Tag: miscellaneous

Vote early, vote often

Media Nation has been nominated in the Blog/Podcast category of the Boston Phoenix’s 2008 “Best” poll. I invite you to vote early and vote often. (Just kidding. Sort of.) Yes, I used to work at the Phoenix, and I still write for the paper occasionally. But this is a reader poll — I have no advantage over anyone else. If you visit Media Nation regularly or occasionally and like what you see, I hope you’ll make your feelings known. I’m keeping the graphic in the upper right until the polls close.

Other nominees are Universal Hub, Jon Keller, Blue Mass Group and the Allston Brighton Community Blog.

Not that Dan Kennedy

Several people have asked me recently about a Dan Kennedy who’s traveling the area and reading from his new book. It’s not me. It’s him. And, oh, there’s a third Dan Kennedy who writes books, too. I’m really glad I’m not him, but I wouldn’t mind having his money.

Alex Beam once wrote a pretty funny column in the Globe about the three of us, but it’s no longer freely available on the Web. So you’ll have to take my word for it.

Did I mention that you can buy my book? (Or you can read it for free if you’d like.)

30 years ago this week

I hadn’t thought much about the 30th anniversary of the Blizzard of ’78 until I saw Tom Gagen’s op-ed piece in today’s Globe, in which he describes the futile efforts to put out a paper the morning after.

Gagen brought back my own memories of trying to publish a paper that night. I was an editor at the Northeastern News, and we had two sports reporters — Steve Silva and Mike Tempesta — at the Beanpot. By all rights, Steve and Mike should have been trapped at the Boston Garden. But the editor, Anthony Pastelis, and I implored them to come back after the game, insisting we were going to get that week’s edition out one way or another.

Somehow, Steve and Mike managed to walk back to Northeastern, arriving in the newsroom at 2 or 3 a.m. and looking like frozen snowmen. We put the finishing touches on the paper. But later that morning, when we got in touch with our compositor/printer — the Boston Phoenix — we were told that it wasn’t going to happen. I’m not sure it would have mattered if the Phoenix’s printing plant was right down the street, but the fact that it was in Auburn, in Central Massachusetts, made our hopes of getting a paper out impossible.

These days, of course, we’d have just published the paper online and that would have been that.

Good deed, unfortunate twist

Michael Paulson reports in today’s Globe that billionaire developer Thomas Flatley has sold a $14 million office building to the Archdiocese of Boston for less than $100. It’s a feel-good story about a dedicated Catholic giving back to his church.

But if I lived in Braintree, I might have a different reaction. Though Paulson’s story doesn’t say, I would imagine that the property will now become tax-exempt. With an assessed value of $14 million and a commercial tax rate (MS Word) of $18.97, the building has been bringing in some $265,000 per year in tax revenue. So that’s a pretty big hit.

Don’t you hate it when this happens?

Having let my spam folder build up to more than 2,500 messages, I decided to delete them all without looking at them. Gmail has gotten much better at handling spam, so I thought I was safe. Naturally, as everything was in the process of disappearing, I saw a message from someone that was clearly personal and valid. Too late.

If you’ve e-mailed me during the past few weeks and I haven’t responded, my apologies. And please try again.