First trooper singular

Linguist John McWhorter, in a commentary for NPR's "All Things Considered," March 27:

One cannot refer to a single soldier as a troop. This means that calling 20,000 soldiers "20,000 troops" depersonalizes the soldiers as individuals, and makes a massive number of living, breathing individuals sound like some kind of mass or substance, like water or Jell-O, or some kind of freight.

President Bush, March 29:

We stand united in saying loud and clear that when we've got a troop in harm's way, we expect that troop to be fully funded.

Crowdsourcing the governor

I want to try a crowdsourcing experiment today.

Lisa Wangsness reports in the Boston Globe that law-enforcement officials, community activists and the like are trying to restore $11 million in funding for an antigang program that Gov. Deval Patrick proposes to eliminate so that he can pay for the first 250 of the 1,000 new police officers he promised during his campaign. State Sen. Jarrett Barrios, D-Cambridge, whose progressive credentials are unquestioned, discusses the issue on his blog.

So far, this sounds like a classic clash of priorities, with Patrick on what is arguably the wrong side. According to Barrios, the Charles Shannon Community Safety Initiative, as the antigang program is known, helps fund "community-based outreach programs, summer jobs programs, reentry programs, after-school programs and community policing initiatives targeting gangs and youth violence." Yes, we all want more police officers, but we also know that a comprehensive approach to crime is the only thing that works in the long run.

But wait — this isn't just a clash of priorities. According to this March 2 Globe story by Andrea Estes and Wangsness, the 250 new police officers are largely being funded by taking other money away from police departments. Here's what they reported back then:

According to the administration, the money to hire the additional officers would come from a new $30 million account for local police. However, $20 million of that money would be taken from the police grant program, which is traditionally distributed to local police by the Legislature. And some of it is already used for hiring police officers, raising questions about whether the Patrick plan would actually add the number of officers that he asserts.

So what, precisely, is it that I want to try crowdsourcing? I want to know if this is as bad as it looks, or if there is some explanation. What Estes and Wangsness describe sounds like a grotesquely exploitative shell game. There's got to be more to it than this. Patrick couldn't be this cynical. Could he?

I'm not going to be chained to my laptop all day, but I'd like to post comments and links as I'm able. I'll point to the most informative of them right here on the front page. At best, this could be an interesting exercise in group media criticism. At worst — hey, it's still Friday.

Update: Maybe this is as bad as it looks. One Media Nation reader points to this March 11 Globe story on the $11 million cut. Here's an excerpt:

"We were shocked," said Emmett Folgert, describing reaction to Patrick's elimination of the $11 million in antigang funding. The veteran director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative, a Fields Corner outreach program, said the money not only helped Boston, which received $3 million, but began to seed new prevention efforts in New Bedford, Fall River, and other cities dealing with youth violence problems. "To abort these new programs that have already achieved success and community support is unthinkable," said Folgert.

Another Media Nation reader wonders if Patrick is "desperate" rather than "cynical" — that is, he's so intent on fulfilling his campaign promise to hire 1,000 new police officers that he's doing more harm than good. An interesting theory.

What controversy?

Check out what Blue Mass Groupie Kate says after several days of well-documented privacy problems at DevalPatrick.com (fixed, fortunately) and concerns expressed even by the Outraged Liberal, a Patrick admirer, about soliciting campaign contributions on a site that's supposed to be a high-minded exercise in online governance:

For those involved in Deval Patrick's innovative, grassroots-driven, decentralized, and empowering campaign, any "controversy" about the governor's relaunched website is much ado about nothing. It appears that those who attack this website are threatened by ordinary citizens being active and engaged.

And what is the reaction of BMG co-editor David Kravitz? "Well said, Kate!"

Priceless.

Sports talk

The Tracksters report in today's Boston Herald that John Dennis and Gerry Callahan may move from WEEI (AM 850) to WBCN (104.1 FM) when their contract expires later this summer. As is always the case with radio, this is a battle of corporate titans, as WBCN is owned by CBS and WEEI by Entercom.

Which reminds me — is it just my imagination, or are the jocks on 'EEI talking about baseball less since the Red Sox moved to sister station WRKO (AM 680)? It seems that every time I tune in lately, they're talking about the Celtics' draft prospects, a subject that I imagine must be about as popular with most sports fans as, oh, double-entry bookkeeping.

What's next? The Bruins? Good grief.

The right direction

In following up on DevalPatrick.com this morning, I found that the privacy concerns have been largely addressed. Now, when you try to create a new account, the very first thing you have to do is enter an e-mail address. Next, you are prompted to enter your name, address and community. I tried to enter just my last name and town, as I did yesterday, and was blocked from going any further.

It still needs some work. It looks as though the system won't accept "St." as an abbreviation for "Street," but will accept "St" (without the period). But this is a huge improvement over yesterday.

Given that folks at the Patrick campaign seem to get it, why do some people continue to defend this breach of privacy? Despite the challenge I issued yesterday, no one has been able to show me a Web site that offers quite the smorgasbord of information that DevalPatrick.com was making available to people. And yet.

The usually sensible Amused but Informed Observer writes to Media Nation wanting to know how Patrick's Web site is (or, now, was) "any different from the street lists that have been sold in town clerk's offices since the beginning of time." Answer: Because you have to walk into the city or town clerk's office and either buy a directory — or use it there — for just that one community. No easy, technology-enhanced fishing expeditions, in other words.

Amused and several others compare what the Patrick site was doing to what's available at online registries of deeds. OK, I'll bite. Here is the site for the Southern Essex District Registry of Deeds, serving the heart of Media Nation. It serves 33 cities and towns, which means that you can't do one-stop shopping for all of the state's 351 communities, as you could with the Patrick site. And yes, I was able to look up some mortgage information about someone I know. But it's not very user-friendly, and you have to be very specific about what you're trying to find.

Finally, Tom Keane was among those who pointed out that DevalPatrick.com was hardly alone in (accidentally) offering a reverse phonebook. Yes, of course. I love reverse phonebooks; here's the one I generally use. Unlike commercial services, though, DevalPatrick.com presumably had access to unlisted phone numbers, since it was based on state records.

My bottom line is this: Before it was fixed, the Patrick site was violating people's privacy. And if you could somehow cobble together similar examples from government sites, commercial services and the like, it doesn't matter, because the Patrick folks were violating your privacy on a partisan political site, paid for with campaign contributions. It was wrong, and I'm glad it's been fixed.

Of course, if Patrick's people want anyone other than their sycophants to take the site seriously as a tool of governance, they're going to have to get that big "Contribute" button off. Not likely, eh?

Awful news

Of course, the human dimension is what's paramount in the news that Tony Snow, like Elizabeth Edwards before him, has suffered a serious recurrence of cancer.

What's especially depressing, though, is that the two announcements conjure up the bad old days, when a cancer diagnosis was inevitably seen as a death sentence. Snow and Edwards are high-profile cancer survivors. So it is likely that they'll now be seen by many people as examples of the limits of medicine.

Or maybe not. Maybe each will lead unexpectedly long lives, managing their disease like a chronic rather than a terminal illness.

It hardly seems relevant at this point, but I can't help but note that Elizabeth Edwards is the best thing about the Edwards campaign, and that Tony Snow is not only a huge upgrade over his predecessors as White House spokesman but also seems like one of the few genuine human beings in the Bush administration.

Best wishes to both.

Breach of privacy at DevalPatrick.com

After reading about Secretary of State Bill Galvin's concern (Globe story here; Herald story here) that DevalPatrick.com was not sufficiently protecting users' privacy, I decided to experiment by starting the process of becoming a registered user.

First I was asked to enter my name or phone number. I entered "Dan Kennedy," along with my town. No go. So then I entered just "Kennedy," again along with my town.

Whoa! I got 78 names along with the streets they live on. The list consisted of everyone in my town named "Kennedy," "Kenneth" or, oddly enough, "Kent," "Kondo" or "Kimby." Yes, Mrs. Media Nation and I were among the 78.

What's weird about this is that the names are listed apparently for the sole purpose of your being able to verify that one of them is you. But you get the complete list without actually having to complete the registration process. So I can enter "Chen" and "Wellesley" and get another nice long list of names and streets, or, say, "Purcell" and "Weston." Oh, look! There's Pat Purcell, publisher of the Boston Herald.

I have no idea why this is necessary. Certainly I can't think of another Web site for which I've registered that requires me to choose from a list of names. I enter my name, and away I go. I suppose the DevalPatrick.com scheme makes it easier to avoid the problem of someone posting nutty comments under a pseudonym. But can't an intern at this campaign-contribution-funded site intercept those comments? Surely that would be better than violating everyone's privacy.

The site carries with it this disclaimer: "www.devalpatrick.com believes strongly in protecting people's privacy. Data on this site is limited to ONLY data that is now publicly available at any number of locations, including city and town halls, and websites. The site further limited data today by eliminating specific street address numbers."

Is that right? Can any of Media Nation's readers find a single Web site that displays entire lists of people along with the streets that they live on? (If you can, I'll post it.) Yes, you can always get stuff like this by going to your town or city clerk's office. But the hassle of having to do that is in itself a guarantee of a certain degree of privacy.

I'm with John Reinstein of the ACLU of Massachusetts, who tells the Globe's Andrea Estes, "I'm puzzled by the whole thing." And, unfortunately, I have to agree with the Herald's Casey Ross, who calls this "yet another embarrassing misstep" for the governor.

And no, I didn't complete the registration process.

Even worse: I just tried registering by entering my phone number, and up popped the Media Nation family. Unlike the registration-by-name feature, you don't have to enter a city or town when you enter a phone number. So DevalPatrick.com also works as a very nice reverse phonebook, using data you were required to provide to the state and paid for by a partisan political-campaign committee.

Paying for the news

San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus and Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media, have been going back and forth over a column Lazarus recently wrote on whether newspapers should start charging for their online editions. In brief, Lazarus: yes; Gillmor: no.

I'm not going to take on every argument each is making. Rather, I want to address the notion that newspapers are hurting because they're giving their product away on the Web. Certainly Lazarus believes that, and he goes so far as to suggest that newspapers be given an antitrust exemption so they can get together and demand payment, both from readers and from aggregators such as Yahoo News and Google News.

Lazarus isn't entirely wrong, but the real problem is that Web advertising simply isn't as valuable as print advertising. Much of this is because lucrative classified ads have migrated to the likes of Craigslist and Monster. The Wall Street Journal has succeeded in charging for its Web edition, and the New York Times has been relatively successful with its much-maligned TimesSelect service.

But I don't think most newspapers are ever going to be able to charge for their online editions — and I don't believe it's fair that they try, either. Here's why:

• Readers have purchased their own personal printing presses — their computers — at a cost of $1,000 to $2,000.
• They've also bought their own distribution systems — Internet access — and are paying $30 to $50 a month.
• The interconnectedness of the Web has greatly changed reading habits. People who regularly whip around 10 or 15 newspaper sites are not going to pay full-blown subscription fees to all of those papers.

So is there a way to get some money out of readers? I think so, and it goes back to the earliest days of the Web. About a dozen years ago, people were talking about digital cash — electronic money that you could spend online without your credit-card company being able to trace it back to you, just like the cash in your pocket. (It's all in the math.) Here is a 1994 story from Wired that I remember reading when it first came out.

That type of digital cash never caught on. But the idea is that you might read 20 articles at a variety of Web sites during a given morning and pay a tenth of a cent apiece — or a penny apiece, or a nickel, or a dime. These microtransactions would be handled anonymously and automatically. Your privacy would not be compromised, and you wouldn't have to slow down to enter usernames and passwords.

As newspaper executives try to figure out how to move into an all- or mostly online future, it may be time to take another look at microtransactions and digital cash.

Dueling wikis

The Associated Press reports on Citizendium, an attempt to create a user-written online encyclopedia that's more reliable than Wikipedia. Citizendium's founder, Larry Sanger, says he's a co-founder of Wikipedia — a claim that's vigorously disputed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

As you'll see if you follow the links, Citizendium and Wikipedia look much the same, and they're based on the same idea. The difference is that Sanger says he'll require real names and use a more rigorous system of expert verification.

There's no doubt Wikipedia has had its problems, such as the editor who fooled the New Yorker — and everyone else — about his credentials. Like many college instructors, I tell my students not to cite it, though I also tell them it can be a great starting point.

Still, Wikipedia has achieved a certain critical mass. Citizendium will be worth watching, but I wonder whether it might be easier to fix Wikipedia than to start all over.

A night in New Haven

I can't be sure, but I might have seen Gov. Deval Patrick's late father perform. In Sally Jacobs' riveting story (link now fixed) in today's Boston Globe about the governor's complicated relationship with his father, Pat Patrick, we learn that the elder Patrick played for a while with the band NRBQ.

I once saw NRBQ at a bar in New Haven in the late 1970s. Pat Patrick supposedly played with the band for a time in the early '80s. So it doesn't quite match up. But given the haziness of memory over events that took place a quarter-century ago, it's possible that he was up on stage playing sax that night.

What I really would have liked to see was the Sun Ra Arkestra, Pat Patrick's main musical outlet. Unfortunately for me, it never happened.

The permanent online campaign

If Gov. Deval Patrick wants to use the Web as a governing tool, as his supporters say, then shouldn't he be doing it here? Why should we look at the soon-to-be-unveiled DevalPatrick.com site as anything other than part of his permanent campaign?

By the way, if you go to DevalPatrick.com right now, you'll find that you can only do two things: (1) get onto his campaign's e-mail list and (2) give money. Of course.

Update: The Outraged Liberal has a characteristically smart take about DevalPatrick.com, which does, indeed, look promising. But O.L. and I will have to continue to differ on one thing: the appropriateness of Patrick's using his privately funded campaign site as his primary outlet for online governance.

I still think this ought to be taking place on his gubernatorial site, and that there's something vaguely wrong about making it an extension of his campaign. But, of course, he wouldn't be able to solicit campaign donations on his official site — something that makes even O.L. a little queasy.

Update II: Media Nation's views get some play in the Herald, in Casey Ross' "Monday morning briefing."

Mapping the vote

Check out NYTimes.com's interactive map of yesterday's congressional vote on the Iraq war. You can do breakouts by urban, suburban and rural districts; affluent and poor districts; mostly white and mostly minority districts; and Kerry and Bush districts. Roll your cursor over a square and you get thumbnail information on each House member and how he or she voted.

Washingtonpost.com does something similar with its Votes Database. It's not as graphically interesting, but it does let you break out the vote by, among other things, a House member's astrological sign and by whether or not she or he is a Baby Boomer.

Don't blame blogging

Did blogging lead Ben Smith down the road to error? Or did he err because he was trying to do real-time reporting on a rapidly unfolding story?

Smith, as you may already know, is the blogger for Politico who reported that John Edwards would suspend his campaign — "and may drop out completely" — because of Elizabeth Edwards' recurrent cancer. Smith wrote a heartfelt mea culpa later in the day, and Howard Kurtz has the complete rundown this morning in the Washington Post.

Smith had what he says was a reliable anonymous source and a chance to make a splash. He made a mistake that anyone could make, and the attacks to which he's been subjected are unwarranted. Still, I find it curious that he blames his error, at least in part, on blogging itself. Smith writes:

Though I've spent the last several years at major newspapers — the New York Observer and the New York Daily News most recently — I've done much of my reporting on blogs, and have developed an instinct to let my readers know whatever I know, as soon as I know it. The medium typically allows you to refine and update a story as it changes — including saying, "Well, my original source had it wrong."

But the scale of this story was simply too big to report that way, to share information with high but imperfect confidence — and without making that level of confidence crystal clear. I should have waited for a second source, or hedged the item much more fully. Or simply waited for the news conference like everybody else.

Smith also quotes his editor, John Harris, as telling him: "I believe a blog item is different than a story — not in standards of accuracy or fairness — but in the ability to report and reveal a breaking story in real time: You write what you know when you know it. BUT, and here's where you went wrong and we let you go wrong, you can not write more than you know."

Well, now. It strikes me that what Smith did was not qualitatively different from what radio and, especially, television journalists have been doing for years: Reporting live from the scene, offering something no newspaper can match, but sometimes getting it wrong because the story is still unfolding.

To screw up as a blogger is to link to a bit of news that has already been proven wrong (see this and this), or to a site that you should know lacks credibility.

Once you pick up the phone and start calling people, though, you're acting not as a blogger, but as a reporter who has a blog. And the normal standards of verification apply.

McNamara departs

I'm playing catch-up — if you're looking for any intelligent comment from me, it will have to wait. But I can't let the day end without noting that Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara is taking the buyout and leaving the paper.

McNamara, who won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, brings an unusually keen social conscience to her post, and her voice will be deeply missed. She was also a fine news reporter for many years prior to being named a columnist.

And here is Globe editor Marty Baron's memo on his accepting buyout applications from 24 staff members.

Bailey to Media Nation: Call me!

Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey e-mails Media Nation:

dan, i have always loved you stuff. but how can a media critic of your standing not call me first! for the record: i am staying. please correct.

best, bailey

Media Nation responds: Steve, thanks for the kind words. And I'm glad you're staying.

I'll save my shtick on what bloggers do and don't do for another time. But I will say that pointing to interesting stuff on the Web is the essence of blogging.

Sometimes you point to something that turns out to be wrong. So consider this a correction.

Speaking of Bailey ...

The city's best columnist, Steve Bailey (left), and legendary investigative reporter Stephen Kurkjian are among those who've told Boston Globe editor Marty Baron that, all things considered, they'd rather be somewhere else. (Update: Bailey tells Adam Reilly that he's staying put.)

Michael Calderone reports in the New York Observer that some 30 Globe staff members have said they want to take advantage of early-retirement incentives the paper is offering in a bid to shrink its news and editorial-page ranks by 19 (via Romenesko). The Bailey-Kurkjian development comports with information Media Nation picked up independently.

The loss of Kurkjian would be significant, though he is near retirement age. Bailey is another matter altogether. No Boston columnist, and few journalists of any kind, breaks as much news as Bailey. It's unimaginable that he'd leave, but, then, a lot of unimaginable things are taking place at the Globe and other struggling newspapers these days.

Even though — or maybe because — he has the best forum in town, Bailey is occasionally rumored to be moving on. Three years ago he turned down an offer from Pat Purcell to work for the Boston Herald. So we'll have to see how this plays out.

Baited and hooked

The most inadvertently (I think) funny line of the day appears in Steve Bailey's Boston Globe column:

"He is not going to give you a fish; he is going to teach you how to fish," says John Fish, president of Suffolk Construction Co.

John Fish knows fish.

Gonzales is just the beginning

Is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' imminent departure really going to be enough to put the fired-prosecutors story to rest? It shouldn't — certainly not after today's disclosure in the Washington Post that Gonzales' office was teeing up U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald while Fitzgerald was in the midst of the Valerie Plame leak investigation.

Fitzgerald was never actually fired, of course. But for the administration to be making ominous noises about his lack of loyalty at the very moment that he was investigating possible illegal behavior in the White House is repellent, to say the least.

TPM Muckraker has a great synopsis of the latest from last night's document-dump.

The media are fully revved up now, but the danger is that they'll drop the story as soon as Gonzales departs. They shouldn't. Just as Scooter Libby's conviction in the leak case told us more about Dick Cheney than it did about Libby, so do the shenanigans of Gonzales and his former aide D. Kyle Sampson tell us more about President Bush's no-hold-bars political operation than it does about Gonzales and Sampson.

Yes, Harriet Miers and Karl Rove, that means you.

Meanwhile, "On the Media" this week has a useful discussion with Slate legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick, who puts to rest the notion that the Bush administration's attempt to get rid of eight U.S. attorneys in midstream is somehow analagous to Bill Clinton's replacing all 93 at the beginning of his presidency.

Media Nation on wheels

Sorry for the light posting. I have been busy upgrading the official vehicle of Media Nation from a 1993 Volvo 960 to a 2007 Toyota Corolla LE. The Volvo went to its reward in engine-smoking glory on the back roads of Middleborough recently despite having just 163,000 miles on it. Media Nation Jr. has his permit, so the Corolla has been equipped with every safety feature known to humankind.

Open Web, closed sites

If you were online in the early 1990s, then today's New York Times story on MySpace's entry into politics will seem familiar. Back then, Prodigy users couldn't send e-mail to friends on America Online, who in turn were walled off from folks on CompuServe. We were still a few years away from the Internet being expanded so that all online services — and their customers — could talk to each other.

Well, here we go again. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain are just a few of the presidential candidates who have deep, useful Web sites. But apparently that's no longer enough. Now candidates have to have separate sites on MySpace and Facebook. Up next: Second Life, an alternate-reality site explained last summer by Camille Dodero, then of the Boston Phoenix, now of the Village Voice.

At least MySpace and Facebook are free — it's not like having to pay monthly subscription fees to Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe in order to stay in touch with all of your online friends. (Not that anyone could actually afford to do that.) But it strikes me that politicians, by setting up shop on such social-networking sites, are moving backwards. The interactivity of the Web is being broken up into chunks. Content on MySpace and Facebook can't even be Googled. You've got to register and log on to each site if you want to keep up.

Here is Obama's MySpace site; here is his Facebook site. (You can access the MySpace page without an account, although you won't be able to do anything but look. To view the Facebook page you'll have to register.) Any reason these couldn't be integrated into his main site? Of course not. And I honestly don't think it's me who's being the Luddite here. I remember how frustrating the online world could be before everyone was connected. Why are we moving back to the bad old days?

A few months ago Lisa Williams got me to sign up for yet another social-networking site, LinkedIn, which I guess is supposed to be like a Facebook for grownups. I do want to explore it when I get some time, as it seems to have some pretty neat features. Ultimately, though, it's yet another walled-off community that I'll need to log on to on a regular basis.

No doubt Hillary, Barack et al. won't be far behind.

Looking at media ownership

Tonight I'll be moderating an hour-long panel discussion called "How Media Ownership Affects Content," part of the "Critical Focus" series on media issues produced by Somerville Community Access Television. The program will be shown live at 8 p.m. in Somerville and Cambridge, and should be webcast here. Joining me will be:

• Paul La Camera, president of WBUR Radio (90.9 FM)
• Robert Hilliard, a communications professor at Emerson College
• Yolanda Hippensteele, outreach director at the media-reform group Free Press

Do credit

A few years ago, when I was working for the Boston Phoenix, I called Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz and suggested he look into why the Boston Globe had run with a story broken by one of my Phoenix colleagues without giving the Phoenix any credit.

I don't have Kurtz's exact quote, but this is pretty close: If I investigated every complaint I got about reporters who didn't think their work had been properly credited, I'd never do anything else.

Indeed, and it's a line I ended up using myself a few times — including the day that I was simultaneously fielding complaints that the Globe had not credited the Boston Herald, and that the Herald had not credited some other paper. It's endemic, and there are no generally agreed-upon rules for when you should and when you shouldn't.

All of which is a long way of saying that Adam Reilly's treatment of the credit issue in this week's Phoenix is among the more thoughtful analyses of this sore subject that I've seen.

Conflicting accounts

Wouldn't you think that before Gov. Deval Patrick put forth his latest account of his interactions with federal officials prior to the New Bedford immigration raid, he'd make sure he wouldn't be immediately contradicted by two members of his own administration? The Globe's Yvonne Abraham has the details. And the Massachusetts Liberal has a smart, deep take on all this.

"Shift Happens"

One of my students passed this along:


Shift Happens - Click Here for more great videos and pictures!

I don't know where this is from, nor have I verified the facts contained therein — although it seems that they're directionally correct, even if a few details could be disputed.

In any case, it's about six minutes long and well worth watching.

The truth about the New Bedford raid

Two Globe columnists today come up aces today in the ongoing controversy over last week's immigration raid in New Bedford.

First, Eileen McNamara fills in the details of something that's been out there from the beginning: that Gov. Deval Patrick was informed of the upcoming raid even before his inauguration, and that Department of Social Services Commissioner Harry Spence was involved in planning at various stages — right down to a phone call he received the night before "to coordinate law enforcement and child protection aspects of the raid." (Spence, as I've observed previously, is the grand master of avoiding blame.) McNamara writes:

So, enough with the breast-beating pretense that the Patrick administration was blindsided by the stealth tactics of shadowy federal immigration officials. This is political grandstanding of the most transparent kind.

Read it all — otherwise you'll miss the priceless comment from Patrick's communications director, Nancy Fernandez Mills.

Next up is Jeff Jacoby, with the first of a two-parter that examines the real problem with illegal immigration:

[I]f hundreds of thousands of immigrants come here illegally each year, is it realistic to conclude that we have a massive crime problem for which a ferocious crackdown is the only solution? Perhaps it is the case instead that America's immigration quotas are simply too low for the world's most dynamic economy. And perhaps the persistent influx of industrious workers is not a plague to be cursed, but a blessing to be better managed.

Buttressing both McNamara's and Jacoby's arguments is a profile by the Globe's Irene Sege of Barthila Solano, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador whose tenuous family situation has been thrown into chaos following the arrest of her husband, Valencio Salas, last week.

"I don't understand what harm we're doing," Solano tells Sege. "We work so hard."

A heartbreaking story

If you read nothing else today, you must read this New York Times story on the parents of infants with fatal conditions. It is riveting and heartbreaking. If you can get through it without tearing up, you're not paying attention. Watch the video, too.

Flatlining

Media Nation readership, usually around 1,000 visitors on weekdays, spiked to 2,400 last Tuesday after Doc Searls gave me a plug. Then Site Meter crashed, and I've been showing nothing but zeroes since Thursday. The Site Meter blog acknowledges problems, but makes it sound like they've been fixed already. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Budget cuts for the blind

Best wishes to Diane Patrick. Depression is a serious illness, and the fact that Gov. Patrick felt the need to make such a public announcement suggests that he and his family have been struggling with this for some time.

But while the governor helps his wife recover, let's not ignore the public's business. Today, Boston Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis reports that Patrick's proposed budget would cut $118,000 for Braille and audio books for the blind.

If Patrick promised to do that last fall, I missed it.

Update: Here is Jessica Fargen's news story on the cuts.

Two for the Globe

Media Nation joins Jon Keller and Adam Reilly in congratulating the Boston Globe for its two (according to Editor & Publisher) Pulitzer Prize nominations. The Globe has reportedly been nominated in Local Reporting for its "Debtor's Hell" series, on unscrupulous bill collectors, and in National Reporting, for its stories on President Bush's promiscuous use of presidential signing statements to negate the will of Congress.

Each is an example of public-service journalism at its best, and it's a demonstration that — for all the angst that has enveloped the newspaper business over rapacious ownership and declining circulation and advertising revenues — large metropolitan dailies like the Globe, as well as national papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, remain the places where most important journalism gets done.

The "Debtor's Hell" series was headed up by Walter Robinson, who is now a colleague at Northeastern. The signing-statement story was reported by Charlie Savage.

"Debtor's Hell" is also a fine example of how the smart use of technology can enhance a story that, no matter how good, would have ended up as day-old fish wrap just a few years ago. The electronic version goes way beyond "shovelware" — that is, print content thrown online with little regard for the Web's strengths and weaknesses.

The main page offers podcasts, offsite resources and the all-important tip line for follow-ups. Dig a little deeper and you'll find a message board, audio Q&As, interactive graphics like this, the transcript of an online chat with Robinson and source documents, such as this, filed by Peter Damon, in which he informed bill collectors that he was in the hospital being treated for the loss of both arms in Iraq.

My guess is that the Pulitzer judges will only be looking at the clips. Someday, though, when the winning team is honored, it ought to include the Web producers alongside the reporters, photographers and editors.

The Pulitzer winners will be announced on April 16.

Goldman returns

Back when he was a prominent Democratic political consultant, Michael Goldman had one trait that endeared him to those of us who were young, unknown reporters working for small papers: He was every bit as willing to talk with you as he was a reporter for the Globe or the Herald. (Republican consultant Charley Manning, who does more corporate than political work these days, shares that admirable quality.)

Now Goldman, after working for the past few years as a talk-show host for Bloomberg Radio, is returning to the consulting wars. Check out the item at the end of Joan Vennochi's column today.

I talked with Goldman this morning, and he was as frenetic as ever. And he had some excellent advice for those who are ready to write off Gov. Deval Patrick, recalling that Michael Dukakis, for whom he once worked, got off to an exceedingly rocky start in his first term (1975-'78), and that even Bill Weld — known for his smooth relations with the media — had to negotiate a pretty steep learning curve.

Welcome back, Michael.

Obama and Selma revisited

Several Media Nation readers (see this, this and this) believe I misread the New York Times account of Barack Obama's speech in Selma, Ala. In my original item, I somehow got it in my head that the Times had reported Obama was claiming his parents had actually met at the famed Selma civil-rights protest in 1965 — something he quite clearly did not do.

But after rereading the story, I now see that's not what the Times was reporting, and I'm not sure how to explain my muddleheadedness other than to cite misfiring synapses and the phases of the moon.

In fact, Obama was born in 1961. So when he suggested that Selma inspired his mother, a white woman from Kansas, and his father, a black man from Kenya, to marry, he was asserting an impossibility.

I stand by what I said about the Times' coverage of Hillary Clinton's speech.

Liar, liar?

Yesterday's New York Times coverage of Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's joint appearance in Selma, Ala., includes a couple of snarky references suggesting that each of them lied in appealing to African-American voters. Those references are, unfortunately for the Times (and for the candidates), based on not one whiff of evidence. In fact, the evidence cuts the other way.

First Obama. Times reporters Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny write:

Mr. Obama relayed a story of how his Kenyan father and his Kansan mother fell in love because of the tumult of Selma, but he was born in 1961, four years before the confrontation at Selma took place. When asked later, Mr. Obama clarified himself, saying: "I meant the whole civil rights movement."

Did Obama try to suggest that his parents met during the famed civil-rights protest in Selma? I can't find the exact text of Obama's speech, but Healy and Zeleny's use of "because of" (as opposed to, for example, "at") indicates that Obama was saying no such thing. And in the Washington Post, Anne E. Kornblut and Peter Whoriskey report Obama's words thusly:

Referring to his heritage, Obama said that although his ancestors were not slaves, the civil rights movement inspired his African father to move from Kenya to seek an American education and eventually marry his white mother — "whose great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves." "But she had a different idea," Obama said.

"Something stirred across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks were willing to march across a bridge," Obama said, explaining that, as a result, his parents "got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born." Earlier in the day at a prayer breakfast, the Illinois Democrat said: "If it hadn't been for Selma, I wouldn't be here."

That doesn't even remotely sound as though Obama was trying to claim that his parents met in Selma. So why did the Times report that Obama "clarified himself," as though he were backing down from an extraordinary inference? Sorry, but that kind of interpretative snark just isn't fair.

As for Clinton, the Times' Healy and Zeleny offer us this:

Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, recalled going with her church youth minister as a teenager in 1963 to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Chicago. Yet, in her autobiography and elsewhere, Mrs. Clinton has described growing up Republican and being a "Goldwater Girl" in 1964 — in other words, a supporter of the presidential candidacy of Senator Barry M. Goldwater, who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Got that? The young Hillary Rodham was a Goldwater supporter. Therefore she must have opposed civil rights for African-Americans. Therefore, she must be lying when she claims that she saw King speak.

Did Clinton hear King speak in Chicago in 1963? As Bob Somerby would say (today being a day for extra-careful attribution), we have no idea. But the fact that she was a Goldwater supporter in 1964 sheds no light whatsoever on the question. And there's circumstantial evidence to suggest that she's telling the truth. Take, for instance, this, from an online review of Clinton's autobiography, "Living History":

In the interlude, she tells of hearing Martin Luther King speak in Chicago, of being in the middle (as an observer) of the Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968, and her beginnings of questioning the system of limited women’s opportunities in America. Rodham was determined to achieve, and she made her move while in high school, serving in student government and becoming a political activist.

And here's something from a 2003 BusinessWeek review of "Living History" and Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars": "Dozens of stories provide bits of insights into Hillary Clinton's complex psyche.... You see how a lecture by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. opened her eyes to civil rights ..."

In other words, Clinton's claim that she heard Martin Luther King speak in Chicago isn't something she made up to feed the poor saps in Selma on Sunday — rather, it's something she's been saying for years. But you wouldn't know that if you read only the Times.

Update: I was wrong about the Times and Obama. Read this.

Borges suspended

Globe football writer Ron Borges has been suspended for two months without pay for lifting material without attribution. This, from the Globe's story, gets to the heart of the matter:

Borges's column, like other sports 'notes' columns in the Globe, contain[s] a line at the bottom, reading, 'material from personal interviews, wire services, other beat writers, and league and team sources was used in this report.' But [sports editor Joe] Sullivan said reporters are expected to use the shared notes for background material and not to lift the language directly from one another.

As a condition of his suspension, Borges has to refrain from broadcast appearances, the paper's editor, Marty Baron, is quoted as saying. Baron also labels Borges' transgression as "plagiarism."

The Herald's Messenger Blog goes with a fuller statement from Baron that also invokes the "P"-word.

I guess the biggest question is whether Borges will accept his punishment or quit the Globe. Borges, like many prominent sportswriters, has several broadcast and writing gigs. But his spot at the Globe is his meal ticket; without that, he wouldn't be nearly as much in demand. My guess is that he'll do his time and stick around.

The next step the Globe should take is to reword and clarify that disclaimer. It's a landmine. I'd be willing to bet that Borges still doesn't think he did anything wrong. (Don't misunderstand me: I think he definitely crossed the line.) Here's a suggestion: Write the "notes" columns like blogs, quoting from other papers directly when appropriate, and linking in the online versions. No disclaimer necessary.

Ron Borges and that disclaimer

After the Boston Globe emerged in the late 1990s from its travails over ethically challenged columnists Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith, the editors began taking a number of steps to restore the paper's credibility. One was the disclaimer placed at the bottom of the Sunday sports "notes" columns: "[M]aterial from personal interviews, wire services, other beat writers, and league and team sources was used in this report."

Now it looks like that disclaimer is going to be put to the test. A Web site called Cold, Hard Football Facts charges that Globe football writer Ron Borges "apparently stole great stretches of his column from a previously published report" in the Tacoma News Tribune. Well, it depends on the meaning of "stole," doesn't it? The site acknowledges the disclaimer, but then adds that "even a 90-pound weakling of a newspaper copy boy has enough sense to change some of the words."

The Phoenix's Adam Reilly has all the details and promises to post responses from Borges and Globe editor Marty Baron as soon as he gets them.

Chris Lydon and talk radio

When UMass Lowell announced last fall that it would stop funding Christopher Lydon's radio show, "Open Source," you had to wonder if its days were numbered. Fortunately, it stayed on the air — and now appears to have some guaranteed longevity.

Last week, the program announced that it's received a $250,000 MacArthur grant "in support of the innovative use of internet-based tools in the production of a daily public radio program."

Lydon and company have made a big deal out of using the Web to generate program ideas and discussion. Frankly, I'm somewhat skeptical of how crucial that's been. The main thing is that "Open Source" is a good program, bringing back to the air one of Boston's most distinctive voices.

I've been complaining a lot about the state of talk radio in Boston recently. Today I want to point out that you can fill up a pretty good part of your weekday with high-quality, locally based talk shows. Consider:

• "On Point," with Tom Ashbrook, 10 a.m. to noon, WBUR (90.9 FM); rebroadcast from 7 to 9 p.m.
  
• "Here and Now," with Robin Young, noon to 1 p.m., WBUR; not quite a talk show, but close enough
• "Eagan and Braude," with Margery Eagan and Jim Braude, noon to 3 p.m., WTKK (96.9 FM)
• "Open Source," 7 to 8 p.m., WGBH (89.7 FM); Monday through Thursday only
• "The Paul Sullivan Show," 8 p.m. to midnight, WBZ (AM 1030)

I'm not deliberately leaving out conservatives. Sullivan is pretty conservative, and I'd be the first to admit that many of the great talk-show hosts of the past were conservative — David Brudnoy, Jerry Williams and Gene Burns foremost among them. (I'd round out that trio with Peter Meade, who's a liberal.)

The problem now is that the morning and afternoon drives are a talk-radio wasteland. On WRKO (AM 680), Tom Finneran shows some promise, so maybe the 6 to 10 a.m. slot won't be a total vacuum.

In the afternoon, though, when NPR starts to drag, you're stuck with Howie Carr on WRKO and Jay Severin on WTKK. Both can be entertaining at times. But you won't respect yourself in the morning.

Banned in Boston

Clea Simon reports in today's Globe that local radio executives are excited about four Boston talk-show hosts' being named to the Talkers magazine "2007 Heavy Hundred."

Well, now. Boston is the ninth-largest radio market in the country. Yet the local "Heavy Hundred" winners are essentially also-rans, with Howie Carr (WRKO, AM 680) coming in at #50, Jay Severin (WTKK, 96.9 FM) at #66 and John Dennis and Gerry Callahan (WEEI, AM 850) at #93. Granted, most of the top 50 hosts are nationally syndicated, but this doesn't strike me as much to get excited about.

And here's something to ponder. Though the majority of the top-ranked hosts are conservatives, with Rush Limbaugh coming in at #1, there are some liberal and left-wing hosts near the top, too. Ed Schultz is ranked fifth. Randi Rhodes is #13. Alan Colmes is #16. Stephanie Miller is #36.

What do they have in common? With the exception of Colmes, they could all be heard in Boston on Clear Channel's weak-signaled "Progressive Talk" stations until December, when the stations were converted to Spanish-language programming.

You think they might do well in liberal Massachusetts if they were put on a station where you could actually hear them? Yeah, I think so, too. Here are the folks who are trying to make that happen.

The Boston Daily Blogger

Media Nation trivia: In the early 1980s John Wilpers and I were competitors. Back then he edited three weekly newspapers, including the Winchester Star, now part of the giant Fairport, N.Y.-based GateHouse Media chain. I edited the Winchester edition of Woburn's Daily Times Chronicle, still owned by the Haggerty family, among the nicest people in the news business. So there you go.

Anyway, these days the much-traveled Wilpers is the editor of a nascent free daily to be called BostonNOW, which will compete directly with Metro Boston and indirectly with the Globe and the Herald. (The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, also owns 49 percent of Metro.) Wilpers is working for Russel Pergament, a hyperactive visionary who founded the suburban Tab weeklies (long since subsumed into the chain that became GateHouse), was the first publisher of Metro Boston — owned by a European media conglomerate — and then started amNewYork, a freebie that (yes) competes with Metro New York.

It looks as though Wilpers and Pergament are looking to fill BostonNOW with gobs of blogger-provided free or nearly free content. Here's what Wilpers says on the BostonNOW blog:

This is your opportunity, as a local blogger, photographer, artist, or pundit, to get in on the ground floor and contribute. You will get to share your perspective on living, surviving, and thriving in this amazing city. Participation in the BostonNOW experience will give you massive exposure to a huge reading audience — your words in a daily newspaper going to tens of thousands of commuters and residents; your words on a website generating thousands of page views; your words syndicated worldwide with a share of any profits going to you.

The best part? You're already doing it on your blogs and websites. We want to give you the opportunity to share your insight with the entire city.

It's an interesting idea, and a way to distinguish BostonNOW from the generic, wire-heavy Metro. I'm skeptical of corporate-driven citizen journalism, of course, as schemes like this strike me as little more than an opportunity to exploit volunteer labor for profit. Handled right, though, BostonNOW could wind up being a better read than Metro. Then, too, I've seen cereal boxes that are a better read than Metro.

Pergament and Wilpers have invited bloggers to meet them on March 10. The details are in Wilpers' post. Wish I could be there. (Via Universal Hub.)