My latest for the Globe looks at an effort to reassemble the coalition that sank the Inner Belt and the Southwest Expressway. Forty years ago, activists from Somerville to Hyde Park crossed neighborhood boundaries to stop highway construction; now, they’re coming together as a constituency for transit-oriented development. Read the whole thing here.

[Creative Commons image via]

Nice job by the Herald today, pairing this column about Mitt Romney’s embarrassing efforts to run for Class President of Michigan Republicans with a banner ad from a Detroit-based car company Romney wanted to bankrupt.

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.