Boston Herald…November 12th, 2006
“Post-election hiatus
Posted by Kimberly Atkins at 8:26 am
The Daily Breifing [sic] will be on a weeklong, post-election hiatus. Back Monday, Nov. 20.”…
WOW! And I thought she had been on hiatus for the whole campaign! Did any reporter put less effort into covering Mass. politics? And how many lawyer/reporters err when spelling a word like “brief”?
The “spoon-feeders” are going to miss her…do you suppose she and Matt Viser will be hiatusing at the same “rest for the rested” stop?
Please share widely!
I think Kim does great work.
If you go back and review Ms. Atkins work over the course of the campaign, you will notice that more than the mediocre quality, it’s the quantity that’s most lacking…many of her posts were echoes of what others were already reporting or were even mirrors of what she was reading on blog posts…she rarely, if ever, broke a story or released a fact before another news reporter did…I could be wrong, but I followed her “Daily Briefing” every day…and the title Brief-ing was apt…but that’s just one person’s opinion…
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She is not alone…you have to go back quite a way to find the Mass. political reporters at both major dailies who really liked reporting politics and were dogged investigators…
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Frank Phillips could surely tick off their names but does not do as good a job as he once did… he has become too conservative and cynical and lacks the energy he once brought to the task. Peter Gelzinis comes closest today (he at least has an institutional/political memory and it shows.)
I don’t have a problem with her. She was at least fair to Deval Patrick (sometimes critical, and that’s fine) during the campaign, which is a LOT more than her colleagues at the Herald can say.
aside from filing at least one story virtually every day for the last several months, in addition to writing the blog? Come on, HL – the fact that she writes short pieces isn’t her fault – that’s how the Herald works. She gets x number of column-inches from the Herald, and she fills what she gets.
I think she did an admirable job. It’s Dave Wedge who, in my opinion, just printed opposition research verbatim instead of news stories.
sounds as if you have a personal beef, but it’s wrong to air it here. Both of your targets covered the campaign, perhaps not to your direction, but equally, in my opinion.
I do not know Ms. Atkins other than through her work…so no “personal beef” is possible…I am sure she is a nice person, she just does not appear to me to be an aggressive reporter…
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and I think BMG is in fact a forum for expressing opinions…even those that may not be in agreement with others…how dull it would be if we all agreed in PC lockstep