RIP, Boston Phoenix

[cali]

The end of The Phoenix, announced Thursday, hit us hard. We’ve been fans of the legendary Boston legendary weekly for a long time. (Some of us remember well that day in the late ‘90s when the paper went free.) The number of great writers that passed through The Phoenix—Susan Orlean, Jason Gay, David Denby, etc.—is remarkable.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/life/longform/2013/03/rip_boston_phoenix_seven_great_articles_from_the_alt_weekly.html

Memories of the Phoenix

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When I went to work at the Phoenix, in 1982, its offices were in a ratty old building at the end of the otherwise glamorous Newbury Street in Boston’s Back Bay. I don’t mean ratty in a figurative sense, either: there were rat traps tucked into most of the corners and nooks, and they weren’t ironic. The office had all the polish and orderliness of a very bad yard sale late in the afternoon. Everyone was shaggy. There were, as one would expect in a roiling workplace full of young folk, a million desperate romances and personal dramas and the like, but everyone was also very serious about the work. Back then, the Boston Globe seemed stuffy and self-important, and the Phoenix set itself up as the scrappy anti-Globe, more tuned into street culture and the arts; funnier, looser, cooler. I did stories on a crazy array of subjects: how Miami had been reborn, how much I loved giving parties, Ginsu knives, and a music festival in Jamaica. Of course, many of us secretly hoped that a big paper like the Globe might scoop us up, eventually. I interviewed for a job there not long after I started working at the Phoenix, and the editor who met with me warned me that the paper, as a rule, didn’t hire from alternative newsweeklies since we didn’t have a work ethic and didn’t understand how to behave in a professional way—as if we were drinking beer and getting high all day and still managing to put out a pretty good newspaper every week. I didn’t get the job, of course, but I realized then that our silly nose-thumbing at the Globe was equalled only by its silly nose-thumbing at us.


It was so much fun. And it was inspiring. By the time I arrived, the Phoenix had already graduated a whole bunch of writers who had gone on to become big deals at bigger publications, and there were staff writers who were winning awards and recognition. The paper was big and fat, and we all assumed (and resented) that the Phoenix’s owner, Stephen Mindich, had gotten rich from the profits. The Phoenix, more than almost any other alternative newsweekly, seemed like it could practically print money, since Boston had such a large population of college students, a perfect audience for what we were doing. For a while, that seemed to be true. The Phoenix bought a radio station, and then some other newsweeklies, and moved into ratless offices near Fenway Park, and appeared to just roll merrily along. Yes, much of the profits probably came from the skanky sex-service ads in the back of the magazine, but that’s business. The Globe editor who had lectured me about work ethic notwithstanding, the Phoenix continued to launch writers into good jobs at magazines and newspapers. While some newsweeklies drifted more into being arts calendars, the Phoenix, like the Village Voice, was one of the papers that kept doing harder journalism in addition to its significant arts coverage—which won the paper a Pulitzer, awarded to Lloyd Schwartz for criticism—and seemed to manage it well.


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The recession, Craigslist, the Internet, newsprint prices—who knows what finally did in the Phoenix? I suppose I shouldn’t have been shocked when I heard the news yesterday that it was shutting down, given the last ten years of bad news about print publications, but boy, was I surprised nonetheless. It feels like my college has suddenly announced that it has gone out of business. Now the liquidators will come in and pick through the remains, putting price tags on the beat-up desks and dented wastebaskets, and this experience that defined me and meant something to so many people—readers and writers, especially when we were young and turning into our adult selves—will live on only as a Wikipedia stub. Farewell, Boston Phoenix, and thanks.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/03/memories-of-the-phoenix.html#ixzz2NjSIehCH

[Mass]

1. Thanks, cali

The Boston Phoenix will be missed by many in Boston and elsewhere. Contrarily to the Boston Globe who seems to revel in a mushy centrist positioning which makes him fawn at "moderate" Republicans and unfairly bash progressive Democrats as out of touch elitists, and to the Boston Herald, spokeperson for the GOP in MA, the Phoenix had always pertinent and interesting analysis on local politics, arts, and cultural activities in Boston.

[cali]

3. So sad. In many ways a brilliant publication

I would guess that the fault lies, to a significant degree, with Mindich.

[klook]

2. WHAT???

This is horrible news. I just read and forwarded a couple of fascinating articles about that scumbag James O'Keefe:

The Trials of Nadia Naffe
The Not-So-Shocking Latest in the James O'Keefe Saga

The Phoenix has been the model for enlightened weeklies all over the country. Very sad.

[cali]

4. The Phoenix's Role in Climate Coverage

James Fallows:

I seem to be one of the few people in journalism who never worked or wrote for the Boston Phoenix. I certainly read and admired it, and feel the same general malaise at news that it is gone.

Wen Stephenson, an Atlantic veteran who was closely involved in our first online versions (called "Atlantic Unbound&quot nearly 20 years ago, says that the Phoenix has played an increasingly important role in climate coverage, and thus its absence will be felt there as well as in other fields. I turn it over to him:


A Death in the Family
By Wen Stephenson

We got the news, of course, on Twitter: "Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck."

That tweet came yesterday afternoon from the Boston Phoenix, the storied but struggling alt-weekly, for which the current print issue will be its last. There will be an online-only issue next week, containing an important piece by my friend and fellow climate activist-journalist Bill McKibben. And then the rest is silence.

But a lot of us can't stay silent, and won't. There are a great many people in Boston right now, and around the country, who care deeply about everything the Phoenix has always represented, right down to the end -- smart, fearless, fiercely independent journalism -- and want to say a few things about what this means for our impoverished media landscape. Many thanks to Jim for lending me this space to offer a few words of my own.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/03/the-phoenixs-role-in-climate-coverage/274079/

[cali]

5. Newspapering Is a Business: The Death of the Legendary Boston Phoenix

Yesterday, the Boston Phoenix announced that the alternative-newsweekly would stop publishing after 47 years. I learned this by phone, from someone who'd been a colleague of mine there, while the paper was experimenting with editors, before its final stretch of apparent stability.

I called Carly Carioli, the paper's last editor ever and someone I'd worked with closely. He'd been at the Phoenix for 20 years, quitting college to take a job there and working his way up. When I reached him, he and some of the staffers had been drinking whiskey in the office's online-radio studio and blasting Lana Del Rey's Born To Die. "I feel like someone just killed my best friend," he said.

The Phoenix was historically important, as everyone is saying today: a breaker of stories, a model for a certain kind of loose-jointed newspaper journalism, an incubator of talent. Charles Pierce of Esquire and Grantland, who is one of the standard entries—Susan Orlean, Charlie Pierce, David Denby—on the list of distinguished graduates of the Phoenix, wrote that it was "where the soul of newspapering came to reside," which was largely as true in fact as it was false in sentiment.

That is, the Phoenix was a business operation, whose owner, Stephen Mindich, showed few signs to most observers that he gave a fuck about its soul. There was an endless cycle of alienating people and selling out—and being denounced for selling out—once Mindich wrested the Phoenix name away from an idealistic countercultural collective and crushed the Real Paper, the idealists' subsequent bid to compete against it. Sex ads paid a lot of the freight. The publication produced such an impressive roster of ex-employees mostly by buying them cheap and working them till they jumped up the professional ladder to get away. But while they were there, grumbling at the business side, they were writing, in ways and at lengths that better-funded journalists couldn't touch. There was a paper to fill.

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http://gawker.com/5990638/newspapering-is-a-business-the-death-of-the-legendary-boston-phoenix

[petronius]

6. Bummer. We visit Boston a few times a year, and sitting somewhere with a

cup of coffee and The Phoenix has always been a great pleasure...

[Smarmie Doofus]

7. Fall of '72. Freshman year. Away from NYC for the first time. Big sigh of relief when...

... I found the Phoenix in a newspaper box on campus.

Whatever else happens... at least there's something decent to *read* here.

That's a shame. But... so it goes.

[olddots]

8. this is very sad

I remember the paper war with the Real Paper when a college town supported two alternative papers now there are none .Hope they still have a few book stores ......

[drkedjr]

9. I thought I'd be the only one

old enough to remember "The Real Paper." It was the early 70's when I was attending the Harvard School of Education, lived on Harvard St., only a short distance to Harvard Square. On my morning walk to classes, I'd pass by the "Boston After Dark" hawkers. Loved BAD because of the alternative news and classifieds. One day on my way to class, BAD was gone and replaced by "The Real Paper." Very sad at the time but soon, the Boston Phoenix was born, the Real Paper was gone but all was right in my alternative world for the next 40 years. RIP