Remember when you could actually read news on Boston.com?
Now it feels like the herald; want to know the latest on Marky Mark, or have felt the need to debate online if you should buy your hookup a present for the holidays? Well, I found a great place for you Boston.com.
But that is not the worst part of the site, it’s the painfully moronic “What the Heck” headlines.
I got one, what the heck are you doing? Please make it stop.
Please share widely!
A while back they said they were essentially shifting the Globe behind the bostonglobe.com paywall and spinning boston.com (um, BDC) off. It’s been getting more and more frivolous for a while now. I don’t think it does their brand any favors since most people quite strongly associate boston.com with the Globe despite this shift.
I’ve ended my subscription to the BG paywall and stopped reading all of it.
Life is too short.
…is how boston dot com described itself in comparison to the Globe. I don’t get it either.
And the Ben Edelman thing kind of blew up in their faces when they passed along as genuine an email from Edelman that probably wasn’t and then had to retract it.
it all just seems so trivial. Oh well, anyone have recommendations on local news sites? Is it only bostonglobe.com?
If you have a Chrome browser and Google News it will geo locate to Massachusetts. Then you just filter out all the crap in the personalization settings, all Globe, Herald and other dying tree ware things with imbecile biz models and towering conceits.
Big stories will spill over into national news feeds and it can be surprising how much better the San Francisco Chronicle is at covering stuff here.
You’ll end up with this fascinating mosaic of all the cool second tier things like Wicked Local sites that are generally more useful than the big city fossils.
Some will have site whining about subscribing, but you can skip around.
TV stations web sites seem to have the most advanced sense of the relative worthlessness of news, while print is still hung up on its chicken scratch and foolishly thinks users have any reason to be loyal or put up with its entreaties.
http://www.universalhub.com/
Also, yahoonews has a local setting. Unfortunately, their results always start with B.c.
But it is like a static rehash cycle of subway ordeals, shootings, restaurant and real estate deal speculations, click bait bicycle controversies and feel good moments.
It’s killer for social anthropology research on massholes with its diverse commentariat but once you hit saturation point.. that’s it.
Poor yahoo is like some sad car with a crank starter in a time when ignition keys are common. Give it a while and it will have antique value.
Sort of like this place…
We grew up being passive recipients of pre chewed stuff from presumed professionals who were conditioned to have a low opinion of us to a point where they’d dumb things down.
Now the world is our oyster but it takes effort. A good news aggregation is a start but it helps to spend time really following a broader array of sources. Most of my local ecology situation news comes from an array of orgs like Neponset Watershed.
There is Reuters, foreign press, and so on. If it’s some local spectacle like college kids marching in protest, you can always check the jabber stream on WBZ.
those headlines could be worse. If it was one of Gawker’s sites, they’d read “What the [F—] Happened at Market Basket?”