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On posts by Marie and Dick about outsourcing the writing of local news (as in the Pasadena, Calif., newspaper that Maureen Dowd commented upon in the NYTimes today), the best and maybe only way to stop that trend would be through the countervailing power of advertisers, subscribers, and readers. It’s a question of what people will stand for or stand up against. Remember the old Sixties poster slogan “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” So, what if they offered an outsourced paper and nobody read it?

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As a reader I have an on-again/off again relationship with New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd. During the recent presidential campaign - especially during the primary - I was frequently aggravated and would skip the column no matter the catchy headline. I deemed her sometimes too catty, too venial and too smarmy as she peeked beneath the political skirts of the candidates. Well I was alerted by a friend to read her column today and quicky appreciated her focus on newspapers and the current “outsourcing” of local news writing assignments to India. Piece work has come to the newspaper business! She writes of a California newspaper guy whose idea it was to explore “offshoring options” which led to firing his seven Pasadena staffers and hiring employees in India to write news and feature stories about Pasadena. (Isn’t that the home of the Rose Bowl and the Parade of Roses?) The old traditions of the garment industry have met the new technology of e-mail, videocasting, internet sources and the like.

“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

 What made the revelation more of a jolt was this passage:

But then in October, Dean Singleton, The Associated Press’s chairman and the head of the MediaNews Group — which counts The Pasadena Star-News, The Denver Post and The Detroit News in its stable of 54 daily newspapers — told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was looking into outsourcing almost every aspect of publishing, including possibly having one news desk for all of his papers, “maybe even offshore.”

Noting that most preproduction work for MediaNews’s papers in California is already outsourced to India, cutting costs by 65 percent, Singleton advised, “If you need to offshore it, offshore it,” and said after the speech, “In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”

Is this the future strategy for the “Lowell” SUN newspaper operation? Or is this another “fake” column attributed to Dowd just to rile-up the masses?

Check out the Maureen Dowd column: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30dowd.html?th&emc=th

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LTC’s newest live local events talk show, City Life Show, which runs each weekday from 4 pm to 5:30 pm on Lowell’s channel 8 (with each episode rebroadcast the next weekday morning at on channel 8 at 7 am) will feature the following guests this week:

• Monday, December 1 - Cliff Krieger - creator of Lowell’s newest blog, Right-Side-of-Lowell
• Tuesday, December 2 - guest to be announced
• Wednesday, December 3 - T J McCarthy - Director of Lowell’s Public Works Department

City Life Show features George Anthes and Tom Byrne on camera and is produced by John McDonough.  To suggest show topics or give feedback, send John an email.

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Check William Safire’s regular feature “On Language” in the NY Times Sunday Magazine today for a mention of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Safire is musing about labels for generations and a name for the generation that will come of age with President Obama. He likes the term Joshua Generation, which Obama himself used in a speech about the generation of African Americans who came of age with the benefits gained from the Moses Generation of Civil Rights leaders. Safire sees the term being construed more broadly and applied to the Obama era.

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A belated welcome from the local blogosphere to Right-Side-of-Lowell, a new website authored by Cliff Krieger, retired Air Force officer and current Republican activist.  Cliff’s early posts provide thoughtful commentary and analysis of regional, national and international events.  Listeners of the old WCAP morning show would recognize Cliff’s voice as that of a frequent caller.  Like his remarks on the radio, his blog posts place a premium on rational discourse which is always a good thing, regardless of ideology.  We’ve added a link to Right-Side-of-Lowell in our blogroll.

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More and more people are searching for information about family and ancestors - searching for their familial roots. Beyond the family Bible, family stories, assorted documents, certificates and photos, searchers use the local library, institutional resources like the UMass Lowell Center for Lowell History and on-line sites like ancestry.com that serve as one-stop shops for references and special sources. One important source - the Boston Archdiocesan Archive is scheduled to re-open to the public on January 6, 2009 in its new home in Braintree. In this week’s edition of The Pilot, correspondent Meghan Noe has an interview with Head Archivist Robert Johnson-Lally and she elicits some suggestions for doing genealogical research while using Church documents. Ms. Noe reports:

Most people have a desire to discover their origins and to know from whence they came. And for many people, tracing family genealogy can be an interesting and rewarding experience; but it can also be a daunting task. Head archdiocesan archivist Robert Johnson-Lally, who oversees thousands of Church records, has helped countless visitors trace their ancestry through the Archdiocese of Boston’s birth, marriage and death records. Johnson-Lally shares his tips with The Pilot for conducting genealogic research using Church documents.

Check out the interview at: http://www.thebostonpilot.com/article.asp?ID=7274.

Access to the Archive will still be by appointment only but the Archivist may be contacted by phone or mail with your inquiries. People in Lowell and Greater Lowell may be familiar with Robert Johnson-Lally from workshops he has conducted for local groups. His spouse Mary Johnson-Lally was a past Director of the Pollard Memorial Library.

In other genealogy news:  Walter Hickey noted genealogist and historian has rejoined the Lowell Historical Society Board of Directors where he’ll serve as the official society genealogist. A past president of the Society , Walter is a longtime staff member of  The National Archives currently assigned to the Northeast Regional site in Waltham. An avid researcher of Lowell stories Walter is a welcome addition to the board.

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Manya Callahan, the manager of the Barnes and Noble in downtown Lowell, told me recently that the latest best seller in her store is Irish Thunder: The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward by Bob Halloran. That factoid reminded me of something I had seen in an old column by the late local newspaperman Charles Sampas. In one of his daily Sampascoopies columns from the late 1950s, he reported that 200 copies of the latest Lowell novel by Jack Kerouac had sold in a store on Merrimack Street–was it Prince’s Books in those days? The lesson is that books on local topics can be popular among local people. I remember the old Lowell Museum in the Wannalancit Mill on Suffolk Street hosting author events and book-signing parties for Call the Darkness Light by Nancy Zaroulis (1979) and Emmeline by Judith Rossner (1980). Both of those were novels from major New York publishers. Lowell history was a hot literary topic around the time the national park was established in the city (1978), especially the chapter about the young women who migrated from the countryside to work in the new mills. Lowell has seen a writing and publishing boom coinciding with the 30 years of the national park. From history books like Brian Mitchell’s Paddy Camps, about the first Irish in the Acre (Brian is now president of Bucknell University), to the photo-documentary books by Jim Higgins and Joan Ross, to historian Mary Blewett’s books and edited volumes dealing with labor history, to Dave Daniel’s crime fiction set in Lowell with private eye Alex Rasmussen, to George Chigas’s bilingual anthologies of Khmer writings, to the late Paul Tsongas’s three books, to Dave Robinson’s poetry-infused novel inspired in part by Lowell (Sweeney-on-the-Fringe)–and many more books.

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Did you notice that the Lowell Sun for Thursday, November 27, 2008 (i.e., Thanksgiving) came at a price of $1.75, the same price charged for the Sunday paper and $1.25 more than the normal weekday price.  I suppose the additional heft of the pre-”Black Friday” advertising inserts justified charging such a premium.  But wait - don’t the advertisers pay for those ads?  Isn’t charging extra for ad inserts a little like charging twice for the same thing? 

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Today’s Boston Globe (11.28.08) has a feature story from the L.A. Times about Linda Biehl, the 2007 Greeley Scholar for Peace Studies at UMass Lowell. Her story, that is, the story of her daughter, the murder of her daughter in South Africa 15 years ago, the men who were punished for it, and her family’s transformation as a result of the tragedy, has been reported far and wide. The Globe article appeared orginally in the L.A. paper in October. Here’s the link

Here’s the link in the Los Angeles paper, with additional photographs.

Linda spent most of last April on campus and around Lowell, giving many talks and meeting people across the community. She was the first Dana McLean Greeley Scholar for Peace Studies at UMass Lowell, a program that began with a major grant from the Greeley Foundation in Concord, Mass.

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If you’re like me, back on election night you thought the music that played when Barack Obama took the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park was perfect for the occasion except you couldn’t identify the piece.  Well tonight Andrew introduced it to me: it’s from the movie Remember the Titans and it’s available on the following audio-only YouTube clip.  And while you’re listening, you can scroll through “MovieFone’s” list of the top 25 inspirational movies of all time (below the YouTube clip).

MovieFone’s 25 most inspirational movies of all time: 

25. Forrest Gump (1994)
24. Stand and Deliver (1988)
23. In the Heat of the Night (1967)
22. Rudy (1993)
21. Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
20. Chariots of Fire (1981)
19. The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)
18.The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
17. A Raisin in the Sun (1961)
16. Philadelphia (1993)
15. Field of Dreams (1989)
14. Erin Brockovich (2000)
13. Hotel Rwanda (2004)
12. Remember the Titans (2000)
11. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
10. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
9. Hoosiers (1986)
8. Norma Rae (1979)
7. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
6. Schindler’s List (1993)
5. Rocky (1976)
4. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
3. The Miracle Worker (1962)
2. Glory (1989)
1. My Left Foot (!989)

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