Don't Bore Me

Is it too much to ask that a Boston media critic know what's going on in the local media? Especially one who has basically been covering and working in the local media for years now?

I ask the question after reading this week's Don't Quote Me in the Phoenix, in which new (also old) Phoenix media critic Mark Jurkowitz goes on and on about the reaction among black journalists to the New York Times starting a newspaper in Gainesville, Fla. aimed at blacks.

The local angle? The column leads with a quote from the publisher of the Boston-based Bay State Banner. Unfortunately, the column misses the real local angle, which is that the Bay State Banner is itself engaged in a similar battle with Bulletin Newspapers, which is owned by a couple of white guys and which recently bought a newspaper covering Boston's black community. How could a media critic for a Boston weekly not even mention this in a column like that?

In his first month back as the Phoenix media critic, Jurkowitz seems to be spending a lot more time on media happenings westa Worcester than on what's going on within 128. Is Boston too boring for him? Is he too friendly with old colleagues at the Globe? I don't know, but to date his columns and blog are enough to drive a local mediaphile into the arms of the Weekly Dig's anonymous Media Farmers (memo to Weekly Dig: Would it kill you to set up a Media Farm index page on your Web site so somebody could actually read more than one Media Farm at a sitting?).

I want the Don't Quote Me of old, where I could read all about the Byzantine manipulations in the Globe newsroom, the latest changes at the Herald, what Channel 5 producers really think about Natalie.

To be sure, Jurkowitz did have something about the sudden departure of Jim Sullivan and Christine Temin from the Globe - but as a sidebar to the Gainesville column. And yes, as somebody who has committed journalism from time to time, I understand why the Wen Ho Lee case has important implications for investigative reporting. But, please, balance that with some reporting on Flo Jonic's disappearance from WBZ-AM and some snarky comments on the Globe's new Sidekick and its endless photos of people making funny faces on vacation in New Hampshire.

His Media Log blog is more of the same. So far this month, he's posted 16 items. Only four of those posts had anything to do with Boston - and that's being generous, because one of them was about the Christian Science Monitor, which, while published here, isn't really a Boston media outlet.

So what is he writing about? He posts that morning network news shows are banal, that the evening news shows spend too much time on that missing white girl in Aruba, that Cindy Sheehan has become a symbol of growing opposition to the war in Iraq (huh, ya think?). He's now put up three posts about the Gainesville situation without, again, a single mention of the same exact battle right here in Boston. Oh, we also learn that there's some sort of contract dispute at the Village Voice. First, there's *always* some sort of contract dispute at the Village Voice; second, if you're interested in the Boston media, who cares? To be sure, he did have the Spare Change/Stomper story, but so far that sort of thing seems, sadly, more the exception than the rule.

Come on, Mark, I really don't want to move to Media Farm - for one thing the type's too small for my aging eyes. But I'm a local-media news junkie - I need my fix.

My standard newspaper disclosure.