It may seem odd to some of our viewers that a relatively small online community news weekly like Open Media Boston helped organize an event at WGBH like last Saturday's Public Media Camp Boston. But it shouldn't. Times are changing. As ever. The once mighty American mass media - including both its commercial and public wings - is in trouble to some extent. Commercial media, especially news media, isn't able to sell as many ads as it could prior to the rise of the internet; so there is less money around for them. This has badly hurt the bottom line of traditional print news publications and broadcast news shows.

On Thursday, Gov. Deval Patrick announced a $1.2 million federal stimulus award to eight workforce training partnership programs across the Commonwealth. He made the announcement at St. Mary's Women and Children's Center in Dorchester - one of the programs receiving funding. A worthy group if ever there was one. Kudos are certainly due to the Patrick administration, the Obama administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the programs in question. After all, it's hard to argue with money for education for people for most any purpose - unless it's for a Mad Scientist Training Center or some such. Yet, given my years-long experience as a labor-community organizer trying to help communities grapple with the rise of bad contingent jobs (e.g., temp, independent contractor, and part-time jobs), I'm worried that many of the training programs receiving funding will ultimately be training people to work low-wage jobs. The same kind of jobs that cause people to get locked into poverty to begin with.

It's really something to watch the mainstream media in our fair state close ranks around the mainstream candidates in the Mass. gubernatorial race. On Tuesday, Green-Rainbow Party candidate Jill Stein was contacted by a consortium of nine major local media organizations and (to quote her press release) "invited to participate in two major televised debates, providing she met certain criteria including raising $100,000 in campaign funds and achieving at least a 5 percent score in election polls." I would have to agree with Stein that the media outlets in question are setting the bar for entry to the debates too high to easily allow qualified third-party candidates to participate.

It's been another tough legislative year for progressives. The battle over the 2011 state budget - and most legislation that will be passed this year - ended with no real job creation program in sight, the winnowing or destruction of many decent state programs, and an accelerating regressive taxation regime. But there have been a few bright spots that it would be remiss of this publication to fail to mention. So this week I thought I'd send some love out to the organizations that successfully pushed legislation through what can only be called a conservative consensus at the Mass. State House and won some good stuff for working people in a time of economic crisis.

One of the pitfalls of running a non-profit independent news publication with a still-shoestring budget is that there are times when the absence of key staff - in this case your faithful Editor/Publisher - is far more apparent than it would be in larger publications. While all of us at Open Media Boston work week-in and week-out to build ourselves up all big and strong and well-paid and stuff, fact of the matter is that we're still a one editor operation. So when I'm sick or out of town or run off to join (and quickly leave) some passing circus for a time, there's no other editor yet available to take up the slack. This week I have a bad cold - which is worse than usual because it's one of those most execrable of all colds, the bad summer cold. And naturally it strikes just as the weather gets nice. Whine whine whine. Anyhow, our latest edition will have to be rolled into the next one. Apologies all around, but a healthy Editor/Publisher is a productive Editor/Publisher. And that's what I'll be with a few days break. So I'll be back next news cycle in what will hopefully be better feather. And best of all, I won't be out in public spreading it to others as it was so thoughtfully spread to me. Just fyi ...

Greetings, Open Media Boston viewers. Just thought I'd take advantage of a slow news week to talk shop with you all. As some of you may recall, several months ago I announced that we were working on starting up a cooperative to help encourage social investment in this community news publication. So I thought I'd give you all an update, and ask more folks to get involved on the ground floor in advance of our coop launch. By way of background, a coop is basically a democratic form of business that a progressive enterprise like this one can organize without getting all weird and sell-outty. A coop signs people up for an annual membership fee (and often an additional annual investment). Members of the coop join to help provide themselves with a needed service - like food from a food coop, or bicycle repair from a bicycle repair coop - or become worker-owners in the case of various kinds of worker coops. Like a worker-owned bakery, for instance.

This week the Open Media Boston inbox has been echoing with alarums from various civil liberties organizations - the Mass. Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union at their forefront - about a law that Gov. Deval Patrick signed back in April that would levy harsh penalties against those who somebody or other decides have disseminated material harmful to minors. The legal changes contained in the new law modify existing language in everyone's favorite section of the Mass. General Laws ... Chapter 272 ... a.k.a. CRIMES AGAINST CHASTITY, MORALITY, DECENCY AND GOOD ORDER [capitalization theirs - Ed.]. This is the chapter that covers Adultery, Polygamy, Incestuous marriage or intercourse, Fornication, Bestiality and so on and so forth. But it's best known of late as the chapter that deals with anything that might corrupt young people in some way. So, if you can follow the scoreboard here for a minute, Patrick signed a new law - Chapter 74 of the Acts of 2010 - that in turn modified Section 31 (Definitions) of Chapter 272. The definitions section in turn affects a number of other sections in Chapter 272 that deal with exposing kids to naughty materials and/or using kids as the subjects of naughty materials.

Almost 40 years ago, Neil Young wrote a song about the destruction caused by heroin use among many musicians he knew at the time. It was called, fittingly enough, "The Needle and the Damage Done." Although such music is far from what I listen to these days (chillout, lounge, hip-hop, and classic jazz ... among much else ... for those of you who might be interested), the song title popped into my head when I sat down to write my editorial on the latest chapter in the Mass. state budget disaster. Because I think ideology can be like heroin at times - driving people to do the wrong thing again and again in the face of strong evidence pointing towards much better courses of action. So when I read about Gov. Deval Patrick signing the FY 2011 budget - just after vetoing $457.6 million from the House-Senate Conference Committee budget, which itself already contained a bunch of program cuts - all I could think of was that neoliberal politicians remind me of a bunch of junkies in a shooting gallery.

A word of congratulations is due this week to the brave young organizers with the Student Immigrant Movement for maintaining a 24/7 presence in front of the Mass. State House for 19 days until they managed to help stop the legislature from pulling off one the more pathetic displays of poll-driven politics in recent memory and convince them to reject the worst provisions of a package of anti-immigrant proposals that the Senate added to their budget proposal with very little debate last month. Not to say that this publication is overexcited about what has been achieved. Some of the proposals still stand - and whether they merely codify existing practice into law or not, they are still anti-immigrant and therefore execrable. And one could also argue that SIM played a dangerous game by risking polarizing the public before immigrant activists have really built a solid coalition that includes large numbers of citizens in Massachusetts.

OK, folks, time for a think piece. It's going to be a bit of a wild ride compared to some of my more straightforward editorials, but I felt the need to develop some ideas this week at a bit more length than normal. Because some discussions just can't be truncated. So in this piece I'm going to argue that immigrant advocates (from both immigrant and citizen backgrounds) are going to keep losing important battles in the fight for comprehensive immigration reform in the U.S. unless they a) start talking real politics and economics with people again, and b) start organizing citizens - especially in the suburbs - in addition to immigrants.