Sometime this April, one of New England’s most venerable daily newspapers will cease to be a daily newspaper. The Christian Science Monitor, which marked its 100th anniversary this past November, is beginning its second century as a multi-platform, multimedia news organization. Central to this new identity will be its free website, CSMonitor.com, begun a dozen […]
Dan Kennedy
Posted inPolitics
Local ink
It’s hard to be optimistic about the newspaper business these days, but Kirk Davis is trying. Davis is the president and publisher of GateHouse Media New England, which owns more than 100 newspapers in eastern Massachusetts — and which itself is part of GateHouse Media, a national chain of some 500 papers based near Rochester, […]
Posted inPolitics
Point of entry
we live in a time of demographic upheaval. We are becoming foreign-born, non-English-speaking, black, brown, yellow, and white. That’s as true in Massachusetts as it is nationally. In 2005, a MassINC study found that one in every seven state residents was from another country. Earlier this year, according to The Boston Globe, the state Department […]
Posted inPolitics
Your blog of blogs
Illustration by Nick Galifianakis HERE’S WHAT Adam Gaffin finds frustrating. He’s in his car, heading for a meeting in Framingham, where he works in tech publishing. He’s got the radio tuned to WBZ. And news is breaking — a fire, a shooting, a derailment on the MBTA, whatever. What he’d like to do is park […]
Posted inPolitics
No-shout zone
jerry from mattapan never knew what hit him. It’s a Monday evening in late October, and the journalist Sally Bedell Smith is a guest on NightSide with Dan Rea, on WBZ-AM (1030). For the past half-hour Rea has been interviewing Smith about her new book on Bill and Hillary Clinton, For Love of Politics. Now […]
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Plugged in, tuned out
it’s morning in Boston. Take a look around. Whether you’re on the subway, walking through downtown, or standing in line at Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts, you’re surrounded by young people—twentysomethings, thirtysomethings, maybe a few teenagers, all of them getting ready for work or for school. Now look more closely. What are they doing? Maybe a […]
Posted inPolitics
Full disclosure
less than a year after its launch, the New England News Forum is a work in progress. At a time when the mainstream media are under assault from bloggers, political partisans, and an unprecedented financial squeeze, the Forum has the potential to educate the public about the importance of journalism in a dem-ocratic society, while […]
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Disappearing ink
one of matt Storin’s last assignments before he retired as editor of The Boston Globe was to carry out a painful round of downsizing. It was the spring of 2001, and-in what has become a familiar story-circulation and advertising revenues were falling at the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, both of which, then […]
Posted inPolitics
The cable guys
it may not be etched in stone, but it’s a rule nonetheless: No one can write about public-access television without making reference to “Wayne’s World,” the Saturday Night Live skit—later a movie—about an access show starring two high-school-age stoners who prattle on about the heavy metal they can’t play and the sex they haven’t had. […]
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New media guru Dan Gillmor wants to reinvent traditional journalism
bloggers in one corner, journalists in the other. Or is it bloggers versus journalists? Perhaps this is a false dichotomy, or an outdated one. After all, it was nearly two years ago that New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote an essay for his influential blog, PressThink, called “Bloggers vs. Journalists Is Over.” Yet, […]