Hey, she stole my shtick!

As you're no doubt aware, I've had a lot of fairly negative things to say about Sentinel & Enterprise editor Jeff McMenemy. His mind-numbingly stupid editorials are always a nice easy target for a post, and I've drunk at that well many times.

Of course, I only know McMenemy through his editorials and the "news" stories that are editorials in disguise. Either way, I come at this as a mere consumer of the news. I don't think I've ever met the man, and I certainly haven't worked for him. Surely someone who knows him better would be able to add a lot that just isn't available to me.

Well, there's a new blog out there that focuses just on McMenemy, and it's written by someone who actually did work for him (my condolences!).

Please direct your browsers to My Own Worst Menemy, subtitled "Jeff McMenemy is the worst editor-in-chief ever." Awesome.

There are only a few posts at this point, but they're quite entertaining, and definitely worth a read. So go show Samm (the blogger) some love.

There's more than enough shtick to go around!

Save Fitchburg is no more!

Well damn, this is sort of sad.

It seems that Jason at Save Fitchburg, the biggest and oldest local political blog, has called it quits. There will be no more posts at Save Fitchburg.

That's unfortunate, but understandable. While Jason & I certainly haven't always agreed on everything, he's always come across as a decent, intelligent guy who really cared about what he was doing. Unfortunately for him, he also ended up as the guy at the center of a commenting community that could be deeply infuriating.

Sadly, it sounds like the stresses of dealing with the commenters is what did him in, and that sucks. It's totally understandable, though. Most of my commenters here are awesome, but the occasional troll or flaming jackass can quickly sap the fun out of an otherwise good time. Once things become un-fun, there's no reason to continue.

He says he's getting out of blogging and politics and all this nonsense, and doing something else. I'm not quite certain, but reading between the lines of his post, I gather that he's going to start racing Nitro-burning funny cars. And who can blame him?

Pictured: Jason Lefferts and friend

Anyway, it's a little sad to see him go. But such is life.

Good luck with your funny cars, Jason!

Now, somebody please step up to fill his former role of serious local political blog guy. I'm going to stick with making dick jokes.

Donnelly's a blogger now!

Mayoral candidate Tom Donnelly has sunk to my level!

That is to say, he wrote a blog post. It's over at the Fitchburg Voice blog, and you can read it at this link.

Here's some of the blogtastic blogging Tom blogged:

This is the first time I have written on a Blog, and this campaign has been a learning experience about the role of the internet in local politics.

I have enjoyed working with my campaign volunteers in developing our campaign web
site http://www.donnellyformayor.com/ and I have read with interest some of the local Blogs which have been discussing the mayoral election. There is no question that the internet will play a more important role in politics in the next few years.

Ooh! Donnelly actually reads blogs! That's... actually not that surprising.

There are those who say blogs won't shape the election. I actually agree with that in some ways, since most voters don't read blogs and couldn't care less what they say. There's another side to things though...

Both the candidates and many "regular citizens" who are politically interested actually do read some of these ramblings. DeSalvatore obviously does, or he wouldn't have a statement on his website telling people not to listen to blogs. I'm quite confident Lisa Wong does as well, and Donnelly has just publicly lost his blogging virginity. Dionne I think mostly sticks to reading telegraphs from the Crimean War.

Still, three out of four!

The point of a blog, of course, is not to shape events. It's to shape discussions. Personally, I wasn't comfortable that the only political analysis in town used to come from the Sentinel's opinion pages and the people who post to Save Fitchburg. Which is why I started this blog.

If you look at the link list on the right of this page, you'll see several other blogs that have started more recently and also have their own viewpoints to present. Generally these are viewpoints that weren't being well-represented anywhere else. The more the merrier! To paraphrase Jello Biafra: "Don't hate the media, become the media!"

Hopefully some of the discussions on the local blogs at least make the candidates think a bit more carefully about these issues. They may or may not agree with any particular point, but at least they're thinking. And more importantly, they know what their constituents are thinking about. If the discussion were controlled by just a couple of outlets it wouldn't come close to representing the majority of citizens. It still doesn't, but the more people who speak up the better we can be represented. If the candidates never know about your concerns they'll never be able to help with them.

Unfortunately, it's only a matter of time before some of the commenters at Save Fitchburg start claiming that Donnelly has hurt himself by appearing on ReallyRachel's site. This is because those commenters aren't very bright, and also really dislike Rachel. I'm pretty sure most people who will be voting don't know her or particularly care.

Anyway, saying Donnelly would be hurt by this would be like saying that Democrats won't vote for a candidate if they appear on FOX News. Which is stupid. Just because you hate the medium doesn't mean you'll hate everyone who appears on it. Similarly, what obviously matters here is what Donnelly says. Not who runs the site where he says it.

That was a long digression. How bloggarific!

Donnelly's blog post itself is not all that blogtacular. Just a brief rundown of his background and so forth, plus some plugs for his website (which as previously noted isn't too bad). But it's nice to have him out there contributing to the discussion. At the time of this writing there are no comments on the post, so get with it and go ask him something!

All the candidates would do well to make themselves available in this way. So nicely done, Tom.



Disclaimer: I actually hate any word that has "blog-" stuck on the front. Like "blogtacular". My use of such words in this post does not constitute an endorsement of them.