Objectivity redefined

The Boston Herald’s Casey Ross reports that pro-casino legislators are trying to steer Gov. Deval Patrick’s three-casino proposal away from the Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies, whose House chairman, Rep. Dan Bosley, D-North Adams, opposes casinos.

Ross writes that casino supporters wonder if Bosley can be “objective,” and he quotes Rep. John Quinn, D-New Bedford:

If we want a fair and open hearing, I’m not sure [Bosley’s] committee is the one that can provide it. I have tremendous respect for the chairman, but this is an issue that impacts the entire commonwealth, and we ought to treat it appropriately.

It seems not to have occurred to Quinn — or maybe it has — that the reason Bosley is such a staunch opponent of casinos is that he’s studied the issue more closely and for a longer time than anyone else in the Legislature.

Bosley understands that casino gambling is bad news, and he’s got the data to back it up. That doesn’t make him non-objective; it makes him right.

And no, I’m not objective, either.

Young people and the news

My latest for CommonWealth Magazine takes a look at the disconnect between young people and the news. Among the folks I interviewed was veteran television journalist Judy Woodruff, now with PBS. Earlier this year Woodruff hosted an hour-long report called “Generation Next,” which examined the lives of people between the ages of 16 and 25. Here’s part of what she told me:

Much of the news young people see is not presented in a way that’s relevant to them. It’s presented in a way that makes sense to people who are older, who know what Medicaid Part B is, or who know what the Kyoto Accord is, or McCain-Feingold. There’s a lot of jargon in the news, and there’s an adult framing of the news, if you will….

I think we need to put ourselves in their shoes. I’m not at all saying we should dumb stories down, because young people today are smart. They’re better educated than any generation that preceded them. But we need to find out what they’re interested in and address the news to them. They’re young. They’re not at a stage in their lives where they own property and are home by 6 or 6:30 at night.

My bottom line: News organizations need to move more quickly in embracing technologies such as interactivity, sharing and social networking. But young people have an obligation to start paying attention to the world around them, too.

If you read the article, you’ll come across a note on how difficult it is to measure the number of people who visit a Web site. The specific example I cite is BostonHerald.com, whose internal numbers show more than three times as many visitors as those counted by Nielsen/NetRatings — a disparity that is not at all unusual.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article that explains all, sort of. The most startling assertion, given how important the Web is to the future of the faltering news business, is this: “[T]he growth of online advertising is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight.” Wow.

Got their mojos working

Pardon the link to a press release, but this bears watching. Reuters journalists have been trying out a Nokia smartphone that lets them write stories, shoot video and still photos, and record audio, and then edit everything and upload it right from the field. I first took note of this trend last December, when it was written up in the Online Journalism Review. Now it’s becoming a reality.

Reuters has put together a site showing off the work of their “mojos,” or mobile journalists. Check out “Robots R Us,” and note the high-quality video and sound. It’s easy to imagine watching this on your own smartphone.

The mojo tool of choice at Reuters is the Nokia N95. With a list price of $699, it’s not cheap — unless the alternative is to outfit a journalist with a laptop and a video/still camera. Compared to that, it’s ridiculously inexpensive.

The press release says that the N95 “provides everything journalists need to file and publish stories from even the most remote regions of the world.” Well, OK. But I suspect such tools are mainly going to be a boon for community journalism, as both professionals and amateurs seek to add more multimedia to their sites.

This just in: No sooner had I posted this than a blog item from the Guardian showed up in my inbox. The writer, Jemima Kiss, goes into quite a bit more detail than the press release does.

A note on quotes

I’m scratching my head over this, from a Boston Globe review by Brion O’Connor about two new Patriots books:

[H]e has an irritating habit of repeating pet clichés, including “mortgaging the future,” “in over his head,” and “slow slide toward mediocrity,” as well as setting up quotes — a gaffe usually corrected in Journalism 101.

Setting up quotes is bad? This Google search suggests the contrary. The very first hit is for a document called “The Art and Craft of Setting Up Quotes.”

I advise my students to tell the reader a little something about new interview subjects and what they’re going to say before quoting them, which is what I take “setting up quotes” to mean. O’Connor is a longtime journalist, and I’m guessing that what he means is different from what I mean.

Anyway, any insight would be appreciated.

Crisp’s last stand

Your blood must run ice-cold if you don’t feel for Coco Crisp, losing his job in the middle of the post-season. So of all the many highlights from last night’s game, I thought the best — well, OK, tied with Pedroia’s home run, and just barely ahead of Papelbon’s shutting down the Indians in the eighth — was Crisp’s running into the wall to grab the final out.

And what about Daisuke? The Sox can’t make it through the Series with just two starters, and it looks as though Matsuzaka has rediscovered enough of his talent at least to keep the game close. Just in time.

Sox, Media Nation climb

I was sitting in my car last night, trying to get a signal from a campsite near Mount Monadnock, when J.D. Drew finally worked off the first $1 million of his $70 million contract. Absolutely incredible. At that point, I took a radio into my tent and listened to the wavering ESPN play-by-play on an AM station in New York.

I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew it was the fifth inning, and the Sox were ahead, 10-1. I turned it off and went to sleep. I still don’t know who the heroes were, other than Drew and Curt Schilling. As soon as I post this item, I’m going to find out.

Today I helped lead a group of eight Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts to the top of Monadnock (elevation: 3,165 feet). It was a perfect day, made all the more so because we knew the Sox would be playing a Game Seven tonight.

Mitigation sought in Middleborough

A Middleborough developer who pays $29,000 a year in taxes to the town wants some of his money back. The reason? The proposed casino is croaking his business. Eileen Reece reports in the Brockton Enterprise:

The developer, whose units are located near the site of the proposed casino, has had problems selling the units as prospective buyers are unsure how close their homes will be to the casino, explained [Selectman Adam] Bond.

“This is a true, dead center, right-on negative impact,” said Bond, who was instrumental in negotiating the casino contract with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

It’s impossible to judge the veracity of this claim, since Bond wouldn’t identify the name of the developer. The selectmen, naturally, are already trying to figure out whether they can deal with the developer in secret.

But Bond, who wants to be town manager despite lacking the minimum qualifications for the job, isn’t exactly known for saying a discouraging word about the proposed casino. So this seems pretty credible, at least on the surface.

My standard disclosure.

A judicial breach of privacy

Superior Court Judge Allan van Gestel‘s contempt for privacy ought to concern all of us. And his latest is hardly the first time he’s made a dubious decision involving the rights of individuals.

Van Gestel recently ordered the ticket service StubHub to turn over the names of about 13,000 customers to the New England Patriots as part of the team’s crackdown on ticket scalping (Globe story here; Herald story here). In a particularly ridiculous gesture, van Gestel ordered the Patriots not to reveal the names to anyone else. But isn’t it the Patriots from whom those customers were most trying to conceal their identities?

Van Gestel is also the judge who’s blocked Herald columnist Howie Carr from taking his talk show from WRKO (AM 680) to WTKK (96.9 FM). I’m not going to argue the legalities of noncompete clauses, right-to-match provisions and the like. Morally, though, there’s something reprehensible about telling Carr he can’t work for any radio station but WRKO until 2012, even though Carr’s contract expired last month.

And say, your honor, does Carr have any recourse regarding the “Virtual Howie” that’s now online at the WRKO Web site?

Finally, in 2000 I bestowed upon Judge van Gestel a Phoenix Muzzle Award for his mind-boggling decision to impose prior restraint on a group of anti-gay activists who had recorded a sex-education session for teenagers and were playing it for anyone who cared to listen.

What the anti-gay hatemongers did was contemptible. It also happened to be protected by the First Amendment, which van Gestel later acknowledged by removing the media from his order.