Dan Kennedy reports some group called City Cast is assembling a three-person team to create "a daily podcast and newsletter" that promises to be "the passionate, curious, connecting voice of your city and mine," unlike all the dull, plodding disconnected media outlets Boston already has, not to mention the ones it's getting.
Media
NBC Boston showed its reporting fury at noon today, putting 15 reporters and weather people on air all at once, easily topping Channel 7's 12-box: Read more.
Axios, best known for its coverage of national politics, has began dabbling in local news and says it plans to begin Boston coverage this year for the sort of people who demand what it calls "smart brevity" - a combination of original reporting and headlines aggregated from other sources, mostly in short articles with lots of bullet points for people too busy for traditional long-read pieces. Go deeper (30-sec. read).
WCVB reports that Richardson, who started at the station as a reporter in 1980, died of complications from Alzheimer's.
WRKO morning host Jeff Kuhner isn't on the air this week because he has Covid-19.
When Gannett shut the Allston/Brighton/West Roxbury/Roslindale Transcript Tab in print a couple weeks back, it said readers could keep getting their news online.
Boy, howdy, they weren't kidding: The site is now providing news that hasn't even happened yet, and won't for another 33 years: Read more.
The Internet Archive has put up a collection of Boston Phoenix copies dating from the 1970s through its demise in 2013. You can do keyword searches, just browse through copies (including all those Phoenix Personals) or download entire copies for reading at your leisure. Read more.
Grizzled Web veteran Steve Garfield of Jamaica Plain was interested in an NBC Boston promotion to have people buy winter clothes off an Amazon list for people who need them. But when he called up the Web site to find out more, it didn't have a clickable link to the wish list. Instead, it just had one of those QR code thingees, so to get to the list, you'd have to first scan in the code with your phone, which seems kind of silly on a medium designed to link people to things. Garfield provides the link.
GateHouse's Transcript Tab, smushed together out of two papers in 2019 to serve two sets of Boston neighborhoods with little in common, has sighed its last and quietly disappeared into the pages of history. Read more.
WSRO-AM at 650 on your dial, yesterday became the first AM station in New England to convert to the digital HD format, the folks at the Boston Radio Interest mailing list report. Read more.
The Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents newsroom and advertising staffers, announced the deal tonight.
Dan Kennedy goes through the trustee list at the Middlesex School to see if any of the trustees might have particular reasons to have pressured the school to uninvite Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Greg Reibman, who once ran the Wicked Local empire, wrote yesterday that "My heart breaks for the once great Newton TAB" after seeing the photo somebody there placed under a headline about the Newton mayoral race.
The New York Times has a long piece today about the way Annissa Essaibi George has ramped up her Boston accent, in her uniquely Anissa Essaibi George way (in which she admits to doing so then says it doesn't matter). The story quotes her, a HiPahk supporter of Michelle Wu, an accent coach and some guy who says he only started dropping his Rs harder when his mother told him to pronounce them if he wanted to get ahead in life. Read more.
A federal judge has dismissed Kaveh Lotfolah Afrasiabi's libel suit against United Press International for a headline it ran on an op-ed piece that labeled him as an Iranian spy after he was arrested on charges he didn't register with the US government as a foreign agent for work he did to present the Iranian side of things in Western press interviews. Read more.
Members of the Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents the newsroom and advertising staff at the Globe, stood outside WBUR's auditorium at Comm. Ave. and St. Paul Street this evening as Globe CEO Linda Pizzuti Henry was inside speaking on a panel titled "Trailblazers: Women news leaders from Katherine Graham to today," led by NPR's Robin Young - who asked if she wanted to say anything about the guild's lack of a contract for three years now. Henry said the panel was not the place to discuss labor issues.