Thursday, February 26, 2009

No air of urgency on Morrissey Blvd.

Despite rising reporter unemployment and tides of red ink in journalism, a confidential source nicknamed Deep Tongue-Piercing wandered the Boston Globe newsroom yesterday for hours before finding a hungover editor to wake up off the sagging sofa around the corner from the Coke machine.

"Nothing seems to be happening," she said. "It's so quiet. The people I expect to see, I'm not seeing them."

Instead, the Globe remains at a standstill, unable to stand near the level of its corporate parent, the New York Times. Instead, say Globe insiders, management has embarked on a race for the two remaining readers of the Boston Herald, code-named Beavis and Butt-head. Accordingly, editors have instructed Matt Viser to write stupid, superficial stories such as this in order to attract the bilious talk radio audience to make stupid, superficial, and ungrammatical comments on the web site.



Laws don't get made in open session. Representation of constituents involves much more than speaking to the chamber.

Measuring the engagement of the legislature by the time it spends assembled is a mug's game that's unbecoming of the paper, the reporter, and his editors. They all know better, but they're pretending they don't to inflame the rubes.

Not only is this bad journalism, it's bad for journalism. The mass audience they're now pimping to is a Fox News audience, and print can't compete with TV even on the web, but it especially can't compete with low-IQ TV in the well-aligned Beavis and Butt-head low-IQ (and proud of it) audience.

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