A Home in the Digital World
Some thoughts from a working journalist A few days ago I was at a local hospital for a routine test, and I got to talking to the tech administering it. She asked what I did. I said that I’m a journalist. And her reaction was very much of this era. She started talking […]
Time for journalists and readers to fight back against the destruction of American newspapers Over the holiday weekend, my wife and I had occasion to take the commuter rail out to Dedham to a family gathering in memory of loved ones who have left us. As we walked the mile to my cousin’s […]
Or: fun with Boston Globe comments Most everyone has had the experience of reading something particularly enraging in the comment area below many online newspaper articles. I think it’s quite normal to feel frustrated and helpless in that situation. Because the nastiest opinions often appear to be the most popular ones. And there […]
Would-be reformers need to keep that in mind A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column about a bill (S. 80) filed with the Mass legislature by Rep. Lori Ehrlich (D – Marblehead) and Sen. Brendan Crighton (D – Lynn) that aims to start a volunteer commission to assess the state of local […]
More working journalists, less elite institutes Chris Faraone,* John Loftus,** and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to rebuild American journalism. Pretty much from the ground up, since so many news outlets and jobs in the field have been destroyed in the last quarter century. And a growing number of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]