Michele McPhee, Boston's queen bee of crime reporting, is jumping from the Herald to a full-time slot at WTKK. Boston Daily landed the scoop confirming what two of Boston's most reliable mediawatchers, Dan Kennedy of Media Nation and Adam Reilly of the Phoenix, heard. From Joe Keohane at Boston Daily: "Sources close to McPhee confirm this, and add that she’s taken a full-time gig at WTKK-FM and ditched daily journalism altogether." What will the Herald......

The mayor has opened his virtual food court so you can find out if your favorite Boston eatery is a squeaky-clean bastion of hygiene or a rat-infested hellhole. We wondered what happened to the swanky spots that Northeastern journalism students found to be filthy back in September, so we looked them up: Figs (As in Todd English's Figs) - Failed on Aug. 2, for many reasons, including "Management has not properly trained staff to use......

Sometimes you think that a story is over and done. Take yesterday's election for the State Senate seat vacated by Jarrett Barrios. Cambridge politician Anthony Galluccio won. End of story, right? Well, David Harris at the Cambridge Chronicle blogged yesterday that a Chronicle reporter received an unnecessarily rude reception at the Galluccio office: Staffers busily escorted the reporter out the door and… locked it behind her. Galluccio was not in his office at the time.......

We thought Jay Garrity, Mitt Romney's former pretend police officer and factotum, was creepy. But Garrity loses to another Mitt Minion - Will Ritter. Casey Ross at the Herald had the best journalism job ever when he got to write about Ritter's self-described shenanigans. On MySpace, Ritter claimed he was in "special ops" yet he still had time to party it up in a hot tub. If he's so important, why does he have so......

It seems that Mother Nature didn't think the Red Sox's doubleheader sweep of the Tigers on Thursday was impressive enough - the first games after that two-fer will be tidily bundled in another dual-game gameday. The Sox called Friday's scheduled game against their Interleague Play Atlanta visitors pretty early, deciding instead to go the route of a 1 p.m./7:35 p.m. Saturday schedule. The pitching breakdown: Dice-K vs. Braves pitcher Anthony Lerew in the afternoon game,......

This year's James Beard Foundation Awards have been announced. Prizes for the prestigious food-related award are handed out in a multitude of categories. From top chefs to television, print critics to books. The Boston area usually gets a fair representation at the Beard Awards, but this year the medals for Boston are tough to come by. The big winner was Frank McClelland of L'Espalier who took home the honor for Best Chef: Northeast. A......

The Sox express train derailed last night, as the Jays finally solved Tim Wakefield en route to a 7-3 win. The culprits? Well, the first four guys in the lineup went 1-for-19. A doable 2-run deficit doubled in the 8th inning; Vernon Wells hit a rocket into center field. Wily Mo Pena looked more like Sily Mo Pena as the ball bounced over his outstretched glove and careened around for a triple. Aaron Hill then......

The Hoax could have been a terrific movie. Whether or not you know anything about Howard "The Aviator" Hughes or Clifford Irving, the man who tried to pass off a fake autobiography of Hughes, the plot is riveting and familiar. In the light of recent publishing and journalism faux-pas, ranging from Jayson Blair to the sudden squelching of OJ Simpson's "confession," Clifford Irving's desperate drive for fame makes sense. Richard Gere stars as Clifford Irving,......

We were diligently writing today's Redux and thinking of lecturing Dan Shaugnessy for committing the major journalism fallacy of assuming everyone "stopped eating and sleeping" when Dice-K touched down in Fort Meyers. Not everyone is tracking every move of Dice-K. Everyone is actually obsessing over tracking every move of Britney Spears. OK, that's not true. But the 24-hour-cable-news channels are, anyway. You probably already heard about it - Britney Spears up and shaved her head.......

Lisa Williams started up H2Otown.info as a community site about Watertown. For ease we'll call it a blog. It's a site with dated entries that flow chronologically – but it welcomes community members to sign up, log in, and share their news about Watertown. Inspired locally relevant blogging. You'll find mentions of cars who's mirrors were smashed off to the large explosion at a gas station last month. Things you may not find out about......

If you head over to Harvard this Saturday night, you'll have a rare chance to hear, for a modest price, two modern masters of Afro-Cuban jazz bang out Dizzy Gillespie's masterpiece "Manteca," Stan Kenton's quirky "The Peanut Vendor," and a whole lot more great Latin jazz. Trumpeter Brian Lynch and drummer/percussionist Bobby Sanabria will perform at 8pm in Lowell Hall with the Harvard Jazz Orchestra. Lynch has played with the legendary Eddie Palmieri for the......

The Harvard Crimson is mired in the controversies of copycat cartoonists, quote cribbing, and an editor who would like to hide in a spiderhole. It's not a good sign for the future of journalism when the editor of an Ivy League paper takes damage-control tips from Saddam Hussein. You'd think the Harvard kids would have learned their lesson after Kaavya Viswanathan's legendary fall from grace. But, in the past few weeks, plagiarism fever has......

Some time ago some smart-aleck in LA created a little app that stripped LAist of their first person plural pronouns and stuck the "I" and "me" into their writing. It quickly grew, offering a singular view of all the "ist" sites at the time. We like the parody but refuse to succumb to singularizing our posts. We are, after all, a collaboration of several minds in Boston posting little snippets of life and items......

While we don’t long for the days of having a required summer reading list, Bostonist has been feeling a bit inspired to pick up a book and actually start reading something not on a computer screen. Since we’re going to be “vacationing” in the city this year, we might as well read some books that are set here in our fair state. Here are some of our Bostonist staff picks for your reading enjoyment. History......

Well, it's bringing (this) Bostonist to a standstill, anyway. If you're wondering why we managed only a paltry number of posts today, and you're not content with the real answer (laziness important, work-related business), consider this: The World Cup (or "FIFA World Cup," as they keep calling it on TV, in case you tuned in looking for that other world cup) is in full swing, and the U.S. had its first match today, against our......

Not infrequently, when the Globe fails to satisfy Bostonist's need for up-to-date local reporting, good sports coverage, or unabashedly biased and inadvertently hilarious journalism, we turn to the Herald. Today was such a day, although what drove us from the Globe this time was actually too much detail in a local story: call Bostonist sqeamish, but we don't want to know that when two Rottweilers attacked a ten-year-old in Brockton, they "tore flesh from his......

We hear that there are still people trying to get home on alternate routes after the closing of Rte. 1. The road remains closed in both directions, even with the sunshine we’re enjoying across New England today. Drying out takes some time (don’t sit on the grass either – wet butt). Following up on the YouTube related post we did yesterday when we told you that the two videos we had collected weren’t worth watching......

On the coat tails of the Herald’s sale of many of its suburban newspaper franchises, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported both newspapers in town saw a decline in circulation numbers – both papers down and Boston placed only second behind San Francisco for declining print readership. The Herald saw its print subscription drop at a slightly higher pace than the Globe for both the weekday circulation and the Sunday edition. It’s not that surprising......

First off, we know the headline is misleading. This post is all news about citizen media - we're not going to be bold and try to claim that it actually is citizen journalism. Some say Dan Gillmor is the father of citizen media. Regardless of whether you believe that, he did, in fact, write the book on it. This year he’s a non-resident fellow at the Berkman Center and lectured there earlier this week.......

Did Bostonist ever say a disparaging word about the Boston Herald? We take it all back, because the Herald has pulled out the literary stops today. With court papers released yesterday outlining some of the discoveries made in a police search of Entwistle's hard drive, you might think the Herald would want to emphasize that the new documents confirm its own earlier reports that Entwistle researched suicide on the internet. Instead, readers learn that Entwistle......

Venture capital, that risky investing that took a turn for the worse when the tech bubble burst with the new millennium, is backing Boston businesses again. Honestly, we’re not surprised. After making our way through a lengthy Boston Globe article on the Boston start-up blog directory, Gather.com, it’s abundantly clear that there is money to be had in the worlds of new technology. Gather has grabbed $6 mil. and they’re still running in Beta. But......

Will someone please give Alex Beam a copy of Boston Common? Last week the Globe’s lifestyle columnist Alex Beam published what appeared to be an open letter to Jason Binn, head honcho at Niche Media and publisher of Boston Common magazine. The column amused us only because we love sarcasm and anything to do with publisher/personage battles. Last week’s column requests a copy of the hefty mag (even though Beam didn’t make the $250k annually......

Bostonist could not believe our eyes when the weekly JFK Jr. Forum calendar "pinged" into our mailbox - next Monday, December, 5 at 6:00 PM none other than Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward will be part of a panel discussion entitled, "ANONYMOUS SOURCES: Lessons Learned." Back when Bostonist was just a wee little News Editor on our high school newspaper, the book and movie All the President's Men made us believe in the power......

Our dear old Supreme Judicial Court, whose decisions so frequently bring ire to Americans outside the Commonwealth borders (and, to a lesser degree, to those within it), won a little victory yesterday, much to the chagrin of journalists everywhere. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take an appeal from the SJC by the Boston Globe, after the paper lost a libel suit and had to pay $1.68 million to a doctor implicated in the death......

Against better judgment Bostonist has been a Metro reader. Ok, you’re pretty smart and figured it out: we don’t pay for anything we read. We take advantage of the wonderful libraries all over the hub for our books, get our daily newspaper free when getting the subway (or the Herald as it's passed out free almost every afternoon), and spend way too much time reading from our computer screens. Still, Bostonist likesWe think of ourselves......

Bostonist owes apologies to both the venerable bastion of journalism The Metro and the lovely Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Bostonist got the new wave band confused with Get Him Eat Him. Bostonist averages four hours of sleep a night due to circumstance. Bostonist doesn't recommend it because it makes you stupid and you easily confuse monosyllabic bands with funny names. So Saturday night, May 28th, The Plan at Great Scott will feature hottie......

The Cambridge Chronicle reports today on the re-emergence of an old tradition at the Baker House Dorm at MIT. Apparently, every few years since the early 1970's students in the building have relieved their mid-semester stress through the traditional "Piano Drop" -- coinciding with the last official day to drop classes. The concept is quite simple, the Chronicle points out: A group of students throw a 700-pound piano off the building's roof just to watch......

Despite a busy last few weeks with the death of State Senator Charlie Shannon and the political jockeying to replace him, a major drug bust on the Tufts campus and the long-anticipated beginning of reconstruction on the Lowell Street bridge, the major news in Somerville this week really doesn't hold water...in fact, it floats on water. The Somerville Journal reported last Thursday that a mysterious boat has been found in the Homan's Building, an......

Can a daily newspaper's mood be affected by uncertain spring weather? Recent events at the Globe suggest the answer is yes. The fluctuating temperatures have certainly made Bostonist a little bit manic: when our town is bathed in balmy, 70-degree sunlight, we feel the exuberance of a schoolkid at 3:00 on a Friday, the notion that anything and everything is possible, that any passing glance from an attractive stranger might really be a lascivious come-hither.......

The 2005 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday and two Massachusetts residents were selected for their work with the written word. David Hackett Fischer, a professor at Brandeis University, won the Pulitzer Prize for History with his book, "Washington's Crossing." The book focuses on George Washington's crossing the Delaware River and winning the Battle of Trenton on Christmas night. The book was a National Book Award Finalist last year and was selected as "Best of......