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Writing

SOMERVILLE COMMUNITY SUMMIT: CONVENING A CITY TO IMPROVE ITS NEWS MEDIA

  EDITORIAL   Last Saturday, DigBoston, our nonprofit wing Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ), and our frequent partner the community access television station Somerville Media Center (SMC) turned out over 100 Somerville residents to the ONCE ballroom on Highland Ave to talk to 15 area journalists about local issues and happenings that they thought […]

PUBLIC BAD. PRIVATE GOOD? BOSTON HERALD’S ATTACK ON MASSHOUSING HIGHLIGHTS DOUBLE STANDARD IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM

  Over the last several days, the Boston Herald has had its knives out in no less than three articles and two editorials against MassHousing—an independent, quasi-public agency created in 1966 and charged with providing financing for affordable housing in Massachusetts.   Readers can be forgiven for assuming that such lavish attention from a publication […]

WHO I WRITE FOR: A MEDITATION

  Like pretty much every journalist, I think about who I am writing for* from time to time. Most writers aren’t just sending messages into the ether, after all. Unless they are writing for therapeutic reasons. Or they are diarists. But even diarists are typically writing for some future audience they have in mind. Be […]

WHY GATEHOUSE’S BOSTON ‘MEGACLUSTER’ IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY

  No corporation should own most newspapers in a region   In last week’s Apparent Horizon, “GateHouse Editorial Flacks for Mass Retailers,” I dissected an editorial, “The benefits of a teen minimum wage,” calling for a subminimum wage for Bay State teenage workers that turned out to have run in over two dozen eastern Mass […]

GATEHOUSE EDITORIAL FLACKS FOR MASS RETAILERS

  Calls for undermining the rising statewide minimum wage with a subminimum wage for teens   A couple of days back I picked up a Cambridge Chronicle newspaper at a takeout joint I frequent. Opened it up. Skimmed the top story, and the week’s arrests. Then moved on to the editorial. And was stopped cold […]

A WINDOW INTO THE STATE HOUSE

  Rep. Mike Connolly’s blog offers a critical look behind the curtain of Mass politics   The Massachusetts State House is not a bastion of democracy. I think a growing number of people in the Commonwealth are pretty clear on that fact. Dominated for decades by a series of imperial House speakers, and to a […]

2019: WE HAVE 11 YEARS TO DO THE IMPOSSIBLE

  In last week’s column looking back at “2018: The Year in Global Warming,”  I reviewed the dire threat posed to humanity and our environment by climate change, and concluded with the following:   The big question for Bostonians and anyone else reading this: How do we go from this grim state of affairs to […]

2018: THE YEAR IN GLOBAL WARMING

  “We are the first generation to fully understand climate change and the last generation to be able to do something about it.” —Petteri Taalas, secretary-general, World Meteorological Organization   Given all the developments I could review from the year that’s now drawing to a close—and given that I primarily write for a Greater Boston […]

EDITORIAL: SAVE COMMUNITY MEDIA

Tell the FCC That You Support Your Local Cable Access Station by Dec 14   December 12, 2018 BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS   At DigBoston, my colleagues and I put a lot of effort into working with local community media stations around Greater Boston. Because they are the heart and soul of grassroots democratic public […]