It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

As the hardreading staff has noted on multiple occasions, Boston Globe Names columnist Mark Shanahan regularly, er, re-curates the work of other Boston journalists.

Exhibit Umpteen: The Dennis Lehane/Emerson College Commencement Rumpus.

Monday’s Names column featured this Lehane interview with Emily Sweeney.

Representative sample:

What are some of the places you miss out here in Boston?

Oh God, I miss everywhere. I miss everywhere. The list is truly endless. I get jealous when my friends call me and bitch about [expletive] weather. Just the list of places is just too long to go into. I miss everything about that city.

Well, we miss you, too.

Aaaaw . .

But this Boston Magazine Daily piece by Spencer Buell yesterday presented a very different portrait of Lehane.

Dennis Lehane Apologizes for Using the N-Word in His Emerson Speech

“I should have known better.”

Author Dennis Lehane has apologized after receiving backlash for his use of the n-word during his Emerson commencement speech Sunday.

“Hurting people with the use of that word, of all words, was about as far from my intention as one could get, but I take ownership of the result,” he says in a statement. “I should have known better.”

In the speech, which cautioned against romanticizing the past, Lehane told a story about growing up in the 1970s during Boston’s busing crisis, when racial divisions in the city spiked over school desegregation.

He described driving with his family in a car through a swarm of protesters on Broadway in South Boston. The demonstrators had “hung effigies” of federal judge Arthur Garrity Jr. and Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, and were “lighting them on fire with torches,” he recalled. He added, “They were screaming, ‘N—s out.’”

That’s all well and good: Two different news outlets with two different news angles. Business as usual.

The problem comes today, with this no-attribution follow-up from Shanahan.

Dennis Lehane apologizes for using racial slur in Emerson speech

Author Dennis Lehane has apologized for using a racial slur during his commencement speech at Emerson College Sunday. Lehane, a Dorchester native best known for his novels “Mystic River” and “The Given Day,” used the N-word while talking about the protests in South Boston during the busing crisis of the 1970s.

“I will never forget this for the rest of my life. We were trapped in the back of a car,” Lehane told graduates. “We couldn’t move. We could just be buffeted down the street. And they had hung effigies of Arthur Garrity, who was a judge at the time, of Teddy Kennedy, and they were lighting them on fire with torches. And they were screaming, ‘N—s out.’”

There were apparently complaints after the speech because Lehane issued a statement Monday morning apologizing for using the slur.

Here’s our complaint: Once again, Shanahan has cribbed material from another reporter without attribution.

Google News time check around midnight Monday:

C’mon, man – be a mensch and give credit where credit’s due, yeah?