 Introducing the first forum of the fall term, not only because we have such a surfeit of glory on our panel, but also because it gives me an opportunity to introduce Seth Menukin, who has agreed to take on the job of co-director of the MIT Communications Forum. And I'm looking forward to many more sessions in which Seth moderates and helps orchestrate the events of the forum. I won't take the time to talk about Seth's own credentials, except to say he seems a godsend to me. And I feel very fortunate to have him as a collaborator in continuing to create interesting forums. The forum website, which you can now see on the screen, lists our other events for the semester. I hope they're there. And I hope I'll see you at those events as well. It remains for me only to say that those of you in the audience who have not signed up for the MIT Communications Forum mailing list, please do so. We never give the list to anyone. We never send advertisements out. You never get any push ads on your work, urgings to download something you don't want. We only send out information about our events. And you receive a very small number of emails, but you are kept in touch with the forum's activities. So please do sign up if you can. Seth. Thank you very much, David. And thank you all for coming out. I know that there is a plethora of riches at MIT this afternoon. But we hope that this will be time well spent. I'm going to very briefly introduce the four people who are on the panel. As I've told some of you out there, I know there are a lot of Phoenix alums out in the audience. The selection of the panel was somewhat arbitrary, only in that there are really an incredible number of incredible Phoenix alumni who are living in the area who we could have included. I took advantage of this as a chance to collect some people that I wanted to hear from and talk to. But a good portion of this next hour and 45 minutes will be spent on audience questions and discussions and comments. And I hope that you all take advantage of that. So going from stage left to right, is that right? Yes. The first person seated is Lloyd Schwartz, who is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at UMass Boston. He is a longtime poet, and in addition to his three and a half works of poetry, he is a particular expert on Elizabeth Bishop and has edited or co-edited several collections of her work. He started working at the Boston Phoenix in 1977 and worked there essentially straight through to this spring when the Phoenix went out of business as the classical music critic and then classical music editor. He also is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism that he won in 1994 as a member of the Phoenix staff, after which he got a call from the New York Times asking them to immediately send his work to them and then never heard back. Next is Charlie Pierce, who if you don't know already when he speaks, you will probably recognize his voice from his, well not just because he has a loud projected voice that you can hear around Boston, but from his frequent appearances on MPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me and Only a Game. He's the author of four books, including the 2009 best seller Idiot America. He was a Boston Globe Sunday magazine staff writer for nine years, ending in 2011. He has been a writer at large at Esquire since 1997 and now writes Esquire's Politics Blog and also writes for as a staff writer at Grantland. Is it technically grantland.com or just Grantland? Grantland.com, okay. Which is a fantastic site. Next along the line, we have Anita Diamond, who began as, oh no, I'm sorry. Shortly next in my line, not next in the actual line. How dare you not sit the way I typed you into my iPhone. Next we have Carly Carioli, who I actually met 20 something years ago, 20 years ago, when he I think was an intern at the Phoenix and I felt like I had broken into their offices and was writing a couple of arts reviews, some music reviews. The music critics at the Phoenix were terrifying. I don't think that ever ended and the biggest talking down I ever received was in a review of a Roger Daltry Pete Townsend concert. I misidentified one of the members of the backing band as the wrong relationship to Pete Townsend and his family. And it was as if I had spelled the president's name wrong. Carly has been at the Phoenix straight through since he started as an intern, did the listings, was a listings editor, was a calendar editor, then went on to be an editor and eventually the editor of the Phoenix. First on the website and then of the newspaper and finally of the magazine. He was the final editor of the Phoenix and is now at Boston Magazine and I will probably not embarrass him by quoting some of the things he said about Boston Magazine over the years in the pages of the Phoenix. I loved it the same thing to me, it was horrible. Yeah, Carly was briefly worked at the Globe before he went to Boston Magazine and he also had some not great things to say about them over the years. Next, finally, is Anita. And Anita began as an assistant to the editor, is that right, at the Phoenix in 1978 and stayed there until 1983, which actually I skipped this over with Charlie but is the exact same timeframe that Charlie was at the Phoenix. Totally coincidental, they assure me. She started out writing profiles and eventually a first person column at the Phoenix in addition to writing a lot about feminist issues, about religion, about personal issues. And since she's left the Phoenix, has become a bestselling author several times over, most notably of 1997's The Red Tent. Her most recent book is 2009's Day After Night and somehow in between all that, she found time to be a staff writer at the Boston Globe Magazine for 10 years, back when the Boston Globe Magazine was still running long stories. So that's the four of them. As I said, I'm gonna try and direct the conversation for the first 45 minutes to an hour. I'm gonna interpret my job as mainly being one to get out of the way. So I wanna start, Carly, with you just because you were there at the end. And I know you've said that you were surprised on the day that it happened because I think the actual announcement came without a huge amount of warning, but was that something that you were surprised about in a larger sense when it happened? Oh, wait, don't talk yet. One last thing, if you're live vlogging, the hashtag is PhoenixMIT, P-H-E-O-N-I-X-M-I-T. P-H, yeah, however you spell Phoenix. Then followed by MIT. Right, there, there. Okay, so, Carly. The question was, was I surprised? I think a lot of us understood that the paper, especially once we switched from a newspaper to a magazine, what that we were doing, sort of an experiment that... Just back up for one second. And so, the Phoenix had been a newspaper, primarily a broad sheet for most of its existence since it started in the late 60s, early 70s, depending on when you date its inception. And then, what changes happened in its format over the last couple of years? So, I mean, it went from the broad sheet, obviously, to sort of the tabloid-y thing. This is, these are actually the Portland and Providence Phoenixes, which are still around. We had it delivered by an actual mendage to our, to this, you just came out today, this fall preview. So, I'm blanking on the date. I think it was, I guess, the early part of, it was like September of 2012, maybe, somewhere in there, where we were given the ultimatum to, over the course of six weeks, turn this 46-year-old newspaper into a glossy magazine. And that was because the finances were not great. The finances of newspapers in general hadn't been great. We'd survived a lot of downturns in the industry, but the Phoenix was, by all accounts, losing, still losing a pretty big amount of money. And so it was kind of a last-ditch attempt to revive. The brand, we sort of came up with this crazy notion of combined the Phoenix and our glossy lifestyle magazine Stuff Magazine into a single publication that would be weekly and try and keep as much of the Phoenix's identities as we could. And we relaunched that after sort of under insane conditions where our offices were also being renovated and there were jackhammers and we were putting together this thing that we'd never done before. So the magazine came out, I loved it. I thought it was great. I think we were all pretty proud of it. The entire thing was designed in-house. It was sort of built from scratch. And then things seemed to be going well, especially at the beginning. It was fat. People seemed to like it. But I guess my point was that at that point we understood that that was an experiment and that we had probably a limited amount of time to try and make that work. And Steve Amindage, the publisher of the Phoenix, sort of made that clear to many of us who had sort of been there for a long time. So the reason that it wasn't a total shock, we were still surprised at the timing, we thought we had more time. But the magazine itself was getting sort of thinner and thinner and the advertising pages just weren't there. So in that sense it began to take on a kind of an and an inevitability, but even at the end it was still kind of a shock. Even now it's still kind of a shock. And Charlie and Anita, you can both jump in on this, but when we were talking just before the forum started we were talking about some of the ways in which the Phoenix covered the news and the types of things that the Phoenix covered that was distinct from what was happening at the globe or anyplace else locally. Can you talk a little bit about that? No, you start. Come on, Charlie. They came to hear you, come on. What I did there for five years, which was essentially right for the news section, although I did do a number of things for lifestyle and for the supplements, because I was writing for my rent. So in more words I wrote, the easier it was to pay the rent. But I thought we were sort of the first generation produced by the long-form narrative nonfiction that came out in New York in the 1970s, the stuff that Tom Wolf put in an anthology called The New Journalism, although it wasn't really new. And are you talking about New York magazine or just? I'm talking about the magazine Harper's Under William Morris, Esquire, the latter days of Hughes and so forth. And I think that we were sort of the next generation of that. We covered almost everything the globe covered, but we did it at length and we did it with voice and we did it with attitude. Terrible word, but that's what it was. And at least when I got there in 1978, it had already carved out a niche within the media biosphere in Boston for that kind of thing. I can't speak to the arts coverage, although I know the arts coverage was brilliant. I don't know if you can talk to that, but from our side of it, I would go out and write long impressionistic pieces from the campaign trail or from or about the guy, I did a piece, a long piece about the last porno house in Chelsea where I had to go with a 70-year-old judge and a whole bunch of jurors who I don't think have ever recovered to go watch a movie so they could witness the evidence. Do you remember the movie? I do not. I do not remember the movie. The judge's name was Rudolph Stanziani, I remember that. But I do not remember the movie, but it was back in the days where they had plots and so forth. But, and anyway, that's what I thought we were, that's what I came there to do. And I think for the balance of the time I was there, that's what we did. And subsequently, I think a lot of that got absorbed into dailies, but at the time, we were the ones who, I mean, the Washington Post style section was doing it, but hardly anybody else was doing it around the country in dailies. Your turn. I started out answering the phone and filing photographs, which is pretty much how women got into the newsroom anyway. I don't know how the arts section worked. And this was, so just to remind everyone, so in the late 70s, you felt still to get into the newsroom. And by that point, you had been a journalist for a couple of years. Well, I was a freelancer. I had been a freelancer and I'd written for Equal Times, which was a women's bi-weekly that had lived for several years and I wrote everything in there under many names. And I learned a lot. And no, I thought Renee Lough had the job of assistant to the editor, Renee Lough, who many of you may know, was a state house, brilliant state house reporter. She was at that desk briefly and she went right to the state house and became the editorial page editor of The Globe most recently. And so then I got the job after that and I remember we had a file called phone calls from the dead. That were really strange phone calls and it was my way. And then I handed things in over the transom to Bob Sales, who was the first editor who really taught me how to write in a lot of ways and Richard Gaines. And then Andy Zelman, who was the lifestyle editor who had started by answering the phones at the front desk, took me out to lunch and said that I had more opinions than anyone she'd ever met. And she offered me a column, which was amazing and I got to write whatever I wanted. And the freedom of that was remarkable. And I think what I was doing and what a lot of us were doing at that time was reinventing the women's pages that the lifestyle section had its own footprint. And when you say women's pages, it's not that there were literally women's pages in the Phoenix. It was the soft stuff, which the women's movement had identified as core important stuff that needed to be covered. And that included everything from women's health to fashion, to politics and the way women were discussed in the media and with humor and with attitude and also with integrity in terms of reporting. So I felt, one of the things I felt that the Phoenix always did with whatever attitude was that we had to do the work. We had to do the reporting and the fact had to be there and so that whenever people sort of raised an eyebrow about the Phoenix, it was like, it's really, it's good journalism, it's solid. It was really, all of it was solid and the lifestyle section was solid and had news in it as well. So I just pulled up your porn again piece. It actually is not from 2006. It's from 1982, I think, is that right? Does that sound right? Sounds right. A piece you wrote, a great piece about a debate between Andrea Dworkin and Alan Dershowitz. Oh, God. Which I should point out, when the Phoenix ran it in their flashback section in 2006, Alan Dershowitz wrote in again. 14 years later to correct the record, to correct what he thought was correct. I've been on panels with him since then and he's absolutely the same person. But so I just want to dig that out. That's the kind of thing that happened all the time. You would, people would get something in their teeth and they would not let it go. Yeah, yeah. And that's what a phone call from the dead was about too. Yeah, yeah, people knew. But so we're talking about how the Phoenix was and all weeklies I think in general certainly the voice during the late 70s, early 80s was doing long form reportage. But I also want to just get at some of the distinctions between the actual subject matter. So was this something that you would see covered or written about in this way in the globe or in any other? I don't think so. And this was just, this was a huge event. I mean there were, there were concerns about violence. There was a lot going on there. And I don't remember if there was globe coverage but I know that we did many more inches. And I was given a lot of space and time as much as I needed and support to do this. And I actually think part of what we did in the lifestyle section was I take stories that the women's movement and feminism had identified and actually elevate them to some extent by making them well reported, well written and not screeds. And also, and that gave it more legitimacy I think. The content got had more legitimacy because it was written that way. I think that's an important point. We almost wrote, there were almost no straight opinion pieces at the Phoenix when I was there. What are people looking at? Oh. Pornography. Kind of a. We have a theme going. I got a kind of Zapruder thing going on with my neck jobs. No, the stories and the reporting was full of analysis and interpretation and opinion. But there were almost, there were very few, as Anita said, screeds. I mean, there were columns that were clearly designated as columns. Phoenix editorials didn't come in until almost the time I was leaving. But the distinction between allowing a guy to go, I mean, the thing that, and I don't want to go off on political reporting, but on the one hand on the other hand thing didn't exist at the Phoenix. It just didn't happen. The faux balance didn't happen. We were, I mean, our politics were left. There was no question about that. But at the same time, I think I did a lot of work with Republicans just at the beginning of the Reagan administration, just as the, what was then, and I also did a piece on a thing called Washington for Jesus, which was the first major rally of what became the religious right. And they were, we were willing to be fair. We weren't gonna, I mean, we were never gonna agree with these folks, but they would, I would get my phone calls returned from Republicans and from the people of Washington for Jesus because they knew that basically I was willing to listen to them for a half an hour and use whatever I could as part of my reporting. But there were very, very few straight out yell in your face kind of screams. And I pulled up Allen's letter in 2006 and the reason was just because he quotes the Globe article that covered this. And what's interesting is, I think Anita, your piece was much less, did not try and hide opinion as fact. It presented a much more complete picture of the facts and you could draw your interpretations from that. And the Globe did almost the exact opposite and it described it as what these men and women saw and some of them created was an ugly collision between 40 enraged radical feminists and Dershowitz who defended free speech and became a symbol for the entire legal system, which I think you would be hard pressed to draw that conclusion from your... Allen was an asshole. Allen was horrible and people reacted. So, but let me just one last thing that I wrote an opinion column, it was in my name, but I had to report, I had to support my opinions with reporting and I was told to go back and get a quote from somebody that I couldn't just say that, that I had to support it with either a citation from somewhere. And that was, I don't see that anywhere very much anymore. Yeah, we were gifted with tremendous, tremendous editors and I don't mean strictly the editors of the newspaper, although certainly Bob Sales, Anita and I owe Bob Sales a debt that we can never repay. But I'm talking about things, people like David Moran who's here, Tom Frail, the late John Ferguson, God the late Cliff Garboden, I'm gonna go down the little hit Rackless, they worked you. And I have been through a bunch of different magazines since then and nobody worked me harder than those guys did. I mean, I'll tell you, Esquire is a breeze compared to submitting a piece to David or John or Tommy was because it was, I mean, you had to have done, you do deal with this. And it was a great training ground. It was a great training ground for accepting the fundamental necessity of editors which writers don't often do very well. But I think that was very important. I didn't realize about the column in here because I never had a column. But yeah, I mean, it was a gauntlet and you had to run it and it was terrific. Lloyd, I wanna jump over to what I think a lot of people saw as one of the defining features of the Phoenix throughout all of its incarnations and that's the arts coverage. It was where growing up in Boston, I learned almost everything I knew about music. And I think one thing that really distinguished the Phoenix from the globe and from the way newspapers generally were covering the arts is it wasn't enough that you were interested in something. You had to really have a deep well of knowledge to be deemed appropriate to criticize it. Is that? Well, this was true of the art section and it began by being true because there was so much space available. I mean, my favorite figure. So you couldn't go on for 3,000 words if you didn't know what you were talking about. Right, and I'm thinking of the person who did go on for 3,000 words was Steven Schiff who was the Phoenix movie critic, movie editor, and who was sort of notorious for going on, talking about a new film or an old film that would take up three entire Phoenix pages and in the days when the Phoenix was actually bigger than it became. And 10 point type also probably. That I don't remember. I could still read it in those days. But we really were, no one was given a space limit. And it was a kind, it was an amazing kind of freedom to have. And I don't think anyone took advantage of that in the worst way. That is people who, but that people who wrote about the arts in Boston and this meant rock music because we had, I think short of maybe, or along with Rolling Stone, we had the best rock critics in the country. And movies, series. Who were some of those critics who then, because I was thinking about trying to list all of the Phoenix critics that had gone on to national prominence and then we just could have spent the entire hour doing that. But during that period, who were some of those critics? Well, Kit Rackless, who then became an editor of the LA Times Magazine and LA Weekly. And there's a very, very long list. And this is like the thing that terrifies me. Milo Miles. Milo Miles, today's here. Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, like. I mean, Mark Moses. But that entire Rolling Stone staff, I think at that time, I mean, the original Rolling Stone crew was also running for the Phoenix. They had like Dave Marsh back there. And, you know, Chris Gow was in there occasionally. And I mean, we found Lester Bang's pieces back in the archives. I mean, just this, anybody who has anybody, just one? Just one? I saw. Do you live? Yeah. Well, it's funny too, because the same, he ran the same, we figured out he ran the same piece like a year later somewhere else. And somebody else had like, you know, obviously not edited him. So, the Phoenix version was a much better edited piece than it goes to Charlie's point. But, I mean, reading through those archives is just astonishing. I mean, Kit Rackless, who is now the editor of the America Prospect, I met him at a conference. He's got white hair. He looks very distinguished. He was in Atlanta when the Sex Pistols landed for their first US show. And there's a Phoenix review of the first Sex Pistols show in America, which always astonished me. But that legacy is really, really deep. And not only that, it, you know, I can say certainly when I got there in 1993, sort of echoing Charlie's stories about becoming a writer there, there was no greater place on earth to like, learn your craft. I showed up to Phoenix, a kid from Philadelphia with hair down his ass, who knew nothing about anything except that. That is actually true. Heavy metal and a little bit about punk rock. And the editors there were John Gorell, who's here, Ted Rostowski, who maybe wrote for his band. That's how I got the gig. And Matt Asher, who seemed to know everybody in town and played in bands with people. And that sort of apprenticeship for four years of just sort of walking into a room where people would tell you what to read and what to listen to and what magazines and what writers. And that was constant. That was something that was your sort of your day-to-day thing with just talking about music and arguing about music and film and books. Current rock music, popular music, was certainly the center and always got the most attention in the Phoenix art section. What is fascinating and what I will always be grateful for is that there was always room. There was always the desire to also include the high culture issues. So there were brilliant art critics. David Benetti, who is also here today. Carolyn Clay writing about theater, people with authoritative voices. And the fact that the Phoenix was actually interested in having reviews of classical music and having serious coverage of classical music. Richard Buell before my time, whom I essentially replaced. And that even when the Phoenix was shrinking in those last days and probably the number of people who actually read classical music reviews was also shrinking. That Steve Mindich and the editors actually continued to want that aspect, that for me crucial aspect of Boston culture in the paper was a real testament to the kind of seriousness of what it meant to be interested in the arts and living in Boston. And so I think one of the things that does and did distinguish the Phoenix was this mix of almost equal emphasis on high low in terms of the arts and engaging with them with a similar depth of meaning. So here I came to the Phoenix after having written for the Herald for three years. Speaking of high art. Speaking of high art, where I had no space and had to turn in reviews without thinking about them because they were due the night of the concert. Not even the Herald does that anymore or certainly not the Globe. And then being butchered especially by the weekend editors. I mean really changing things and making mistakes and continual embarrassment. Although it was a great, that was my apprenticeship. And then coming to the Phoenix where I'm actually asked to write essays about music and getting the most serious responses from the editors. I mean David Moran was certainly here today with someone who actually knew and was interested in classical music. The person who was editing me most at the time was Kit Rackles who was a rock critic and who really didn't know much about classical music but who really wanted to make sure that he could understand what I was talking about and that I was really backing up everything that I had to say. I had a lot of opinions and I really had to support those opinions. Those opinions, the opinions of the people writing about arts weren't necessarily the most popular opinions. For me it was my profoundly and increasingly serious reservations about Seiji Ozawa being the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the most important classical music institution in certainly in this area outside of New York in the East. And even the Globe, I mean they were very good critics writing for the Globe. But there was a kind of pressure coming from the higher ups at the Globe that you really had to be very careful about what you said about the major institutions. And this was not the case at the Phoenix. And I think it was important to say that the Emperor had no clothes. So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about what we think or what you all think is going to be missing from the Boston Intellectual and Journalistic scene now that the Phoenix is gone. And I'll preface that by saying that one of the things that it seemed to me as an outsider that occurred over the last decade or so was you had the Globe increasingly either appropriating or exploring some of the areas that the Phoenix did, probably best represented by the ideas section, which I don't know if they hired Peter Canales, Gareth, and Steve Heuser all at the same time, but essentially just took a bunch of Phoenix editors and had them make their own section. I know Stephen would be here tonight, but he's closing that section at the moment. And so in addition to that, you had a lot of what was being covered by all weeklies in the arts moving over to the internet. And so despite the fact that we all will miss the Phoenix and it was integral in our lives, what are we actually going to be missing in Boston now that it's gone? You're missing, I mean, just to start, you're missing really terrific writers getting really seriously edited by brilliant editors. And there's just nothing else like that. And it's certainly not on the internet. And I don't see it anyplace else. Carly? Not in the Times. Yeah, I mean, I felt the trend you're describing as a Globe sort of trying to veer into pop culture coverage and the web, those things definitely happen. I mean, not just the Globe, but the Times has done that much more successfully. One of the things that I used to say is that the sort of the alt-media crowd is that the alternative media won. The idea was that there was this once this hegemony of the mainstream media and that the alternative media was encroaching and sort of breaking up that pseudo-monopoly. It did that. And the internet, when it sort of began to develop its own voice, took many elements of the alternative weekly style. I think that's true. But to Lloyd's point, there was a ton of stuff. Many of us have gone off and gone different places. But there were also voices that I cared deeply about, even in the very last Phoenix. Two of them are here that you won't see anywhere on Boston. You won't see Liz Pelley writing about underground music and underground activism. You won't see Matty Myers writing about feminist video game critics, like nobody's doing that in Boston. And they're both doing astounding work in other places, but not for the globe and not for Boston Magazine and not for any of the places that we represent. Although I assume that those places are available online. So functionally, are they doing it for a Boston audience? Well, I mean, sure. I mean, Liz Pelley started an advertising-free, alt-weekly-inspired online thing called Fuck the Media, which is amazing and still is amazing. And Matty's stuff is obviously available online. But she's also writing a book. So I mean, it depends on exactly what you think, if you want that at length. And is that sustainable? You're talking about two people who were getting paychecks from the Phoenix and are not getting paychecks now. And for people to sort of provide a space for writers like that to hone their craft and learn how to be writers, there's an entire generation of kids who just aren't going to get to do that. And with all respect to The Dig, which is a great paper, it's not particularly sustainable at this point. I mean, they're not paying people the same way that we were. And they don't have the kind of scope that can sort of pick up this like, I hope they are able to grow into something that can do that. That would be great. But I think there's a huge hole. Anita, I know you said that you had not been a reader of the Phoenix recently. Do you think that's because you aged out or because you were getting what you had been looking for the Phoenix for elsewhere? Yes and no. I think I did age out. But I didn't see the Phoenix anymore. And we were talking about that when it stopped being sold, I stopped seeing it. So as I've been sold, I think we figured roughly in the mid-90s, is that right? Mid- or late-90s, it went from, was it a buck 50 at that point, is that right? So it went from being a buck 50 to following the model that virtually by that point every other weekly had taken on, including the voice, which was free distribution. And that felt like, well, you're too old for this, because this is on college campuses for the most part. That's what it felt like, anyway, even though I knew that there were, and every now and then I would pick it up and read Lloyd or Carolyn Clay, who I really, who I think still is the best theater critic in town. But then I didn't see it again for another six months or eight months. So I felt that the hands were somewhat washed. And there were other places. And I do think the alternative media won in terms of adding more voices to the mainstream press and to broadening what's covered in the mainstream press. And of course, then the internet came along and picked up everything. I'm sorry to not have known about the video game reviews, because I've started reading them in the times. And I'm realizing there's this whole universe that I need to learn more about. Wait, why do you need to learn more about it? Because it's there, because it's there. Just because I'm interested in what women are doing with it. And I was trying to follow that a little bit. But that's not happening locally anywhere else that I'm aware of. So now I'm going to have to figure out the website. But it is out there. What's missing is, of course, an address for all of this stuff, an address to find Lloyd's writing and what other really talented people are writing, which is going to be somewhere on the internet. And Charlie and I were talking about this. The internet is a baby. We have no idea what's going to happen with it, and how it's going to coalesce, and how branding is going to work, and how we're going to start finding things in the future. And it sort of scares the crap out of paper people. But we won't know for quite some time how it's going to shake out and how we will find addresses and how people who need long form and deserve long form can find their audiences out there. What's frustrating is that there's so much, and you don't know how to get it. So it'll change. But I want to go back to something Charlie mentioned right at the end, which is an odd place for me to be now, because I'm almost entirely on all my work is entirely done on the web now, pretty much. I do an occasional piece for the Dead Tree version of Esquire. But I work in a world of very young people. I have not, since I left the Globe magazine and moved on to the internet, I haven't had an editor who's 30 years old yet. I mean, I have socks that are older than every editor. I'm wearing some now. But I do think that there is something to be said for the woodshedding you have to do early in your career, especially as a writer, as you develop yourself. And to get a piece chucked back at you a couple of times by David Moran or John Ferguson or somebody, and to develop your craft as a writer. And I see that sort of lacking in web-based journalism. I'm sure it'll develop as the need said, baby grows up. But I know that I would not be whatever I am without having gone through this process. And I think that was, for me, that was the most valuable part about being at the Phoenix. I walked out of the Phoenix in 1983 knowing everything I needed to know about making a career and what I did. Everything else was refinement. And I think that's what, if you're asking what the whole is, that's the whole. So it's finishing school. Exactly. Well, that may be the first time the Phoenix has ever been described as finishing school. Graduate school. People usually call it a graduate school thing. Can I just correct a little bit of history quickly? Sure. Can you grab the mic? And we will in about eight minutes. I don't want to start going on on anything. I'm David Moran. The 10 years before these distinguished people were there, there was an entire history of the paper, not just the rock critics. But the entire way that we were blessed to have sensationally talented people come in, like Lloyd, Charlie, and Anita, all had predecessors, 10 years of predecessors. I'm certainly not saying that. No, but I'm just saying there were. In fact, Anita and I came in at a moment of great transition. How are you socks to color? My only point was, when we're talking about names or trying to reach Robert Criskauer, names that weren't really part of the Phoenix. But I was hired by Bill Miller, who is still alive. He was a Globe News guy. I'm the one who hired Frail and Ferguson. And it is Bill Miller and Ken Emerson before me in the arts, and all of these, and Ben Gerson before Ken Emerson. And we also, the only other historical footnote I'll say is, we had dozens of women, none of whom started by answering the phone. There was no, there's somebody's blogging and saying that Anita didn't have to answer the phone. People came in wanting to answer the phone. I wanted to answer the phone. It was my way in. No, we were. I mean, to get someone insanely overeducated, like Anita, who wanted to join the paper, that's fine. But there are 15 Anita's before Anita. And there were feminist columnist Karen Lindsey. Kerry Grusen was an early editor before my time. So from 66 to 76, so I'm just, from 66 to 77, let us say. There's an entire momentum into which, I mean, you can step in the same river twice. One of the challenges of putting this together was figuring out how you encompass, unless a half century's worth of history, with a tiny handful of people and over a small amount of time. And I was about to say, well, David was talking. In 78, 79 when I got there and Anita got there, the staff was undergoing great transition. A lot of the people David was talking about were leaving. Diane Dumanosky, Howard Hussach, Stu Cohen, Richard Gaines became the editor, having done magnificent work as a state house reporter. So there was a lot of room for, there were huge shoes for us to step into. And we jumped into them with both feet to really torture the metaphor. But there was an enormous, there was an enormous transition right between 1978. I never met Bill Miller. I was sorry, he preceded Bob Sales. And there were a few Constants, Dave O'Brien, George Kimball, who we have not mentioned up until this point, and that's too bad. And I think Tom Sheehan was already there. I mean, if we name checked, we would literally be here till 10 o'clock, everyone at the Phoenix. And it's not not to give everyone props. I'm just pointing out that there was this very kind of great energy and turnover in this thing. I mean, as we've all shown, it was a great place to work your way up to what you wanted to be. But that also came along with this. We used to have these massive turnovers. And it was healthy, it wasn't, you know. By the 70s, certainly, I mean, the voices rightfully cited as sort of the first big metro all weekly, I think a lot of people don't realize that the Phoenix was really the second big metro all weekly. And a lot of the innovations that came to the form came out of Boston and out of the Phoenix. And the sort of New York oxygen sometimes, I think, overlooks that. So I do want to make sure that we touch on one last thing before we open it up. And that's this sense of the attitude of the Phoenix or of all weeklies in general, shifting to the mainstream. So the notion that the all weeklies won. And what that really means and what was lost in that transition. And I'll explain a little bit what I'm talking about. Dan Kennedy, who is here also and right here, and worked at the Phoenix for a long time and is now a media critic, wrote something that I thought was very interesting when during one of the pieces written in the immediate aftermath. And that was, he said, the community that sustained the Phoenix has passed from the scene. At one time, the Boston area was a wash in concert venues, record stores, guitar emporiums, independent bookstores, head shops, the kind of businesses that reached their customers by advertising in alternative weeklies. And the reason I thought that was interesting was because you look at Harvard Square and what has happened there over the last 20 years and how that is now a magnet for tourists in a way that it wasn't. And so on the one hand, you could say, well, this downtown Cambridge attitude has sort of taken over. On the other hand, the taste is gone, the worst house is gone, you have a bunch of banks and chain stores in their place. So are we seeing, with the passing of the Phoenix, the sort of culmination of what has been this now ongoing trend of the kind of edges being shorn off of what we thought of as an alternative culture and kind of repackaged for malls and mainstream America. In 30 seconds or less. No, I mean, kind of, I mean, twice ever thus though, right? I mean, something becomes popular in the underground and people on the overground realize it can sell and then they start selling it. I mean, whatever. I just distrust nostalgia. And this is getting into nostalgia for me. And the good old days at the head shops and. I just think whatever will come next is whatever the alternative to the present is, which is what the whole, it may well, I have no idea what that will be. I was a constant enemy at the Phoenix. I mean, the part of the ever-presentness of the Phoenix was its constant reinvention of itself over and over and over again. The name was sort of good about that. You're asking about whether or not there was a sustainable thing there. I actually disagreed with Dan a bit about what he wrote. In a broad sense, he's not wrong. Those are accurate changes. But I also sort of was trying to point out that a lot of the things that people sort of identified with the older Phoenix, those things evolved as well. I mean, there were things in Boston that are much more profitable than some of the underground things where if you look at a business like Carmeloupe, like this is a streetwear company that is now worth millions and millions of dollars, is sort of taken over for maybe what Newberry Comics was in the 90s or what sort of your head shop was in the 70s. I'm not sure that I think you can sort of go a little bit too far and say that the audience for that evaporated. I certainly felt a renewal, especially in the last five years of the newspaper, that I think had been sort of absent for maybe more than a decade with sort of a reflowering of certainly like DIY and punk culture in Boston and sort of and surprisingly like a real strong base of activism that sort of had been absent for a lot of my tenure there. I'm not saying that head shops and guitar stores were good or bad. I was just making a comment about that generally and I do think that one thing that the Phoenix was able to seize on as its own was a sort of part of Boston and a part of life that you wouldn't see in the globe because it made people uncomfortable and there just is, it seems to me, that in the same way that Boston is a safer city than it has ever been, I remember being shocked when a school field trip drove through the combat zone. You don't have, there aren't really any areas in the city in what today in which you would feel like you had to cover up your kid's eyes when you were driving through, that I have kids so I'm happy about that. I'm not saying that we should return to that. I'll throw that comment to Chris Ferron. Is Chris Ferron here? He is, he's nodded off. I don't know, I don't know if that's necessary. I mean, yeah, it's a safer city but I don't know that there's, that that means that there's nothing, is this like a Jane's addiction thing? Is there nothing shocking? I don't know that that's necessarily a case. I think there were still stories that you can tell that differentiate yourself. So, Anita, your story about that, the Andrea Dworkin, Alan Dershowitz debate and the way that you talked about what was actually going on there instead of talked about it euphemistically or Charlie, your fantastic quote was at Daryl Dawkins that you cited when the 76ers beat the Celtics and a chant of beat LA went up in the Boston Garden and the Globe Sports Reporter asked Daryl Dawkins what that was like and he said, when I heard that, my dick got stiff and he turned to the Phoenix reporter and said- Ah, Brian, we gave it to Michael Guy. You were on this because we're not gonna be able to. And it was Michael's lead. But in terms of, so, you know, still, you're not gonna see cursing in the pages of the Globe, but in terms of subject matter, are there things today that, and maybe Carly, this can be the final question of this part for you or Charlie, you can also jump in, but are there things today that the Phoenix was covering that no one else would cover? Chris Farron on Occupy. Nobody covered Occupy, by the way, he did. Nobody in America covered the Occupy movement the way that guy did. I mean, you find your alternative. I mean, the thing about this business is there will always be a mainstream, therefore there will always be an alternative. You just have to go find it. Was that a failure of the fact that no one else covered it like Chris did? And I agree with that. Is that because if Chris had been working for a quote, mainstream publication, they wouldn't have run it because they weren't interested or just because they didn't have Chris- They wouldn't have run it because it wasn't within their comprehension to cover it that way. And just to shout out, the other people who covered that for us, Ariel Shearer, Liz Pelley, and we had a couple of people doing that. They literally around the clock. Farron's cover was amazing of that. But you remember, there were other reporters there. There were global reporters there. They just didn't, I mean, it's not like they didn't know about it. And not only that, I mean, Steven Ear was covering it for the Metro and actually probably doing the best mainstream job of any of the mainstream papers. Just to kid out you who's interested in there. I'll throw another one out there, which was in the very final days of the Phoenix, when Stevenson's climate coverage, which is a very mainstream issue, but the way that he was covering that, I think was pretty distinctive and had kind of a different kind of impact, where he's talking about essentially a mainstream climate environmentalist movement that is moving off into a mode of radical action. And he came to us, you're talking about a guy who'd written for the Atlantic, who'd written for Global Idea Section, who had been at GVH and WBR and could not get anybody else to publish that stuff. So yeah, there's still stuff. I was, go ahead, Chris. This is, Chris, just step up to the mic, just so because this is recorded and then we'll have you for posterity. It's not just... Chris, just identify yourself. Chris Farone, so I came on staff in exactly five years, September 2008. But it wasn't just covering the same stuff. Other people are covering in a different way, but there's just a million, I think your question is, there's still a million stories in Boston. I still have a book full of shit that I didn't get to write for the Phoenix and trying to do some all over the place. There's still cults, literally, on college campuses, LaRouche houses. So if you brought that story, if you brought a story of a cult on a college campus to Boston Magazine or to the Globe, to the ideas section, or do you think they would say, ah, we're not interested in that? I don't mess with the Globe, but otherwise it's like only because they know who I am at this point. But if you're a young writer out there who's going to come out and you have a badass story, I mean, it probably will get stolen. So you're just better off doing it for an independent outlet. I mean, I guess my point was, it's not that they wouldn't run it. And if they'd water it down or whatever, as far as, I mean, the way that we got to do stuff at the Phoenix is really not another outlet where you can get paid. I mean, I traveled. I was on the road for four months a year. The guy who's standing here on here is just like, he's an alt-weekly reporter. That's what they look like. And they don't, they don't get to write for other people. The look stays, by the way, in case you didn't notice. The salaries go up a little bit, but the look stays. He's a maniac. I mean, like, there's, he's just, like, the way that he reports stories, the way that he writes. I agree. No, we need to start talking with the fact that paper and is, is, I have a 27-year-old daughter who does not pick this up. Right. And she reads The New York Times. That's because it's not in existence anymore. She doesn't pick up the, she reads The New York Times, she does not read The Paper. I don't read The New York Times. And so I think that's, I mean, there's room. The question is, how do we create a Phoenix-like world with editors who can help people and where readers can find this stuff on the Internet? And that's where it has to go. Yeah, there's a little bit of stirring like that and oddly enough in my other life as a sports writer, there's a couple of sites that are doing long-form sports reporting with a fully-edited Glenn Stout, who many of you may know from, he runs the best American sports writing. He has a, I think it's called, it's called Wordplow or something, which is a long-form journalism site. ESPN.com is doing a lot of long form. What I do basically is I print the stories out and then read them in hard copy because I'm an old guy. But, so there, I mean, at least and somebody's doing a long-form political site now and I can't remember who it is. I just, I read about it the other day nationally. Can I make one other comment about the Phoenix service as a Boston institution, as a, you know, removed from all the old weekly stuff. You know, this is something that, it was a thing that you picked up on Thursdays or, you know, on the old days on Fridays. And it was like the Bible of what was going on in Boston. And it had everything in it. And yes, it's been disaggregated by the internet, but there isn't anything that anybody started in Boston of any of the websites that you pick up and you can find out what bands are playing and what bands are good and what theaters playing and what you should be thinking about and what books to read. And that, that, I mean, obviously, that this is not like, this is not rocket science. But when the thing goes away, you start to miss it. And I was sort of shocked that even, you know, I would sort of, like, it's like having a phantom limb. Like, you're looking for this thing that you're like, wait, I know where to find that, but it's not very much. I was, right after the marathon bombings, I actually, I knew the Phoenix didn't exist. But the thought that came into my mind is, it's Thursday, I have to go pick up the Phoenix because I really want to read something meaningful about that event, which everyone was covering. Right. You know, to argue with Anita a little bit about nostalgia. There, you know, there was a period in Boston theater in the late 60s and early 70s where you could go to the Loeb Drama Center and see Tommy Lee Jones as Coriolanus and Stocker Channing as Isabella in Measure for Measure or Jenny in Three Penny Opera. John Lithgow was acting in and directing plays. This was a period of about seven years. There's been nothing, nothing in Boston like that since then. There was Sarah Caldwell doing amazing productions of operas that the Met hadn't quite heard of yet, though they figured it out later. We were getting amazing productions of, you know, of, that was, that were revelations. Robert Lowell was in Boston teaching at Harvard. And there's nothing like that. And these, and the Phoenix is sort of in, Phoenix had a really great run. And it's horrible that it doesn't exist anymore. It's so sad that it doesn't exist anymore. But it's one of those things that is really irreplaceable. And, and I think, you know, we could talk about the ART and what they're doing, which I think is pretty impressive these days. But I do want to, I do want to move on and make sure we get to the audience part of this. We have thumbs down for the ART. Okay. Let's argue about theater. So, yeah, so let's move on. One thing I did just want to, and when we were talking about some of the Phoenix's coverage, I just wanted to point out one incredibly impressive piece of reporting. The fact that it's 10 years ago does not at all mean that this stopped over the last 10 years. But one of the things the Globe gets credit for, a huge amount of credit for, is its coverage of the Catholic Church in the early part of the last decade. And this was a story that Phoenix was writing about for months before the Globe picked it up. So it, here was a story, I don't know if the Globe would or would not have come upon it. But it certainly was a story that the Phoenix was at first. It's about Harvey's not here. Reach out to him. Anyway, yes, and please identify yourself. Sure, I'm Mark Tomizawa. And I grew up in Chicago, so Chicago Reader, which is still going, and WFMT, which was an all classical station with people who spoke their minds rather well. I wanted to add, I didn't want this to feel like a funeral. Yes. Okay. Yeah, right. That's tomorrow at seven o'clock? Seven o'clock. Seven o'clock. Because here's what I'm going to say. The old English expression, I think, is the difference between a grave and a rut is dimension. You've talked about lots of structural things. I think it's not nostalgic to say what part of the structure is universal and goes way back to the best of narrative. And how does that structure come to life on the internet? And I'd like to suggest that with a certain man buying the globe, and with the amazing talent we have in Boston, including the Dean of BU's communications department, who made the Herald Digital, that we have the people. All right, I saw the little grimace. We may have a difference of opinion about what happened, but I'm just saying that Boston has this urge to become great again. All right, technically, we lost it to Silicon Valley. We've given it away twice. Let's make, I just want to make sure that there's a question because we have a lot of very opinionated people in the audience. No, there is. But this is all structure and this is opportunity. Okay, this is not pathological. So the idea is this. We go to John Henry and say, you need to create a new version of whatever it is. You need an alt version of the globe and you've got the people who can do it. Okay, but what is the question? Anything I can do that is. No, I'm trying to. Well, actually, I'm going to answer your question. The irony is that that's essentially what Boston.com hired me to do when I got right after Phoenix died. And they'll be launching a site that is something like that probably mid-October. And does it, last question, does it include really talented people like him and the younger versions of him? It damn well better. But there's no guarantee that it will. No, I mean, and, but, I mean, they're. They'll invite it. And there's no guarantee that even if it does, it'll succeed. But yeah, I mean, the question is, is there an opportunity? And yeah, there's an enormous opportunity there. There's an opportunity for the dig. There's another all weekly in town. And there's an opportunity for Boston Magazine. Maybe, yeah. So I just hope that MIT will be a big player in that because MIT has the ability. I can almost guarantee that MIT will not be a big player in starting a new media company. Although oddly enough, I mean, what. No, no, no, no. You say that, but that. It's saying the structure up. I was going to say. Okay. In. Isn't that what Joey Ito is talking about now is spreading out the media lab to the rest of the world. So isn't all a way of innovating? I'm just trying to get. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We did. I mean, in, in trying to think about like whether there would be a place online for, for some new kind of thing with a lot of the same kinds of people who are, who are doing stuff to Phoenix. We did talk to, we talked to the MIT game lab, actually. And I was involved in this. I hope they, I mean, I'm not, I'm distanced from that, from that process at this point, obviously. But, but it's ongoing. And I think, I think there's an opportunity for anybody who wants to really cares about that stuff. You also, I think all of us on this stage and a lot of people who are here have a sense, just an innate sense of what an enormous job that is. To do on a week-to-week basis. It's easy to do for a little while, but it's hard to do for 40 years. I think that's one of the lessons of the dig. And I know everybody has different opinions on, on Steven Mendes who kept us in the game for 46 years. But he made extraordinary contributions of money and of time and of, and lots of other stuff over the years. And, and the, yeah, John Henry's definitely, you know, one of those sort of rich people who can subsidize the thing. But those people are pretty, are pretty rare now. My point about that, guaranteeing that MIT was not going to do that. I didn't mean MIT was not going to help create new structures. MIT is not going to go and work with the globe on bringing a Phoenix-like outlet to Boston.com or the globe. Why? I don't, I don't think. It doesn't matter because I'm not in a position to make that and you can ask Joey if you want to. Okay. I will. All right. Thanks. Yes. A couple of thoughts for your consideration questions. Make sure it's a question. Yeah, they're, they're questions. The, when you, you, you touched on what I think is most important. The Phoenix started as Boston After Dark. It started as what you described, a kind of calendar listing. And so it seems to me that was always the core, at least what it, what I liked about the Phoenix. When it, the Phoenix bought, you know, that whole complicated history. So I guess number one, isn't there a place, and I think you've touched on it a little, for a hard copy version of something you pick up on a weekly basis that has all the music and the lectures and everything else, what I found useful about the Phoenix. Secondly, the Phoenix went from being- What's, let's make sure there's a question. Yeah. Don't worry. Just- Well, you're already on number two. Yeah. Okay. Well, if you listen, I think you'll hear it. That wasn't, that wasn't good. I think the first one was, now here's the second. The Phoenix went down a road that I completely horrified me. And I think it was sort of self-destruction. When it switched over from the paper version into this glossy thing with this whole new advertising strategy, which turned it into the yuppie extraordinaire publication, which I had no interest in whatsoever. Maybe there's a new market out there that, but I evidently didn't respond. No one I don't think has talked yet about that particular thing that happened, which led directly to the demise of that version of the publication. And the link to that question is, I just came back from Maine a short while ago, and there's a Portland version of the Phoenix that's still going. Yeah, it's right here. And there's a, and there's a Providence version, if I'm not mistaken. So why is it, I don't, you know, no one has really explained how it's possible to have a Phoenix in Portland, unless I missed it at the very beginning of this. Carly, you might, I know, you might have something to say about this, but I think that's something that you see actually around the country in that smaller communities are having a much easier time sustaining all weeklies than large cities, because what all weeklies are giving truly cannot be found in those cities. You see it throughout the South. You see it in Portland. Where's, you see it in Providence, I guess, still? I would, I mean, what you're talking about is, I think, pretty accurate. And this is one of the things that I've mentioned a few times in different contexts, but I was on the board of directors for the alternative weekly group, which is all, like, there's like 150 of them in the country. And it is one of the things that you, one of the trends you see is that the big city ones, you know, the Village Voices of Iraq right now, the Phoenix, obviously, is dead. But in the small and medium markets, a lot of those papers are becoming, almost, papers of record. And the couple that I tend to mention, one is Seven Days in Vermont, which is a fantastic paper and growing and doing great stuff. And what's the one in Jackson, Mississippi? I'm gonna miss, I'm gonna forget that anyway, but there's a, there's also, there's a couple of really good ones. And so, yeah, I mean, the, you know, I definitely, I mean, I heard, believe me, you're not the first person to say that they hated the glossy version. We disagree. I mean, I thought it was great, a great magazine. And, you know, one of the things that I think I personally underestimated when we went to the glossy was that the Phoenix represented not just what was there, because we went through a great effort to keep long form journalism in it, to keep all the, to actually add to our arts coverage and to make a space for all the things that made the Phoenix the Phoenix. But it made perfect sense to me afterwards that people responded to the Phoenix as being what was not there. I mean, the part of what it meant to be this newspaper version of the Phoenix was that it wasn't on glossy paper and that it didn't have these gorgeous pretty pictures. And there's a grittiness to it that certainly was lost, although I can tell you that inside that newspaper there were a lot of us who were really excited to have the opportunity to do the magazine version. Awesome, Miss Cyprus. David? I wonder if I could ask the panel to... Please identify yourself. Sorry, I'm David Thorburn, the director of the communications forum. This is very rich, interesting discussion, but I'm listening to it partly as an outsider. And I think that one problem with the discourse so far has been that the people who are Phoenix writers and Phoenix long-time Phoenix readers certainly know what everyone is alluding to. But for those of us who have a less full sense of what the issues are, it isn't entirely clear what's so alternative about what you've described. One... Here's one thing I got, I'm sure, is right, that there was a much greater and more systematic and respectful emphasis on what we'll call popular culture. And that the Phoenix, like other alternative weeklies or non-mainstream publications, helped to naturalize the notion now very widespread that these distinctions are unhelpful. That seems... So one thing is clear to me that one thing that distinguished the Phoenix in its heyday, at least, was this kind of emphasis. But what in other... And then another thing that you're telling us distinguished it was the quality of its contributors and its writing, which of course I accept and understand. And in fact, my experience with the Phoenix certainly confirms that tremendously so. But still, what else about the Phoenix made it so alternative? What really distinguished it from the globe or from other things? And have we really... Are there no other spaces online where such things are available? Two things I can think of right off the bat. First of all, George Kimball. Nobody wrote about sports the way George Kimball did, anywhere in America. I mean, if anybody during my time at the Phoenix can be said to have reinvented a form of journalism, it was George Kimball. Simply by leaving the press box. I would think that I think you could say the same thing about Dave O'Brien. And at that point, nobody was covering the media in Boston as a beat. People had done media criticism before going back to, you know, Liebling and Menken and everyone else. Nobody else was doing that at the time. Those are two that... So part of the point, Charlie, is the boldness and non-mainstream interests of the writers. That was also non-mainstream style. It was also non-mainstream vocabulary. It was also... I mean, everything about the two that I mentioned, and I hope most of the work the rest of us did, was everything about it was alternative, except for the basic journalism, as Anita said, which was always solid. But the approaches to stories, the discoveries, I remember to this day in 1980, right before I left, 82, 83, we had a terrific writer named Neil Miller, and he kept coming to me or coming to meetings with this story about this weird disease that gay men were getting and were dying of. And even at the Phoenix, people didn't see the story. I mean, it was just this kind of strange thing. But Neil dogged it. And I don't know that The Globe had anybody on it then, but it wasn't just the approach that was alternative. It was the way we all did our jobs in a fashion that was the alternative to what was then the mainstream. And I can't explain it to you without taking you back to what The Globe was. I was going to say, and what The Globe still is, I think Charlie's got a real great perspective on this, having been at a bunch of these places for significantly longer than the rest of us have, but even to get a peek inside what a daily newspaper is like and the strictures that are put on that, in many ways, there are lots of great things that The Globe was able to do, but there are patently things that they cannot do and don't wish to do that left open a vast spectrum of... So part of it then are the oppressive standards of convention and taste that keep the mainstream media from looking at certain kinds of questions. Not entirely. I mean, wait a minute, because I did get to run so did you at the magazine, at The Globe, when we're given the opportunity to stretch out. And at Boston Magazine, when I worked for David O'Brien, and I wrote about the AIDS epidemic early on and was given a lot of time as well as space to fill those things out. So it's not just the outlets, it's also the fact that all of our print... Everything is shrinking so much. You can't do that anymore in The Globe magazine. There's just no space and there's no time, there's no money to pay the reporters. So it's not just the media outlet, it's what's happened to journalism and to our... And to paper in the last... Yes, I know what you're doing, you're linking the demise of the Phoenix in part to the tremendous transformations that will certainly make sense. All right, yes. Please make sure you add in. Yeah, sure. Hi, I'm Raika Murthy. I'm actually a CMS alum from far too long ago now. Hi, David. So I heard Chris talk about all the stories that he still has left to be told, and I heard Anita talk about how do you create a Phoenix online. And I'm in the public radio space where local, more and more, gets talked about as a differentiator for stations that otherwise can be bypassed by all sorts of other channels besides broadcasts for the same national programs. However, I feel like local media doesn't get respect when it comes down to it. And I'm not just saying that in public radio, I think in general. And what I'd love to hear from all of you is... When you say respect, do you mean within the industry or from an audience? Both, I think. Okay. I mean, obviously, this is all anecdotal, but that's why I want to hear from you guys. What I want to hear is when you were at the Phoenix, what were your perceptions? I mean, it's all anecdotal, it's very qualitative. I mean, you can bring circulation in if that's useful, but I want to get a sense not of how advertisers felt about advertising in the Phoenix, but I want to get a sense from you guys of how you felt the community and appetite among the readers and among the Boston scene, the movers and shakers, as well as the Alts. What was the appetite for local media, for talking about it, for reading about it, for even knowing that there were local stories? I mean, that's another issue. And we were talking about it. And how do you see that over history? Yeah. And can you also bring in the internet, too, because there's such a perception now that there's so much media and there's too much of it, but obviously there's so many stories that aren't getting told. So just over time, I'd love to hear what you think. I'm really big on local media, on local radio. And everybody I know talks about it all the time. And the local outlets, Lloyd and I were talking about the very long report we heard in the card today about the opera. This new opera company. This new opera thing. It would never in a million years know about that, nor would I necessarily read about it. And was that on BUR? On BUR. And the kind of arts reporting they're doing there, the kind of local reporting they're doing there. And also on GBH, although, anyway. I really think the BUR reporting is really, it's quite interesting. And some of the other, I'm also a new big fan of Tell Me More, which is a national show. I'm so glad you just said that. I walk around saying how great and underplayed it is. Yes. And this is a show about minority voices and brilliant hostess. And I said that because you should know it's a woman. And this great barbershop thing on Fridays. It's just, it's terrific. So I'm actually very excited about local radio. And in terms of the audience, it's all anecdotal. It's all, you know, it's how many letters did you get? How many emails did you get? What's the response? But it's just in terms of the chatter. I actually think that local radio is where it's happening. What about local news? What about a culture around local news and people's expectations for reading it, prioritizing it? Are they going to read the globe or are they going to read the next national political website? I think that's what I want. Not just a rainbow. I'm still hungry for the globe website or not the globe. Somebody to do a local website. And I don't, and the Thursday afternoon thing doesn't do it for me because if it's Tuesday, I want to know if it's, you know, things change. So I want a website that does Boston After Dark and I want it to be really good and I want it to have reviews on it. And it, you know, somebody needs to aggregate that for the city of Boston, for the greater Boston area. My follow-up would be you guys did it in print. Obviously you did it in various different contexts. How might one do it in the future? Because you guys are among the few who succeeded. Do it online. It's got to be done online. It's got to be done online. Right, but how? With, I don't know. Yeah. What are the elements? You've got to ask somebody else. I think just by constraints of time, we're not going to have any business plans. Somebody in this room knows how. Somebody in this room knows how to do that, I'm sure. I do have one follow-up and I'm talking about tell me more and the focus on minority voices. That's something that historically the Phoenix had a varied record on in terms of representing. Do any of you have any thoughts about why that is and what that says about an alternative weekly and about the alternative weekly culture that there was that varied record? It's white. What is it? The culture of the Phoenix that I knew was white. It was white. That was it. There was whatever attempts were made. So you had this community. There was nobody of color in there. I'm sorry, David. I'm sure somewhere in the history of the Phoenix, there was a person of color. But in my four fives, Charlie? No. You had a community of people who had a counterculture perspective who were pushing back against. We covered a lot of stories out of the different communities in Boston. But we did so as and you said a pretty white paper. But we did. I mean, there's certainly Dave O'Brien's work on the James Bowden case, which I don't know if anybody remembers now. But we were out there covering stories as we were everywhere that other people weren't getting to. It's just that the composition of the staff was the way it was. And that's why I wrote a blog about the voices on NPR and the names on NPR. Just saying Megna Chakrabarti makes me feel good. And all of those names, all of the names I can't identify necessarily where they came from. I think that's a tremendous shift in what we're hearing on the air. And I think that's really exciting. So I'm really looking forward to what happens with radio and I'm hoping it will stay local to that extent too. It's exciting. But just bringing it back to the Phoenix, we have people here who collectively were at the paper for decades and decades. Was that a discussion that you had? And if not, why not? I think it's a... I've read it all the time. Yeah, it was a... I've read it all the time. Oh my God. Bill Miller and I went on to... That's why I asked the question. In 1907... That's why I asked the question. I think it was constant not just for the Phoenix but for all weeklies in general. The Jackson Free Press, which is the one I was trying to think of in Jackson, Mississippi, is the only alt-weekly I know. And it started online and then became a print paper that has a racially diverse staff and as well as readership. But I think... I think the other thing to remember is that at the time... And this is certainly no excuse, but at the time there was a thriving Black press, news press around the country. A lot of the good talent went to the Amsterdam News in New York or the banner here or the Chicago Defender. That was still alive. That was still alive. That was still alive. Charlie, was there a Black radio station? I'm sure. Local stations? WLD? WLD. I mean, there was a universe of African American media that was still thriving at that point, which is no excuse for the way we were, but that's the fact. Yes? Hi, I'm Carolina Donovan from the Nieman Journalism Lab, and I'm sorry to go back to all of these things, but I did kind of want to talk about a paid model for long-form and for magazine writing and for narrative. And I mean, we've introduced some of those examples, Grantland, some other things, and maybe there is no answer. Maybe the answer is not in this room right now, but we've talked about the web a little bit and in terms of unbundling that. So I'm not talking about local, I'm not talking about listings, not even necessarily talking about Boston, but if we're talking about making the kind of, the really, the meat of the writing that you guys did, profitable, and obviously you said you're still doing it, Charlie, you said you're still doing it and getting paid for it, presumably, where and how is that happening and how can we make it the same? I'm not doing long-form online. I'm doing a blog for Esquire and a 1500 word column for Grantland. That's not what I don't consider that long-form. The stuff I do for Esquire Magazine is what I consider long-form, and I'm still doing that for print. I just mentioned that I know a couple of people and I can't remember who's doing, somebody is launching a political website of with long-form political journalism and I heard about it while I was in Washington the last couple of days and I can't remember, somebody fairly famous and I can't remember who it is, but in any event, Glenn Stout is doing it in sports writing right now. Part of the genius of the alt-weeklies was, I mean, and you hear this constantly across all kinds of journalism, that the long-form stuff is traditionally not been thought of as stuff that pays the bills. So this was sort of the idea of it being that Bible, the street Bible, the thing that people would pick up. The business model for alt-weeklies was you had this audience of 18 to 36 year olds who had disposable time and disposable income and just really wanted to go out and be involved in the cultural life of the city. And if you could have this thing that everybody wanted to pick up and read because of all the, essentially, this great rock writing and this great, but they've read the ads the same way that they read the copy, that you could afford to build all the space that made room for all the stuff that we love to do. What do we get paid? Excuse me. I'm talking about monetizing. What were we paid? Not a lot. It wasn't a lot, but it was something. It was something, but it wasn't enough to live on. For more than a couple of years. I mean, it was enough for me to live on, believe it or not, in Jamaica Plain. Yeah, but it was one of the old days. Not today. It was one of the reasons that there was so much turnover at the Phoenix. Right, exactly. Because there was a kind of ceiling to... We were fairly easily outbid, is what Lloyd was saying. Yes. Right. I don't know what you were paying attention to. Harvey Silvergate actually wrote about this and how he went to Steve Mindich, the publisher at one point, and said, look, we could build this stable of all-time great writers if we just paid them more. And Steve, according to Harvey, flipped his lid and essentially said, I'm not going to tell you how to practice law. You don't tell me how to publish my paper. But I guess Harvey's impression was that one of the things that Stephen eventually said to him in conversation, and one of the lessons there was that if you pay people a comfortable wage, then you don't get that constant infusion of new talent. I think it was a pain in the neck, but it was sort of understood. It could be a publisher's way of justifying, paying people a non-livable wage. However, it is worth pointing out that you were there for five years. It was graduate school. It was graduate school. It was not a plan. But so I think it does speak to this just a second about monetizing it. So we were given a chance and the opportunity and in exchange for not getting paid a lot, we were given great editors, and we understood that there was an exchange there. I don't know how that works online, and I don't know if it still works, but I don't think there's this coverage enough to pay anybody anything at all. How it could work online. So again, the nostalgia here has to be tempered with what we were getting paid and what we weren't getting paid and why people had to leave. Because some people had real jobs, and then they wrote for the Phoenix, right? Like me. Like you. There are, this isn't the topic of this forum, but there are places like The Atavist and Byliner that are only publishing long form, five to 15,000 word pieces, and have an economic model that involves paying for those pieces. Who knows if that'll work, but certainly the writers. There's also a journalist in the back of the room, Mara Johnson, who's pioneering the model of just sort of having your own online magazine that is on your iPod. And it's in the iTunes store, and then you assign your friends stories and people pay you for a subscription to that. Sure. And I can't remember the name of the, it might be what you're talking about, but someone is doing an e-book single thing right now out of Esquire, it's Esquire editors. I think they're using the Kindles, they're using like a Kindles kind of thing. Kindles, yeah. But I mean, yeah. David. Go ahead, yeah. I can. Yes. My name is David Rosenbaum. The question was raised, what made the Phoenix old? I walked into the Phoenix in 1973, 23 years old, and they said, okay, write something and we'll pay you. I couldn't have walked into the New York Times, I couldn't have walked into the Village Voice. The Village Voice was too scary. Been around for a long time, couldn't walk into the Herald, but I could walk into the Phoenix, and they may not have paid a lot. I think they paid me $75, but $75 is more than I get paid online. I remember getting $35, actually. A few years later, so. I think it was hot. In the end, we were paying, what, $35 for a record review? Well, this was a $150 for a half page. Book review. $30, we cut it down. Instead of, we don't need to revisit all of it. But the point is, I don't know where, I have a friend's son who is now an editor at Slate, and basically what he does is edit stuff that people write for free and put it up. And because it's the web and it's an, you got to fill in an infinite amount of space. You're talking about a long form. Have to fill an infinite amount of space constantly. You can't pay these people. So the validation I got from that $75, I'm sorry Anita, allowed me to say, okay, I can maybe do this. This might be a profession for me. I don't know where that exists, but that, at that time, was what made it alternative. Is that it was a place for not a journalism person. You know, just somebody off the street with a college education to say, why don't I try writing? And then I got support for it. We're going to move into a lightning round where you all need to answer as many questions as possible in 60 seconds or less. I guess there are not a lot of wait, wait, don't tell me listeners in the audience. But we do only have 15 minutes left. So we are going to try and keep questions and answers even more succinct than usual so we can get to everyone. And a reminder that there will be a reception afterwards so we can continue this kind. Yes, I'll make, you know, I'll remind everyone right before we go and where it is, but we can continue this discussion there as well. Yes. Hi, Kelly Kreitz with CMS. I want to pick on something that came up in David's question but also has been a little bit of an underlying theme and what a lot of you have said, which is this idea of your writing having been a craft, that word came up a lot. And the idea that what was really alternative about the Phoenix was the quality of the writing or the art or the craft to use your word, which is a really different kind of conversation about what might be, quote, lost as journalism changes than I've heard in other communications forums, for example, when we're maybe talking with journalists who represent mainstream outlets. And one thing that makes me think is that, you know, for thinking about the craft of the writing as part of what made what you were doing alternative and part of what you want to try to, you know, see what that future might be in digital media, it puts the Phoenix into a kind of history that, I mean, there's a history of alternative spaces in print that goes beyond journalism. You've talked about new journalism, which sort of walked the line between literature and journalism in the 1970s, but also literary magazines in the late 19th century and early 20th century. And it makes me think that, you know, you could argue, well, there's a history that has to do with changes in media technologies of a sort of shifting line between the way we think about the literary and the journalistic. And so maybe there's a future for something like the Phoenix that isn't within the realm of professional journalism. Maybe it is, you know, some new way of thinking about the literary or another kind of art space. So I'm just, I think I'm asking maybe for you to talk a little bit more about this artistic side of what the Phoenix represented, and is there another place to look for where it could... You want to go first? Yeah, let me just give you a little anecdote. This is about Pulitzer Prizes. Lloyd is the only one on the panel who can speak with an expertise here. I'm just telling you. I was going to say, between the five of us, we've won more than one. But I served on the Pulitzer jury for a couple of years after I won my award. And I had a very interesting conversation with my fellow jurors. As far as I know, and I may be getting the numbers wrong, only three or four writers in my category have ever won a Pulitzer Prize in the history of the category of criticism. And what do you mean in your category? Criticism. The category is criticism. The Pulitzer Prize in criticism. No, actually, I'm going to make that more generally. Only three or four Pulitzer Prize winners have ever won for working on an alternative weekly, for working on a weekly. When I was a juror, I was blown away by an art critic for the LA Weekly, who seemed to me to be transforming the nature of art criticism and who is an absolutely brilliant writer. And in the discussion that we went through to choose the three finalists, I said something like, this guy is the best writer of the 1,100 contenders that we saw. And one of my colleagues on the jury, who was a managing editor of a major daily newspaper, said- You can say who it is. No, I'm not going to say who it is. But not from here, not from Boston. Doesn't matter. Said, I'm not interested in good writing. I'm interested in someone who can fill that space every day. And I was totally outvoted. The person that I thought should have won the prize and certainly should have been a finalist wasn't even considered. It was totally outvoted by the other jurors. But that sounds like a philosophical question about whether a Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism should be someone who has to file every day or whether, if you write three columns and they're the best columns, you can submit those. But in terms of your question about craft, right? And I wanted the difference to answer your question. The difference at the Phoenix for me was editors. There's one thing that drives me freaking crazy about daily newspapers, absolutely out of my fucking mind, is a newspaper will promote a writer to be an editor. That's like promoting a gardener to be a plumber. I know brilliant editors. I've had brilliant editors. I married a brilliant editor. I can't edit copy. Everything I edit comes out sounding like me and we know how writers just love that. It's a different skill set. It's a different calling. It's a different craft to use the word. And I think that the first place I learned that was at the Phoenix was that there were people who, frankly, I wrote better than they did. But boy, they edited much better. I mean, it was just when you gave them your thing, it came back to you in your voice looking better than it did. The ability to do that, to work the craft of editing within the writer's voice, without losing the writer's voice, that to me is as distant from my ability as flying the space shuttle. I don't know how anyone does it. Though some of those editors were terrific writers. I was thinking of Cliff, it was an amazing writer as well as a great editor. But I think that's what differentiated the Phoenix for me as a place where I wasn't completely starting out there, but it was really the first place I really felt I could spread my wings. It was because I developed an appreciation and through demonstration of the craft of editing. Yeah. Three blendingly fast comments. And just identify yourself first. Scott Munze. And three blendingly fast comments, and then one extraordinarily succinct question. First of all, in terms of the economics of way back then, I love to torment 20-somethings about with my $350 a month two bedroom apartment in Cambridgeport, rent control. It was vastly cheaper and easier to live and to be independent and to do your own thing back then. Yes. Two, Globe versus the Phoenix. What is alternative? One of the most important aspects of that is where is the money coming from? I mean, the Globe had filings and major national accounts and all sorts of stuff. Where did the money come from for the Phoenix? That certainly wasn't all of it, but it had a major impact on the difference between the two publications. The only reason, number three, I visit Esquire Magazine online every single damn day is Charlie Pierce. And there that should be an example, and there should be money in that for the people that can do that for publications. So the writers and also the online publications should be looking into monetizing good journalism in that fashion. So here's the extraordinarily succinct question. Earlier, Anita was talking about curation, websites that bring together good folks. And then Charlie immediately started talking about how you guys had great editors back in the day. And I was wondering, do you guys have any examples of any current websites that provide good editorial nurturing for journalistic writers online now? There must be some. I think Josh Marshall does a great job at talking points. Memo has been doing it for a while. I think Politico could be, but it's not. I think Politico is, one thing about Politico is a tremendous, it's a tremendous lost opportunity because it could be exactly what you're talking about. And it's not. I will leave the floor open for any other examples. This seems to me the best of the online Boston Arts Reviews is the Arts Fuse, which is Bill Marx's website. And I think there seems to be very good editing. There are some very good writers. There would be more good writers if anyone was getting paid. And the long form only outlets have some excellent editors there, some refugees from Wired and The New Yorker. And they put an enormous, I haven't written for them, but know a lot of people who have. And they put an enormous amount of effort into editing those 10,000 and 15,000 word pieces. So maybe the sense is good. One other thing too, which is that I think if you look at what BUI has done online to sort of do some arts stuff over there, I think there's a possibility for that to become a bigger outlet. They've got some interesting, they're a nonprofit, they've got some money, they might be able to afford to pay some people. And there is that sort of institutional backing for the arts there. So that could become a new base for some of that stuff. One point I just want to make sure we touch on, or at least mention before we go, and that's something that Dan Kennedy was talking about here. And that's the effect that the collapse of the classified market had on alt-weeklies. And we can debate in retrospect, the Phoenix has moved to go free, but when they stopped charging and then no longer had the classifies. Yeah, but we survived that. I mean, not to say that that wasn't a blow, but it was a blow to regular newspapers as well. I don't think that alt-weeklies were any more or less and in fact, there's a case being made that we were less affected than the dailies were, where the dailies were immediately cutting their circulation, not their circulation, but where you saw 50% cuts in staff at dailies, that was out of the circulation stuff, I'm sorry, out of the classified stuff. Where the Phoenix did lose a lot of its classifies, but I mean, that wasn't the blow that killed us. That was sort of the 2006 where you saw the paper getting smaller. It would have been a blow that killed you if someone hadn't been subsidizing it. I mean, Stephen was losing a fair amount of money at the end. Well, and that's sort of Oz behind the curtain thing. I can't tell you for sure that that's right or wrong, but I can tell you that we weren't having discussions about the end of the newspaper in 2006, and we were having those like three years later when it seemed to me at least that we had stabilized after the classifies had gone away and sort of restructured around, it was the dropping out of national advertising, which seemed to me to be the more of a body blow than the classified advertising. I think we probably have time for one more question. This will be very quick. My name is Fred Hapgood. I have one question. Why is it that the financial model for alternative newspapers seems more viable in smaller communities? Less competition. Yeah, there's really nobody else. Yeah. That was a very synced question. And I think the most succinct answer. What smaller? No, just smaller pond, lower overhead, cheaper and less up. I mean, I wish we had gotten more people on the record for this. There's so many people I have questions for in this audience. I hope you're all coming to this thing afterwards. So that's probably as good a place to wrap it up as any. We obviously could have continued this for many hours. One of the ways we can continue it is by partaking of crudities and wine and beer and assorted soft drinks. I think technically starting at 7.30, but we can probably start heading over. That's at the R&D pub, which is on the fourth floor of the Stata Center. The Stata Center is the, I guess, unique would be a nice way to phrase it, looking Frank Gehry building that is on Bassar Street. We will all be walking over there, so you can just sort of follow us. I also want to point out the other two forums that we have scheduled for this semester, both of which should be really excellent. The first is on October 10th, and that is with John Palfrey. Ethan Zuckerman, and that's talking about how the generation born in the digital age is different from its analog ancestors. The second is an entire forum just about long-form journalism, what's going on with it and where it's going. Looking specifically at the Atlantic, my colleague Tom Levinson will be moderating that, and Jim Fallows, national correspondent from the Atlantic, will be there as will his editor, Corbie Kummer, who, in addition to being an editor, is a food writer. But Corbie, I know from personal experience, is a really excellent, excellent editor. That's on December 5th. I'll send you an email. Yes. So again, thank you all for coming. I do apologize that we didn't have time to get to everyone's questions, but I hope as many of you as possible do join us afterwards. And I would really like to thank the four of you who put up with me for this, and sat here. I know you all had a lot more to say, and we were limited in time, so it was excellent having you all, and let's give them a big round of applause.