Tag: Boston Globe

Clinton enters “Daily Show” territory

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.

A rewarding clash of headlines

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.

Local focus on the big picture

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.

A fine story, an unanswered question

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.

Columnist smackdown!

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?

Fangs for the memories

Boston Magazine’s John Gonzalez writes that the Boston Globe’s three metro columnists — Adrian Walker, Kevin Cullen and Yvonne Abraham — seem more intent on writing inoffensive feature stories than in drawing blood.

Personally, I’d like to see more outrage. But I suppose the last thing the Globe needs right now is for pissed-off readers to call up and cancel their subscriptions.

Just recently I was thinking about how I’d like to see the metro columnists redeployed, and I came up with an old-fashioned idea that I think might work. (Keep in mind even having metro columnists is pretty old-fashioned.)

I’d station one at the Statehouse, one at City Hall and one at Boston Police headquarters, and instruct all three to write reported pieces with opinion, attitude and, yes, an occasional sense of outrage. Not to be too narrow — they’d be allowed to stray from their beats, but not often.

If you’re thinking that’s not the way to draw in a new generation of twentysomething readers, well, I guess I’d have to agree. But it would certainly make me happy.

Younger and cheaper (III)

Yet another knowledgeable source tells me that there will be some external hires at the Globe. My judgment is that this source supersedes the previous source.

What we’ve got here is the eternal blogger’s dilemma. Standard blogging practice is to post information as it becomes available. When stuff like this happens, though, I find myself wishing I’d done it the old-fashioned way — make calls, and hold off until I have the whole story.

Anyway, I’m now confident that I do have the whole story. Start polishing those résumés, kids.