Before I type more I would like to be on the record as saying that this proposal is too soon for Lowell. Yes, it has been executed successfully elsewhere. That said, it is too soon for Lowell, where we are not a community saturated with on-line users. Some day this will be a good proposal for Lowell, but not just yet. First we need to do something about providing a free WiFi service to the center of the City. Not all of the City, but parts. And, maybe encouraging Internet Cafes around town. But, we are not yet a netted community in an internet sort of way. Good idea, but not yet.
Then, besides Mr Wallace, there is Blogger Gerry Nutter jumping in on this issue, and suggesting some collusion between the Manager and the Mayor over this Notices issue.
Mr. Manager aside from the sewer tie-in which you know my position on, why did you allow yourself and your Administration to get dragged into this Legal Notice Fiasco?Gerry, what is your evidence?
Is there some bad blood between City Hall and the [local] Paper of Record? Appears so. Should we move beyond this? Definitely. Let us not get into a situation where one has to pick a side. That is a Chairman Mao Phase I Revolutionary War approach. "Side with us or we will kill you and your family and destroy your village." We should all take a deep breath and step back.
And, while I am here, I would like to note that I like The [Lowell] Sun. I have liked it since I arrived in Lowell. Given its fighting class I think it is a better paper than The Boston Globe. Coming here from the DC area, where I read The Washington Post, I was very disappointed in The Boston Globe (I like Joan Vennochi). Boston may be the Hub of the Universe, but based upon the paper, it is a very small and insular universe. One of the things I picked up on early was that The [Lowell] Sun was more responsive regarding international news than was Brand X from Boston. Not as in depth, but more timely.
Regards — Cliff
♠ Remember, articles in The Sun go away after a while, to a different place. I will not be updating their links unless I am bedridden and have read every book in the house. And, besides, the Editor tells me the links cost money after a few weeks. It is the new business model.
2 comments:
Had some all-too-rare downtime on Sunday morning just prior to the change of command.
So I bought a Sunday Globe and dug in. There was some great stuff there (like the article about the best streets in Greater Boston)...but the FRONT page, above-the-fold, lead story was about a teenager in Cambridge who is torn between his penchant for the performing arts in theater and a loose affiliation with a street gang.
Really.
Of all the things happening in all the world, or even in all of Greater Boston, THAT was the #1 news piece? I'm not saying his story wasn't worthy of the paper, but it seems like there are other sections for that sort of thing.
The article almost read like a giant spoof. It was as if the Onion was parodying one of the stories the Globe likes to champion...but it was all too real.
Poking fun at the Boston Globe is a fish-in-a-barrel pursuit if there ever was one, but, seriously, what does that have to do with the proverbial price of tea?
I can take an expression of Sun-satisfaction with only so much salt. Let's call this spade a spade: for warmed-over AP content, it's always fastest and most thorough to just read about it online. The fact that the Sun pay-giarizes more quickly than the Globe is hardly an endorsement to me. The BBC World Service is even more thorough and timely most of the time than the AP. The Sun doesn't republish their stuff. So let's not try to offer this sort of a thing as an excuse.
The sad fact of the matter is that the Lowell Sun has steadily decreased their local news-gathering and reporting resources to the point of self-parody. Local musicians are self-producing award-winning music, and performing it live right here in the city, and all the Sun can manage to do is paraphrase the PR blurbs they receive from the Bull Run in Shirley, Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry, and various performance venues in Boston, all roughly 20 miles away or more from the city in which the rag gets published. We had a city-wide "skill share" this weekend. Where's the coverage? Anyone who spends any time on the street here can list any number of things they see that are never explained or published in the "local" paper. Why are we not frustrated about that?
I suspect that people who spend most of their time indoors at home or elsewhere not out and about in Lowell are less concerned, because they don't see, hear or know what they're missing. If they all want to spend $225 each year having their ignorance confirmed for them, it's all our collective loss.
We put up with an abysmal local newspaper situation, I guess, because we feel like we don't deserve better, and because some nearby cities may have it worse.
I, for one, don't feel so satisfied at all. We get very little value for our subscription dollars, and less and less of that every single year. When are we going to stop apologizing for that and for them down at the Sun, and agree that some better accommodation towards an actual majority of residents is a useful thing for our public notices?
That wider, more fair distribution could be at lower cost to us as taxpayers would seem like a noble goal. Yeah, the Mayor was a putz not to propose a hybrid solution to start as some of his political nemeses, to their credit, more reasonably suggested. But that doesn't excuse the anachronistic and poor-value and poorer constituent covering local paper for their baseless rant in favor of preserving their corrupt monopoly on public notice publication revenue.
I would hope for better, from them, and from you, Cliff.
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