Real Worcester Blog

What will we lose if we lose the T&G? (update)

With this post, journalism prof Jay Rosen rounds up some of the best of the past month’s nationwide debate on the future of newspapers and news in America.

In light of these new facts and opinions, what’s the future of newspapers in Worcester?

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette is owned by the troubled New York Times, is a sister paper to the troubled Boston Globe, and has lost more circulation than average these past few years. I have no idea if they’re doing well or poorly at the moment; last fall, Scott Zoback made the case they were in trouble.

If the T&G closes or (more likely) continues to shrink, we stand to lose two things:

1. The threat of investigative reporting.

See the Byrnes teacher fiasco for this week’s example.

The T&G has the money to pay people to do this, and to fight the long legal battles that may result. No internet equivalent in Worcester. They hardly ever expose serious corruption, but I have to think they deter a lot of politicians and others from going too far. For more on this point, see the Rosen-linked Paul Starr and a response from Yochai Benkler. (Note that I admire Benkler to the point that I podcasted his magnum opus.)

2. Local news.

Last year it seemed that some days informal news sources came close to providing as much local news as the T&G, while other days it wasn’t even close. As part of the nationwide debate on papers, we’ve seen people claim the Chicago Tribune publishes a scant 8 local stories some days (this is contested), with similar numbers for the Sunday Seattle Times.

At least with #2, there’s hope of filling in some of the gaps the T&G increasingly leaves. Jesse Walker has “an early and incomplete catalog of places to look for local data as once-mighty papers fade away.”

And so…

I know I’m looking at a worst-case scenario here, but it no longer looks like a crazy scenario. The T&G’s smartest public voices still aren’t acknowledging this, so I think that as random citizens we should continue the conversation amongst ourselves: What will we lose if we lose the T&G?

Worcestershire Journal – Why Holden needs three pharmacy chains

Just a reminder that the good folks of Holden are struggling, bearing up under great privation, with only two national pharmacy chains (Rite-Aid and CVS) in town. A third, Walgreens, is under construction on Main Street. It can’t come soon enough.

	At Rite-Aid, you can find edible Easter grass, which is a great if a) you can teach your three-year-old to distinguish between the Easter basket grass that is edible and the stuff that isn’t and b) these guys don’t show up.
	Meanwhile, at CVS, you can get your Croc-knock-offs and work gloves, head out to the garden, and play with a somber cherub, a happy turtle, and a plastic planter.
	But, only at Walgreens can you celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior with a stuffed bunny that sings “Oh, Baby. That’s What I Like.”

For more info about this new pharmacy, see my post from last summer.

Worcestershire Journal – News, not news, rinse, repeat – Part 2

The current breathless brouhaha regarding bloggers, the future of newspapers and the news industry, the World Wide Web, and the Twittersphere is just one more round in a centuries-old struggle to define what it means to think and act on those thoughts in society.

• Socrates ranted about the invention of writing, that it would lead to weakening of memory.
• The texts that form the foundation of Christianty were established by committee. Other commentary on the life and times of Jesus, the bloggers of their time, didn’t make the cut.
• Thoreau was singularly unimpressed when the telegraph brought news from Europe:
  We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
  To Henry, faster news delivery, even from “trained to report the news fairly and objectively,” only hastened the delivery of trivia that drained the human soul of its vitality.

Jim Cramer of CNBC, we learn, is a Harvard-educated reporter who, along with others in the business news profession, failed spectactularly in his responsibility to tell us what he knew about how the heavily-leveraged financial instruments could and would bring down our economic infrastructure. He was skilled, he was paid, and he was wrong.

Meanwhile, some of us who write “for fun” can and do bring more than 30 years of professional writing experience in area ranging from local, state, and national government, murders, and fires to Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop file servers and the increasing number of men as administrative assistants. (I wrote an article for a trade journal about my experience as an office temp in the Kelly Girl division of Kelly Services.) The Web, by the intent of its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, affords us the opportunity to write for an audience that, by now, numbers in the many 10s.
So, where does that leave us? We’re still figuring that out, just like Wallace and Gromit building a train track as they go along. We’ll get there, for varying values of there, and it’ll be interesting.

Years ago,  my mother established what she called Hakkarainen Clipping Service. She’d send books, magazines, newspaper articles, and other bits of printed material to a friend who might be interested, usually with a note “No need to read, acknowledge, or return.” It’s how I learned about blogging decades before the Intertubes – sharing interesting stuff in any way you can, for free, because ideas matter.

Worcestershire Journal – News, not news, rinse, repeat – Part 1

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another, …To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
Henry David Thoreau – Walden, Chapter Two, Where I Lived, and What I Lived for

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Dianne Williamson’s column about the newspaper business and the follow-up from Jeff at Wormtown Taxi. In the next few Journal entries, I’ll collect some experiences in the news business, notes on technology and publishing,

Dianne observed, “If you told me 30 years ago that daily newspapers would someday be facing a fight to survive, I doubt that I would have believed it.”

Well, it was just a bit less than 30 years ago when when I was a reporter with the Hudson Daily Sun and we were feeling the first twinges of the contractions in the newspaper business.

One of the deep joys of college was being able to read as many newspapers as I wanted. I could pick up a copy of the daily New York Times and savor the world news before (or instead of) going off to classes. I could read the Christian Science Monitor, delighting in the clarity of its prose and the balance of its tone.  I endured the Boston Herald Traveler for the sake of Pogo comics. The Boston Globe had an afternoon edition, much like our 20-years-gone Evening Gazette.

A trip to the Out-of-Town newsstand in Harvard Square was a pilgrimage to pick up a three-day-old edition of The Guardian or Sydney Morning Herald.

I had written free-lance features for pay as well as writing, editing, and opining in my college newspapers. With a good turn of luck, I landed the reporter’s job at the Hudson paper. We lived in Hudson at the time, so I enjoyed getting to know my town better. Because of my feature work,  my editor was surprised when I turned in a credible report on the Hudson Board of Selectman’s meeting. “People who do features usually can’t do straight news,” he said, which I took as high praise.

Already, the business was changing. At the start, we wrote our stories on typewriters and delivered the copy, first to a great copy editor, Martha Ferrecchia, who, after correcting and clarifying my prose, sent it to the back room where the text was rekeyed into the typesetting system. Shortly after I started, we changed from typewriters to computer terminals. (One night, I was reading my editor’s latest column and managed to delete it by mistake.) I first learned about John Lennon’s murder while reaing the UPI news feed on a green-screen terminal that December evening in 1980.
Content was changing. One Saturday morning, I was editing that day’s edition when my boss, Ralph Grasso, came in. He was also the sports editor and was bringing in his stories from the Friday night sports. He looked over my shoulder and shouted, “Where’s the ‘Who Shot J.R.?’ story?”

“I didn’t use it. People who care already know and people who don’t care don’t care.”

“It’s the biggest story of the year!” he said and ordered me to include it. We compromised and put it on page 2.

The business was changing in other ways. During my tenure, we closed the Hudson office and worked solely out of the Marlborough Enterprise offices. I was married with two sons, owned a house, and needed a bit more money to get by.  I learned that I could have made more money working at the McDonald’s that was front of the Enterprise building and told my bosses so. They offered me an extra twenty bucks a week. I turned them down and took a job as a proofreader in a technical writing department at Digital, a move that led to a long and deeply-satisfying career in high tech.

Next – newspapers and publishing technologies

Worcestershire Journal – Where were you when your lights came back on?

Most of the angst regarding Holden Municipal Light Department’s handling of the December ice storm was focused on communications, the delivery of information that was incomplete, incorrect, or just plain absent. So, YNB (your noble blogger) was pleased to see that the Board of Selectmen would be having a debriefing meeting this week. It would be a chance for the whole town to hear and be heard.

For a meeting about communications, it didn’t start well. I arrived at 6:20, went to the main door, and then to the business office window, where I looked around for a sign that would direct me to the meeting location. When I mentioned that I was here for the Selectmen’s meeting, the very nice person behind the counter stared at me blankly. After a few awkward moments of silence, another very nice person whom I couldn’t see said, “I think it’s in the meeting room.” The first very nice person directed me to go through an unmarked door, around an unmarked corner, and down an unmarked set of stairs, to the meeting room. I then saw that there was a side door leading a parking lot.

The selectmen had started their meeting at 5:30, so that, as I settled into my front-row seat, several of the selectmen spoke from their notes, gently raising the question of whether it’s a good idea for the Town Manager to have responsibility for the light department as well. Selectman Ken O’Brien offered that we should ‘review the organizational structure’ as the result of this event. Selectman Joe Sullivan observed that a lot, perhaps too much, knowledge of the electrical grid resides in the heads of certain key, long-time employees and that a comprehensive CAD drawing would help in future emergencies, allowing outside crews to understand the system configuration more quickly.

At 6:30, Chairman David White opened the discussion to the public. When I use the term public, I’m being generous. By my account, we had, in addition to two newspaper reports and YNB, eight people in the audience, approximately 0.04825% of the town’s population. Eight people. We could have borrowed someone’s Suburban and held the meeting at the drive-through at Dunkin’ Donuts. And, not everyone spoke. If we’d held the meeting at Dunkin’ Donuts, a couple of guys wouldn’t even had a cruller.

The people who did speak were articulate, respectful, and earnest. We heard about the lack of good information through most of the storm period, about the difficulty removing brush from the Beetle zone, about the challenges faced and overcome by the nursing home workers who had to thread their way through the traffic gridlock on Main Street. We heard stories about how some town workers were having difficulty making the transition from business-as-usual bureaucracy to the business-as-unusual nature of the times.

One citizen reminded us that, in the wake of 9/11, we’d all do well to have a personal disaster preparedness plan with the basics – non-perishable food, water, batteries. While this might have been a once-in-a-century event, we can’t always expect that government or others will be able to help us.

The public comments wound down about five minutes past seven, although follow-on discussions led to a bit more commentary from the um, assembled throng.

Selectman Sullivan then told of how many people stepped forward, showing up at the shelter that had been set up at the Senior Center, asking, “How can I help?” Townspeople, unsolicited and unpaid, worked in the kitchen, mopped the floors, answered the phones. While many people worked long and hard for pay, others worked long and hard because it was the right thing to do.

There’s still a lot of brush and tree limbs on the roadside, but there are hopeful signs, too. One utility pole that had been leaning precariously has a companion, a new pole ready to take the load of wires that run along Chapel Street.
It’s a 10-minute walk home, time enough to let the words and ideas do a little dance in my head. What would I have done, for example, if our power had come back on the third day, as it had for the rest of the folks on the street. As it was, we were reconnected on the 11th day, so there was plenty to do around the house, literally keeping the home fires burning. Had the electricity come back sooner, where would I have been? At the Senior Center, making pots of spaghetti? Dunno.

Well, yeah, I know.

Bill Cosby at Hanover Theatre- A Review

Be careful what you wish for Worcesterites, because you just might get it. The Federal Square area of Main Street was a hub of activity in the 7pm hour on Saturday night. Inside the Hanover Theatre Bill Cosby was telling stories to 2 sold

out houses with a show at 5pm and a second performance at 8pm.

As an usher at The Hanover we were told that the show was expected to last 75 minutes and no longer than 90 minutes. This would have ended the first show no later than 6:30, giving just enough time to empty the theatre of the matinee crowd before opening the door for the evening performance. But Cosby had other ideas.

Taking to the stage wearing a UMASS sweatshirt Cosby sat down at a small chair and table set upon an oriental rug. And from there storytime with The Cos began. This intimate setup lent the right atmosphere to the evening as Cosby told stories more than he told “jokes”, however the stories were laced with antidotes, quips and truisms relating to life, love and relationships. The Food Network might want to think about giving Cosby his own show because if he was not talking about how man can survive 40+ years of marriage and still be sane he was talking about food. He spent what must have been half an hour on a story about Thanksgiving and the best and worst stuffing that he has made, during these stories he would get sidetracked and go off on a tangent in a totally separate direction before asking the audience what he was talking about in the first place.

The food theme continued as Cosby extolled the qualities of the Monkey Bread served by an 83 year old cook at his California manse and how she refuses to give him the recipe for the bread as well as how one of the caretakers of his western Massachusetts properties makes the best stuffing because it is StoveTop stuffing and “he follows what it says on the box”.

At this point it was approaching 7pm and Cosby had been onstage for almost 2 hours, and he asked the audience what time it was. When the crowd responded 5 of 7, Cosby gasped in surprise and said, “well I have to le you go, the folks fro the suburbs are coming”. But Cosby didn’t stop there as he went on a rant wondering why he couldn’t find the bacon in his Thanksgiving turkey and the subsequent trip to his Western Mass butcher to find our where turkey bacon really does come from. To close out the set Cosby pulled out the tried and true “Dentist” skit… I cabbbn’t feeble my boddum libbp.

The first show ended at 7:18 with Cosby leaving the full house to a standing ovation. At this point the real fun was happening out on Main Street. Since the first show was sold out the parking garage across the street was obviously full, Main Street and the surrounding blocks were filled with cars looking for parking and there were over 1,000 people cooling their heels in a line that stretched past the door of Ding Ho waiting to enter for the second performance. As I headed to my car groups of people were streaming to Main Street from every direction as they were forced to find further flung parking options. It was certainly the busiest that I have seen that section of Main Street since The Hanover Theatre opened I and I will freely admit that I liked what I saw.

Worcestershire Journal – Sidewalk anthropologist

It’s a mile-and-a-half from our house to the Holden-Worcester line, all on sidewalks and only one tricky intersection to navigate. Marley (this Marley, not that Marley) and I make the t three or four times a week. He’ll be 13 at the end of this month, but is still able to walk the distance with enthusiasm. There are plenty of interesting sights and smells. The dogs who are left outside for the day give fair warning as we approach their houses; Marley’s respectful of any dog who’s protecting its own turf.
Along with cleaning up after Marley, I try to pick some of the litter along the way. The recent warm-up has cleared away nearly all of the snow and ice on the sidewalks, giving up the winter’s debris. The litter is pretty much what you’d expect: lottery tickets, empty Red Bull cans, cigarette packs, stuff like that. You’re probably not surprised that the kids in Holden smoke name-brand cigarettes, Newports, mostly.  The litterers aren’t big liquor drinkers. This week I picked up an empty nip of Jamieson’s, the first sighting of the harder stuff in months.
(In case you’re wondering, yes, I probably do need a real hobby.)
So, even though it’s still mid-February, it’s starting to feel like spring. The birds are singing a bit more, the sun is higher and stronger, and, in places where the ground is warm, we’re starting to see the first tentative sprouts. The hard pack of snow and ice is relaxing its grip on the broken branches from the December storm and folks are working hard to gather up the brush for collection or burning. Tangled among the fallen limbs are lengths of electric, phone, and cable wires, leftovers from the hurried repairs.
On the way home on Monday, I noticed seed packets scattered on one lawn. This is a hopeful sign, I said to myself. Seed packets mean that people are not only thinking about spring, but they’re really getting ready, starting plants early, even though we can have freezing temperatures for three more months.
That’s what I thought until I looked more closely and saw that the 10 or so seed packets were all of one type, morning glory seeds. You’ve got to be a pretty big fan of morning glory to plant 10 packages of seeds and then toss the empty packets on your lawn. Unless. Hmm. Unless, well, let’s just say that everything old is new again.

If your kid develops a sudden, intense interest in seed catalogs, you probably won’t find much help from Paul Rogers nor from your Rite-Aid special on drug testing kits. Nope, you’ve got to talk to your kid. And good luck with that. As my wife says, if there was an easy answer, we’d have found it already.

Worcestershire Journal – While waiting for the weather to change

Although we’re deep in heart of Red Sox Nation, our #1 sport, spectator or participant, is, of course, the weather and those who forecast it. Our engagement ranges from Mark Twain’s quips about “raw apprentices in the Weather Clerk’s factory ” to the woman who, on a snowy day in Cambridge, boarded a bus, shook the snow from her head and shoulders, and muttered for all to hear, “Damn you, Don Kent.” The standard greeting for most folks in central New England this winter has been, “So, how long were you without power?” The ice storm of December 11-12, 2008 has become one of those reference points, like the Blizzard of ’78, the Worcester Tornado, and the Hurricane of ’38, that we use to organize our memories. Where were you? What did you do? How did it change your life?

Given our passion for all things weather, it’s not surprising that a crowd of more than 100 gathered at the Holden Senior Center on Thursday, February 12, to hear Barry Burbank , veteran WBZ-TV meteoroligist (trying typing that word three times quickly). Burbank, a graduate of then-Lowell Tech, joined WBZ in 1978. With the retirement of Dick Albert from WCVB at the end of this month, Barry is second in seniority among Boston broadcast meteorolgists, behind Harvey Leonard, and the one with the most time at one station.
At the start of his talk, Burbank commented on the amount of damage left over from the December storm, a perfect lead-in to a discussion about the four types of winter precipitation (snow, sleet, freezing rain, and rain), how it is that it can rain at 16° and snow at 37°. He described the  atmosphere as an invisible layer cake, each layer with its own temperature, winds, and humidity. The interaction of those layers is what makes weather forecasting so challenging. A slight change in any of the parameters, the Butterfly Effect, can invalidate hours of careful analysis by very smart people and big honkin’ computers, as anyone who has had to shovel a half-foot of “partly cloudy” can attest.
Typically, Burbank visits two or three school a week. He includes a couple of DVD video clips. The first , obviously geared to school kids, describes the Channel 4 weather team, some background information about how the weather forecast is prepared, and glimpses into some of the TV wizardry that goes into a broadcast weather forecast. (Hint: don’t wear a green shirt or you’ll disappear.) It’s a clever and fun view of weather and weather forecasting. The second video is kinda scary, a National Geographic film about tornadoes, in particularly about the April 26, 1991 tornado outbreak , when dozen tornadoes killed 24, injured hundreds, and destroyed countless homes throughout the midwest.
The tornado video opened discussion about the 1953 Worcester tornado, which killed 94 people and, for its time, was the longest-lasting tornado on record, staying on the ground for 84 minutes on its rampage from Petersham to Southborough. Many in the audience lived in the area at the time and shared vivid recollections of the terror brought by the storm and stunning destruction in its wake. “The ice storm was bad,” said one audience member, “but it’s nothing like a tornado.” Several others mentioned the Hurricane of 1938. Burbank noted that, although Massachusetts averages 1-3 tornadoes per year, most are short-lived and damage a small area. New England has typically seen more damage from hurricanes and tropical storms than from tornadoes.
Burbank doesn’t accept a fee for his speaking engagements, instead donating funds to Jack Williams’ Wednesday’s Child program. The Council on Aging, hosts of the event, made a donation to the program and then passed a basket in the audience, raising another $200.
The bonds of affection between New Englanders and our weather forecasters are long and strong. Barry concluded his presentation with a description of a regular weather luncheon that included names familiar to anyone in the area with a TV or radio in the last 60 years . Every month or so, Burbank joins Don Kent, Dr. Fred Ward, Bob Copeland, Bruce Schwoegler, and others get together and, as you might expect, talk about weather for three or four hours. As Barry mentioned each name, the audience murmured a bit of recognition and approval. These folks don’t make the weather, but our experience of the weather would be incomplete without them.

Worcestershire Journal – It’s winter, people.

Wednesday night’s Greater Boston included a segment, More snow means more school cancellations, about the number of school cancellations that were called on Wednesday morning, even before the first bit of snow fell. It turned out that Waltham canceled school while Cambridge did not. Emily Rooney, the show’s host, wondered aloud if the increasing common practice of canceling school was meant to forestall any lawsuits, should any of our precious little ones slip on the slippery sidewalk and suffer a boo-boo or, heaven forbid, an owie. David Frank, from Massachusetts Lawyers’ Weekly, indicated that the decision to cancel classes or not was a judgement call for school adminstrators and that, as such, they have a good deal of legal protection in exercising that judgement.

FWIW, I’ve not been able to locate any statistics regarding the number of cancelations statewide and whether that number has increased or not. State policy dictates that school districts schedule 185 days with the expectation that five days would be lost to cancelations. Back in 2001, schools were seeking relief from the 180-day requirement because of a particularly rough winter. They got no relief then, either. (PDF).

Of course, everyone beyond school age had it tougher when they were growing up. The Logger tells us that, when he was growing up in Vermont, you had to have had three buses flipped over on the side of the road, in flames, before school would be called off. If there were two buses in flames and one lying on its side, well, you might get a delayed opening.

So, we really don’t know if we’re worse weather wimps or not. It seems like it, although perhaps with some cause. We may be jumpy because, as Emily Rooney suggested, that double-plus–ungood snowstorm-induced traffic jam in December 2007 makes us skittish at the first hint of snow in the forecasts. That event, which had people in their cars or kids on buses for hours and hours, has terrorized our thinking. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger  unless it makes us stupid.

At this writing, there’s talk of a good-sized storm on Monday night/Tuesday, although the forecast models differ significantly on the type (rain or snow) and amount (little or a lot) of precipitation,

So, get out while you still can.

Or, not.

Planet USA edges Canadian All Stars in record setting All Star Tilt

The Worcester Sharks were the hosts with the most over the highly successful AHL All star weekend which culminated last night with the highest scoring All Star game of all time before 7,245 fans at The DCU Center.

It was plain to see that Worcester was ground zero for rabid minor league hockey fans from all parts of New England the mid Atlantic states and beyond. Surveying the jerseys on fans backs and the intensity of their cheers fans from hockey hotbeds such as Philadelphia PA, Hershey PA and Rochester NY made their allegiances known. Fans of the New England teams were out in force as well with backers of the Springfield Falcons, Hartford Wolfpack, Manchester Monarchs and Providence  Bruins out in force.

The loudest cheers of the weekend were reserved for the two Worcester players involved, Derek Joslin and Ryan Vesce. Joslin wowed the crowd on Sunday winning the hardest shot contest with a slap shot registering just over 98 mph.

The All Star game on Monday night was a fast paced shootout won by the Planet USA All Stars by a score of 14-11. Planet USA stormed back from an 8 to 5 deficit at the start of the 3rd period for the win scoring an unprecedented 9 goals in the final 20 minutes. The game featured 2 hat tricks, some superb goaltending by Massachusetts native Cory Schneider and the eventual game winner scored by Chris Bourque as his father Ray looked on from the crowd.

Over my two evenings watching the festivities I can freely admit that I did not hear one fan complain about anything wrong with the event or their experience here in town. Even in this down economy it seems that everyone was opening their wallets inside the DCU Center buying $6.25 beers and hot dogs and cotton candy for the kids and by the end of the night the stands that were selling Worcester 09 All Star merchandise such as pucks, hats and tshirts seemed to have their stock decimated. I hope that downtown businesses saw the uptick in business that they anticipated and that the AHL fans went back home with nothing but good things to say about our city.