“Business-as-usual, politics-as-usual, and journalism-as-usual are failing us when it comes to addressing the climate threat. If there's to be any hope for the kind of bold action we need, a great deal of pressure must be brought from outside the system, in the form of a broad-based grassroots movement, in order to break the stranglehold of the big-money fossil fuel lobby on our politics. ”

—A Convenient Excuse

By WEN STEPHENSON  |  October 31, 2012

The most important story you can read today.

“The media-watchers who’ve pontificated about the Phoenix’s transformation from newspaper to magazine have generally missed the real story entirely. If anyone wants to tell it, give me a call, I’ll be happy to walk you through it. Here’s the lede: A weekly magazine is an elegant solution to a series of problems – financial, aesthetic, journalistic -- that weekly newspapers cannot solve, and almost all of those problems stem from the internet being a better delivery vehicle for news and advertising than cheap newsprint. ”

—An open letter in which Carly Carioli, longtime writer and editor at the Boston Phoenix, angrily and emphatically refutes Salon’s Goodbye, Alt-Weeklies story.

The Boston Phoenix, RIP

The Boston Phoenix, alt-weekly legend, award-winning newspaper, the place I worked out of college until I was 29, is ceasing publication as of the next issue. This is sad, sad news, for my pals and colleagues past and present, and for alternative, issue-based journalism in this country.

Write-In Zack Cordes For Boston's Best Comedian!

I don’t want to make a long speech about it, but people who know Zack Cordes, I mean really know him, know that he’s the nicest, sweetest guy on the planet. So naturally, people around the comedy scene in Boston treat him like shit. I want to see that change, and that’s why I’m staging a write-in campaign and make Zack Boston’s #1 comedian in the Phoenix Reader Poll. Then the Phoenix would HAVE to do a write-up on him and his profile would rise. People would have to give him the time of day. Plus it would be some honest recognition for all the work he puts in, often being forced to go last or extremely late at open mics and being treated like a pariah by people he looks up to.


All you have to do is click on the link and write his name in and vote (make sure after you vote you click FINISHED under 2nd step at the bottom, you then have to CONFIRM your vote) and do this every day until the contest ends. Do it from as many computers as you can, you can also do it from phones and iPods. I’ll try to keep reminding you, and if you could reblog and send it to friends we could really give him a shot. I think we can make this happen. Thanks!

-JPD

Rory Gilmore's Early-20s Crisis

portlandphoenix.com

I feel sick to my stomach to hear about the Boston Phoenix closing immediately - it’s terrible news. Like countless others, it’s one of the first places to publish and take a chance on me, and thanks to them I had adventures like Bowling with Franz Ferdinand and getting to peek behind the scenes during an MTV reality show. It was a great place to get started as a writer and so many talented people have come out of it - on tumblr, in the newspapers, everywhere you read words. Here’s a link to one slim piece that I wrote on Gilmore Girls’ season 6 premiere; basically how it was a proto-Girls-like “quarter life crisis.” Remember those, pre-Recession?

Oh, and I’m pretty sure if it wasn’t for a very early-on mention of Grizzly Bear upstairs at the Middle East where the writer (by Simon Vosick-Levinson, I think? I have a weird memory for this stuff) mentioned their “four-part harmony,” and if I didn’t go to their next show at TT the Bear’s with a notebook in my hand, I would’ve never met the guy in a band who invited me to the party where I met the guy who changed my life. So thanks again, Boston Phoenix!

ETA: An hour later, still gobsmacked. How sad! It hits a variety of different emotional points involving journalism and the ways that Boston’s changing as a city (everything alt and fun from high school/college is GONE now in a way that suggests total obliteration). And reading that someone like Susan Orlean got her start there, and that people could go from The Boston Phoenix onto bigger and better publications, was a big part of the reason I always wanted to write for them. Ugh.

I read a great article in the Boston Phoenix...

… about the Hearing Voices movement; a support group for people with Schizophrenia to talk openly with each other about how it feels to live with voices in your head. Really insightful.

Best quote for me:
“It helps that she has found a psychiatrist she likes - a man who, when she asks him what her diagnosis is, tells her she’s a human being.”

I want to marry that psychiatrist Or at least give him a giant hug.

“For the longest time, when journalism students would ask me how to get started as writers, I would tell them to go to work for an alternative newsweekly. Better than graduate school, in my opinion, I’d say, and more fun than a conventional job at a conventional publication. Now, as the ranks of alternative newsweeklies thin out, I’m not sure what I’ll tell them. The thing that I learned at the Phoenix, which I feel is essential for a writer to learn, is to be enterprising. I’ve never worked on staff at a regular newspaper, and I imagine you learn lots of valuable lessons from their tradition and stature, but what I loved about being at a place like the Phoenix was the sense that we were sort of making it up as we went along. The Phoenix felt like a handmade thing, and that made me feel like I ought to be inventive with my story ideas and my thinking and my writing, even if it didn’t always turn out perfectly. A conventional job would have had health insurance, but working somewhere where I was encouraged to write a story about Ginsu knives not only made me who I am as a writer but in many ways made me mature as a person: it was up to me to figure things out. I can’t imagine where I’d be today if I hadn’t had that experience.”

—Susan Orlean writes for The New Yorker’s blog about her experience working for the Boston Phoenix 
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