UPDATE: 10:30 pm It’s been an interesting if not L-O-N-G day. My forever business partner (as opposed to forever wife) is in L.A. cornering for an Ultimate Fighting women’s World Champ he trains, so I had to do a tad more work at the athletic Club than usual. And I’m still in a bad mood over yesterday’s election results.
So,
he whispered soflty, just between
us, this is what transpired over the past four or five hours:
Discussion on the Town Meeting Listserve (mistakenly called a blog by one poster):
On Mar 31, 2008, at 10:27 PM, mlwentworth@comcast.net wrote:
The editor of the editorial page of the Bulletin made a commitment to an op-ed writer several weeks ago that his column would appear in the March 27th edition. It did not. The editor also established in writing the process by which letters would be printed. He did not fulfill that promise either. One can only surmise that he was overruled by his superiors in Northampton who decided to arrange the page — letters and column — to support their endorsement.
Furthermore, it is generally considered to be an unfair practice
for a news paper to print attacks on candidates in the last edition
leading to the election. The Bulletin chose not to do this either.
Some editors in the interest of fairness would have shown the
letters/columns to the candidate and given him/her an opportunity to reply
And finally, we were told that letters in support of Greeney that
were supposed to be printed and that addressed a misconception of
her stand in regard to the budget and the schools were Online. But
it developed that the only way these letters could be accessed was
by doing a search using the name of the letter writer. Very cute. Freedom of the press has limitations in the same way that freedom of speech does.
From: Richard Bentley
To: amhersttownmeeting@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 3:37 pm
Can we get their side of the story on this blog? It would appear they
owe the town a HUGE explanation, and it might allay future mistrust.
From: amherstac@aol.com
To: amhersttownmeeting@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 5:33 pm
Bricks and mortar editors NEVER apologize and NEVER explain.
Larry
My comment on Tommy Devine's stellar blog this evening:
Yeah, let's hope the Big Shots that own the Springfield Republican can find a way to keep Local Buzz buzzing along. With only a cyber footprint it most certainly has a cheaper overhead than all that messy printing and distributing of heavy material that comes from trees Amherst folks so love to hug.
The Net was born out of Doomsday and has grown into the communication revolution that has ushered us into the 21'st Century. As the Dinosaurs discovered a few million years ago, adapt or die (or try to avoid those damn meteors)
Speaking of Doomsday, my very first notification on THAT awful morning came via an AOL Instant Message, something I usually declined.
I had just posted a flaming message to the Gazettenet forum (that at the time was way more popular than the Masslive Amherst forum) about the 'Only in Amherst' anti-flag events from the Select Board meeting the night before.
I accepted the call (AOL used to open a pop up in your top left corner of the screen saying "Do you wish to accept this I.M. from so and so) because I knew he lived in Boston and thought--since the Select board meeting had made the AP wire in the pre dawn hours of 9/11--that it had to do with little old Amherst.
He sent the text message "Are you near a TV?" I responded, "Flags in Amherst?" No he came back instantly "A plane impaled the North Tower of the World Trade Center".
I responded "Holy shit!" Again he came back: "Make that two--another one just hit the South Tower." I said, "I gotta go". Only then did I speed home to turn on the TV and see those searing images. My God!
Fast forward and look at Gazettenet now. They have been in cyberspace forever in Internet time (over ten years) but this new major revision is a disaster. They launched on February 20 and claimed the beta version would be fully in place within a week and here we are almost six weeks later and they still rely on the previous build.
The blogs are a joke. Chief editor Foudy posted once on Feb 20 and has not updated since.
Newspapers of New England recently purchased The Gazette and Valley Advocate and the new publisher Aaron Julien (who married the President's daughter) has no journalism experience whatsoever. Unfortunately for me he moved to Amherst (like a lot of carpetbaggers) and his wife has been politically active in ACE the pro-education group that can't spell.
The Gazette spent millions installing a new color printer and constructing a giganormous (ugly as Hell) building to keep it out of the rain in their headquarters in Hamp and they recently acquired a subsidy from the taxpayers in the form of a $630,000 state tax credit.
And not so surprisingly the Amherst Bulletin (also under the control of Pretty-Boy Julien) at the 11'th hour endorsed Stein and O'Keeffe just when their campaigns were starting to panic.
So yeah, in light of that last second meddling by the Bricks-and-Mortar, Powers That Be, it's not so surprising that Hwei-Ling Greeney lost (although that pose with Kerry probably didn't help...Yikes)
Posted by LarryK4 to Tommy Devine's Online Journal at Wednesday, April 2, 2008 7:08:00 PM EST
