Archive for May, 2008

I learned today that Boston’s classical music station WCRB’s web site recently, I think, added five channels one can choose from apart from the pre-existing stream of the station’s live broadcast. So if one finds oneself listening to a turgid late-19th Century piano piece on the live stream one can click through the five so-called [...]

Here are a few pictures from the 2008 Memorial Day parade in Watertown, Massachusetts. It was a great parade and I thank everyone who participated in it or helped organize it. Nice work all around. I would also like to express my gratitude to those who have served in the United States Armed Forces and [...]

While rifling through boxes in our basement I found a user-traffic study from 1998 of “Eight Search and Navigational Guides.” They were: AltaVista Excite Infoseek WebCrawler AOL NetFind HoBot Lycos and Yahoo. AOL and Yahoo are still around, the former thanks to its pre-Internet userbase and the latter thanks to winning the pre-Google traffic wars, [...]

Swedish daily tabloid Aftonbladet, owned by Norwegian media company Schibsted, has shut down its daily free commuter newspaper, Punkt SE (literally “Dot SE”. Had I been a Swedish headline writer I would have gone with punkt slut, which is quite a bit funnier in English than in Swedish). Schibsted decided that wasting time and money [...]

Boston Herald reporter John Tomase attempts to explain how he went wrong in reporting Tapegate, a hoax that should now be known as Tomasegate (or Tomasequiddick, if you prefer). Tomase’s explanation for his misstep is basically that he was told an urban legend so many times that he pretty much had no choice but to [...]

The Boston Herald‘s apology for printing the Tapegate story is rendered worthless by Tony Massarotti – who, like John Tomase, is a seamhead from Tufts University in Medford – in a Tourette Syndrome inspired article today. It’s clear that the Herald is not out to apologize or mend fences but to squeeze as much money [...]

Beleaguered Boston Herald sports reporter John Tomase’s coverage of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s press conference on what former New England Patriots employee Matt Walsh had to say about the team’s videotaping habits includes the following passage: [A]fter the press conference, NFL counsel Gregg Levy explained that Walsh had passed on observations from the walkthrough to [...]

A paid daily circulation of 388,000. A free daily circulation of 335,000. More than 3 million monthly web site visitors. 17 visitor reference, lifestyle and economic development publications. 181 penny saver editions. 97% of all this can be yours for $630 million. Actually, it can’t anymore, because Cablevision has already bought Newsday in a $650 [...]

Three topics to ponder: CHB, John Tomase, and whether Pat Purcell should waste money on beefing up the Boston Herald’s sport section. Mark In The Car is on the phone. What’s up, Mark? Yo, Matt, listen, dude. All these people who rag on Shank are retards, figuratively speaking. Take this guy Boston Blood Sox who [...]

Massachusetts’s population grew 1.6% from 2000 to 2007 according to estimates by the United States Census Bureau. Last week the Bureau released estimates for population changes with-in the different races in the 50 states and the United States. The demographic story for Massachusetts is the familiar one: A slow decline in the number of whites, [...]