At long last we're pleased to unveil the new Open Media Boston website! You'll notice it still looks a little rough around the edges. That's because we're open beta test phase of our site build over the next couple of weeks and are planning an official site launch as soon as we're done testing and tweaking functionality.
Open Media Boston is pleased to invite the general public to attend the 3rd Digital Media Conference on October 25-27, 2013 at Lesley University's Doble Campus on Mellen St. in Cambridge.
Richard Stallman, noted software developer, software freedom activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation, will give the keynote address on Saturday, October 26 at 9:30 a.m. The address is entitled "Should the US have more surveillance than the USSR?"
Just a heads-up to loyal Open Media Boston viewers, today we're launching our partnership with WMBR 88.1 FM's new bi-weekly local news show called, aptly enough, Local Edition.
When one thinks about people working for poverty wages, college professors traditionally don't spring to mind. But over the last four decades tremendous structural changes have remade the face of American higher education. And most would agree that these changes are not positive for our students or our society. It has been remarked in many reports and broadsides that one of the greatest right-wing victories of the last generation has been the transition away from the Great Society goal of offering every qualified student a taxpayer-subsidized higher education, and towards a market-based system that forces students into what usually becomes a lifetime of debt-bondage so profound that it cannot even be removed by declaring bankruptcy. The key to this victory lay in simply cutting state and federal spending on higher education to the point where students have to accept ridiculous amounts of debt just to attend college.
Sometimes I just can't crank out an editorial on what should be an obvious stance on an issue or an event in time to make my regular deadline. Because I decide that I'm not in agreement with the obvious stance, and that I need to take extra time to formulate a different stance. Such is the case with this belated Labor Day editorial. Given this publication's left-wing editorial position, the obvious stance on Labor Day 2013 would be "yay, Labor Day, the nation's official holiday in honor of working people ...
The 3rd Digital Media Conference is coming up October 25-27 at Lesley University in Cambridge; so we thought we'd give everyone a bit of advance notice. Regular Open Media Boston viewers will recall that we co-organized the first two iterations of the conference, and we're doing so this time, too.
It's always puzzling to read articles in the American press on the subject of labor leaders running for office. Although I suppose I should be glad that any journalist at any major news outlet is still focusing on labor at all - even sporadically. As I've said repeatedly in the past, the ongoing collapse of traditional news establishment has put more and more pressure on fewer and fewer journalists to cover more and more news in less and less time.
When Open Media Boston staffer Jonathan Adams pitched me a new reporting project a few days ago, I thought "oh it'll probably be a couple of weeks before it gets underway ... might as well go ahead and focus on these six other things that I have on my plate right now." But nope, he pumped out a bunch of content right out of the gate, so it is with great excitement that OMB announces our new Open Court Project - our effort to help fill the large and growing vacuum in news coverage of significant court proceedings in the Boston area.
Regular Open Media Boston viewers take note ... after many months of work on my thesis and accompanying artwork, I got my MFA in Visual Arts from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in late June. [And, yes, Lesley was the "minor metropolitan university" that I joked about attending in occasional mentions of my extra-journalistic activities in editorials over the last two and a half years.]
