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Boston to get new news site with reporters and everything, but they won't touch politics at all
By adamg on Fri, 09/24/2021 - 1:02pm
Dan Kennedy alerts us to the impending arrival of BOStoday, a newsletter that will be staffed with at least two reporters who "exude CurioCity, maximizing the live work and play environment in Boston," part of a national chain of such urban newsletters run by a company called 6AM.
We might've thought CurioCity is an attempt to rebrand the Brimfield Fair, but the chain says it picked Boston and other cities for new newsletters based on "their level of Pride in Place™" - to which Kennedy adds, "Yes, that’s right. A trademark symbol." Also, they will stay way the hell away from politics and instead focus on "small businesses and development, local events and the dining scene and charity and philanthropy," because, naturally, and especially here in Boston, politics doesn't affect any of that in the least.
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Comments
This is great, with Boston
This is great, with Boston having two conservative papers (the far right Herald and the center right Boston (Baker Booster Club) Globe. I wish they would touch politics since liberals and progressives don't have a voice here since John Henry took over the Globe. But at least we might get a little more about Boston and not just the squidport and the burbs.
Ah yes, the center right
Ah yes, the center right Globe, which is why they keep pushing Andrea Campbell and now pushing against Annissa Essaibi George and for Wu.
This is hardly a “paper”
This is the kind of publication that makes the Market Basket circular look like hard-hitting, no-nonsense journalism.
The Globe is "center-right"?
Wow. If you said "center-left" I wouldn't be writing back. As a regular Globe reader, I sometimes wonder what the conservative media is saying about certain stories, just to have balance. The Globe is pretty liberal, as media goes.
liberal = center-right as the world goes
in the vein of HRC, Obama, Biden
So, more mindless advertising
So, more mindless advertising fluff disguised as “news”?
Wonder how much it costs to put a “story” in there.
Sounds like another Improper Bostonian
Who should we pay for them to declare we have the Best Burger?
I expect you're being jocular, but The Improper's
food and drink coverage wasn't really about Boston boosterism relative to other cities. We did do an annual Boston's Best Issue with a Food & Drink section that highlighted what we thought were the best recent examples of various restaurants and categories and dishes in the Greater Boston area.
Hard to believe the last one of those was in 2018. Time flies, and everything pre-pandemic feels like it was a hundred years ago.
When pressed the IB would claim to be "a guide to nightlife"
and not a true news source. Anything goes. Basically the Rush Limbaugh defense of "you can't blame us for anything we say." Also, I know the guys who long held the trophy of Best Burger and it was tied to their advertising in the IB. Sorry Slim.
Your friends may have believed that buying
ads led to their Boston's Best award, and maybe their ad rep led them that way, but that's BS. I got assigned about half the writeups for The Improper's Food & Drink awards every year of my five-plus years there, and got to make the choices myself, though if pressed, was supposed to claim the decision was made by the entire F&D staff and unspecified local food mavens. I also got to shape the categories and invented a bunch of new ones as the scene evolved (food truck, gastropub, fast-casual, etc.)
Before my time at The Improper, I did the same thing at Stuff Magazine for four years (in collaboration with the awesome Ruth Tobias), which was one of my favorites, as it was much more free-form, and they let me invent some snarky, dissing awards for special awfulness, too. I did a smaller piece of the awards issue one year, 2008 if memory serves, for Boston Magazine (they gave me all the fried foods, presumably because I also owned the Cheap Eats beat at the Boston Phoenix at the time.)
To be fair, before getting involved myself, I assumed that ads drove choices. Turns out the magazines weren't Andelman-style taint-smoochers-for-hire after all.
Are you certain
You're not thinking of Boston Magazine? That's the one I've heard (love the rumor world) was how places won the 'Best of Boston' awards: through buying ad space.
Not true at BoMag either, at least not for
my small sample. I only wrote for them for a couple of years, worked only on one Best of Boston issue. But the dining awards they assigned me, maybe eight or nine categories, I got to choose the winner and write it up. I can't really speak to other categories.
But I was intimately involved with the Stuff Magazine and Improper Bostonian dining awards for over ten years, and there was a hard wall between editorial and sales on those choices. That pleasantly surprised me.
Thank you for the feedback.
As I noted above - gotta love the rumor scene.
Seems pretty obvious
That this sort of operation is essentially just a bunch of press releases rebranded as "news." And you get a bigger mention in the "news" if you advertise.
So, it's The Metro
without the (physical) mess.
A curated fluff site for Herb Chambers and Encore adverts.
Trade-marked cutesie slogans
Yep, ya lost me at "CurioCity" I'm afraid.
Politics touches everything in life, if you remove any possible reference to it the result is going to be very one-dimensional and vacuous.
Huh
"Politics touches everything in life" sounds like a miserable way to live
I'm certainly not actively
I'm certainly not actively thinking about politics all day long, the decisions made by government absolutely have an effect on everything in life whether you choose to think about them or not.
You can't deny reality by saying it sounds miserable.
Politics *does* impact everything in life. What are some aspects of living, working or playing in the city that you think aren't impacted by politics?
"Politics touches everything
- a white man
Conversation starter
I thought that CurioCity was the Boston souvenir and "antique" shop on Charles Street close to Boston Common and Beacon Street they were going to operate. Below their "offices."
Echoing everyone
Life is political. What a stupid addition to the fray of social media.
Worked great
For deadspin
actually
defector.com is doing so well that they’re hiring. also their masthead is comprised of most of the core GMG group
fwiw, portnoy pretty obviously took his victory lap a little too early - which of course is hilarious on it’s own merit since peter thiel probably hasn’t even heard of barstool.
My Point (poorly stated)
Yeah, it was deadspin's new management declaring the "stick to sports" mandate that killed the website.
Is it being hosted on the
Is it being hosted on the "New" New Internet?
BOStoday is an email
But no politics, lololololololololol
Not that I have any faith in this newsletter
But there is a spot for journalism which doesn't specifically get into the ins and outs of campaigns and elections. If anything, the lack of any other coverage in many media outlets is a big problem.
Take Uhub for example: Only a fairly small percentage of stories are specifically about candidates, elections, endorsements, etc. This site would be largely the same if those were eliminated.
Yes and no
I admit I tend to stay away from what we think of as "politics" in the traditional media sense: Stories about people running for office, polls, campaign finances, etc (aside from those "election roundups" and occasional debate coverage).
In terms of reporting, it would just take a lot of time to do halfway decently and there are just so many other interesting stories out there.
But, and maybe this is the poli-sci major in me talking, politics is way more than that.
Take development, one of the things this new newsletter will supposedly cover. How can you possibly cover that well in Boston without getting into politics? The entire Seaport is, at its heart, political: What it is today is because Tom Menino had a dream and the political will to get it done (one might wish his dream had included better public transit, parks, schools, etc., but that, too, is political). Across Fort Point Channel, how could one ignore the politics of why Don Chiofaro still hasn't been able to build a skyscraper on the water?
So I might not be covering development well, either, but to just say at the outset that you'll ignore politics in a place like Boston seems a bit foolhardy