Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld (R-Amber-Colored Liquid) made a house call at the Boston Herald yesterday, and the feisty local tabloid made him its coverboy today (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages).
Inside was a two-page Weldian trifecta, starting with Big Red’s pooh-poohing the charges in the Tim Cahill rumpus over his use of Lottery ads during his boneheaded 2010 gubernatorial trot . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
The hardtracking staff at Sneak Adtack has a piece in WBUR’s Cognoscenti today:
Facebook Announcements Can Be Confusing. Let Us Explain
When you’ve got mail from Facebook, nothing good can come of it.
Exhibit Umpteen: The latest Facemail that launched a thousand tsks.
It begins this way:
“We recently announced some proposed updates to our Data Use Policy, which explains how we collect and use data when people use Facebook, and our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR), which explains the terms governing use of our services . “
Read the rest here.
Back in the ’70s, I was lucky enough to interview the great Dave Brubeck, although I didn’t know that he was great or that I was lucky at the time.
For reasons that defy explanation, I was a music reviewer without portfolio then, writing for every B-music publication in town: Musician’s Guide, PopTop, Rock Around the World, Nightfall, Night Life, whatever.
(See The Redemption Unit for further details.)
Anyway, Brubeck had a gig in Boston and I had a gig to interview him, which I did in the lobby of the Colonnade Hotel for reasons that defy explanation.
I had somehow gotten it into my head that Brubeck was too popular to be really good (and there was some element of resentment that he was so famous for Take Five when saxophonist Paul Desmond had actually composed it).
Regardless, I remember that I was far less respectful than I should have been.
For which I hereby apologize and offer this makeup (from his legendary 1963 Carnegie Hall performance):
Brubeck was a jazz original, as this New York Times obituary attests:
In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck brought a distinctive mixture of experimentation and accessibility that won over listeners who had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single.
Mr. Brubeck experimented with time signatures and polytonality and explored musical theater and the oratorio, baroque compositional devices and foreign modes. He did not always please the critics, who often described his music as schematic, bombastic and — a word he particularly disliked — stolid. But his very stubbornness and strangeness — the blockiness of his playing, the oppositional push-and-pull between his piano and Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone — make the Brubeck quartet’s best work still sound original.
It sounds even better now he’s gone.
This is so Liz Warren (via techPresident):
Worries Over Copyright Infringement Kept Warren’s Senate Campaign Off Pinterest
Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 campaign stayed away from the social image-sharing platform Pinterest because the campaign’s new media director feared that the platform could be shut down by copyright infringement claims.
“The reason I didn’t create a Pinterest account for Elizabeth was because there’s been a lot of legal talk about whether the content on Pinterest is legal or not,” said Lauren Miller, the Warren campaign’s new media director.
“[L]egal talk about whether the content on Pinterest is legal or not” – is that a classic Warrenism or what? It could have come straight out of her I’m Not There press conference last month.
As techPresident notes, Warren’s website does have a button if site visitors want to share on Pinterest. And even though the campaign didn’t set up its own account, there are still plenty of images of Warren up there:
Worth a thousand words, eh? And with Warren, maybe even more.
The mainstream media are all a-Twitter over the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to Vati-tweet the faithful. From Tuesday’s New York Times:
Twitter Has a New User: The Pope
VATICAN CITY — Now trending on Twitter: Pope Benedict XVI.
On Monday, the Vatican announced that the 85-year-old pontiff would begin posting messages on Twitter next week under the handle@pontifex, a term for the pope that means “bridge builder” in Latin. Within hours, he had more than 250,000 followers.
The hardworking staff jumped on the bandwagon midday yesterday, and discovered that the number of followers had already risen to 409,922. By the time we actually clocked in (a full 10 seconds later) 180 additional followers had enlisted.
Which made us Number 410,102.
[Full Cathaholic disclosure: We had the laughingly named Sisters of Charity for eight years and the Jesuits (great teachers/hell on Saturday night) for eight years, then recuperated for eight years (see The Redemption Unit) during which we lapsed like the average magazine subscriber.]
Of course, Tweetedict XVI will largely be a Papal Tiger, as the Times piece notes:
Aides will write Benedict’s posts, but the pope himself will “engage and approve” the content. The pope will post messages however often he feels like it.
“The pope is not the kind of person like the rest of us who in a meeting or a lunch is looking at their BlackBerrys to see if any messages have come in,” Mr. Burke said. “He is not walking around with an iPad, but all the pope’s tweets are the pope’s words.”
Uh-huh.
But don’t be thinking the Pope-a-tweets are infallible:
Msgr. Claudio Maria Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications . . . said they would be part of the church Magisterium, or collective teaching, but should be considered “pearls of wisdom,” not exactly doctrine.
“In any case, it’s a papal teaching,” Monsignor Celli said. “The message is just entrusted to a new technology.”
A new technology that often has technical glitches like this one (via Advertising Age):
The Pope’s Twitter Feed Runneth Over for Pontiflex
A Brooklyn startup is getting a lot of Twitter traffic today, thanks to Pope Benedict XVI.
The Papal Twitter account launched Monday with the handle @Pontifex, so named for a Latin word referencing a member of the ancient priests of Rome. It is also very similar to @Pontiflex, the handle for Pontiflex, a mobile advertising platform and No. 16 on this week’s Crain’s list of Best Places to Work in New York City.
Since early Monday morning, the company has gotten between 50 and 75 new followers each hour and hundreds of tweets from Twitter users who have accidentally inserted a letter “L” into what they thought was the Pope’s handle, according to Crain’s New York Business.
Let us prey, eh?
Monday’s Boston Globe featured major coverage of a major brain injury study from Boston University.
Via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages:
(Full disclosure: The hardreading staff moonlights as a mass communication professor at BU.) . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
The hardworking staff was struck by this image in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal review of a new Saul Steinberg biography:
Caption:
Glad You Could Make It: A 1978 portrait by Evelyn Hofer in which Steinberg holds hands with a cutout of himself at age 8.
Compare that old-media Wayback Machine encounter with this new-media Time Travel video created by Jeremiah McDonald:
Welcome to the Playback Machine.
Saturday’s local dailies duly reported on Thursday’s MBTA trolley-car crash, the latest in a series of T-bonehead incidents over the past several years.
The Boston Herald, as usual, has the basics . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
The stealth marketing underworld is starting to surface above ground.
Witness this New York Times Magazine piece by George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen:
Who Do Online Advertisers Think You Are?
Not long ago, I decided to test how much privacy I have online. I cleared the cookies, the bits of code that Web sites leave on my computer to track what I browse and buy, from my two Internet browsers, Safari and Firefox. Then, with my digital past superficially erased, I set out to create two new identities: Democratic Jeff and Republican Jeff.
Safari became the home of Democratic Jeff. I started by spending time on Barack Obama’s re-election Web site and then visited some travel, car and shopping sites to search for flights to Los Angeles, Volvos and Birkenstocks. On Firefox, as Republican Jeff, I went to Mitt Romney’s site and then searched for Cadillacs, flights to Hawaii and diamond rings.
Sufficiently self-profiled, Rosen then returned to his usual webitude . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
Yesterday the hardworking staff at kissin’ cousin Campaign Outsider noted that the Boston Globe was having a difficult time distinguishing between the late Tip O’Neill and Ken Howard, who played Tip in a local stage production.
From yesterday’s boston.com homepage . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
UPDATE: Unbeknownst to us, Megan Johnson had left the Track before this item ran.
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