Uh-oh: The Howie Edition
Channel 5's David Boeri of all people has a blistering critique of Howie Carr's new book in the Phoenix this week: ["Howie Carr blows up"]. This is huge, despite the soaring sales of the book, because it goes through the thing point by point. What is also interesting here is that Boeri is basically confirming what we've all kinda known about Howie for a long time: He's been phoning it in for years; obsessed with trying to become the next Howard Stern. And when that didn't work, the next Rush Limbaugh. And then the next whatever, instead of being as great as he could be at who he is: Howie Carr. With newspaper sales sagging and his show limited to New England syndication, he really needed to come out with a really good book which wasn't just an overview - especially in the wake of the amazing "Black Mass." To be fair and balanced, Howie has always called the Phoenix, "a one-hand rag ..." But this didn't come from one of the great front section writers of the Phoenix - but a colleague in TV who has been covering the same story.

Wicked Local: Now, this is cool: ["Wicked Local Plymouth"]. Mark Jurkowitz posted this over at Media Log yesterday. A localized Web version - almost an expanded news blog - which is subsidized by a newspaper. The only problem I see here is the financial model. How do you pay to keep it up when there doesn't seem to be any advertising revenue around the model?
There isn't much about this and I can't seem for find any other information about how many towns this will be covering or anything else. But I did find this when I Googled "Wicked Local," from a conference by Suburban Newspapers of America scheduled for May 2006:

10:15 AM – 11:15 AM: WickedLocal.com – A Case Study in the Boston Suburbs, Presented by Bob Kempf, Vice President of Interactive Media, Enterprise NewsMedia, LLC. Locally based web-only companies are showing-up in markets across North America. What do you know about this new competitor…who are they and how do they operate?
One such approach was recently launched by Enterprise NewsMedia in Quincy, MA. Traditionally a print newspaper company, Enterprise NewsMedia identified this new threat early and decided that a strong offense was their best defense. Bob Kempf and his internet development team have just launched what is now known as ‘WickedLocal’. More than simply a separate brand, Wicked Local breaks new ground with a network of hyper-local websites that will draw news content from affiliate newspapers, offer a robust platform for citizen journalism and provide a comprehensive local search resource.
In this session we’ll hear how this new group of local, community based websites coexists with their traditional print products and what they mean to the communities they serve.