The Curse of Celebrity

Does anyone really think that Jenna Bush Hager would be getting a job as correspondent for NBC's Today show if she weren't the daughter of a former US President?

Anyone? Anyone at all?

Yeah, didn't think so.

And actually, that could well be a horribly unfair judgment. Having done a little work on both sides of this particular aisle, I know there are lots of young newshounds out there that are quite skilled and capable. Many have little experience because this is a tough business to get work in... competition is perennially fierce in journalism...but are nonetheless have inborn talent. Talent that can refined nicely with a little seasoning.

That said, I don't buy for one second that Jenna has that talent. The reason why is that Jenna is essentially starting out at the top...the Today show...but is given a lousy monthly gig so that even when (not if) she sucks the air out of the room, she's only doing it once per month.

And she will suck, count on that. Everyone does, no matter how talented, when they get started. Even journalists experienced in other media almost always suck big-time for the first several rounds when they start on radio or TV. The good ones get better after a half-dozen tries, and then gradually get better and better until they hit the limit of their talent - whatever that is.

A prime example is Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. Despite his long experience with TV, and several years essentially playing the same character on The Daily Show, the first month or two of TCR was riddled with screwups and flat takes. But pretty soon Colbert found a rhythm and, you know, started winning Emmys and Peabody Awards.

If Bush Hager were really talented (not to mention serious about TV journalism) they'd started her on a smaller scale where she could be more free to screw up and learn from it. If she had the talent, I'm sure within a year she'd be ready enough for a monthly segment, certainly.

But the fact that she's getting the brass ring from day one says she's a political appointment meant to suck up to some funder or politico somewhere. And Today viewers are the ones paying for it.

I Must Promise To Use this Power Only for Good

Off and on, I've been trying to find the blog post where I first suggested that Boston University ought to buy the Boston Globe, and turn it into a giant mentorship/curriculum. Let the pros stay and do their jobs, but they're all required to take on one or two journalism students as mentors for the semester...maybe for a year (or longer if the student desires).

The Globe gets an owner that won't pimp it out like a cheap whore, and BU gets enormous prestige and a fabulous real-world learning environment for its students. Everyone wins.

Of course, despite the same hit to its endowment that all colleges are feeling, I think that BU could afford to drop the dime and buy the Globe, especially if we're talking $200 million...or even just the oft-quoted but hard-to-substaniate $20 million. However, I agree that if the Globe is losing $85 million a year, then even BU can't afford to float that boat.

Still, drastic changes are necessary at the Globe, no matter who owns it or when. I would argue that despite BU's, ehem, "checkered past" with unions, I'd still trust it to "do right" by journalism than I would The New York Times Co. at this point...or most other owners.

Anyways, I originally wrote down the idea as a comment to a May 2006 blog post at Dan Kennedy's Media Nation. If BU does end up buying the Globe, I will expect a modest finder's fee. 5% would do nicely. :-) Hey, at least it'd be going to an alum! (BU College of Arts & Sciences, Class of 1998)

For what it's worth, I said it again in September 2006, and have been mentioning it off and on...including in an e-mail to BU's Dean of the College of Communication, Tom Fiedler, in December 2008. At the time, it was a side note to Mr. Fiedler's quote in the Daily Free Press about the old COM Tower being taken down. But, interestingly, that was right before I noticed the New England Center for Investigative Reporting...which seems to have been launched on January 16, 2009. Coincidence? I think NOT! :-)

I wish I could've had the foresight in 2006 to see the stock market crash of 2008. Oh well.

Scaling the Great Wall of Newsprint

Okay, okay, I know that this entire post is completely being unfair to Kinsey Wilson, the new SVP/GM of Digital Media of NPR. But dammit, this is something I've blogged about before (or commented about it...although I can't seem to find 'em at the moment) so I'll blog about it now.

I'm getting mighty annoyed with this vast influx of non-radio journalists into the radio business. Especially public radio. Just because you're a really good print or TV journalist does not mean you're a good radio journalist. And this further annoys me because I know a helluva lot of really good radio journalists who're struggling mightily to get ahead in the world.

In fairness, I think this is true of other positions within radio, like management and whatnot.

And there's a LOT of examples of it... (name: home / former print or TV home)

• Tom Ashbrook: WBUR / Boston Globe
• Jon Marcus: WBUR / Boston Globe
• Paul LaCamera: WBUR / WCVB-TV
  
• Rob Bradford & Michael Felger: WEEI / Boston Herald
• Sacha Pfeffier: WBUR / Boston Globe
• David Boeri: WBUR / WCVB-TV
• Wen Stephenson: WBUR / Boston Globe
• Michael Barnicle: WTKK / Boston Globe
  
• ...and now Kinsey Wilson: NPR / USA Today
  

Of course, I suppose I can't overlook that - in general - most of radio is crashing and burning hard, and has been for a decade. Not exactly a strong track record and quite possibly an argument for hiring "outside of the family" to bring in some fresh blood.

But I don't think that argument really flies when you're talking about public radio. In general, pubradio has done quite well over the past two decades. Admittedly, this begs the question: has part of that been due to hires from print and TV? Frankly, I have no idea. I don't think it has, but I have no evidence one way or the other really.

And admittedly, I've seen the reverse migration, too. Two good friends of mine worked with me at The Infinite Mind. One came from print (a national magazine) and went back to it...the other went to a local newspaper's web division. I don't think either of them is unhappy with the transitions. Although off the top of my head, I don't know too many high-end radio folks that have transitioned to print or TV.

On the other hand, I also want to point out that part of the reason why so many young folks aren't interested in a radio career is because the possibility for advancement is so blatantly slim. Hiring non-radio people for radio jobs certainly doesn't help that. And between print being a dying medium and TV careers being incredibly hard to break into to begin with, it's not like this radio people can realistically "work their way up" in another medium and then back into radio.

I want to point out that Wilson might well be the most qualified hire. And even if there were more qualified people, Wilson could easily end up doing the job the best. That sort of thing happens all the time.

But it's still a little disappointing that more radio people aren't getting these top jobs.

Why Jon Stewart is the Most Trusted Man in America

When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And a study this year from the center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that “ ‘The Daily Show’ is clearly impacting American dialogue” and “getting people to think critically about the public square.”

The New York Times has an article today: Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America? Nice article. Great little fluff piece about The Daily Show, what it does, and how it's risen to become a - and this is kinda scary - a trusted news source for many people. But the article dances around what I'd consider the real point here: it's not that Stewart himself is particularly trustworthy. Despite his relentless insistence to speak truth to power, he freely admits that they are not a real news team and if you really look at what they're reporting, they will indeed play fast and loose with a fact if it plays for a laugh.

No, the point is that the rest of TV news is considered so untrustworthy that a frickin' FAKE NEWS SHOW is no more untrustworthy than the rest of the ilk. THAT, my friends, is quite depressing for someone who works in the news business.

God I love The Daily Show, but this is no way to start the day before I've even had any coffee...

Newspapers: I can has intellectualist-elitism?

God, I don't know what I'd do for blogging material without Current. Today there's a story about how Lee Abrams, former XM satellite radio programmer, now chief innovation officer for the Tribune Company, is gracing us with 15 ideas for growing newspapers. Current focuses on how Abrams sort-of disses NPR, and everything that needs to be said either already is or will be said by others.

I'd rather pause for a minute and opine that the fact that Abrams is working for the Tribune, has the job title "chief INNOVATION officer", and is spouting incredibly ignorant tripe like these 15 ideas? That's the reason why newspapers are, supposedly, going down in flames as a business model.

First off, you can't bring in ONE guy and expect him or her to change a stodgy corporate culture into something fresh, hip and innovative. It's gotta be people like that from the corner office to the guy cleaning the bathrooms. Well, okay, maybe not the bathroom guy...but it can't just be one person off in a corner scribbling on post-it notes.

Second, I doubt I'm alone in wondering why Abrams seems hellbent to turn his newspaper into a website. I don't mean a companion site, I mean he's almost talking as if everyone's walking around with a laptop, reading a PDF of his newspaper. Lemme try explaining this from another angle: who reads newspapers? Is it young twentysomethings? Generally speaking, no. And why should they? They grew up on the web. It has all the benefits of a print newspaper, many benefits over a print newspaper, and none of the detriments. Hell, to them, reading a newspaper on a 2x3 inch cellphone display is "easier" than reading it on a piece of paper....the point being that nothing you do in regards to the content of your print newspaper...short of restricting the content only to print (a proven loser of an idea) is going to get kids to read it. They are just instinctively more comfortable on the web.

So who's reading the newspaper? Probably older people. People who grew up reading newspapers. And if you structure your newspaper so that it appeals to young people, there's a damn good chance (near-certainty, even) that you'll annoy the hell of out the older generations.
They are instinctively less comfortable on the web.

This isn't to say Abrams' ideas are all stinkers. He's certainly "getting it" when it comes to how you can't ever make assumptions about your audience. And I applaud him for evangelizing an idea long-overdue: stop scattering news articles across a wide range of pages. It's based on a very old-world idea of forcing reader's eyes to sweep across as many pages as possible, thus seeing as many ads as possible. It's a horrible idea in the web age, when everyone...even old fogies...are more used to getting straight to the point and don't have time to screw around searching through lots of content they don't want.

I also suspect that Abrams may be using these ideas to back the paper into another long-overdue concept: better integration between a newspaper and its website. Very few papers really do a good job synchronizing the content between the two so that they are more than a "For more info, go to www.newspaper.com" sort of thing. The layout is different, the feel is different, and rarely does the actual content on one really complement the other. Usually the content for the paper is just barfed back up on the website, too...with a little eye candy tossed in for fun. I don't usually see the reverse angle applied - why not use the web to drive print stories? There's no rule that says it can't be done effectively; collect info and opinions on the web, use it for an expose in the print.

Oyeah, pet peeve: why is it that so many newspaper websites seem to have no problem with giant ads covering up their content? Would they accept that in their print version? Of course not! So why should readers have to accept it on the website? It's annoying, it's hard (as a user) to get rid of, and it invariably uses Flash which is a resource hog (especially on older computers) and is very, very insecure (vulnerable to hacking).

Wiki Editing

I stumbled across the Get An Edit service today, by way of RadioSutton, and at first I was quite intrigued. Certainly there is a large and growing need for greater "editing" in general out there. By which I mean there's a ton of media...mostly thanks to blogs and blog-like services...available for consumption, but the vast majority of it faces no vetting by an outside source whatsoever. Never mind fact-checking, most of this stuff desperately needs SPELL-checking. Or something that helps cure diarrhea of the keyboard (present blog not excluded).

Turns out Get An Edit appears to largely just be a one-man consulting shop by a guy named Mark Moran, news director at KJZZ. That's cool and all, but I'm disappointed.

I'm disappointed because my first thought was that this was more of a "crowd-sourced" wiki-based service. A means by which people could submit work for review and members of the public could review and edit it. Editors who do a good job would get ranked somehow, and would get access to more and more "important" material as they demonstrated their worth.

Actually, I have a vague feeling that such a service already exists in a similar form, but I don't think anyone's really taken it to the level where you could, as an independent public radio producer, submit your work to the service and expect that it would be edited at a high enough level to be appropriate for public radio's fairly high standards.

That would be pretty cool. Imagine if every NPR affiliate, and NPR itself, all participated in a project like this. It wouldn't matter if you lived in some podunk town with a tiny NPR affiliate; if you had the skills, you'd be working on stuff that aired in major markets.

Of course, the catch is that good editors are made, not born, so it requires time and effort to be a good editor. Time and effort take money. And where would the money come from? There's a limit to how good the editing quality would consistently be if it were all an unpaid venture. And to make it a paying gig introduces an incredible level of complexity to the system, and probably will cost a lot more than the value it would bring.

Pity.

The No Journalism Zone

A friend of mine alerted me to this little bit on page 22 of the Feb.2008 edition of Boston Magazine. Click the image to read it, but the short version is that the Daily Free Press (the independent student newspaper at BU) is in deep doo-doo financially and is considering money from the king of "truthiness": Bill O'Reilly.

Bill O'Reilly?

Bailing out the Freep??

BILL O'REILLY BAILING OUT THE FREEP?!?!

Okay, I admit...I'm a WTBU grad, and there was a serious rivalry between WTBU and the Daily Free Press. Neither of us had much respect for each other and, in retrospect, neither of us deserved any respect anyways. So there's a certain degree of glee for me that's associated with bad news for the Freep.

And it's not like the Freep is immune to all the problems that have plagued the newspaper industry as a whole in the past ten years. Certainly the arrival of the Boston Metro and BostonNOW have been exceptionally damaging to the Freep...since prior to them, the Freep was indeed Boston's third largest daily newspaper. And the Freep was great for BU students because it was free, readily available all over BU's campus, and a quick enough read to be taken in over lunch...three things both the Metro and BostonNOW are as well, and are (debatebly) better papers to boot.


But dammit. Even I wouldn't wish this on the Freep.

BILL O'REILLY??!?!?!

Something that has come up often in my discussions on journalism is that PERCEPTION MATTERS. If you are going to present yourself as an objective source of journalism to your readers, you must be above suspicion of any lack of objectivity.

Bill O'Reilly is the living embodiment of lack of objectivity. Regardless of how he may be in person, his "news show" never fails to bend, or break, the truth. It plays fast and loose with the facts. In short, it has zero regard of objectivity...and it is NOT objective journalism. It is advocacy journalism...and while technically there's nothing wrong with that, I do wish more people in America would realize that fact and take everything Bill says with a fat grain of salt.

Kyle Cheney is simply wrong here: there is very much a reason why the Freep should distinguish between alumni when it comes to financial assistance. If you take Bill's money, you take his taint as well; you can't sell only a small piece of your soul, as it were.

All the more so as O'Reilly is quoted as saying "I need to see exactly what their situation is; then I can come up with a plan to help them." Which is entirely the worst kind of donation: the kind with strings attached. Oh sure, O'Reilly is correct in saying "just to throw them a check ain't going to help in the long run" because the problems with the Freep are endemic to the newspaper industry as a whole. But to turn to O'Reilly to develop strategies for dealing with those problems means you're going to sensationalize the news and turn the Freep into a print version of the "No Spin Zone" because, fiscally, that's what's worked for O'Reilly and Fox News in general.

But that doesn't mean it's the only solution, and it sure as hell doesn't mean it's the RIGHT solution. The last thing this world needs is several hundred little Fox News disciples churning out of the Daily Free Press every year.

As an alum, I don't give anything to Boston University because the school was far too focused on business and profits when I was there. That's changed somewhat since former BU President John Silber left, but nowhere near enough. That the Freep is even considering having O'Reilly restructure them is just more evidence that my alma mater is still not worthy of my donations.

When 50,000 Watts Isn't Really 50,000 Watts

Caught this story in Current about "Community Wireless" (public radio) in Park City, Utah.

I don't have much to say about the situation in general, but I did want to point out something the article didn't touch on much. Let me set the scene...

The overall story is about how Community Wireless shrewdly sold a transmitter/facility they had in Coalville for a significant profit, and used the proceeds to buy 1010AM in Tooele, UT (a close-in suburb of Salt Lake City) with the idea of getting access to the more lucrative (population dense) Salt Lake City market.

Seems like a good idea in theory, but here's the problem. While 1010 is a nice 50,000 watt AM station during the day. It's still a Class D daytimer with a weak 3,100 watts during Critical Hours (the short time around sunrise/sunset) and a miserable 13 watts (yes, just thirteen watts) at night. Fortunately that 13 watts is right next to downtown SLC, so there's some chance that it's reaching a more densely populated area. But with all the sources of RF interference out there these days (wi-fi, cellphones, lamp dimmers, power lines, computers, etc) that 13 watts might as well be nothing.

The unfortunate reality is that in today's on-demand / instant-gratification age..."super D" AM's, that essentially disappear once the sun goes down, are damn near impossible to make work financially. You can't have your signal go "poof" right in the middle of morning or afternoon drive...or worse, miss it altogether. Well, okay, with some niche/block formats you can do it because listeners tune in for a specific show, regardless of the time of the day. But while public radio is somewhat inherently block-formatted, there's no denying that the two big listener draws are Morning Edition and All Things Considered...otherwise known as when everyone's driving to and from work. During the summer it's not as bad as there's more daylight, but during winter it's a giant bummer when the sun sets at 4pm and your signal disappears.

Even worse, you've got to make enough money to keep that 50,000 watts pumping out during the day; transmitters that big are not cheap to operate. At least it's an non-directional facility. I can't imagine how expensive it'd be to shove 50kW through a directional array.

I wish the article had focused on this more...it'd make the initial shrewdness of Community Wireless's owners seem more foolhardy, but that's kind of the point; CW spent a lot of money to try and make this work, and now the station is struggling financially. It appears the struggling is as much due to fiscal mismanagement (if not outright fraud) by CW's managers, but this transmitter point might be something you could point a finger at, too.

Or maybe not; I don't know enough about the background of the story to really know for sure. But my point still stands about how a lot of these Class D AM stations are in an inherently difficult...if not impossible...situation.

The Boston Globe needs to sharpen the fangs a little

Now I'm not saying we need the Boston Globe to become another Boston Herald. One tabloid rag is just right...no more, no less. But this week's Starts & Stops in the Globe could use a dash of bloodlust the tabloidish Herald is known for. I'll explain:

This week, Starts & Stops author Noah Bierman (with assistance from Sarah M. Gantz) writes:

Route 66 woes

Bruce Blake gets no kicks on Route 66.

The Allston man waited more than 25 minutes during rush hour Wednesday morning for a number 66 bus, which is supposed to arrive every 10 minutes.

For years, he has been taking the ride from Allston to Harvard, the T's sixth-busiest bus route, and says the huge rush-hour gaps in service are commonplace. "I know folks who have waited a good 45 minutes in a snowstorm," he said.

It is a lament among bus riders that goes back more than a decade.

"You're standing out there waiting for the bus and it ain't coming," Blake said.

MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said the T added another bus to the route, which also goes through Roxbury and Brookline, last winter and believes there are now enough in service to accommodate the 11,100 daily passengers. He said the 66 goes through 40 traffic lights, making it especially tricky to keep buses from stacking behind one another, which can create gaps in service.

In response to complaints, the T recently reassigned supervisors to monitor the route and prevent these gaps. By the end of this week, the T will finish installing Global Positioning System equipment on Route 66 buses, another measure meant to help keep them better staggered.

Blake will wait for proof. He said other complaints have been fruitless: "It's maybe different for an hour or a day, but nothing changes."

Now I'll overlook the fact that printing any response from Joe Pesaturo...without aggressive followup and fact-checking...can only be described as "rip and read" journalism. Joe might be a nice guy in person (I don't know, I've never met him) but his statements as the T's public relations guy are almost laughable in their rah-rah "The T is Never Wrong" tone, no matter how glaring the evidence is to the contrary.

And in this case, it's pretty glaring.

In particular, I'm referring the damning admission that the T regularly cancels bus runs on various routes because they can't afford to do them. I've blogged about this before, too.

Note that I say "cancels", not "canceled"...as in, past tense. Supposedly MBTA GM Dan Grabauskas ended the practice quickly after becoming GM a few years ago, but continued the lie because he knew what the political fallout would be. I say that's bullcrap, and that the T is using a smidgen of truth to cover up the lie; that they're still routinely cancelling bus (and probably subway) runs all the time in a desperate attempt to cut costs.

Regardless, this is news that is directly relevant to the story in this week's Starts & Stops, and yet no mention whatsoever is made of it.

Why not?

Is Chris Lydon a McCain fan?

Today on my regular blog trawling I checked out Christopher Lydon's Radio Open Source site and got a bit of a surprise: an ad for John McCain For President. Click the image to the right to see a full size version.

I'm hardly a bosum buddy of Chris, but I have worked with him a bit here and there. I wouldn't have pegged him as a McCain supporter, but neither would I guess that he wouldn't be, either. Hell, Chris might not even know about the ad...at the bottom it says "Ads by Google" and, IIRC, the individual blog has little control over those ads.

Regardless, my initial reaction was that it was pretty inappropriate for a journalist/talk-show host's site to have a political ad for any candidate. Impartiality and all that, you know?

Then I mused a bit more and wondered really if it was all that inappropriate. Chris certainly has a long history as a traditional journalist, but technically he's not a radio or TV journalist anyone - he's purely on the web, and like it or not, the rules are somewhat different for web journalists. Primarily because of the odd phenomena where you have so little control over what ads are delivered on your site, and yet most people know that and are, consciously at least, reasonably comfortable divorcing their opinion of your ads and their opinion of your work. Of course, how successful at unconsciously divorcing those two issues is open to debate, and that's why I think most journalists lean towards avoiding the issue entirely.

Why the Media is Failing

So apparently Mitt Romney has won the Michigan primaries. sigh

From 1996 until 2007, I lived in Boston...capital of Massachusetts. From 2003 to 2007, Romney was Governor of Massachusetts. Massachusetts is often referred to as not just a "Blue State", but the "Bluest State"...mostly because of the whole gay marriage thing, but it is generally a pretty liberal state, even if Bush got 37% of the vote in 2004 there.

So as you might imagine, Romney didn't exactly win the gubernatorial race by being a right wing "Christian" conservative. He won it essentially by saying he was a centrist and by support for abortion rights, gay rights, and by "raising taxes" (technically it's jacking the fees, but if you have to pay it either way, does it matter). It didn't hurt that his opponent was Shannon O'Brien (who?)

Now for us Bostonians, and Massachusetts denizens as a whole, from day one we all knew Romney was a slick-haired used-car salesman who would say and do anything to get elected so he could springboard from Beacon Hill to the US Presidency. He muscled sitting (and "Acting") Governor Jane Swift, also a Republican, out of the way so he could run. Pretty nasty stuff. And he proceeded to spend the next four years putting style way the hell over substance on everything from gay marriage to the Big Dig. This man would say ANYTHING he wanted to win whatever battle he was fighting at the moment, no matter how blatantly it contradicted anything he'd said before. See folks, flip-flopping isn't only a Democrat thing when it comes to major Massachusetts politicians.

So when Romney announced he was running for Prez, most of us merely groaned and wondered why he waited as long as he did to officially announce it since he'd essentially been telling us since January of 2003, and shouting it since 2005 in his constant attacks on Massachusetts while still Governor (classy, Mitt)

Yet while I know all this as a matter of routine, my co-worker...a radio news reporter here in upstate New York...tells me that generally he didn't know anything about Romney until about six or eight months ago when the national media started picking up on him, and even now knows virtually nothing about his record as a Massachusetts politician; much less what most Massachusetts residents actually think of Romney. Namely, that he sucked so bad that his hand-picked successor (Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey) got her ass whipped by a political neophyte who's proven very inept in office.

So why the hell isn't Romney's record, or lack thereof, being dissected on the national stage? Why aren't news organizations showing how Mitt's "business leadership" killed a woman through pathetic mismanagement. Why hasn't the media shown that you can't trust a word Mitt says??

sigh I suppose this is true of all Presidential contenders. I imagine Obama's foes in Illinois are shaking their heads about his success and wondering how the country doesn't know about X, Y or Z. Perhaps that's why Hillary gets such vitriol; she's already been in the White House for eight years; we know exactly what she'll do in there and it scares the crap out of most of us. With everyone else, we can tell ourselves comforting little white lies because we don't know them well enough to know better.

Aaron's Not as Dumb as He Looks!

Woo-hoo! A little validation is always a nice thing. :-) I posted a comment over at Media Nation, an excellent media commentary blog by Northeastern University Professor (and journalist extraordinare, Dan Kennedy). It was about how the relative ease of researching quote attribution on the web has led to an unrealistic...and growing...expectation that journalists will be much more thorough in attribution than they've ever been expected to be in the past; and far more so than many do right now.

I quote the esteemed Mr. Kennedy:
Aaron: One of the smartest comments I've seen on this in a long while. I think the ease of blogging and linking is causing a lot of people to look at traditional practices like no-credit backgrounding in a new, less favorable light.

All this and from a Red Sox fan, no less. :-)

Misleading News about Auto Insurance

Actually this isn't a post about auto insurance, which is big in the news today because Massachusetts is experimenting with "competitive" auto insurance. No, this is a post about the media, which has shameless trumpted a particular news tidbit without providing crucial context.

In Massachusetts, ever since a disasterous experience with market-based competition for insurance rates in 1977, the rates an auto insurance company charges are set by a state regulatory agency. Rates are set statewide, which means drivers in rural areas are subsidizing drivers in urban areas. In 1977, when this subsidy was removed, rates overall shot up over 14% but in the urban areas it was much, much worse than that. Over howls of protest, the flat rate was reintroduced after seven months.

What is often being quoted is that Massachusetts is the "only state in the US where auto insurance rates are set by the State."

While this is factually accurate, it paints a very misleading picture...namely that the other 49 states are all using the same system, and only Massachusetts is not. This is not true - every State regulates their auto insurance differently; while none of them quite come to the level of direct State control over rates, it's not like there is zero regulation elsewhere.

Since this new decision could mean significantly higher or lower rates (mostly higher - we're terrible drivers in Mass.) it's a very politically charged issue. That means people will no doubt be contacting the Legislature to sound off on it.

The upshot here is the way the media at large (both the Boston Globe and WBUR 90.9FM...I haven't checked any other media outlets yet) is reporting this is presenting a subtle but powerful political argument that argues against the status quo. That is unseemly for news organizations that claim to present objective news.

Mac Daniel's New Job: A Conflict of Interest?

I feel like I have a problem with this, but I'm not sure I really should.

The new communications director at the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority is someone with experience dealing with the agency. Mac Daniel has covered the Turnpike for years as a reporter with the Boston Globe. His hiring comes about a week after legislation went into effect making Governor Patrick's transportation secretary the chairman of the Turnpike's governing board of directors.

See the full article at WPRI.com

I've talked with Mac personally a handful of times, he's a nice enough guy. And in the interests of disclosure I frequently do send in questions & tips to his email address: starts@globe.com

But he's been oft-critized by sites like BadTransit for being too "soft" on the MBTA and other transit agencies around Massachusetts. I don't really agree with that assessment, but I can see why...Mac rarely "went for blood" on his Starts & Stops column in the Globe. Granted, the Globe is not a "gotcha" news organization...they strive to be objective...but I do concede that our transit organizations here in Boston definitely need someone to smack them around on a regular basis, since the elected officials certainly won't (most Massachusetts transit agencies are havens for patronage jobs) and the public is routinely ignored by these organizations.

So you can see why I'm uneasy about Mr. Daniel leaving his job to report on the transit in Boston, to go work for one of the agencies he used to report on. It raises legitimate questions about the objectivity of his reporting.

For example, how long ago did he know he was a candidate for this job? During that entire time, his objectivity is completely in question. Now, carrying that train of thought to a logical (albeit extreme) conclusion...has Mr.Daniel always wanted a job like that? If so, then virtually everything he's ever written should be considered "invalid" because maybe he "took it easy" in his column to avoid annoying the people who are now his supervisors.

Again, for the record, I choose to believe that Mac Daniel has enough journalistic integrity that none of his writing should be questioned. But the problem (mostly for the Globe) is that there's no way anyone...even Mac...can prove that he did have that integrity. And as such, it looks bad.

As my journalist friends often remind me...when it comes to journalistic integrity, looking bad is the same thing as being bad. So that's why I feel uneasy about this.

But at the same time...it's not like he was writing columns for months or years while knowing he had this job in the wings. Charging Mr. Daniel with a conflict of interest feels a bit like a Catch 22; is he never allowed to ever have a job in a transit agency just because he covered transit while at the Globe? Maybe his column gives him valuable insight and experience for the job!

Argh. I don't need these moral dilemmas in the summer...it's too damn humid to think.

Beyond Broadcast 2007

I've been remiss in blogging about the Beyond Broadcast conference back in late February.

First and foremost, kudos once again to Jake Shapiro and many others at PRX and the Berkman Center for pulling together an excellent conference.

Second, I noticed that the "problem" with the first BB conference was back in force with this year's. That is, there weren't many answers for a lot of really pressing questions. Everyone seems to know that there are significant needs for radio to diversify across additional media channels, but nobody really seems to know how to actually do it...or at least do it in a way that makes money. Even just enough money to break even, never mind turn a profit.

So these conference sessions are fascinating discussions...sometimes veering into bulls**t sessions (but that's okay)...but there's not a lot of the rubber meeting the road here. I suppose that's okay, too...you gotta start somewhere and it's not a bad thing to have a really high-level discussion at the conference that can then spark more mid-level planning back at your station (or comparable media organization).

On a snarky note, there were some definite technical glitches during the conference, too...especially in getting a presenter's videoconference to work. I don't mention this to blame anyone, but more to call attention to how web media has traded flexibility for robustness; your average AM or FM radio is very simple, and has a very well-known and defined set of expectations assigned to it. Not surprising given how radio has been around for more than five decades. Duplicating this remarkable reliability in the web has been frustratingly difficult.

Trusting your employees?

I read this article about "mystery shoppers" in hospitals in the Boston Globe this week. Interesting concept, using "fake patients" to take notes on the sly about how well a hospital/medical waiting room is serving patients.

I don't disagree with this concept. The medical profession is, in many ways, a service profession. So applying the "mystery shopper" concept to "check up on the employees" isn't an inherently bad thing. And if done correctly, I would choose to believe that employees would welcome the feedback; it could lead to needed resources being allocated to a poor-scoring office. And sometimes we just don't realize that something we're doing is being taken in a bad way by others. I know I'm mighty far from perfect so I kinda welcome the occasional dope-slap like this.

But at the same time, it's hard to get away from the feeling that this is management showing a marked lack of trust in their employees' ability to do their jobs. And if management uses this as an excuse to scapegoat the front desk, it could really undermine those workers and make for a lousy work experience.

The article in question did touch on this issue:

Brigham and Women's Hospital, however, will not mystery shop its employees. "Is it a little devious, a little misleading to staff, and how would they react?" said Dr. Michael Gustafson, vice president for clinical excellence.

But for a two-page article that barely scratched the surface...I do wish a little more attention had been paid to it.

Metro & the Morning Commute

Like many fellow Boston subway riders, during my morning commute I read the Metro, our local freebie rag that is often compared to "mental twinkies". Meh, it's free and it passes the time. But today two things caught my attention.

First was this picture of Barry Bonds. (thanks to Metro and AP) I saw it and the first thought that came to mind was: "He's taken so many steroids even his tongue muscle has gotten freakishly huge!"

Yeah, I really don't like Barry Bonds. Not one bit. I don't really begrudge him the steroids so much as the blatant dishonesty about it. And the apparent greed in trashing Hank Aaron's great homer count for Barry's own personal glory.

I also really hate Barry for what he's doing to Giants' fans. Well, at least one Giants fan, anyways...one of my best friends...who's a San Francisco native living in Boston. And this season he can't just pop a brew and enjoy a damn Giants game because everything is about Barry Bonds. It's like the rest of the team doesn't exist. That's not fair to the fans, Barry. Screw you.

I suppose this touches on a long-held theory of mine that I believe players should be completely indebted to the fans. Because it's the fans that pay for outrageously overpriced tickets, concessions, playbooks and jerseys. Those sales ultimately pay for athletes' salaries, so don't give me "I'm not a role model" bullcrap. You can't sell part of your soul, folks, you gotta sell it all.

But I digress...

The other thing was "Ask the (insert government official here)" column with Dan Grabauskas, General Manager of the MBTA. Dan was appointed after creating a reputation as a "cleanup man" after his success at the Massachusettes Motor Vehicle Registry. If his goal was to "clean up" the MBTA, he's failed miserably...things are worse now than when Grabauskas started in 2005, and the recent reports of state transportation's fiscal health indicate it's gonna get a lot worse in the future.

One of the Q&A questions was about fare evasion on the Green Line...I'll quote the relevant part so you don't have to open the PDF...

QUESTION: What is being done about fare evasion on the Green Line? I’m sick of paying $60 a month for my pass, and watching kids and adults alike board the back doors, laughing how easy it is not to pay. What happened to “proof of payment,” and why is it never enforced?
(name omitted, 23, Brookline)

ANSWER: The Green Line fare collection system is working. While we do have some peak loading problems, we are addressing them with staffing or other measures.

(emphasis added by me)

Don't tell someone that that a pig is a swan when it's oinking and dripping mud on your carpet. The fare collection system on the Green Line is completely a farce and every regular rider knows it. After three fare hikes in six years, it's reasonable to expect that people who pay their fair share are gonna be mad when anyone does not.

Even if the system really worked, the perception is that it's a farce...and that's just as bad.

Thinking more broadly, this is why I don't really care for these kind of "Ask your elected official" columns. The Metro has had the "Ask the Mayor" column for a little while now with Boston Mayor Tom Menino and it's equally useless and arrogant-sounding. People are essentially writing in with a complaint and the Mayor's never going to be in a position where he can say "You know, you're right! We really f**ked that one up, and I'm going to fire the jerks responsible, and hire some actual real workers who aren't patronage appointments!" because no elected official can ever actually say that. Even if Menino could actually do that, he probably wouldn't say it.

Really all we'll ever get out of these columns is arrogant-sounding dismissals that there's not really a problem, but we're working hard to fix it (in vague, unspecified terms). That doesn't benefit the questioners, the readers or the elected officials. So why do these columns continue?!?!?