By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
To borrow from an old advertising campaign.
Our phenomenal delivery guy of some 20 years’ standing, Brent, is gone. The paper arrived late yesterday, and as of 9 a.m. today, it’s still not here. So, for the second morning in a row, I’ve read the paper strictly online, propping open my MacBook while eating breakfast.
Warning: I could get used to this.
Yvonne Abraham gets a tetanus shot.
A couple of odd headlines in today’s Boston Globe:
No, as a matter of fact, the MBTA is not tearing down a just-built bridge on the South Shore, as the Boston Globe reported the other day. The one it’s tearing down is more than 100 years old. (Via Universal Hub.)
The funniest thing about today’s lead Boston Globe headline is that it’s completely accurate.
I just sent off a piece to the Guardian on where the race goes from here. Despite some technical difficulties, it should be up in a bit.
Update: Well, this is annoying. I’m told that my deathless prose won’t go up until 5 p.m. or so due to computer issues. Since my stuff tends to have the shelf-life of day-old fish, I’m afraid it may be overtaken by events. So be it.
The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette may both be owned by the New York Times Co. But their copy desks certainly didn’t see eye to eye when it came to writing a headline for an AP story on those annoying rewards cards. To wit:
Since I’ve already got more than enough crap that I carry in my wallet, I’ll go with the Globe.
Boston Magazine has the latest update on who’s leaving the Globe, as well as a clarification on is-he-or-isn’t-he baseball guy Gordon Edes. (Answer: he is, unless he isn’t.)
Here’s an good example of how a large regional daily can use databases to do targeted local reporting.
Last Thursday the Boston Globe published a story in its four suburban supplements about inconsistencies in the way that applications for concealed-weapons licenses are handled from community to community. The story, by Globe database wiz Matt Carroll, is based on statistics provided by the state’s Criminal History Systems Board.
Carroll’s story was customized in each of the four supplements, reporting the same basic facts but quoting local people. The chart accompanying the story was customized as well. Here are the versions published in the North, NorthWest, West and South editions. In City Weekly, Carroll teamed up with Ric Kahn for yet another version that was published yesterday.
This sort of approach isn’t entirely new. Heck, I was customizing regional stories on a town-by-town basis when I was working for the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn in the 1980s. But there are a lot more meaningful stories that can be told this way now that government statistics are readily available online.
Today’s front-page Boston Globe story on the sad, dysfunctional family of Acia Johnson is as fine an example of long-form narrative journalism as you’ll see in a daily newspaper, especially in 2008.
It’s exactly the sort of storytelling that’s most endangered by cutbacks in the newspaper business, and it’s heartening that the Globe is still willing and able to commit itself to such stories. Reporters Keith O’Brien and Donovan Slack and photographer Suzanne Kreiter deserve a lot of credit.
But I come away with a question that’s not really answered by the article.
Acia Johnson is the older of two sisters who recently died in each other’s arms when a fire ripped through their South Boston home. Their mother’s girlfriend has been charged with setting the fire.
O’Brien and Slack write that Acia and Sophia Johnson’s lives could have been saved if the state Department of Social Services had intervened a long time ago, removing the girls and their brother, Ray Johnson Jr., from the chaotic environment in which they were growing up. There is ample evidence of that chaos throughout the article, and there’s no question that DSS could have and should have acted. No surprise there.
But the link between that chaos and the girls’ deaths is tenuous. Their mother, Anna Reisopoulos, had fallen in love with Nicole Chuminski, who, authorities say, turned out to be dangerously unstable. Reisopoulos was home, asleep, when Chuminski allegedly showed up, began shouting and then torched the house. According to O’Brien and Slack’s reporting, Reisopoulos and Chuminski’s relationship was volatile, but that’s not all that unusual. It was other aspects of Reisopoulos’ life that should have led to DSS’s taking her children away.
Yes, Reisopoulos was “half drunk” when she was awakened, allegedly by Chuminski’s shouting, at 3 a.m. But that doesn’t make her an unfit parent. Indeed, it strikes me that what happened that night could have taken place even if Reisopoulos had been leading an exemplary life.
The girls died on a night when their mother was not wandering the streets, was not abusing drugs and was not out shoplifting with the girls’ father. Maybe that’s the ultimate irony.
Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen responds to John Gonzalez’s Boston Magazine piece, making up for any perceived bile shortage in rather spectacular fashion. And Boston Magazine blogger Amy Derjue responds to Cullen’s response with applause, urging Cullen’s metro-columnist stablemates, Yvonne Abraham and Adrian Walker, to get similarly worked up.
A note to the Globe’s Web folks: If Cullen thought Gonzalez’s critique was worth expending 660 words, don’t you think you should have linked to it?