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Do metro columnists dream of the national beat?
By adamg on Mon, 06/02/2008 - 9:27am
Kevin Cullen files a decent enough column that has nothing at all to do with daily life in Boston.
Speaking of Cullen, Dan Kennedy and his readers notice some interesting editing of his Celtics piece between the time it ran online and its appearance in print this weekend.
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Do bloggers dream of being
Do bloggers dream of being relevant?
Do anonymous drive-by
Do anonymous drive-by commenters dream of ever being taken seriously ?
Relevancy
Relevant? Me? Nah. But neither is a *metro* columnist who writes about the war in Iraq without somehow connecting it to the local area. Hey, there's a guy in Roslindale whose kid died there and who protests the war. Do Globe metro columnists even know where Roslindale is? Do Globe metro columnists have anything to say about fatal accidents on the T? The immolation of a downtown landmark? Boston employee sick time? If so, they're doing a good job keeping it to themselves.
Not to be a complete UH suckup, but...
If a pedestrian gets killed in Central Square,
or a Green Line train derails, or there's a major
fire downtown, I come here before I go to boston.com
every single time.
Not sure if that's relevant enuf for anon.
and for the most part I hit boston.com
only when Adam links to it. So anon had better hope bloggers are relevant.
Lame criticism
Here's what the column said: "I met him last year in Cambridge, in the Senior Common Room in Adams House at Harvard, where he got his master's in international development from the Kennedy School." So if Cullen met the dude on Comm. Ave in Allston last week, it would've passed UH muster? Gimme a break. There's plenty of things to criticize in the papers, but this was not one of them. We have soldiers from Greater Boston fighting and dying in Iraq as we speak. How is the war not relevant to our lives here? Because it's far away? Beacuse you have no relatives fighting? That's like saying the sun is irrelevant because it would take years to get there. Or that wind is irrelevant because you can't see it.
Yeah, I saw that
The war is very relevant to Boston/Cambridge/Somerville, etc. residents. But do you mean to tell me Cullen couldn't find a truly local person who is affected by the war, as opposed to somebody he happened to meet at Harvard last year? I mentioned the guy from Roslindale; surely there are other people who live here who have equally sad stories to tell.
It's sort of like his column a few weeks ago on the Irish prime minister. Interesting as far as it goes, but not really relevant to most Bostonians (as opposed to the follow-up piece about him actually drinking beer at the Eire Pub, or wherever it was).
Both of those columns would have made perfect sense in the national pages. In the metro (excuse me, City and Region) pages? Not really.
I don't necessarily agree
I don't necessarily agree that a metro columnist has to stick to matters and events found exclusively in Boston. This city has a very sophisticated population compared to others, and engaging them with 'hyperlocal' reporting probably won't work. They want big ideas with a bit of local color thrown in, and they especially like 'one of their own' to introduce them to new and interesting things.
Isn't that what Ideas is for?
OK, I'll move an inch over toward that direction :-). I still think a metro columnist for the Globe should be writing about local stuff (or the local angle on national/international stuff), especially since we both know that people who really care deeply about weighty non-local matters are going to be subscribing to the Times, anyway. But let's grant them some discretion (I know, I know, who am I to grant anybody anything ...).
And I'd argue that by your definition, today's column still belongs under Fail: Cullen writes that Scott McClellan is just a whiny two-faced, two-bit whore and that the war in Iraq is bad. Not exactly new and interesting, especially for a daily newspaper in Boston.
baby steps
He did express an opinion about something. It wasn't a very unpopular opinion, it cost him exactly nothing amongst his peers/sources/readers to express it, it had very little to do with metro Boston, and he couldn't resist throwing in a wounded, crying four-year-old lisping "Thank you, America," just for good measure. But it was an opinion and he expressed it. Go go gadget columnist!
I'm with Peggy Noonan on this one:
online.wsj.com...SB121209803493730619.html