Boston Phoenix

David Bernstein reports on himself. Can a Best of Boston Politicians list be far behind?

Peter Kadzis at WGBH and Carly Carioli at Boston.com.

Jill watched yesterday as some guy went down Mass. Ave. in Cambridge, hauling away Phoenix boxes.

You can read articles from what would have been this week's issue on the Phoenix site (scroll past the big box where the PDF of the print issue would have been).

But wait, bonus extra good news that's so marvelous we can hardly stand it! Ron Newman alerts us that while the money-losing news and arts stuff is gone, the sex ads in the back live on!

No worries - BOSTON AT NITE IS HERE TO STAY! You can still pick up your free copy of Boston's best adult listings every Thursday in the big black box!

Charles Pierce remembers the Phoenix:

What's the prayer of thanksgiving for a hundred days of fellowship, drunk on words, all of us, as though there were nothing more beyond the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph locked into place? Please say that the muse is something beyond the balance sheet, something beyond technology. Tell me that she’s alive the way she once was when you'd feel her on your shoulder as one word slammed into the other, and the story got itself told, and you came to end and realized, with wonderment and awe, that the story existed out beyond you, and that it had chosen you, and you were its vehicle, and the grinning muse had the last laugh after all.

Pre-glossy. See the last cover.Both the Dig and the Globe report the Boston Phoenix is shutting down immediately.

The Phoenix itself tweets:

Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck.

The Phoenix has been around since 1966. It had been hard hit in recent years by the decline in print advertising and had sold off its radio station and merged the newspaper with Stuff magazine in an attempt to stay afloat.

Jim Romanesko posts a copy of publisher Stephen Mindich's memo to his staff:

This week's Phoenix carries an article headlined:

Fresh Blood: Meet Boston's new culinary muscle

It features a photo and bio of Doug Rodrigues, executive chef at Clio, strike that, the now former executive chef at Clio, who was fired for stabbing a man at a Back Bay bar last weekend - accidentally, he says. His alleged victim lost so much blood a bystander used his belt as a tourniquet.

We think we'll go for a walk, Phoenix declares, in response to some Salon body collector.

The Phoenix's Chris Faraone, down in New York for the Occupy Wall Street anniversary protest, tweets he was among those arrested:

I just got out of jail. Was arrested despite screaming over and over that I'm a journalist.

Layoffs are involved. The new pub will be called the Phoenix, rather than the Boston Stuff or Stuffnix. Key question: Will they still run those "adult services" ads?

The shrinking Phoenix Media Group still has one possible ace in the hole - a patent lawsuit against Facebook that, if successful, would give it ownership over one of the most fundamental parts of social networking.

At issue is a patent held by Phoenix subsidiary People2People on the concept of creating a personal page on a Web site.

Oops, they did it again. The New York Times, which hates when people post copies of its work, posted a copy of a Boston Review article without permission. The Phoenix's Carly Carioli, who called out the Gray Lady for posting a story now owned by the Phoenix just the other day, does the honors again:

How many more examples of this hypocrisy will we have to uncover before the Times begins to acknowledge that the problem isn't merely piracy -- the problem is a copyright law written so stringently that not even a newspaper with the resources of the New York Times can comply with it? As several commenters on our original post have pointed out, under some of the proposed language for SOPA and PIPA, a website that engaged in copyright infringement equivalent to the Times's hosting of our article could be blocked from the DNS registry.

That was the entire point of my first post: that the copyright fundamentalism advocated by big-media barons like Keller and the Times is counterproductive -- even to newspapers like the Times.

The day before ex-Times editor and current Times thumbsucker Bill Keller blasted people who reprint Times content without its permission, the Times reprinted a PDF of a Real Paper story without permission from its current copyright owner, our very own Boston Phoenix. Not just the words, but the actual pages from that long-ago alt-weekly, whose remnants the Phoenix bought.

The Phoenix is not amused:

This is about the most literal instance of copyright theft, in terms of source material (someone else's), method (photocopied a print article), and intention of the law (don't copy someone else's stuff and distribute it as your own), as can be imagined.

Boston Phoenix Editor Carly Carioli reports the death of longtime Phoenix editor and writer Clif Garboden.

Phoenix Editor Carly Carioli has a short reply to the Dig item - which we, being good little media sponges, sucked right in - about how Entercom might be thinking of buying and shutting down WFNX to move WEEI to FM:

For the record: it's total bullshit.

No doubt Jeff Lawrence is formulating a response at this very moment.

Last fall, the Phoenix sued Facebook, alleging the social network violated patents owned by a Phoenix subsidiary for creating user profiles online. Facebook yesterday returned the favor, suing the Phoenix for alleged violations of patents it owns on equally fundamental parts of the Web.

In its lawsuit, like the Phoenix suit, filed in US District Court in Boston, Facebook charges search engines on the Phoenix Web site that let uses find bands, events and restaurants violate a Facebook patent on a technique for letting users narrow the results of a search query. Facebook also charges its patent is violated by a Phoenix search engine that lets users specify exactly what sort of sex acts they want to see in X-rated videos catalogued by the Phoenix's adult sites.

Blue Mass. Group captures the interchange between David Bernstein kvetching about a young woman asking a gubernatorial debate question about health insurance and the woman, who checked Twitter to see what people were saying about the debate.

The Phoenix awakens to inform us that Bill O'Reilly, yes, that Bill O'Reilly, once wrote for the Phoenix and the Real Paper, and that he interviewed both Linda Lovelace and her director in "Deep Throat."

Dan Kennedy reports and analyzes. In the short term, it means Lance Gould is out and Carly Carioli is in.

Earlier this week, you may recall, Boston Police asked newspaper distributors to remove their boxes from areas where hopped-up Celtics revelers/mourners might be tempted to use them to put holes in plate-glass windows. The Phoenix reports the Boston DPW apparently thinks plastic boxes for free papers are more of a risk, because it sent crews out to remove them while leaving the potentially more lethal metal Globe and Herald boxes alone:

Can't people throw them through windows, as well? In fact, aren't their metal boxes more fun to throw through windows than our plastic ones?

The Dig breaks the news about firings and stuff on the financial side of the house at the Phoenix.

What Craigslist hasn't killed, federal indictments will: The indictment against five people for running an alleged Asian sex ring shows they were repeat customers of the Boston Phoenix.

For nearly four years, the indictment alleges, two local organizers of the ring regularly bought ads in the Phoenix's "Female Escort" section to advertise the services of prostitutes - some allegedly held against their will - in a network of Boston-area brothels (in addition to using Craigslist):

From April, 2009 through Oct. 2009, defendant Xiang Hua Zhang made ten payments to The Boston Phoenix totaling approximately $13,125 from his Bank of America checking account in payment of advertising for the services of Asian women in The Boston Phoenix, Female Escort section.

The indictment does not specify how much the Phoenix made between December, 2005 and February, 2009, when another alleged ring leader, Jiang Liang Chen, used his credit card to buy ads in the paper.

Meanwhile, if you live in Allston, Quincy, Stoneham, Wellesley, Newton, Woburn, Malden, Peabody, Somerville, Burlington, Watertown or Medford, you can check the indictment to see if you lived next to a brothel - it lists the specific addresses (Ed. note: The indictment mentions Somerville, but doesn't give a specific address).

The entire indictment.
The arrest warrants.

Innocent, etc.

Boston Phoenix columnist Adam Reilly reports he's moving to WGBH to become an associate producer.

UPDATE: Rush over to your nearest Phoenix box now for a card worth 30 minutes of free time on a porn site. That's what was worth pawing through all those papers for.

On-the-street reporter Matthew files this puzzler:

Over by North Station I witnessed someone pull the entire stack of papers out of the box. He went through each one to pull out a small white-ish piece of paper.

It didn't look like it was the first distributon box he hit either ...

In addition to the patent used by Phoenix subsidiary Tele-Publishing, Inc. to sue Facebook this week, the company has a patent (issued in 2000) for a method and apparatus for matching registered profiles.

And in 2005, Tele-Publishing sued several alternative weeklies across the country for allegedly violating both of these patents. The issue never got to a jury because the newspapers, in Washington, Chicago and Sacramento, settled the matter by signing a licensing deal with Tele-Publishing (here's the consent decree).

Here's the abstract:

Tele-Publishing, Inc., a subsidiary of Phoenix Media/Communications Group, Inc., yesterday filed a federal lawsuit against Facebook, alleging the social network's personal pages violate a patent Tele-Publishing was granted in 2001.

The complaint, filed in US District Court in Boston, seeks unspecified treble damages and an end to Facebook's alleged infringement of Tele-Publishing's patent, which sets out a method by which a remote user can upload images and information to a server to build a personal Web page.

From the Tele-Publishing patent: