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Sending the Phoenix off
By adamg on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 12:59pm
Charles Pierce remembers the Phoenix:
What's the prayer of thanksgiving for a hundred days of fellowship, drunk on words, all of us, as though there were nothing more beyond the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph locked into place? Please say that the muse is something beyond the balance sheet, something beyond technology. Tell me that she’s alive the way she once was when you'd feel her on your shoulder as one word slammed into the other, and the story got itself told, and you came to end and realized, with wonderment and awe, that the story existed out beyond you, and that it had chosen you, and you were its vehicle, and the grinning muse had the last laugh after all.
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Comments
If you don't like the balance
If you don't like the balance sheet, don't expect to get paid for it. Get a job selling life insurance, and do it in your free time. There, fixed. Free of corporate greed.
The Muse has
left the building.
Replacements for best of The Boston Phoenix.
What are the best Boston online sources that you consider replace the best Boston content of The Boston Phoenix?
If http://www.universalhub.com/node/add could it would great i
They couldn't survive without
They couldn't survive without the money they made from prostitution advertisements, Craigslist cut into it a great deal.
Has Mindich cancelled the
Has Mindich cancelled the prostitution newsletter too, or will "Boston After Dark" continue to plague recycle bins?
You mean 'Boston at Nite'
and that's a very good question. The current issue, which you can find at BostonAtNite.com, consists of one page of a music review, and seven pages of prostitution ads. When this rag first came out last fall, it also had a page or two of entertainment listings, but those have gone by the wayside.
(Boston After Dark is the name of the newspaper Mindich owned in the late 1960s and early 70s, before he bought and merged in the competing Cambridge Phoenix.)
Great piece...
about when the Phoenix was a newspaper and not a "lifestyle digest" run by a bunch of goofy hipsters that Mindich kept around because they worked cheap.
Yes and we all know it was Craigslist and Backpage that really finished off "The Phoenix". Selling script wasn't going to last forever either.
And here's a worthy response to this, from Lissa Harris
(who was formerly an editor at the Weekly Dig):
Phoenix Shuts Down; Women Are Ambivalent, Emotional
Thanks for posting that, Ron
The Phoenix format change was chatted about on UHub a bit, and I think this was predicted. Too bad. Chances of the Phoenix getting enough national ads (the target the glossy was aiming for) during a slow economy seemed impossible. I wonder if, instead of taking the best of Phoenix and mixing it with the worst of Stuff/Boston/Improper Bostonian, the Phoenix had become a glossy version of its old self, would it have survived. There are a million lifestyle mags in the nekkid city. However, not too many glossies covering politics from left of center, in-depth arts, non-mainstream music, etc. It could have become what Rolling Stone would be without the pop mentality.
I hate seeing alt weeklies die. I had my first sort of adult job in one. Even now, they can be the best jaundiced-eye view of affairs in a city. I do wish it had at least made it online. I would have paid for an ereader subscription, like I do w/ the NYT. As a matter of fact, wasn't the Phoenix a pay paper way back? I kind of remember paying for it in the 80's & early 90's.
How do the "Post!" mechanisms work?
If the "Post!" mechanism in the upper right could be made more clear... how do the mechanisms work? for "Article Post Boston-related news and comment." and "Blog entry Add a blog entry." at http://www.universalhub.com/node/add
This could replace the best Boston content of The Boston Phoenix !
Reporting and red boxes
I will miss the reporting at times. Silvergate, some of the political coverage, muzzle awards were good journalism.
But I do wonder; is anyone left there to go pick up all the red boxes? .
The Muzzle Awards
The 16th annual New England Muzzle Awards will be published right on schedule, sometime around the Fourth of July. Not sure where yet. It will be announced in due course at Media Nation. And now that you mention it, I would like one of those red boxes for our backyard.
Those red Phoenix boxes
Since they will be abandoned property by next Thursday, I wonder if some place like Artisan's Asylum would like to turn them into some more creative Weekly Dig boxes ?
Who are the other Phoenix journalists coopted by City Hall?
Who are the other Phoenix journalists coopted by Boston City Hall after covering metro politics?... beside that guy who ended up in the Mayor's Press Office, a great writer critical of the city government completely coopted subsequently by the work for the city.