The hardreading staff is a longtime devotee of Boston Globe comic strips such as Dan Piraro’s Bizarro, Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead, and Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy, and we’ve long had a morning routine of reading the Globe Sports section, then turning to the back of the Metro section to read the funny pages.
Until yesterday.
When suddenly – magically! – the comics pages appeared at the back of the Sports section. (D6 and D7 for those of you keeping score at home.)
No advance warning.
No Editor’s note.
No nothing.
And then today – poof! – the comics pages are back at the rear of Metro.
Reporters: Don’t know much about Brexit? Don’t let that stop you.
Who could have predicted that the press harbored so many experts on the repercussions of Brexit? Following Thursday’s vote by the British electorate to leave the European Union, these whizzes crowded the airwaves, clogged the newspapers and swamped their websites with assessments of the breakup’s meaning.
Obviously, some outlets that specialize in finance and cover the Eurozone—like the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and CNBC—have a handle on the subject; they’d been covering it long before Thursday. But as you stray from these specialists for the generalists, whose job it is to report on whatever Topic A might be that day (weather, politics, infectious disease, baseball), the more the Brexit coverage begins to resemble one long amateur hour.
Yeah, except most of journalism is amateur hour: generalists interviewing specialists to cobble together something that sounds vaguely reasonable. And, very often, reasonably vague.
Regardless, here’s Shafer’s Boston Globe nuts-to-you graf:
At the Boston Globe, for example, reporter James Pindell dug deeply into his bag of journalistic clichés last week to deduced that the Brexit vote was “about the economy, stupid” and that if Brexit caused a recession it would “dramatically change the conversation of the presidential race.” No kidding! Michael A. Cohen, a regular on the Globe op-ed page, concluded that it was not David Cameron’s fault Brexit passed, nor was it Jeremy Corbyn’s, nor could it be blamed on the EU elites who pushed immigration. It was “actual voters.” Another astonishing finding.
C’mon, Jack – you can do better than to beat up on what’s essentially beat reporting (in every sense of that phrase). Besides, you’re always a lot more interesting when you go after the high-hanging fruit.
As the hardreading staff has noted, yesterday’s Boston Globe ran this Associated Press obituary of the great Vietnam War chronicler Michael Herr.
As we also noted, Dispatches is not a novel – it’s a splendid example of the literary non-fiction/New Journalism of the ’60s and ’70s. The AP has apparently recognized that, because here’s their obit as picked up by today’s Boston Herald.
Oddest thing, though: The Herald’s online version has it both ways.
“Non-fiction novel,” eh? That’s new.
Meanwhile, the Globe still hasn’t amended its online version of the obit. A novel approach to corrections, eh?
Noooo . . . not a novel, but “the seminal work of new journalism about the Vietnam War,” as Emmett Rensin wrote in Vox. It took Herr ten years to produce Dispatches, after suffering a nervous breakdown upon his return from Vietnam and not writing anything for five years.
Rensin also noted this quote by Hunter S. Thompson: “We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived . . . but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade.”
The end of the AP obit notes that “[Herr’s] other books included ‘Walter Winchell,’ a 1990 novel about the powerful and irascible gossip columnist.” Actually, that is a novel, so the AP went one-for-two on the book front.
No correction attached to the Globe pickup, though. So they’re oh-for-one.
As the hardreading staff has chronicled in excruciating detail, the Boston Herald is a past master at promoting itself in its news pages.
But now comes the selfie local tabloid promoting itself in this half-page ad for the OneOrlando Fund.
So you might reasonably be thinking:
1) This is a fund set up by the Boston Herald
2) The multiphobic Herald (immigrants, Muslims, GLBT, and etc.) has finally seen the light.
Except . . .
The OneOrlando Fund has nothing to do with the Herald. From its website:
We’ll give the Herald the benefit of the doubt and assume this is just the milk of human kindness. But given the sketchy local tabloid’s track record, well, draw your own conclusions.
There’s a gossip gap regarding the late lamented Whitney Houston in today’s Boston dailies.
Start with this Boston Globe Names item about Houston’s parasitic partner Bobby Brown, who’s currently flacking a new book.
Brown: ‘I’ve had some crazy situations’
Bobby Brown will say what he wants, weird as it may be. That’s his prerogative.
In an interview to promote his new memoir, “Every Little Step,” the Roxbury native and cofounder of the ’80s boy band New Edition told Robin Roberts on “20/20” Tuesday that he had sex with a ghost.
“I bought this mansion in Georgia. This was a really, really spooky place,” he said. “But yes, one time I woke up and, yeah, a ghost. . . . I wasn’t high.”
Uh-huh. Then there’s some other stuff in the item that’s entirely unremarkable, as Brown himself tends to be.
But it was a whole nother story from the Boston Herald’s Inside Track Gal, Gayle Fee.
Bobby book blames Whitney’s death on lack of acceptance for BFF lovers
Bobby Brown, the Roxbury R&B star who was married to the late Whitney Houston for 14 years, reveals that the mega-pop star had a lesbian love affair with her best friend and longtime assistant Robyn Crawford, adding that if the two were still together, Houston might never have died.
“I really feel that if Robyn was accepted into Whitney’s life, Whitney would still be alive today,” Brown told Us Weekly. “She didn’t have close friends with her anymore.”
With grave robbers like Bobby Brown around, though, she’ll never really be gone.
Back in 2014 when the Boston Globe introduced its new weekly Capital section, it was a fat 12 pages with lots of advertising, as the hardreading staff noted at the time.
By the next year, however, Capital had started to dwindle, as we also noted.
Boston Globe’s Capital Withdrawal
Well the hardreading staff was leafing through the Boston Globe this morning and here’s what we found on Metro Page One:
Sure enough, the former stand-alone section occupied all of four Metro pages that featured – motheragawd! – exactly zero ads.
And now it’s come to this . . . one lonely page in yesterday’s edition of the Globe.
The only Capitalization in sight was Steward Health Care System’s promotion of James Pindell’s Ground Game, but even that lacked its usual full-page companion ad.
Looks like Capital might be the Globe’s latest strand of spaghetti that didn’t stick to the wall.
The local dailies have duly noted this week’s Boston University School of Medicine shindig to kick off a seven-year, $16 million study called DIAGNOSE CTE, which will examine the relationship of head injuries to the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
That, of course, is a subject the National Football League has a $12 billion a year interest in.
Interestingly, that interest got very different play in yesterday’s local papers.
Why do some athletes who suffer repeated head injuries develop a devastating brain disease, while others seem immune? And can this degenerative disease be treated or even prevented?
A team of scientists from across the country gathered Wednesday at Boston University School of Medicine to launch a pioneering study aimed at detecting chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a disease that silently destroys the minds of athletes after years of repetitive blows to the head. But this time, unlike so much of the research preceding it, the studies will be conducted in people who are alive.
The NFL connection was relegated to the story’s final graf.
[A] congressional committee last week issued a scathing report saying it found evidence top NFL officials improperly tried to influence the selection of scientists for government-funded research on CTE. That interference, the report found, concerned the grant eventually awarded to the team led by BU’s [Robert] Stern.
But the National Finagling League’s interference was headline material in Lindsay Kalter’s Boston Herald report.
Doc: we won’t fumble
Despite NFL cries, CTE project rolls on
Boston University neuroscientist Dr. Robert Stern said his groundbreaking study on head trauma, which was officially launched yesterday, will not be sullied by the long-brewing controversy over the NFL’s alleged attempts to strip him of his funding.
“I’m just so unbelievably excited to get this science moving right now,” Stern told the Herald. “This is the time to do this science.”
He added, “We’re now going to move forward.”
As will the Boston dailies, each on its own track.
The hardreading staff yields to no man in our admiration and respect for Boston Globe critic Mark Feeney. (Full disclosure: Feeney was one of our editors back in the Jurassic Era when we wrote for the Globe’s Focus section.)
Harvard exhibit on early radios and broadcasts proves listening is imagining
Is there a stranger term than “terrestrial radio”? Oh sure, it distinguishes traditional radio from the satellite kind. But radio, with its plucking of sound from the ether, is the least terrestrial of media. For that same reason, it’s the most magical. That sense of magic is there in the most common early nickname for radio, “the wireless.” No wires is even better than no strings. We can hear an echo in today’s “wireless technology.”
“They told Marconi/ Wireless was a phony.” Ira Gershwin, “They All Laughed”
The magic begins with technology and extends far beyond it — to inside the listener’s head. Radio has a unique capacity to evoke. Seeing is believing, no question. But listening is something better. Listening is imagining.
“I heard the voice of America/ Callin’ on my wavelength/ Tellin’ me to tune in on my radio.” Van Morrison, “Wavelength”
Much of the medium’s magic comes through in “Radio Contact: Tuning in to Politics, Technology, & Culture.”
Feeney peppered his review with other radio-related quotes from a variety of songwriters.
“I got the AM/ (Radio On!)/ Got the car, got the AM/ (Radio On!)/ Got the AM sound, got the/ (Radio On!)/ Got the rockin’ modern neon sound/ (Radio On!)/ I got the car from Massachusetts, got the/ (Radio On!) /I got the power of Massachusetts when it’s late at night/(Radio On!) /I got the modern sounds of modern Massachusetts.” Jonathan Richman, “Roadrunner”
“We’re having a party/ Dancing to the music/ Played by the DJ/ On the radio.” Sam Cooke, “Having a Party”
“Despite all the computation/ You could dance to a rock ’n’ roll station/And it was all right.” Lou Reed, “Rock’n’Roll”
“The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know/ May just be passing fancies and in time may go.” Ira Gershwin, “Love Is Here to Stay”
Excellent!
Just one problem: No Elvis Costello, who wrote the ultimate radio anthem.
Roll your own lyrics:
I was tuning in the shine on the light night dial
Doing anything my radio advised
With every one of those late night stations
Playing songs bringing tears to my eyes
I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver
When the switch broke ’cause it’s old
They’re saying things that I can hardly believe
They really think we’re getting out of control
Radio is a sound salvation
Radio is cleaning up the nation
They say you better listen to the voice of reason
But they don’t give you any choice ’cause they think that it’s treason
So you had better do as you are told
You better listen to the radio
I wanna bite the hand that feeds me
I wanna bite that hand so badly
I want to make them wish they’d never seen me
Some of my friends sit around every evening
And they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
And the promise of an early bed
You either shut up or get cut up, they don’t wanna hear about it
It’s only inches on the reel-to-reel
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
Tryin’ to anaesthetise the way that you feel
Wonderful radio
Marvelous radio
Wonderful radio
Radio, radio
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