It’s the first we heard, but apparently Dan Kennedy is leaving his post as media critic at the Boston Phoenix. Over the years, we’ve enjoyed reading him—especially his smart, clean copy about the rivalry between the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.
One of the best things about the alternative press is its self-conferred (and now somewhat disingenuous) outsider status, which you can always recognize by its generally relentless advocacy and polemicism. It also allows a paper to write about “big media” competitors without pulling any punches, and in a town like Boston, that is certainly the least readers expect. The Phoenix has been around long enough that both of Beantown’s daily papers keep a close eye on it, and have not missed their own opportunities to shake Steve Mindich’s tree to see what sort of rotten fruit falls down.
Here in our genteel berg, we have no good counterpart to Dan Kennedy. The serious media beat seems to be a dying breed, which we think is a mildly frightening canary-in-the-coal-mine omen. Despite the financial health of the Star Tribune, the reinvigorated anger of City Pages, and the terminal stasis of the Pioneer Press, no one in print is writing about print with any regularity. Of course, we have our own selfish reasons for wishing it were otherwise—and we certainly wish to count our blessings. But it is a somewhat odd consequence of Minnesota Nice that there seems to be a gentleman’s agreement among all parties to go easy on each other—that is, to not write about each other at all.
Tronnes and Levine had, for some time, been keeping a lively grip on the neck of all local media, and those silly men at Powerline have their little spats with Nick Coleman, and someone named Hugh or Howard something-or-other claims to be hosting a permanent “swarm” on the Strib, and City Pages admits to reading the daily papers each day, so there is some hope—we suppose—for the world of media criticism as it pertains to print.
But when we point our finger, of course, three fingers point back at us, and we have to admit that this here blog may be the best place for regular hit-and-run commentary of an industrial sort. We have always had a strong feeling that readers care a lot less about us as people—working at desks in our shoes with our petty complaints and triumphs—than we think they do, and we have never seriously thought about migrating regular print-media criticism to the pages of the magazine.
That doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be doing it. To pretend that “media criticism” should be limited to TV, with the occasional bit on Tom Barnard or Gary Eichten—that is being part of the problem, not the solution.
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