How quaint: New York Times dispatches foreign stringer to the wilds of Boston

"I have disagreements with The Globe, but what's good for Boston" he said in an interview. "To have them not here would be a big hole in our life."

"A big hole" is the metaphor on everyone's minds.

When Google wanted to open a major US office, they went to New York instead of Boston.

As they were building the staff for NY, they cold-called me, but I told them I had to decline to due personal connections in Boston.

When they later opened an outpost in Boston, it was publicly known to be tiny and perpetually flirting with acquiring bigger office space. I had to go to them, practically begging (including a sleepless night before one of the interviews), rather than them approach me like they did for the fancy office in NY.

(NDA prevents me from saying much more, though I can humbly admit that I didn't get the job I wanted, and it was left open as a possibility if/when a specific thing in Boston happened. I couldn't afford to wait for the timeframe they mentioned, so I quickly accepted an opportunity elsewhere, and never got back to Google.)

For high-tech industry, I'd say things Boston has going for it are the schools (especially MIT and Harvard, but some of the others as well), Blue State-ness and progressiveness on things like gay marriage, momentum from past high-tech industry, walkability, some degree of livability and cultural opportunities, and (for people like me) gentler compared to NY.

Drawbacks for high-tech -- and I'll preface this by saying that Boston is my home and I've continually chosen to stay here -- include paucity of local investors, inferior nightlife/culture, general second-class status compared to NY, so-so public transit, lousy weather compared to Bay Area, high prices for inferior real estate, perceived by techies as bumbling due to how some recent news events played out in Internet forums.

If you stand at the corner of Summer and Washington Streets, you see exactly what the Times reporter saw -- a large vacant building. Only if you walk further north on Washington do you see that only two of the four walls are still there.

The more the survival of the Globe becomes framed as one of those Boston vs. New York things, the more we can say goodbye to the Hub's broadsheet.

Alas, in the last week or so, we've seen the latest incarnation of the old rivalry -- often one-sided, as believe me, most New Yorkers don't sit around stewing about why they hate Boston.

I'm waiting for the "Times Sucks" T-shirts to go on sale anytime now.

Maybe the bigger, more systemic problem is contained in Dan Kennedy's comment at the end of the Times piece:

But Mr. Kennedy said that last year, when he taught a freshman journalism class at Northeastern, “one of the things that really struck me was these students had basically no experience reading a newspaper of any kind.”

I wonder if Philadelphia or Baltimaore kvetches and wrings their hands so much about New York? Look, it's simple - the NY metro area has about 20,000,000 compared to Boston's 5,000,000. NY can be compared to London, Paris, Tokyo, but I see Boston as being on the same scale as Vienna, San Francisco and Prague. Doesn't mean Boston is a lesser city, it just means a smaller city. By the way, I love visting NYC, but the Yankees still suck.