Tag: Boston Phoenix

Real Paper alumni get together this Thursday

Veterans of the Real Paper, a Boston-based alternative weekly in the 1970s, will get together in a Ford Hall Forum event this Thursday to discuss what they learned and what lessons that might hold for the future of journalism. The event will take place in Suffolk University’s C. Walsh Theatre from 6:30 to 8 p.m. You can find out more here.

As we old-timers well remember, the rivalry between the Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix was intense during the decade or so that they both published. The Real Paper was formed in 1972 after Stephen Mindich, the founder of Boston After Dark, bought the Phoenix, which was sometimes known in that earlier incarnation as the Cambridge Phoenix. Mindich called his new paper the Boston Phoenix.

The former staff of the Cambridge Phoenix, rather than going away, founded the Real Paper, which during its first few years operated as an employee-run collective. The paper ceased publication in 1981.

This Wikipedia article on the Real Paper strikes me as an accurate summary of those years.

The Ford Hall Forum event brings together a number of well-known former Real Paper staff members: Harper Barnes, Jan Freeman, Mark Zanger, Laura Shapiro and Paul Solman, assembled by Monica Collins, herself a Real Paper alumna who’s also vice president of the Ford Hall Forum.

Remembering George Kimball

I’m in California on a working vacation this week. But I want to break blog silence to pay tribute to the great George Kimball, a sports columnist for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald who died on Wednesday at the age of 67.

I remember reading Kimball in the Phoenix when I was in high school. Kimball would sit in the bleachers at Fenway Park and write about the Red Sox from a fan’s perspective. His column was called “The Sporting Eye,” after his glass eye, which, as legend would have it, he would pop out in order to entertain and intimidate as the spirit moved him.

Eventually Kimball left for the Herald. I didn’t read him all that much after that because his beat was boxing, which interested me some when Muhammad Ali was fighting and not at all otherwise. But I do have one measly Kimball anecdote that no one else has.

At the beginning of the 1986 Woburn toxic-waste trial in U.S. District Court (the case immortalized in Jonathan Harr’s book “A Civil Action”), Judge Walter Jay Skinner ruled that the media could cover jury selection on the condition that they not report on what had happened until the jury was seated. The Boston Globe and the Herald refused to go along and boycotted the proceedings. I was covering the trial for the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, and saw no reason not to sit in. I got a pretty good story out of it, too.

Among the prospective jurors brought in for questioning was Kimball. He was polite and obviously very intelligent. He told the judge that the case would pose a significant hardship for him, since he had to travel to cover boxing for the Herald. (Indeed, the trial lasted five months.) I don’t think Kimball ever expected to be seated, but after he left the room, the judge and the lawyers expressed considerable interest. “Your Honor, he’s a great boxing columnist,” Neil Jacobs of Hale and Dorr, part of the legal team for the defendant Beatrice Foods, told Skinner. (Obviously that quote may be off by a word or two.)

There was quite a bit of discussion regarding the pros and cons of choosing Kimball. In the end, Skinner decided that the trial would, in fact, pose an unfair burden to him, and he was dismissed. But it was a close call. A year later I ran into Kimball at a New England Press Association function and told him about what had happened after he left the judge’s chambers. I don’t remember what he said, except that he appeared to be amused by the story, and glad he’d dodged the draft.

If you want to know more about Kimball (and I’ve told you very little), you must read this appreciation by Michael Gee, who followed Kimball as the Phoenix sports columnist and later joined him at the Herald. This Phoenix blog post by Sean Kerrigan hits the highlights of Kimball’s pre-Herald career. And the Phoenix has posted a classic Kimball story from 1976 on a boxing match between Ali and Ken Norton.

Finally, here’s a great story from the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World on Kimball’s early days as “one-eyed radical who once campaigned as a ‘two-fisted’ candidate for Douglas County sheriff.” I had no idea.

Presenting the 14th annual Phoenix Muzzle Awards

The 14th annual Boston Phoenix (and Portland Phoenix and Providence Phoenix) Muzzle Awards are now online and in print, pillorying New England enemies of free speech in Greater Boston, Maine and Rhode Island, from Max Kennedy to Tom Menino. But we begin with some tough words about President Obama.

My friend Harvey Silverglate has written a companion piece on free speech on college campuses.

Sadly, since I first began writing this Fourth of July feature in 1998, finding suitable recipients has only gotten easier.

Pulitzer winner Barry’s 1996 report from Russia

Ellen Barry

While the Boston Globe’s visual-arts critic, Sebastian Smee, continues to receive well-deserved accolades for his Pulitzer Prize, it is less well-known that another of yesterday’s Pulitzer winners has strong Boston ties, too.

Ellen Barry of the New York Times, who shared the award for international reporting with her Times colleague Clifford Levy, is a former reporter for the Globe and the Boston Phoenix. Ellen and I worked together at the Phoenix in the mid-1990s.

In 1996, she reported from Russia for the Phoenix on Boris Yeltsin’s re-election campaign — and wrote a classic story headlined “Generation Nyet.” The folks at the Phoenix have dug the story of their archives and linked to it anew. It is well worth your time, as is Phoenix editor Carly Carioli’s tribute.

Remembering Clif Garboden

The Boston Globe has published a wonderful obituary of Clif Garboden in advance of his memorial service, which will be held on April 9 at 2 p.m. at Framingham Friends Meeting. Clif, as readers of this blog know, was senior managing editor of the Boston Phoenix, and had been the heart and soul of the newsroom since the 1960s.

Globe obit writer Bryan Marquard’s observation that Clif “could do compassion and curmudgeon in a single sentence and write with equal eloquence about swan boats or the cancer that cut short his life” is a keeper.

Here is my earlier item on Clif’s untimely passing. And here is the Phoenix’s tribute to him.

A morally repugnant ban against a journalist

Hollman Morris

This past March, Media Nation celebrated when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reversed a Bush-era ban on South African scholar Adam Habib, who had been prevented from traveling to the United States on unproven and undocumented charges that he was somehow tied to terrorism.

Now the Obama administration — and Clinton’s State Department — are doing what appears to be exactly the same thing to Hollman Morris, a Colombian journalist. Morris, the Washington Post reports, was recently denied a visa to enter the United States so that he could spend a year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow.

Morris is not exactly a favorite of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, a right-wing strongman with a miserable human-rights record. The Uribe government has accused Morris of playing nice with the FARC, a left-wing guerrilla movement whose viciousness is beyond question, and which the U.S. government regards as a terrorist organization. By most accounts, though, Morris is guilty of nothing but practicing journalism — which, in Uribe’s eyes, is bad enough.

Not to get all conspiratorial, but it should be noted that the Clintons have longstanding ties to Uribe. In fact, when then-presidential candidate Clinton’s chief political strategist, Mark Penn, was thrown overboard in April 2008, it was over his own unsavory dealings with the Uribe government.

What makes the ban against Morris especially repugnant is that, according to the Spanish news agency EFE, his and his family’s safety has been threatened, and he has been living “under protection” for quite some time. Now the Obama White House has placed him in even greater peril. Fortunately, Morris is currently traveling in Europe, and it sounds like he has no plans to return home anytime soon.

The ban against Habib appeared to be based on nothing more than his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq — hardly a novel view. The exclusion prevented Habib from speaking at an academic conference in Boston, a circumstance that led to a 2008 Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award for Condoleezza Rice and Michael Chertoff, then the secretaries of state and homeland security, respectively.

Likewise, in the absence of any evidence from the Obama administration, it appears that the ban against Morris is motivated by nothing more than a desire not to offend Uribe and the incoming president, Uribe protégé Juan Manuel Santos. Needless to say, Hillary Clinton is an early contender for a 2011 Muzzle.

More coverage: Nieman Foundation curator Robert Giles recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times on Morris’ behalf. The Boston Globe editorialized against the ban. Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab has a good round-up of other coverage. And we discussed the Morris case last Friday on “Beat the Press,” on WGBH-TV (Channel 2).

Presenting the 13th annual Phoenix Muzzle Awards

Just in time for your Fourth of July celebrations, we present the 13th annual Muzzle Awards, published in the Phoenix newspapers of Boston, Portland and Providence.

Starting in 1998, I’ve been rounding up enemies of free speech and personal liberties in New England, based on news reports over the previous year. For the past several years my friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate has been writing a sidebar about free speech and the lack thereof on campus.

Yes, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department makes the list for his failure to understand that you shouldn’t arrest someone who’s done nothing wrong other than mouth off to you in his own home. So does former Newton mayor David Cohen, who should not seek a second career as a newspaper editor. So does the MBTA, a hardy perennial.

But my personal favorite is the Portland Press Herald, whose editorial page came out in support of a proposal by the Falmouth Town Council to clamp down on the right of residents to speak out at council meetings. When the council itself unanimously voted against the proposal several weeks later, citing free-speech concerns, the newspaper found itself in the bizarre position of showing less regard for the First Amendment than elected officials.

On Friday at 9 p.m., I’ll join Dan Rea of WBZ Radio (AM 1030) to talk about the Muzzles and anything else that might come up.

At the Phoenix, new roles for Gantz, Garelick

The Boston Phoenix has announced more changes to the top of its masthead, as associate arts editor Jon Garelick has been named arts editor, and arts editor Jeffrey Gantz will become managing editor for arts.

The titles are more than semantic, according to an internal memo from new editor Carly Carioli. Jon will be in charge of the paper’s arts coverage, while Jeffrey’s role — a three-month assignment — will consist of easing the transition.

I had the privilege of working with both Jeffrey and Jon during my years at the Phoenix. In fact, Jeffrey was one of several people responsible for hiring me in 1991, as it was he who determined I had performed somewhat less miserably on the Phoenix’s notorious copy-editing test than other candidates.

In addition to being an admirably meticulous copy editor, Jeffrey was an expert on an eclectic variety of subjects that caught his interest — from soccer (I still remember my son, Tim, kicking a ball around with him at a company picnic on Georges Island), to espresso, to which varieties of cheese should be uppercased and which ones lowercased.

Jon, like Jeffrey, is a journalist with a daunting intellect. He has a deep background in music, especially jazz, and is highly regarded in the local arts community. He is also married to well-known local writer Clea Simon.

Jon is originally from Woonsocket, where I spent a couple of years as a student-reporter for the Woonsocket Call in the mid-1970s. Jon, a keen observer of his surroundings, once provided me with a hilarious example of the fractured syntax used by many old-time residents, who speak English that is heavily inflected with the French they learned growing up in Quebec: “Please throw me down the stairs my keys.”

Carly, in his memo, referred to Jeffrey as “a tireless editor, critic, protector of style, and keeper of institutional wisdom,” and to Jon as “a fantastic judge and incubator of raw writing talent.” Best of luck to both of them.

Carly Carioli named editor of the Boston Phoenix

A little more than a month after a shake-up on the business side, the Phoenix Media/Communications Group (PM/CG) has announced some major changes in the newsroom. The most significant: Carly Carioli is the new editor of the Boston Phoenix, replacing Lance Gould. Carioli had been editor of thephoenix.com, which will now be integrated with the rest of the company’s media properties.

Carly tells me he’ll be running the three Phoenix newspapers (Boston, Providence and Portland) and the biweekly glossy magazine Stuff, and will have some responsibilities at WFNX Radio (101.7 FM) as well. He’ll work alongside Peter Kadzis, who moved up from editor of the Phoenix to executive editor of PM/CG in 2006.

Most readers of Media Nation know that I was on staff at the Phoenix from 1991 to 2005, and that I continue to be a member of the extended Phoenix family. So consider this a personal note. I care about what happens at the Phoenix.

Gould came to the paper after I left, but I have worked with him on several stories during the past few years — including just a few days ago. He’s a good editor and a good guy, and I’m sorry that he’s leaving. Kadzis, in a statement, describes the reason for the change this way:

The changes we are making will not save any money. This is about rethinking and re-engineering how we deliver content to our audience — or, I should say, audiences: we have readers devoted to the printed paper, we have users who use nothing but online, we have our audience of WFNX listeners and we have people we are trying to engage via mobile. Our future sits with fashioning these groups into a coherent audience. Not every editor, or every executive, has the skill to help move this forward.

Carioli, now 37, is a rising star both at the Phoenix and on the Boston media scene, and I’m glad he’s getting a greater opportunity to show what he can do. He’s highly regarded in local music circles, and he knows a lot about news — and journalism — as well. He reminded me today that I was among the first people at the Phoenix to urge him to jump onto the management ladder.

Carly has been a leader in figuring out how to bring print, online and social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare together. He started at the Phoenix as an intern in 1993 and joined the staff in 1994. His first job at the paper was the all-important but thankless task of putting together the listings section. His goal as editor, he says, is to reinvent what an alternative news weekly can be in an era when the very term sounds like an anachronism.

“Alternative is what your dad listened to in college, news is what Jon Stewart talks about and weekly is way too long to wait to get what’s going on out in the world,” he says.

Also announced today is the hiring of a new music editor, Michael Marotta, and a new staff writer, Eugenia Williamson. Their backgrounds are described in the press release below. Also, Ashley Rigazio, the online listings coordinator, becomes events editor for the combined print/online operation.

These days, every newspaper faces financial challenges. A year ago, the New York Times Co. was threatening to shut the Boston Globe. The Phoenix, too, is a lot thinner than it used to be. My conversations with friends at the company, though, leave me convinced that they’re in this for the long haul. And I would never bet against owner and publisher Stephen Mindich, one of the smartest, toughest people in the business.

What follows is a statement from PMCG president Brad Mindich and an e-mail to the troops from Carioli.

BOSTON PHOENIX NAMES NEW EDITOR

Web chief Carly Carioli tapped to helm both online and editorial

Move will maximize alent and resources, says PM/CG Executive Editor Peter Kadzis

PM/CG President Brad Mindich sees Phoenix content flowing across multiple platforms: online, in paper, mobile, and radio

New music editor and staff writer also announced

Carly Carioli, who began work at the Boston Phoenix 17 years ago as a music critic, today was named editor of the award-winning weekly.

For the last four years, Carioli, 37, has been Online Editor, responsible for operations and content of the Boston, Providence, and Portland newspapers, WFNX radio, and Stuff magazine.

During Carioli’s tenure, the Phoenix website, thephoenix.com, was named Best Website by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN). In 2009, the New England Press Association awarded the Phoenix its top “convergence” award, for the best storytelling across print and web.

Carioli’s appointment is part of an internal editorial reorganization. Phoenix Online, which had been a free-standing department, is being folded back into the newspaper. As editor of the Boston Phoenix, Carioli will integrate and direct both the online and the editorial staff.

In a first move in that direction, Carioli named Ashley Rigazio, an online listings coordinator, to become Events Editor for the newly combined web and in-paper Arts and Entertainment operation.

Earlier in the day, two new hires were also announced:

Michael Marotta, a music writer from the Boston Herald, will become Phoenix Music Editor, replacing Michael Brodeur, who left the Phoenix for the Boston Globe. And joining the Phoenix as a staff writer will be Eugenia Williamson, a freelance contributor to the Phoenix and the Sunday Globe. Williamson has previously written for Time Out Chicago, Stop Smiling, Venus Zine, and McSweeney’s.

Carioli replaces Lance Gould, who has served as editor of the Boston Phoenix for the last two years.

In his tenure as Online Editor, Carioli oversaw the launch of staff blogs for music, pop culture, film, and politics. He also oversaw the re-launch of thephoenix.com and re-designs of both stuffboston.com and wfnx.com; the launch of thephoenix.tv, the Phoenix’s first online-video venuture, which features exclusive performances by Massachusetts-based musicians from Thurston Moore to Converge; and a podcast that partners with local bookstores, museums, and cultural institutions to record longform readings and talks by the likes of Al Gore, Ozzy Osbourne, Cornel West, and John Irving, to name but a few. For WFNX’s 2009 Best Music Poll and the 2010 SXSW music festival, he oversaw online coverage including live video, mobile blogging, and real-time Twitter updates, as well as traditional reporting that was later re-used in print. He was a panelist at 2010’s South By Southwest Interactive conference on the future of alternative weeklies.

Carioli’s music writing has been anthologized in “The Best Music Writing,” edited by Nick Hornby and published by DeCapo.

Carioli was born and raised in Philadelphia. He studied journalism at Boston University. He is married and has two young daughters.

Of Carioli’s appointment, PM/CG President Brad Mindich said, “Carly will be responsible for unifying our content across platforms: print, online, radio and mobile. This is the future — especially for our forward thinking, educated, and on-the-go audience. It’s critical that our readers, users, and listeners interact with our content in whichever way is best for them.”

PM/CG Executive Editor Peter Kadzis said, “As a music critic, as an editor, and as the architect of the Phoenix’s online growth, Carly has for more than ten years lived his professional life at the intersection of technology and popular culture. For a paper like the Phoenix, that’s the ultimate sweet spot.

“What once were considered challenging circumstances have now become standard operating conditions. But all Phoenix media are heading into the summer on an extremely strong footing. Carly’s appointment together with two new hires is an unmistakable expression of the Mindich family’s commitment to strong journalistic values and the vibrant journalism that results,” said Kadzis .

The Phoenix Media/Communications Group is a private, family-owned business, which began in 1966 as Boston After Dark, a four-page arts-and-entertainment weekly. Today the Boston, Providence, and Portland (Maine) Phoenix newspapers cover a wide range of subjects from politics to the arts to lifestyle.

Below are the contents of an e-mail Carioli wrote and sent to subscribers of thephoenix.com’s various e-mails. It should give you a flavor of what his leadership style will likely be:

From Carly Carioli

Carly Carioli here. As of a few hours ago, I’m the new editor of the Boston Phoenix. Feel free to drop me a line: I’m @carlycarioli on Twitter, or shoot me an e-mail at editor@phx.com.

If you didn’t already know and love the Phoenix, you wouldn’t be getting this e-mail. Whether you signed up for our free sneak-preview movie screenings, or to get the first word on this week’s Phoenix headlines, I want to thank you for supporting local, progressive, independent journalism. I came to the Phoenix over 15 years ago and never left, because I believed — and continue to believe — in what the Phoenix stands for: writing that’s passionate, skeptical, intellectually curious, unconventional, and engaged with its readers.

I’ve been thrilled to write for and edit a newspaper where some of my early heroes got their start: Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Susan Orlean, writers who were by turns innovative, irreverent, and irascible. (Thanks to a new partnership, you’ll soon be able to read all 40-plus years of our back issues — right down to the vintage concert ads — through Google’s News Archive project.)

It’s even more thrilling to be editing today’s Phoenix, because this is our moment: the mainstream media is crumbling, corporate boardrooms are losing their choke-hold on popular culture, and new technologies are empowering all of us to be more creative and to build stronger communities. This isn’t the apocalypse; this is the promised land. Our readers have always been early-adopters and forward-thinkers. Unlike other media companies, we don’t think our readers are competing with us. We think you’re one of us. And we’re excited about what we can create together.

If you haven’t checked in with us lately, I urge you to take another look — and to tell us what you like as well as what you don’t. I think you’ll find a voice that rings true. It’s David Bernstein’s nationally recognized political coverage (not to mention his must-read Twitter feed) and Chris Faraone’s gutsy, street-smart reporting. In a city that has pillaged its arts coverage, we’ve got Peter Keough, Boston’s toughest film critic, and Jon Garelick’s award-winning jazz writing. There’s also former Something Awful columnist David Thorpe’s brilliant skewering of the music industry, erstwhile Rolling Stone correspondent Matt Taibbi’s sports-crime blotter, and Maddy Myers’s flame-war-inducing feminist video-gaming critiques. And stay tuned: we’ve got some fantastic new talent coming on board.

We know you’re busy, so for those of you who spend all day on Facebook and Twitter, follow or friend us to stay in touch. See you on the internets.

Best,
Carly