Just a heads-up to loyal Open Media Boston viewers, today we're launching our partnership with WMBR 88.1 FM's new bi-weekly local news show called, aptly enough, Local Edition.
When one thinks about people working for poverty wages, college professors traditionally don't spring to mind. But over the last four decades tremendous structural changes have remade the face of American higher education. And most would agree that these changes are not positive for our students or our society. It has been remarked in many reports and broadsides that one of the greatest right-wing victories of the last generation has been the transition away from the Great Society goal of offering every qualified student a taxpayer-subsidized higher education, and towards a market-based system that forces students into what usually becomes a lifetime of debt-bondage so profound that it cannot even be removed by declaring bankruptcy. The key to this victory lay in simply cutting state and federal spending on higher education to the point where students have to accept ridiculous amounts of debt just to attend college.
Sometimes I just can't crank out an editorial on what should be an obvious stance on an issue or an event in time to make my regular deadline. Because I decide that I'm not in agreement with the obvious stance, and that I need to take extra time to formulate a different stance. Such is the case with this belated Labor Day editorial. Given this publication's left-wing editorial position, the obvious stance on Labor Day 2013 would be "yay, Labor Day, the nation's official holiday in honor of working people ...
The 3rd Digital Media Conference is coming up October 25-27 at Lesley University in Cambridge; so we thought we'd give everyone a bit of advance notice. Regular Open Media Boston viewers will recall that we co-organized the first two iterations of the conference, and we're doing so this time, too.
It's always puzzling to read articles in the American press on the subject of labor leaders running for office. Although I suppose I should be glad that any journalist at any major news outlet is still focusing on labor at all - even sporadically. As I've said repeatedly in the past, the ongoing collapse of traditional news establishment has put more and more pressure on fewer and fewer journalists to cover more and more news in less and less time.
When Open Media Boston staffer Jonathan Adams pitched me a new reporting project a few days ago, I thought "oh it'll probably be a couple of weeks before it gets underway ... might as well go ahead and focus on these six other things that I have on my plate right now." But nope, he pumped out a bunch of content right out of the gate, so it is with great excitement that OMB announces our new Open Court Project - our effort to help fill the large and growing vacuum in news coverage of significant court proceedings in the Boston area.
Regular Open Media Boston viewers take note ... after many months of work on my thesis and accompanying artwork, I got my MFA in Visual Arts from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in late June. [And, yes, Lesley was the "minor metropolitan university" that I joked about attending in occasional mentions of my extra-journalistic activities in editorials over the last two and a half years.]
Over the last several months, regular Open Media Boston viewers will have seen my periodic notices mentioning that I was only writing editorials infrequently while completing my MFA in Visual Arts at an area university.
Well, now I'm almost finished with that program and I'm slated to graduate soon. So, I just wanted to let folks know that I expect to be back to writing regularly by late July, and that the OMB staff will continue producing top quality articles throughout the next few weeks while I'm busy.
While finishing my MFA Visual Arts thesis this spring, I've been observing the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing and trying to decide what to say about it in a period when I've only had time to write about one editorial a month. Obviously, as I said in my editorial the day of the bombing, everyone on the Open Media Boston staff was shocked and saddened by the cowardly attack on civilians.
Like everyone else in the Boston area, the Open Media Boston staff is still numb with shock at the news that a vicious explosive attack was perpetrated by forces unknown against innocent civilians at the Boston Marathon today. Three people are dead as of this writing - one of them an eight year old boy. Well over 100 people have been injured - quite a large number with damage to their lower extremeties.
