The Herald digs deep and uncovers Blue Mass. Group's nasty little secret: It's run by - you are sitting down, I hope - people who want to elect Democrats:
The Blue Mass Group bloggers have never tried to hide their lefty allegiances, but their latest stunt puts to rest any misconception that the site is anything other than an activist network.
And so news finally reaches Joe Fitzgerald of the battle between the West Roxbury Loons of Decency and the Boston Phoenix, five months after the whole thing was all over the blogs and West Roxbury papers. Of course, the Herald's short on space these days, which forces Fitzgerald to economize on words and omit the names of the woman the column is about and the paper she's complaining about.
I wonder if one of the younger members of the Herald staff could show Joe how to use this InterWebs thing, because it's really useful for checking stuff like election results, which would let him avoid the embarrassment of saying self-appointed Defender of Public Morality Bob Joyce gave state Sen. Marian Walsh "a real scare" in 2004, when, in fact, she beat him 2-1.
Via Dan Kennedy, who apparently still reads Fitzgerald so we don't have to.
Bonus: One of the woman's complaints was that she had to shield her son's eyes from a giant Abercrombie & Fitch poster at Faneuil Hall showing "a barechested young man with hardly any pants on." Guess that means she won't be letting him look at Fitzgerald's column online:
Not only has WEEI hired away two Herald sports writers to try to turn its Web site into the major go-to site for New England sports info, but it's advertising for some serious Web/systems help, Mats Tolander reports:
... I like weei.com's Director of Product Development:
I'm kind of glad Herald reporter O'Ryan Grylls Johnson didn't actually find that great white off Martha's Vineyard, because you know he would've tried to capture it and you know the thing would've eaten him and his boatmates because they wouldn't have a spare oxygen tank to kill it with and the Herald really can't afford to lose any more reporters.
But speaking as a recovering reporter who once went into the deepest woods of Weston with a moose hunter in search of a moose that had been hit by a car the day before, I applaud the Herald's new wildlife beat. When will the Herald be sending reporters up to the White Mountains to go mano-a-pawo with a bear?
We look for the beast outside Bartlett
Or to the Berkshires to go mano-a-talono with a bald eagle?
We look for the beast up a pine tree
I'd pay for video of that.
The Boston Herald reports:
For the third time in a little over a year, residents of a Peabody apartment complex were forced to flee as their flame-plagued complex caught fire again.
A three-alarm blaze broke out on the roof of a building at the Highlands at Dearborn yesterday after a lightning bolt struck.
Herald editor camped out at the Entwistle trial complains because when deliberations were over for the day, he had to drive home during the hailstorm:
Try sitting in a cramped court all day then driving away into traffic and some summer fury. This assignment ain't no picnic. ...
Last night, I spoke to some graduate journalism students at Northeastern about, well, things such as Universal Hub. I told them there's a big opportunity for folks like them in non-traditional media because mainstream media, at least in Boston, just misses so much.
I asked them if they'd heard of Rodrick Taylor. Nobody raised their hands. Then I asked them if they'd heard of Neil Entwistle. Almost all of them raised their hands.
Yvonne Abraham files a nice, simple, well told column on a Dorchester gangbanger who had an epiphany in jail and now is trying to get his life straight in college. Peter Gelzinis expresses angst about the really important things in life, but gets too tied up in knots and his head explodes in a paroxysm of random thoughts - at one point he started wagging his finger at us and telling us we all suck because we cared more about the Celtics victory parade than Curt Schilling's shoulder, which is enough to make the reader go "huh?" and wonder if maybe Gelzinis should stop downing entire six packs of Red Bull in a single sitting.
On Friday, the front page of the Globe's City & Region section featured a color photo of Neil Entwistle crying and a long story about how distressed he was to see video of his dead wife and daughter (the online version has video for you to enjoy).
You had to turn the page to see one-paragraph rewrites of press releases from the DA's office about a former Army sharpshooter being convicted of first-degree murder for shooting a man outside a Fenway bar and about a mistrial for two guys accused of killing a woman (and shooting out the eye of her companion) in Dorchester.
Over at the Herald, Peter Gelzinis today compares the stop-the-presses coverage of the Entwistle case with the almost non-existent coverage of the Calvin Carnes case (only some guy who is charged with gunning down FOUR PEOPLE in a Dorchester basement) and the case of Rodrick Taylor, accused of killing a young woman from Milton, then taking her body to Franklin Park and burning it:
Regardless of how despicable or merciless the crime, it is easier to numb ourselves when it happens "over there," in those places police classify as "hot zones." There are no manicured front lawns, no entrances secured with push-button combination alarms, no two-car garages.
The irony, of course, is that a pair of overlooked inner-city human dramas now unfolding in two Boston courtrooms have far more to do with murder as it actually exists, day in and day out, than the made-for-TV-movie playing out in Woburn.
Hmm, wonder what the Powers that Be at the Herald think of this column? Might be kind of hard to ask them, though, since they seem too busy filing Entwistle dispatches every 10 minutes ("We all got to see Dan Bennett, assistant district attorney, in action as he rolled out Neil's eBay wheeling and dealing. I'm sure he has juicier Web work to come.")
In other words, did it just hire Casey Ross away from the Herald?
UPDATE: Yes, yes it did; but he won't be covering transportation.
UPDATE: They've fixed it online.
Hilary Chabot starts a Herald story today like this:
It was a game-changing moment no Celts fan could forget - Kevin McHale clotheslining L.A. Lakers bruiser Kurt Rambis in Game 7 of the heated 1984 playoffs.
Herald reporters, however, apparently could forget which game that happened in - it was Game 4 - and that's important because some would argue it changed the course of the series (hat tip to Peter Shanley).
The Herald does redeem itself with its right person in wrong place story on a guy murdered in South Boston on Saturday. The Globe's coverage so far consists of a news brief.
Ben Alper imagines its first letter about Lincoln's address at Gettysburg:
Hey Abe, where's my property tax relief? – Josiah, Woburn
You certainly can't accuse the Herald of hiding Tomase's Tapegate mea culpa. In case you're busy, the basic idea is:
Nobody lied to me, I just jumped to conclusions, I feel terrible, will carry this with me for the rest of my life, but I'm a better person for it and, yes, I'm still covering the Patriots and no, I'm not telling you my sources.
Bruce Allen: Um….so that's it?
Dan Kennedy deconstructs Tomase's deconstruction and wonders: Where were the editors?
David Scott conducts what is probably the first liveblogging of a newspaper column.
On Day 2 of Herald Held Hostage, Bruce Allen begins to feel alienated by the Herald, especially Tony Massarotti:
... My instinct tells me it's the Herald capitalizing on the publicity that this whole incident has generated. Tony writes angry column. Fans can't help but read it. They respond by commenting and talking about it with others. More papers are purchased. More ads are shown online as more pageviews are generated. The comments fly in on the page. People return again and again to read them, creating even more page views and thus ad views. The column gets analyzed on blogs and on sports radio. ...
Dan Shaughnessy Watch is amazed by Massarotti's column today:
His column today was the nastiest, most ignorant piece I have ever read. It tops even Shank's 38pitches parody. ...
A Northeastern journalism professor wants answers.
This Sunday, there's going to be a "Man Up for Liquarry Jefferson Accountability March" from Grove Hall to City Hall, to try to get black men to take more responsibility for stopping violence in inner-city Boston (starts at 11 a.m.; it's named for the little boy shot by a cousin with an illegal gun a family member left lying around).
I didn't read about it in the Globe or the Herald, of course. Instead, I heard about it this morning on Touch FM, the pirate radio station a toothless FCC can't seem to shut down.
Bruce Allen tries to sort out the whole issue involving the Herald Patriots reporter and what did or didn't happen in New Orleans in 2002.
Really. Only problem with the Herald's zeal to scare us all: Car crimes are actually way down in recent years.
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