Given the recent history of locals losing interest in minor league teams full of players outside the major league pipeline, it looks like a risky business venture. But more importantly, the stadium would be astonishingly unproductive as a tool for revitalizing Malden’s struggling downtown. Right now the city needs as much mixed-income transit-oriented development as it can grab, and giving away a prime site across from the T isn’t the way to get there.

Read the whole thing here.

This chart, which accompanies a WSJ story about how nobody inside the Fed knew how a fake housing boom was propping up the entire economy, just seems mean. Poor Ben Bernanke. It’s like the paper thinks he goes around kicking puppies or something.

It turns out that when an aggressive regulator operates with little accountability, things tend to go wrong. Projects get held up for months, or disappear altogether. This agency I write about, the Mass. Historical Commission, is one of the most feared agencies in the state. It wields enormous power over development, and that power is often used in such a way as to make life miserable for developers. The interesting part is, it’s not at all clear that Mass. Historical is the villain in this Freetown case.

Read the whole thing here.

And if you buy that argument, we’ve got a hot virtual-slave labor gig you should totally check out.

Denton, in a post that certainly appears to have topped his self-imposed 200-word target, ripped the awards as “self-congratulating” and “symptomatic of the decline of the newspaper industry.”

[N]ewspapers’ Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, US newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the internet. Pulitzer-winning journalism will win Pulitzers; it won’t save an industry which is experiencing double-digit annual declines in advertising revenue.

What’s more, the steaming douche-tard holds up British dailies, which “[lack] much of the worthy reporting that wins Pulitzers,” as objects for emulation. His advice: Regain readership by producing less newsworthy news.

This is the opposite of what needs to happen, obviously. Papers don’t win, or chase, Pulitzers entirely for the sake of editors’ egos. Instead, the awards recognize the type of reporting that papers have to do more of, not less, to survive – aggressive, unique, enterprising investigations and commentary that have broad social and political ramifications. They reinforce the newspaper as being more than a (failing) business, but also public good. And they’re a reminder that, every once in a while, there’s more to life than web stats and bargain-basement scat.

Reilly’s already hit this first bit, but it bears repeating: Damn, this is one restrained bit of reporting. For anyone, really, but especially for Alterman, who’s… yeah, you know. The fact that Alterman didn’t heap even a bit of blame for the newspaper industry’s current woes on right-wing vampires is, well, jaw dropping. Kid should get an award for this fact alone.

Still, while the reporting is solid and nuanced and restrained and all, the conclusions Alterman draws from his reporting are terrifying.

Take, for instance, the fact that newspaper companies are getting hammered on Wall Street. That’s not news to anybody. But it also doesn’t mean that publicly traded papers are worthless because traders say they are, nor does it mean that these papers will never be profitable. All it does mean that they are highly unlikely, in the foreseeable future, to post the kind of robust growth that stockholders rightly demand. So the solution isn’t to abandon papers altogether, but to find a different business model, built on nonprofit mechanisms and private owners comfortable with lower than usual rates of return on their money.

Then there’s the argument that the liberal blogosphere’s ability to “bypass the big media institutions and conduct conversations within a like-minded community” represents “genuinely democratic discourse,” since, “Thanks to the Web, we can all join in a Deweyan debate on Presidents, policies, and proposals.”

Think about that for a second. These conversations are Deweyan, are genuinely democratic, because they’re taking place “within a like-minded community.” That is, within a self-congratulatory echo chamber full of chimps screeching in unison and throwing handfuls of muck at each other for lack of anything better to do. The liberal blogs Alterman cites may mobilize bodies and generate noise, but the very fact that they’re like-minded – often, militantly so – doesn’t mean that they fuel “genuinely democratic discourse.” It just means that the blogs’ readers don’t have to talk to themselves to hear themselves talk.

Alterman does call out Arianna Huffington for failing to address the “parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers.” But he seems to shrug off the consequences of the parasites will wreak on their hosts:

[W]e are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

Uh, yeah. And, no thanks. Equally terrifying is Alterman allowing Huffington to argue that “wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting” can pick up the slack when the big and medium-sized papers fold, because “A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom.”

The fact is, the biggest, most important stories newspapers report on – the type of stories that newspapers exist to cover in the first place – can’t be done by anyone but nonpartisan professionals with significant resources behind them. Hyperlocal blogs may be able to cover town politics just fine, but if it weren’t for the Globe‘s Spotlight Team, and the paper’s significant legal budget, Cardinal Law wouldn’t be on Roman vacation right now, and BC wouldn’t be terrorizing its neighbors. That’s one story, and a whole host of significant ramifications.

The implications are greater on a national and international scale. Imagine what Bush-bashing would sound like without Abu Ghraib, warrantless wiretaps, SWIFT banking, or signing statements. Among many, many others. Imagine what Alterman’s national narrative looks like without that agreed-upon set of facts. It ain’t pretty. Alterman mentions that “brazenly partisan newspapers” got along just fine in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; what’s not mentioned are the staggering levels of political and economic corruption that flourished under the partisan press.

So the answer isn’t to shrug off the death of newspapers as reporting organs (versus newspapers as ink-stained dead trees) while shrugging off the supremacy of the partisan internet, but to figure out, at all costs, how to stave off that death in the first place. The alternative isn’t anything any of us should want to see.

Dan Kennedy hazards three guesses: That the paper cut circulation voluntarily, that the loss accounts for capacity they were never using anyway, or that the newer, even dumber kid on the block is totally eating their lunch.

Of those three, I’m inclined to line up behind the second. When I spoke with now-deposed BostonNOW editor John Wilpers last spring, prior to the paper’s launch, he strongly suggested that the Metro was grossly inflating its circulation numbers. A walk through downtown in the afternoon, when street corners are often littered with surplus copies of the Metro, would seem to provide anecdotal evidence for this contention. The paper floods its distribution area, and whatever stacks of extras remain in the afternoon serve the cause of Media Audit name recognition ubiquity, and are written off as the cost of doing business.

The problem is, newsprint is wicked expensive, and sooner or later, whatever benefits you get by pumping up your circ numbers are outweighed by the cost of printing all those extra newspapers. If I had to guess, I’d say this fact is at least as responsible for the Metro‘s sudden fall as competition from BostonNOW is.

All of which is not to hold BostonNOW blameless in the circ numbers game, either. On most days, they still deliver papers to the Chinese place down the street from my house. Even though it burned down six or seven months ago.

But, for a better summary of what the Chamber’s much-discussed report actually says, you’d have better luck looking to Dan Kennedy – “Casino Supporters Support Casinos.”

I understand that some of the issues we’re dealing with here are tricky. And I’m a reporter, so math does scare me, too. But you can’t write off the costs just because the Globe editorial board does.

If you chase down half the “opponents say” caveats in today’s front page story, you’ll find a much different scenario at play than all the governor’s promises being fulfilled. You’re left with, as I termed it earlier today, a cost-benefit analysis without the costs. A benefit analysis.

And that doesn’t do much good when the argument against Deval Patrick’s casino plan hinges on the fact that the costs aren’t immediately obvious, but they’re very real, and they erode the benefits remarkably quickly.

First off: Rate of return. For every dollar residents pump into the Lottery, towns immediately get $0.24 back in local aid. Of every dollar residents would drop into a casino, they’d recoup $0.03 or $0.04. So casinos aren’t just inefficient as a means of delivering local aid (or property tax relief and transportation funding) – they’re, at best, eight times less efficient than the Lottery. And if you want to make up that difference, you’d better open up those wallets wide.

Dan Bosley, who co-chairs the committee examining Patrick’s casino bill, sent a letter to his colleagues this afternoon in which he called the Chamber’s study “flawed” for relying on research from the casino industry and Clyde Barrow. “While I question their conclusions,” Bosley wrote, “there has never been a question over the creation of a revenue stream from casinos. If you build them, people will spend money. However, there is a vast difference between revenue and economic development and the administration fails to realize this.”

What the administration has never admitted, and what the Chamber report and the stories regarding it ignore, is the fact that the money going into casinos is not new to the economy. It’s transferred from within the economy – as if in a shell game, if you will. The greater the share of money coming from areas close to the casino, the greater the shift away from local businesses and towards the casino will be. That’s why Patrick favors destination casinos over slots – to minimize economic cannibalization.

The number in the Chamber report that should terrify casino proponents – a number that’s been ignored in the press so far – is the study’s contention that, of the $2 billion – $2.3 billion in annual gross gaming revenue that three local casinos would generate, only $500 million to $550 million would be coming from out of state.

So, if three-quarters of casino revenue would be coming from in-state, and, as the Boston Federal Reserve has said, up to three-quarters of money spent in a casino is already spent inside the economy … uh, that’s not good.

Just 24% of respondents to a recent Rasmussen study expressed a favorable opinion of the paper, compared with 44% unfavorable, and 31% “not sure.”

Not sure? Why not? That’s logical. The paper might be a collective of people with notebooks chasing down quotes and calling sources and writing down what they hear. Or Bill Keller might run around his office all day in Muslim garb. Not sure.

And you know, Vladimir Putin doesn’t look like such a horrible tyrant. If it’s Putin’s word against the Times‘s, how can we ever know for sure???