Do the Yak

...is undergoing a tectonic shift (thanks, Internet): Don’t bail out newspapers – let them die and get out of the way Post-Newspaper Media Wars: Small-Town Blogs

And to think I once planned to pursue the broadcast news track while getting my master's in journalism. Good thing I stuck with newspapers. They'll always be a vital and treasured part of our society, right? Yeah, so how's that advanced degree workin' out for ya? * * * Seen and heard (or heard of) on the way to work: 1. A man rubbing his ass against a card reader in a subway station. Because, you know, it was too much trouble to take his T pass out of his back pocket. He just had to get... close enough. 2. The most laughably stupid thing ever done while behind the wheel. On a ride to the subway after dropping off my car for repairs, we were slowed by an accident (clear weather). I remarked that the offending driver was probably texting and talked with the shuttle driver about stupid things we've seen people do while driving. Me: I once saw a woman zooming through the intersection in Brighton center while she was applying mascara in the rear-view mi...

Along with the rapidly approaching obsolescence of newspapers and CDs, now I hear of the demise of music radio as the place to go for hearing the latest tunes. The Boston Globe did an article spurred by the closure of WBCN, which in the 60s and 70s was the epicenter of the rock scene around here. Now we have the online streaming-music struggle between Last.FM and Pandora . I had heard of Pandora but not LastFM so I quickly checked out both their websites. I quickly decided I preferred the look and feel of Pandora and proceeded to create my own "station." Great! Of course you have to be at a computer, but then I found you can get an iPhone app to listen to your station on the go. Even greater! So now the only remaining issues I have are (1) the car (since my 2004 model does not have an MP3 jack and iTrip sucks), and (2) what about lousy cell reception and the radio equivalent of dropped calls? Then again, radio reception isn't always perfect either; you sometimes have st...

As I wrote a while back, we switched to four-day-a-week home delivery of the Globe, which has worked out quite well -- it's really a treat now when I get to fondle an actual paper over coffee -- but the one thing for which I couldn't get my daily fix was the comics. The Globe happens to have the best and largest selection of comics I've ever seen. As of a year or two ago, they're nicely packaged (in print) in the "g" tabloid color magazine insert, which also has the arts and living sections. But on Monday through Wednesday, what's a girl to do? All the strips are on one website or another, but who wants to do that much clicking? The Globe's website, boston.com, has a link to a so-called comics page but it's obviously been completely neglected -- it has a few lame comics that don't even run in the paper. What I did was pony up $11 a year to gocomics.com to get a daily email with many of my favorite strips embedded -- just a gentle turn of th...

Am I missing something here? I just rediscovered the Globe Reader after they stuck an ad for it on today's paper. It's not new -- I remember checking it out a year or two ago -- but had forgotten about it until all this mess about the newspaper industry tanking. Here's the multimedia demo if you're curious. But here's the stupid: you can't download the Globe Reader unless you already subscribe to the print paper! WTF?! So... you're supposed to pay to have the paper delivered so you can kill trees and drop it unread into the recycling bucket just so you can get a decent online version? I'm very confused. The Globe is not saving any money on printing and delivery by doing this. The only thing I can think of it that the Globe Reader apparently serves up the content with no ads, which is great, but that freaks out the execs who can't get their head around making money from something other than advertising. Do they have some sort of senile fantasy that ...

Today's political news actually isn't about Clinton and Obama -- it's about Eliot Spitzer, the rising-star governor of New York and anti-corruption former attorney general, the Crime-Fighting Sir Galahad Who Couldn't Keep His Lance in His Pants. Yes, he was caught via government wiretapping (one of his favorite weapons as AG) as being "Client #9" in a high-priced prostitution and money-laundering ring. He follows a well-traveled highway in American politics after Toe-Tapping Larry Craig, Gary Hart, James McGreevey and of course Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy. I was going to speculate here about what causes this urge for reckless sex in men of power, but The New York Times beat me to it. The only question remaining in my mind, which a family newspaper can't address, is what exactly would make it worth $4,300 for three hours of... whatever? I mean, just how good can the sex and thrills be to justify that kind of dough? In short, what the heck were they doing...