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It's summertime and the livin' is easy on Morrissey Boulevard
By adamg on Mon, 08/03/2009 - 12:57pm
So last summer, Kevin Cullen spent his summer vacation in Delaware. And now we know he spent his summer vacation this year in New Jersey. Maybe next summer, if the Globe still offers employees vacations, it can just leave his space blank the day after his break, so readers can write down their own thoughts.
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Comments
Thanks, Metro section!
"Home / News / Local / Mass.
Kevin Cullen
The view from Jersey"
Hard hitting local commentary.
It isn't news, local, or really even about Mass.
I thought...
...he was trying to relate an external perspective on Boston, at least at the beginning.
Separate from whether or not he did a good job of that, he made a strategic error, if we are blind and deaf to how outsiders view Boston. :)
He had to go to Jersey for this column?
I hear you, and you are correct, but when the perspective turns out to be that we are self-absorbed, small town losers, I think we can safely say that we all knew the answer before he ever asked the question. The rest of the column is the same crap we've been hearing about everywhere we turn for the last few weeks. We know what New York/New Jersey thinks about us, and its the same every time any issue comes up.
If this column were in the sports section, it would have been written by Dan Shaughnessy.
I wonder
Now that there are effectively infinite free venues for opinion writing, there's less of a need for it in newspapers.
How about we reassign opinion columnists to do objective reporting?
No more pressure on opinion columnists to have new noteworthy opinions every few days.
Still a role for metro columnists
Just not for columns that take 15 minutes to write or which bloggers already beat to death the week before.
At their best, Cullen and Abraham tell us things we don't already know and sometimes even break news or advance a story. Even Walker turns in a good column every few months.
Breaking news or advancing a story
That's why I suggested reassigning columnists as reporters.
We have way too much well-written opinion already. People have opinions in their spare time, and give them away for free on the Internet. What people don't do for free so much is burn shoe leather and take pains to be objective.
I think we're heading in the same direction
I don't mind a good metro column telling me I should be outraged about X as long as it's not something I didn't already know about a week ago (Gates, for example) - although, yes, better to let the story, well, tell the story, than the columnist (best news story I ever wrote was designed to get people outraged, I didn't, I don't think, put my own flashing "Get Outraged, People!" nut graf in it, but damn, yes, I was personally outraged by what I wrote about).
hate to break it...
...but regardless of the merits of Cullen's column, bottom line is that folks in New York aren't all that attentive to the latest Hub news. Call it NYC's own brand of provincialism, but in the City That Never Sleeps, folks aren't staying awake at night worrying about what's going on in Boston.
The other thing about Cullen's column today
Was how he managed to get a couple of gratuitous digs in about New Jersey (nyuk, nyuk, New Jersey, amirite?).
just had a flashback moment...
...of Gov. Tom Kean's commercial for the Garden State, "New Jersey and You."