In an editorial titled “Flunking the test” published Thursday, The Boston Globe’s editorial board came out against the R.I. Department of Education’s new requirement that students pass the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) to get their diplomas:

The fundamental problem … is that the test wasn’t originally designed to be a graduation requirement and isn’t suited for that purpose. Schools need more high standards and accountability, and the NECAP was designed not to evaluate individual students’ proficiency, but to rank the quality of the schools they attend. Unlike tests meant primarily for student assessment, such as the MCAS in Massachusetts, the NECAP expects a certain portion of test-takers to fail. Research suggests that percentage will likely come from low-income, working-class neighborhoods — the students who are least likely to return for a fifth year of high school, even if skipping it means going without a diploma.

As a side note, Aaron Regunberg’s Providence Student Union has done an impressive job using savvy public relations to keep this issue on the radar and put pressure on Education Commissioner Deborah Gist.

Update: Regunberg writes in to say: “I want to make clear that, while I help coordinate and do some of the organizational and media outreach, PSU is a youth-led organization.” He’s “an organizer/coordinator.”

• Related: RI Board of Education Chairwoman Mancuso discuss NECAP on Newsmakers (April 7)

As if winning $5 million from Mike Bloomberg wasn’t enough, now Providence Mayor Angel Taveras’s big plan to shrink the “word gap” between higher- and lower-income children is getting ink in The Boston Globe’s Ideas section. No less an authority on vocab than Ben Zimmer of VisualThesaurus.com - who was often cited by the late, great William Safire – wrote about the project over the weekend:

Through Providence Talks, researchers and policy makers are likely to learn much more about whether pulling this language lever can really help level the academic playing field. At the same time, however, by asking scores of regular parents to opt into massive, data-driven recording and analysis of all the language their children hear in their first few years, and then encouraging them to change the personal matter of how they talk to their kids as a result, they are launching a project of unprecedented scope and audacity—one that opens up fascinating questions about language, social engineering, privacy, and parenting.

Read the rest here. The piece includes a note of caution from Kyle Gorman, a researcher at the Center for Spoken Language Understanding in Oregon, who warned that Providence Talks could turn into a “boondoggle” – Gorman elaborates on his concerns here. (He adds, however: “I support, tentatively, the Providence initiative and wish them the best of luck; if these assumptions all turn out to be true, the organizers and scientists behind the grant will be real heroes to me.”)

Bob Ryan – whose Boston Globe column will be dearly missed after he retires this summer – traveled to Pawtucket last week for the ceremony honoring the late Ben Mondor, who saved the PawSox in the 1970s. The resulting column is a must-read for Rhode Islanders:

PAWTUCKET, R.I. – He did not want the stadium named after him, and he more than likely would not have been too thrilled about what they were doing to perpetuate his memory now, but when you leave so many people behind who loved and respected you, the issue is out of your control.

That is why visitors to McCoy Stadium will now find a life-sized statue of the truly beloved Ben Mondor just outside the left-field foul pole, adjacent to what is known as the “Mondor Gardens.” At the base of the statue is an oft-heard Mondor passage that sums up his outlook on being involved in baseball:

“We’re blessed to make our living playing a little kid’s game on a field of freshly cut grass under God’s blue sky.”

Read Ryan’s entire column here.

• Related: Pawtucket celebrates birthday at former mayor’s stadium ‘folly’ (Aug. 23)

It’s not just a Rhode Island saga anymore.

The Boston Globe, New England’s largest newspaper and one of the nation’s best, devotes significant resources in Friday’s edition to detailing the 38 Studios mess and commenting on its genesis and implications.

In addition to this extensive overview by Todd Wallack and former Projo scribe Mark Arsenault, two of the paper’s columnists tackle the topic.

“If hypocrisy had a face, a look, a certain familiar strut, it would be that of old favorite Curt Schilling,” Brian McGrory writes in a piece excoriating Schilling. Meanwhile, business columnist Steven Syre writes: “Schilling and his company may have Rhode Island officials over a barrel but 38 Studios shouldn’t be their problem to solve. That would turn a poor decision into a disaster.”

And, McGrory adds, “the Rhode Island officials who committed this public money to 38 Studios are idiots.” Ouch.

The most poignant part of the Globe coverage, though, is the front page.

Juxtaposed with the 38 Studios coverage is a banner headline about Massachusetts’ unemployment rate dropping to 6.3% – on the same day Rhode Island’s rose to 11.2%. It’s hard not to see a lesson in the disparate performances of the Bay State that spurned Schilling and the Ocean State that aided him.

Rhode Island politicians are getting some media attention outside the state’s borders this Sunday.

First there’s Congressman David Cicilline, whose recent apology in an interview with Tim White makes Politico’s list of the “top 5 most memorable political apologies”:

The risk of admitting a major mistake is too much for most pols to chance, so when you see a public apology, you know the blunder had to be a whopper. And Washington — and the citizens of Rhode Island — just saw one from freshman Democratic Rep. David Cicilline, who recently swallowed hard and apologized for making a highly misleading statement about the finances of the city of Providence on his way to Congress.

On a lighter note, Gov. Lincoln Chafee recalls his days shoeing Canadian horses in a Boston Globe column by Kevin Paul Dupont:

The job, said Chafee, gave him many skills, the direct ones he sometimes uses when his daughter’s horse needs a change of shoes. He is 59 now, and though not as quick with the rasp and hammer, he still feels he has a good touch with the tools and the clients.

“I could always get along with the horse, that’s key,” he said. “I could get under there and not have them go nuts on me.”

As for the fast and potted track of politics, his work long ago with hammer and hoof often helps there, too. Since putting his tools in storage, Chafee has been mayor of Warwick, R.I., a US Senator and, since January 2011, the governor.

“What’s similar is that it’s hard work,” he said. “If a trainer wanted me on Saturday or Sunday to shoe a horse because of a race, you had to do it, to keep your business. If you want to stay in politics, and they say there is a wake you should go to – and maybe you have other plans – you should really go to the wake. It’s what you do.”

The Providence Journal’s new website is drawing a smaller online audience than the one it replaced in October, according to two companies that track Internet traffic.

The total number of visitors and page views to ProvidenceJournal.com/Projo.com were both down 32% in the 10 weeks ended Dec. 24 compared with the 10 weeks before the new website launched, figures from Experian Hitwise show. The paper switched to the new, scaled-down ProvidenceJournal.com site on Oct. 17.

ProvidenceJournal.com/Projo.com averaged 300,241 U.S. visitors a week between Oct. 22 and Dec. 24, down from Projo.com’s 439,013 weekly average between Aug. 13 and Oct. 15, Hitwise said. Average weekly page views declined from 1.3 million to 884,706 over the same period.

Separate figures from Nielsen also showed a decline in The Journal’s Web audience.

(more…)

It’s looking like 2012 may be a make-or-break year in the long history of The Providence Journal.

With revenue and circulation still falling precipitously, the Projo is poised to bet big on pushing readers back to print by forcing those who want all its content to either subscribe to the print edition or read it in an electronic format that’s an exact digital replica of the dead tree version.

The strategy is risky, to say the least. The new ProvidenceJournal.com’s debut was met with withering criticism, including from the paper’s own commenters. The e-edition software developed by Olive Interactive remains buggy (the share tools stopped working on Firefox 8 for Mac earlier this month) and its article pages don’t even say that you’re reading a Providence Journal story. There are still no Projo iPhone or Android apps. It’s all a marked contrast with the award-winning new BostonGlobe.com, also launched this fall and also charging readers.

Journal management is notoriously tight-lipped, so it’s hard to judge if the new website is meeting their expectations. Compete.com says the paper’s unique visitors on the Web plunged from 425,486 in September (on Projo.com) to 233,091 in November (on ProvidenceJournal.com). But take that with a grain of salt, since Compete’s numbers are notoriously unreliable.

(more…)

“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify,” Jerry Seinfeld once said. “Because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city – you’re actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it.”

That may sound sacrilegious in these salad days for local sports fans, with the Celtics moving on to the second round, the Bruins on a three-game streak against the hated Habs, and the Sox righting the ship after a shaky start. But The Boston Globe’s Leon Neyfakh reports that Seinfeld was onto something:

[T]he link between losing [games] and loyalty is less puzzling to experts in the growing field of fan studies, a burgeoning effort in the academy whose practitioners are interested in how sports fans think and why they feel as intensely as they do about their favorite teams. …

Having a winning record, these researchers have found, is just a small part of what makes franchises like the Sox, or the Celtics, or the Bruins, the objects of intense dedication. Instead, their findings point to a variety of factors that contribute to fanship, including our instinct for tribal affiliation, our desire to participate in tradition, and our hunger for compelling characters and dramatic story lines.

Fandom, it turns out, is a surprisingly clear window into our brains, and into how loyalty in general works.

One of the academics featured in The Globe story hails from right in our own backyard: Daniel Cavicchi, an American Studies professor who’s been teaching at RISD for the past 15 years and has a Ph.D. from Brown. (His first book was “Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans.”)

Cavicchi also writes a blog covering the same topics, amusingly named “The Ardent Audience” – check it out. I liked his posts about how iPods are changing listening culture and how fans used to rush the field more.

(photo: Rene Schwietzke/Flickr)

In a comment about my Projo valuation story, Jef Nickerson asked a good question:

I think an interesting thing to look at is not so much the loss of valuation, but what exactly was wrong with the world when the Journal was bought for $500 million (and the Times bought the Globe for what, somewhere in the neighborhood of a $billion?). Why did anyone ever think these properties were worth so much? When did the valuations get so out of control?

I won’t claim to be a total expert on this, but I can offer some of the history.

One factor is poor timing. The New York Times Co. paid $1.1 billion for The Boston Globe in 1993, and Belo paid $1.5 billion for The Providence Journal Co. (including its nine TV stations) in 1997. Newspapers still looked to be in good shape then – the World Wide Web was only opened to the public in 1993, and while circulation had been shrinking for years, ad revenue wouldn’t peak until 2005.

Sentiment can play a role, too; the romance of owning a newspaper helped convince Rupert Murdoch to overpay for The Wall Street Journal a few years back. Times Co. executives were enamored with the idea of owning two of the nation’s great papers, which seems to have led them to pay a premium for The Globe. Plus, the newspaper industry had been consolidating for years by the time the two transactions happened.

That said, both purchases did raise eyebrows at the time among skeptics who questioned whether either company should be paying as much as they were.

Belo paid “a very full price” for the Journal Co., one analyst told The New York Times in October 1996, and that same month the paper called the $1.5 billion price tag “a big premium.” And in the case of the NYT-Globe tie-up, this June 1993 Times story shows some experts doubted its wisdom, too:

In all of the places where the $1.1 billion deal was being studied, questions were raised that went to the heart of the modern newspaper business: Will the industry’s once-high profit margins return? Does conglomerate ownership of news-gathering businesses hurt the news? Is the newspaper business still the future?

Again and again, in meetings with securities analysts and in news conferences in Boston and New York, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Sulzberger and their executives worked to convince the skeptics. Why, Times executives were asked again and again, would the company make such a huge investment in a newspaper market so much like New York or, for that matter, in a newspaper at all?

“It is a true diversification,” the president of the Times Company, Lance R. Primis, answered. The economies of Boston and New York, he said, are different. As a strong regional newspaper, The Globe, which is much more dominant in Boston than The Times is in New York, is a different type of paper than any the company has owned before, he said.

And Mr. Primis said there were possibilities for joint distribution, advertising sales and new newspaper ventures like efforts to use the huge amounts of data they collect in new commercial ways.

Kennedy father and son in the Oval Office in 2008

When Congressman Patrick Kennedy retires at the end of this term and is succeeded by David Cicilline, it will mark the first time since 1946 that no Kennedy has been serving in Congress. That was the year JFK was first elected to a House seat in Massachusetts at the age of 29.

The combination of the Kennedy name and Patrick’s troubled personal life has proven irresistible to reporters, and over the past week three papers have published profiles of the 43-year-old: The New York Times (Thursday), The Boston Globe (Friday) and The Providence Journal (Sunday).

The articles clock in at a combined 4,947 words and each one covers some of the same ground. Since Nesi’s Notes is all about constituent service, here are the highlights from the three stories. I’d also recommend Globe columnist Brian McGrory’s reflections on Patrick from last winter.

His Future

Kennedy plans to remain a Rhode Islander and is keeping his Portsmouth farmhouse, which he either recently renovated (NYT) or is renovating (Globe). He also may keep an office in Washington. (NYT)

Kennedy’s memoir, “Coming Clean,” is set to be be published in late 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (NYT) Mary Ann Akers, a gossip columnist at The Washington Post, is his co-author. (Projo)

Kennedy’s next focus will be on promoting brain research, and he’s planning a brain research conference in Boston on May 25. He’s also set up a website, Moonshot.org, that compares the effort to JFK’s push to put a man on the moon. (NYT)

In another echo of his uncle, Kennedy calls neurology the “new frontier” of science. (Globe) He hopes he can “put together something like the American Cancer Society for brain research” (Globe), and thinks it could do a huge amount to help wounded veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

David Cicilline is going to take over Kennedy’s Capitol Hill apartment. (Globe, Projo) A Republican will get his old House office. (NYT)

(more…)

With retailer A.J. Wright shutting down and taking its Fall River distribution center with it, two Boston Globe reporters traveled to the hometown of Lizzie Borden and Emeril Lagasse to take stock of its economy.

Unsurprisingly, they found its 91,000 residents to be in a grim mood:

It’s not hard to find people here who have lost hope. This former manufacturing city, once home to humming factories, has for years been pummeled by one economic blow after another.

Fall River’s unemployment rate is consistently among the state’s highest, and a series of efforts to revitalize the city have not made much of a difference. The latest punch came last week when Framingham retailer TJX Cos. said it will shutter the A.J. Wright clothing chain, putting 815 employees at a local distribution plant out of work. More than ever, business owners, officials, and other residents are wondering whether there is any way to give this long-suffering coastal city an economic recharge.

The rest of the article is here, if you can stand to read it. Among other things, it talks about Mayor Flanagan’s Hail Mary pass on the Wampanoag casino and the endlessly discussed but still-unbuilt South Coast commuter-rail line.

Poor Fall River. Even its city motto sounds sort of sad and resigned: “We’ll Try.” I guess that’s better than the alternatives – “We Won’t Try”? “We’ll Probably Fail”? – but it sure doesn’t exude confidence.

Between this article about Fall River and the endless bad headlines out of Central Falls, it seems as if we really need a new approach to shore up small cities that used to be industrial centers and are now drifting into dysfunction. What these places appear to need more than anything are jobs – decent-paying ones, and lots of them.

Then again, considering how many years these problems have been festering, what’s going to cause a change of course now?

The big story in New England’s media world this morning is the news that a group of investors led by a 37-year-old Wellesley, Mass., entrepreneur is preparing an unsolicited bid to buy The Boston Globe from The New York Times Co., which bought the region’s largest daily for $1.1 billion in 1993. The announcement comes a year after The Globe went through a traumatic near-death experience that saw the NYT threaten to shut it down to staunch its losses.

The Globe bid makes me wonder whether we might ever see something similar happen here in Rhode Island, where The Providence Journal has been owned for the past 13 years by Dallas-based Belo (now A.H. Belo after its TV and print divisions split). Just to be clear, I’ve heard zero – zilch – nada about any local group looking at buying The Journal, so this is all hypothetical.

Back in his Providence Phoenix days, WRNI reporter (and Nesi’s Notes mentor) Ian Donnis wrote extensively about potential Journal buyers including the New York Times Co. (2001), Buddy Cianci (2003), former Gov. Bruce Sundlun and Providence Equity Partners’ Jonathan Nelson (2006). In the last of those stories, however, Ian also pointed out why local ownership is no panacea for the newspaper industry’s woes:

Now, though, it’s hard to know whether the Journal would be in better shape, journalistically or business-wise, with local ownership.

While the notion of local do-gooders stepping in to strengthen the journalistic mission of the hometown daily — rather than diminishing it — sounds nice, it doesn’t always work out as planned. The signature example is in Philadelphia, where businessman Brian P. Tierney led a group of investors to buy the Philadelphia Inquirer last spring. Although the plan was to fund good journalism and steer clear of job reductions, the publisher and editor were subsequently axed, expenses were cut, and a large number of layoffs were considered very likely.

The Projo’s paywall plan may be in some sort of holding pattern, but other papers in the region aren’t sitting still. A top executive at The Boston Globe’s parent company says the company could announce plans to start charging for Boston.com before New Year’s, the Boston Business Journal reports:

When asked about paid models and iPad subscriptions for Globe content, NYT Co. CEO Janet Robinson had this to say at a Wednesday conference sponsored by Goldman Sachs:

“We are moving pretty quickly in regard to the Globe as well. There is more work — we have certainly done more work in regard to NYTimes.com. But the Globe has a paid app out there. In regard to big picture, you’re going to be seeing introduction of apps going in this quarter, in fact, in regard to Boston.com. But from a standpoint of evaluating what we plan on doing in regard to paid models, they are, that is under evaluation right now, in fact.”

The metered model, as explained by NYT Co. senior vice president of digital operations Martin Nisenholtz, is basically where a certain amount of content articles are provided free on a running, 30-day basis. And after they hit that number, readers are asked to subscribe.

Having reported on the Rhode Island economy for a bit more than two years now, I am pretty intimately familiar with the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, aka the EDC. But with the agency’s board now giving high-profile backing to Curt Schilling’s video game company, I’m seeing the agency referenced in some unlikely places – such as Boston Globe sports writer Dan Shaughnessy’s column this morning:

Not the sort of coverage the agency wants, of course, though in fairness Shaughnessy’s never been Schilling’s biggest fan to begin with.