government site. (Thanks to O-Fish-L for calling my attention to the Herald story.)
While everyone is focused on the looming 50-person cut in the Boston Globe’s newsroom, the Boston Herald yesterday quietly announced that it would soon shed 20 jobs.
Lisa van der Pool reports in the Boston Business Journal that the cuts won’t come exclusively from the Herald’s newsroom: publisher Pat Purcell says the reductions will involve “editorial and commercial” employees at both the paper and its Web site.
As at the Globe, the Herald will look for volunteers first.
There’s a howler near the top of former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld’s op-ed in today’s Boston Globe that any sharp-eyed editor should have caught. Weld and John Stimpson write:
In 1981, the United States was in the midst of what President Jimmy Carter had labeled a “national malaise” and a “crisis in confidence.”
Trouble is, as this PBS article explains, “Though he never used the word — [political adviser Pat] Caddell had in his memo — it became known as Carter’s ‘malaise’ speech.”