Tag: Boston Phoenix

Big changes for the Phoenix and Stuff magazine

As most of you know, I’m a contributor to the Boston Phoenix, where I was on staff from 1991 to 2005. I wrote the cover story as recently as a few weeks ago. Given my longstanding ties, I present this without comment, except to express my hope that it will prove to be a good move.

The Phoenix remains vital to the fabric of the city. On a more personal level, I’ve still got a lot of friends over there. Good wishes and best of luck to everyone — including those who, sadly, are now moving on.

August 1, 2012 (Boston, MA) – The Phoenix Media/Communications Group, one of New England’s largest independently owned news companies, shakes up the region’s media landscape today with the exciting announcement of its plans to launch a new glossy weekly magazine for greater Boston called The Phoenix. When it hits the market in early fall 2012, The Phoenix will replace the media group’s existing Boston publications: STUFF magazine and The Boston Phoenix, which has served as one of the country’s regional leading alternative weeklies for over 45 years.

The Phoenix will redefine the 21st century alternative publication with the goal of providing a richer experience for the reader. Its content will combine the lifestyle appeal of STUFF with the journalistic prowess of The Boston Phoenix and it will give vital and fresh coverage of Boston’s life, culture, politics, music and style. With free distribution throughout greater Boston, the new format will allow the media group to better meet the needs and desires of readers and advertisers. Its design is being created in-house and will place a renewed emphasis on visuals – photography, illustrations and graphics will be bold and vibrant. Carly Carioli, Editor-in-Chief at The Boston Phoenix, will lead the editorial team at The Phoenix. Carioli has been with the company since 1993.

“It has been an exciting few months for The Phoenix Media/Communications Group; we are really thrilled to bring a new publication to Boston that will better serve the city. As a group that has delivered original news and served as cultural arbiters in New England for over four decades, it’s great to step back and change the focus of our platforms while keeping the integrity of our culture and quality of our output. We are exceptionally proud to be the first major market alternative weekly newspaper to make the change to glossy magazine format. We will also be creating a new online presence for The Phoenix that will complement that of WFNX.com, the online successor to WFNX-FM, where we break new, alternative music, as well as integrate content from the new Phoenix and the Company’s other resources” says Stephen Mindich, Founder and Chairman of The Phoenix Media/Communications Group.

The Phoenix Media/Communications Group’s The Providence Phoenix and The Portland Phoenix will remain in publication as alternative weekly newspapers.

In Alan Lupo, Alexander Cockburn met his match

If you read the New York Times obituary of the radical journalist Alexander Cockburn, then you may have found yourself surprised by this tidbit about his departure from the Village Voice:

Mr. Cockburn, a fierce critic in the columns of Israeli policies in the Middle East, was dismissed from The Voice in 1984 after The Boston Phoenix reported that he had accepted a $10,000 grant from a group that its critics called pro-Arab. David Schneiderman, The Voice’s editor at the time, suggested that the grant created a conflict of interest.

The Phoenix has now reposted that article, which was reported and written by the late, great Alan Lupo. An essential bit of Boston journalism history, and well worth your time.

Presenting the 15th Annual Muzzle Awards

The 15th Annual Muzzle Awards, published every Fourth of July (give or take) by the Phoenix newspapers of Boston, Providence and Portland, are now online and in print.

Inspired by my friend Harvey Silverglate, a prominent civil-liberties lawyer who wrote the sidebar on free speech in academia, the Muzzles highlight outrages against the First Amendment that took place in New England during the previous 12 months.

I’ll be talking about the Muzzles on Friday at 9 p.m. with Dan Rea on WBZ Radio (AM 1030). Hope you can tune in.

Rory O’Connor to read from his new book

Backscratching Day festivities continue with my interview at thephoenix.com with old friend Rory O’Connor. The occasion is O’Connor’s excellent new book, “Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media,” published by City Lights.

O’Connor will appear on Tuesday, May 22, at 7 p.m. at the Brookline Booksmith to talk about his book and sign. His book grew out of a semester he spent a few years ago at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center after stepping down as editorial director of NewsTrust. The idea behind NewsTrust was that an online community could identify and evaluate journalism with respect to sourcing, fairness and the like. Unfortunately, O’Connor discovered that too many of the people who joined NewsTrust were pushing a political agenda.

Among the more provocative ideas that O’Connor discusses in “Friends, Followers and the Future” is that Facebook is actually a fairly effective platform for sharing diverse sources of information, since members tend to cultivate a lot of “weak ties” with acquaintances whose political views and life experiences may be quite different from their own.

The larger issue, in O’Connor’s view, is trust. We no longer fully trust legacy media, whether it’s the New York Times or Fox News. Facebook, Google and other online services present their own trust issues. “But I’m optimistic,” he concludes, “that ultimately the ongoing digital information revolution will help us not only to trust, but also to verify.”

A blow to independent radio

This is very sad news indeed: Boston Phoenix publisher Stephen Mindich has announced that WFNX Radio (101.7 FM), one of the few big-market independent rock stations in the country, is being sold to Clear Channel.

The Phoenix has posted Mindich’s email to the staff here.

I remain part of the Phoenix family, and my best wishes go out to everyone affected. Mindich has fought hard to keep his media holdings out of the clutches of corporate chain ownership. But economic conditions remain miserable.

The FCC must approve the sale.

Clear Channel owns 850 radio stations in 150 cities. Its Boston stations are WJMN (94.5 FM), WXKS-FM (107.9 FM), WXKS-AM (AM 1200) and the Spanish-language station WKOX (AM 1430).

Update: Lisa van der Pool of the Boston Business Journal has more details.

Still more: Donna Goodison has a very good, thorough story in the Boston Herald. D.C. Denison has a briefer account at Boston.com.

Olympia Snowe, a motorcycle rally and me

One of the more fun things I got to do during my years at the Boston Phoenix was drive to Augusta one weekend in 1999 to meet Maine’s senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, at a motorcycle rally. I started thinking about that story following Snowe’s announcement that she won’t seek re-election.

My article, by the way, appeared in the debut issue of the Portland Phoenix, which is still going strong more than a dozen years later. When you visit Portland (one of my favorite cities), you should be sure to pick up a copy.

Snowe’s career harks back to a time when there was such a thing as liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Nonideological partisan politics had its shortcomings, but it did tend to minimize the gridlock and enmity that characterizes the national dialogue today.

Snowe’s announcement will also reduce the ranks of moderate New England Republican senators to just two: Collins and Scott Brown of Massachusetts. And that’s assuming Brown wins re-election this November against his Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren.

Copyright hypocrisy at the New York Times

Last Saturday the New York Times posted a PDF of a 1976 article by the legendary Boston sports journalist Clark Booth that appeared in the Real Paper, an alternative weekly that was published for several years in the 1970s. The article accompanied a column by Joe Nocera on football injuries, about which Booth wrote perceptively some 36 years ago.

I have to confess I didn’t think twice about copyright, figuring Booth, whom Nocera interviewed, had given him permission to reproduce his words. But now Boston Phoenix editor Carly Carioli has pointed out — rightly, in my view — that, in fact, the Times has violated the Real Paper’s copyright and that of the photographer(s) whose work was reproduced. And since the Phoenix acquired the Real Paper’s assets when the paper went out of business, the Times must answer to the Phoenix.

The Times’ reproduction clearly fails the fair-use test, most obviously on the grounds that it reposted the Real Paper article not for the purpose of commentary and criticism, but so that its readers could enjoy reading it. I imagine the Times could also get whacked for taking too much of the article (i.e., the whole thing). Even though it would be tough to argue that anyone lost any money as a result of the Times’ actions, another important fair-use test, I’d guess a judge would favor the Phoenix if it ever came to that.

But Carioli is not concerned with the negligible harm the Times has done to the Phoenix so much as he is with the behemoth’s rank hypocrisy. Former executive editor Bill Keller, now a Times columnist, has been obsessed with the nefarious forces whom he believes have been improperly profiting from Times content. And, Carioli notes, the Times reached out and killed a pretty cool iPad app called Pulse merely because it reproduced headlines without permission.

Writing that “copyright in this country is a goddamn mess,” Carioli continues: “We want an internet and an intellectual-property regime that rewards discovery and innovation. We won’t get it with copyright construed the way it is now.”

And we won’t get it with the Times saying one thing and doing another.

Addenda: (1) I had the privilege of copy-editing Clark Booth’s weekly sports column for a short time in 1990, when I was working at the Pilot, for whom he still writes; (2) you can also read Booth in the Dorchester Reporter.

Disclosure: I’m a contributor to the Phoenix, and was a staff member from 1991 to 2005. I have a standing disclosure here, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to remind people.

A memorable remembrance of Kevin White

Kevin White (left), John Silber and John Kenneth Galbraith in 1977

My friend and former editor Peter Kadzis has written a remembrance of the late Boston mayor Kevin White for the Boston Phoenix that is striking in its depth and nuance. Phoenix publisher Stephen Mindich, a White admirer, makes a cameo as well.

Peter grew up in Dorchester and continues to live in the city. His intricate knowledge of Boston’s tribalism helps him negotiate the city’s complexities in a way that few others can match. For instance:

For most of his mayoral career, White was the candidate of middle-class aspiration. White was more than a politician; he was a symbol.

To those already in the middle class and to the far larger number of blue-collar families aspiring to that status, White validated the idea that social and economic mobility was real. A vote for White was a subliminal endorsement of the idea that each generation could expect to better itself.

In contrast, White’s mayoral rivals, School Committeewoman Louise Day Hicks and City Councilor Joseph Timilty essentially defined themselves by not being Kevin White. Hicks and Timilty offered no vision.

Kadzis reminds us that it was the Harvard economist (and Kennedy family intimate) John Kenneth Galbraith who stuck the shiv in White’s aspirations for the vice presidential nomination in 1972 — which, if it had become reality, might have led to a White presidential campaign four years later.

So I was thrilled to find the photo I’ve included here of White and Galbraith making small talk in front of a scowling John Silber five years later. (The occasion was Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler’s birthday.) Clearly White believed in keeping his friends close and his enemies closer.

Photo (cc) by City of Boston Archives and reprinted here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.