Media Watch

Wall Street Journal looks askance at Delahunt-engineered oil deal with Venezuela

... in an editorial today under the headline,
"Oil for Friends" -  Hugo Ch?vez repays his Congressional amigo

"Money can't buy love, unless you're Anna Nicole Smith. But these days a little heating oil can buy friends in Washington, especially if they come as cheap as Democrat William Delahunt. Massachusetts wants bargain oil prices to help it through the winter. Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez wants influence in Washington. Leave it to the Congressman from the Commonwealth and a Kennedy to close the deal," the editorial states.

" ... 'To Citgo (a US-based subsidiary of the nationalized Venezuelan oil industry), to the people of Venezuela, our debt,' the Congressman pledged. Mr. Delahunt should rightly feel a debt to the people of Venezuela, whose per-capita income is perhaps one-tenth that of Massachusetts and whose sole source of hard currency is the oil that their leader is now giving away to the second-richest state in the union. But Mr. Delahunt has no unpaid debt to Mr. Chavez. For some years now the Congressman has been lobbying hard for the Venezuelan despot, whom he paints as a misunderstood humanitarian. How French."

"Mr. Chavez came to power in 1999," the editorial further states. "In seven years he has a domestic record of human rights abuses, election fraud, property confiscations a la Zimbabwe's (Robert) Mugabe, erosion of the independent judiciary, limits on press freedom and militarization. His best friends include Fidel Castro, the Iranian mullahs and Colombia's FARC terrorists ."

"The Bush Administration is worried about all this, but Mr. Delahunt has no qualms. After Mr. Chavez was briefly deposed in 2002 because of his use of violence against dissent, Mr. Delahunt visited Venezuela and proclaimed, 'I think he's learned from this. I think he understands that healing and reconciliation are the true qualities of leadership, not division.' Mr. Chavez's attacks on critics have since worsened. "

"Mr. Delahunt returned to Caracas to dine with Mr. Chavez in August and was asked if he might be working in opposition to U.S. policy. 'I don't work for Condoleezza Rice. I don't report to the State Department. I report to the people who elected me in the state of Massachusetts. I belong to an independent branch of government,' " the editorial goes on to say.

"Which would be more accurate if it were possible for Massachusetts to have a separate foreign policy. Mr. Delahunt's lobbying for the dictator undermines any official U.S. pressure on Mr. Chavez to behave more humanely, which is precisely why Mr. Chavez is returning the favor by plying Mr. Delahunt with cheap oil."

"For less pliable Americans," the editorial concludes, "el jefe Caracas has a different policy. On Monday a U.S. Congressional delegation led by House International Relations Chairman Henry Hyde and ranking Democrat Tom Lantos was barred from entering the country and held aboard their aircraft for two hours (blogger's note - Delahunt serves on the same committee).  The delegation's itinerary had been known to Venezuelan officials for weeks. For a little more discount oil, perhaps Mr. Delahunt will explain to his colleagues how this was all just one big misunderstanding." See original editorial (after one-time registration) here.

Do As I Say,(Not As I Do)

New best-selling blockbuster explains how leading liberals preach one set of ideals for you and me while living by quite different standards themselves.

Hypocrisy has proved to be a wonderful weapon for liberals in their war against conservatives. When a pro-family politician gets caught cheating on his wife, or a conservative pundit turns out to have a bad habit or addiction, their enemies use the charge to good effect. Fair enough. But what happens when the spotlights are turned on liberals themselves? Do the supporters of progressive taxes, affirmative action, strict environmental safeguards, and unionized labor practice what they preach?

In a word: NO. Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy is Hoover Fellow Peter Schweizer's hard-hitting exposé of the contradictions between the public stances and real-life behavior of prominent liberals like  Ted Kennedy. Among the books charges are these ; 

• Ted Kennedy favors racial set-asides on federal contracts -- but when it came to his own investment in an entire city block of Washington, DC, he got his political friends to help him waive an affirmative action set-aside

• Another of Kennedy's great causes has been support of the estate or inheritance tax. But, he has repeatedly benefited from an intricate web of trusts and private foundations that have kept most of the family pie from ever ending up in the hands of the IRS

• Kennedy has introduced dozens of pieces of legislation over the years to encourage alternative energy sources. But he helped block the Cape Wind Project -- an effort to provide clean energy for thousands of homes on Cape Cod -- because the project would be built in one of the family's favorite sailing and yachting areas. This at the same time he and his family own oil stocks and even oil companies starting in 1950 when his father bought Artic Oil. The Kennedys subsequently bought two more oil companies and made a killing in the Texas oil fields.
  

Read the  review here.

Political Correctness Gone Wrong

 A sidebar to the above is one of our favorite liberals, Sarah Peake of Ptown going whacko over an antique painting in Town Hall which didn't have a woman in it. This is especially troubling for the rest of us non-Ptown folks since Ms. Peake is the presumptive heir to Representative Shirley Gomes' seat in next November's  election

Read all of Brian McGrory very funny column in today's Globe, but try this for starters:

Winter must come awfully early to that little spit of sand called Provincetown. The town isn't exactly Mayberry to begin with, if you know what I mean. But as the cold winds blow relentlessly down Commercial Street and the gray waves slap constantly against the shore, the isolation must lead to a total divorce from reality.

Think Jack Nicholson in ''The Shining." How else to explain the bizarre behavior of a majority of the town's selectmen at a meeting earlier this month? To wit, Selectwoman Sarah Peake spun her chair around near the end of the Nov. 14 meeting, gazed up at an oversized oil painting depicting the Pilgrims voting on the Mayflower Compact when they first landed in Provincetown, and declared that she wanted it removed.

Mind you, it's not that she didn't like the look or the colors or the style. It's not that she thought it was too big or too small for the Judge Welsh Hearing Room. It's not that it clashed with anything around it.

No, what Peake didn't like was that the painting didn't include any women. That and the fact that the painting's only Indian -- Native American, I'd better call him -- wasn't holding a ballot like everyone else."  Read the rest here.

P.S. One of the comments below points out that The Cape Codder ran this story a week ago, and no, our local daily hasn't seen fit to let us know about this insanity until two weeks later (after CNC and The Globe covered it for them) when it began the lame excuses for MS Peake's incredible stupidity and lack of class. 

WCAI shuns Clean Power Now

The radio station is already in bed with The Cape Cod Times and the Alliance to Save our Sound (ASS).

An interesting relationship has developed between the local NPR station, WCAI-NAN and the local daily newspaper, The Cape Cod Times.  While some of us are railing about the lack of local news coverage by the Times, letting the internet and even the weeklies beat them to local news stories, they have been diversifying into a different  media ... radio. Leave it to the Times to go back to the future.

Every morning you can catch the editors from the local daily commenting on the news of the day, really yesterday's  news, promoting the stories and features in their own paper while being interviewed on WCAI.

Some of the more astute of you will remember that the Times and the WCAI got together to sponsor a poll on Cape Wind a while back. You can tell from the way The Times ran roughshod over the poll results, who wears the pants in this relationship.

But the point of this story is to explain to some of our listeners, er readers, why you only get to hear the opponents of Cape Wind on the radio, in studio. Not that WCAI has been unfair to Cape Wind, it's just that they won't have the Clean Power Now folks on. Why not? They have about the same number of members as the Alliance.

It has a lot to do with who's running the (radio) show now. The Times - WCAI relationship, financial and otherwise, made it possible for the NPR affliliate  to buy another channel to broadcast its programming deeper into the Cape. The new antenna  (located in Brewster) signal reaches Provincetown. And together with WNAN on Nantucket, the local NPR affiliate can reach all of Cape Cod and the Islands.

So long as the Times is calling the shots at WCAI, you won't see or hear the spokeman from Clean Power Now  in Woods Hole. The Times may no longer love the Alliance, but they can't afford to have anyone correcting their dis-information about Cape Wind on air.

The Times has become very important to WCAI's bottom line. Who wants to go back to pledge drives.  So let's oblige them this fundraising season. Skip the donation to the radio station, just buy the paper instead.

Times "bottom lines" another top position

A couple years ago when CC Times then-publisher John Wilcox was elevated to Ottaway Newspapers H.Q., the G.M. Peter Meyer was named to replace him.

 The newspaper did not name a replacement for Meyer and thus saved the expense of a General Manager's salary.

On Wednesday Publisher Meyer named former Editor for News Paul Pronovost to replace top Editor Cliff Schechtman who left in August. 

No one was named to Pronovost's old position. The Times thus saves his former salary . 

Pronovost has worked at The Times for five years but still lives in Fairhaven which is across the harbor from New Bedford.

The Times buries an embarrassment

Buried in the back of the first section of today's Cape Cod Times is another chapter in a  criminal conspiracy against Cape Wind which the newspaper should have run on page one since the villain of the piece is a former employee of the newspaper.

John Donelan who worked for The Cape Cod Times before becoming the Asst. Director of The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound was found to have "knowingly published defamatory statements about the developer of the proposed wind farm" by Judge Allan Van Gesta on Monday.

Not only was the story buried, but The CC Times' connection was further buried in the last paragraph.

Times' reporter Dennehy's had called Mark Rodgers late yesterday afternoon when he saw the item in a court report. Rodgers called him back to answer Dennehy's questions, and then Dennehy slammed him with this bush league slap - Mark Rodgers, a Cape Wind spokesman, yesterday seized the opportunity to say Donelan's actions typified the Alliance's history of ''deception and false information." Strange (and unprofessional) way to handle a news source who calls you back.

 Dennehy also didn't have the intelligence to ask Alliance flack Ernie Corrigan why, as his story states - "the matter remains between Cape Wind and John Donelan," since the newspaper knows full well that Donelan was a founding board member of The Alliance, and thus ANYTHING Donelan did was nailed to the backside of this organization for all time.

The Alliance is still trying to stop (see March 2005 story) Cape Wind's lawyers from reviewing emails on The Alliance computers. Some believe there may be a link to the newspaper in these Donelan/Alliance files. Here's today CCTimes article in full.

Ex-Alliance worker sent phony e-mail, judge says

By KEVIN DENNEHY
STAFF WRITER
A former employee of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound knowingly published defamatory statements about the developer of the proposed wind farm, a Massachusetts trial court judge has determined.

But before any liability can be entered, Cape Wind Associates must prove an e-mail and press release sent by Barnstable resident John Donelan damaged their reputation.

''It remains the burden of Cape Wind to prove that it suffered damages as a result of Donelan's defamatory publication,'' according to an order sent by Judge Allan VanGestal on Monday.

Donelan, a former research director and co-founder of the Alliance, admitted last year he wrote a press release alleging that a Cape company cut its ties with Cape Wind Associates because of legal problems, a charge that was not true.

The release was sent to the State House News Service in Boston on Jan. 29, 2004.

The lawsuit filed by Cape Wind in Suffolk Superior Court alleges that the bogus press release damaged the company's relationships with other businesses.

Mark Rodgers, a Cape Wind spokesman, yesterday seized the opportunity to say Donelan's actions typified the Alliance's history of ''deception and false information.''

Alliance officials distanced themselves from their former employee, who resigned in March 2004.

''We have not seen the judge's order, and the matter remains between Cape Wind and John Donelan,'' said Ernie Corrigan, an Alliance spokesman.

Nonetheless, Alliance officials are still hoping a state appeals judge will overturn a March court decision that would allow Cape Wind to review more than 400 of the group's e-mails and documents as part of the libel suit. Donelan also is a former employee of the Cape Cod Times.

Kevin Dennehy can be reached at kdennehy@capecodonline.com.

(Published: November 23, 2005)

Going to the Bogs with a "Bog Blog"

The New York Times today had a feature on the new Ocean Spray Cranberry ad campaign which may even include a "Bog Blog".

It sounds like they mean business for a change because in brainstorming the new campaign Boston's Arnold Advertising brought creative talents from other offices according to  Ken Romanzi, chief operating officer for the domestic business of Ocean Spray in Lakeville. Romanzi said the agency  “put together a war room, which had plastered on the walls old pictures of harvests, old advertising, old packaging.”

He adds that Ocean Spray is even considering a BLOG recounting the exploits of Justin and Henry the fictional bog-hoppers in the ad campaign, sort of a BOG BLOG. Below is the start of The Times report and the rest is clickable in the headline.

Going to the Bogs 

The campaign, which promotes cranberries as being
The agricultural co-operative that grows cranberries is heading back to the source in a campaign intended to convince consumers to take a closer look at their crop.

“Straight from the bog,” is getting under way as the Ocean Spray co-operative, owned by more than 650 growers, celebrates its 75th anniversary. It replaces ads that carried the theme “Crave the wave,” which peddled mostly Ocean Spray beverages.

The new campaign, by Arnold Worldwide in Boston, is centered on two growers (portrayed by actors) who are ready for work, wearing old shirts, pants known as waders and carrying rakes. The pair, the youthful rookie Justin and the calmer veteran Henry (above, right), talk up attributes of cranberries like healthfulness and taste while standing waist deep in a flooded bog (portrayed by an actual bog).

The unspoken, implied message the actors deliver: Because cranberries come straight from the bog, they are fresh, natural, authentic, the real deal In addition to traditional elements like television commercials and print advertisements, the campaign is also taking an offbeat tack with promotions that are re-creating cranberry bogs in high-profile public places like Rockefeller Center and Las Vegas. A makeover of the Ocean Spray Web site (www.oceanspray.com) to promote the “Straight from the bog” theme is also on tap.

The Ocean Spray cooperative spends about $30 million a year on advertising in the United States and an additional $20 million for ads in countries like Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Spain. Click here to read the whole story.

BlackBerry, CranBerry or Chuck Berry?

A Cape Cod tech company sued over use of the word "CranBerry"

There's a funny tale wagging its way through the web about  the owners of  the famous BlackBerry PDA suing a Cape Cod company over its use of the name CranBerry. Here's the story as culled from several sources including Bloomberg,  The Globe & Mail , Metro and The Boston Globe.

Canadia's Research In Motion's long-running patent dispute in the U.S. with NTP Inc. seems to have given the BlackBerry maker a taste for the courtroom. It might even consider changing its name to File A Motion.

RIM was ordered to stop selling its BlackBerry device in the U.S. and pay NTP approximately $54 million in damages, but the company was recently granted a temporary reprieve, pending an appeal. RIM is fighting several other legal battles as well. It filed suit against Xerox Corp. last month to prevent the document technology company from demanding patent royalties. It is already involved in litigation with rival Good Technology Inc. over alleged stolen trade secrets.

Fruity names are the problem 

RIM is suing U.S. companies that have created brands, not PDA's, with similarly fruity names, claiming they could cause confusion in consumers' minds.

One suit filed this month, according to the Bloomberg news service, is against a Massachusetts company, BackOffice Associates,  which has a software division called CranBerry, claiming the name "clearly intended to trade on the substantial goodwill that RIM has developed in its BlackBerry." This despite the fact that the Cape Cod company being sued doesn't even make a PDA.

An executive for the company, Back Office, denied the claim this week, adding: "We're a company based on Cape Cod. We've got cranberry bogs all over the place."

RIM has also sued Sakar International of Edison, NJ for using names such as StrawBerry and BlueBerry for its children's handheld devices. Sakar disputed the copying charge, but is changing the products' names to avoid a fight with the Canadian Colossus.  Sakar's lawyer Ezra Sutton said. "They don't own all berries. The berries describe the color. The company is making the change because we don't want to have a fight with BlackBerry. We feel a little sorry for them these days."

Finally yesterday's Boston Globe reported that RIM., facing a lawsuit that may halt US sales of its BlackBerry e-mail pagers, said it has finished an alternative technology designed not to infringe patents held by NTP Inc.

Whats next? 

As one story had it, "Coming to a courtroom near you: BlackBerry vs. Chuck Berry."

Get info faster with Google text technology

It's hard to dispute that we live in a world where information is available to us instantaneously.  With the right equipment, of course.  The folks at Google.com have developed a new way to provide us with news, telephone numbers, driving directions and weather updates no matter where we are.  All you need is a cell phone, a signal and text messaging. 

Text messaging is old hat by now.  You can vote for your favorite American Idol or request a song on satellite radio.  It's also a great way to send little love missives to your sweetie.

Google's new program allows you to treat your cell phone like a mini computer--without a web connection. 

Just access your text message function and enter any number of questions as a text message.  As a test I entered "w", the shortcut for weather, and 02660 to request a weather update for South Dennis.  It provided temperature, humidity, wind speed and a forecast for the rest of the week.  Test number 2, I entered "pizza" and 02660.  I received two text message replies pointing me in the direction of Pizza Hut and Buncey's, both on Route 134 in Dennis.  My phone also gave me the option of auto-dialing the numbers I received. 

So, there you have it. Type in your query, then send the message to short code 46645 (G00GL). I've already added the code to my cell's address book.

According to Google's info site, you can access a myriad of topics such as directions to a store, movie show times, stock quotes or get an answer to a simple question--like who wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?"  What a great way to cheat a Trivial Pursuit!  Not that I would do that.

At the moment, there is no charge for the service, but text message charges through your cell company still apply.  What a bonus for those of us with unlimited text messaging.  This will surely eliminate the need to pay the arm and a leg required to get substandard service when calling information.

The beginning of the end

The Mating Sounds of Dinosaurs
#2 Newspaper Chain bites the dust 

This column has been predicting for years the end of large, daily newspapers, and no story or event can prove that assertion better than the fact that America's  second-largest chain is being forced to sell out by failing circulation and irrelevance to the marketplace.

Yesterday under growing pressure from big shareholders, Knight Ridder, the publisher of 32 newspapers including The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer, is being forced to sell by pressure from its major shareholders who want to get their money out of this business dinosaur.

The meltdown began last week when Knight Ridder's largest shareholder, Private Capital Management, publicly urged the company’s sale because of “limited growth across the newspaper industry... continuing consolidation among the traditional sources of print advertising revenue and the redirection of advertising dollars to other media.” The next two largest shareholders quickly said they agreed.

What's different this time is that K-R is too big for the other big chains to swallow and may see its parts sold to local "would-be" publishers.

Read the story in today's New York Times story and BusinessWeek online. 

And this just in ....

More than 317,000 people from 41 countries took part in the world’s largest ever survey on sexual attitudes and behaviour. The research confirmed that Greece is officially the sexiest country with the Greeks having sex 138 times a year - well above the global average of 103. Croatia (134) and Serbia and Montenegro (128) come a close second and third.

Media Talking Points

On Monday it was WXTK. Today it was The Cape Cod Times. It sounds like a coordinated effort. The Alliance has been good lately at getting its message out with its friends. Last week the talking point was the Birds, again. This week it’s the view, again. Want to bet what it is next week?

Earlier this week, Ed Lambert, host of the morning talk show on WXTK took up the charge with, "I don’t want to look at these damn things, and I don’t even live on the water" They’re ugly. They don’t belong on Nantucket Sound. Is that view we want the visitors to see when they come to the Cape?"

That last part got me.

Ever look to the north as you’re crossing the Sagamore bridge. Ever gaze out to the west when you’re at Sandy Neck.  Even going up Route 6 in some spots you can see the smokestack of the Mirant plant.

I guess that’s what we really want the visitors to see as they come to the Cape. And if the tower of the Canal plant isn’t pretty enough, sometimes you get to see the pollution (read poison) coming out of it to remind us that we're asking the visitors to breath in the worse air quality in Massachusetts while on Cape Cod.  (The rest of us choose to breath it in, I guess.)

Today The Cape Cod Times published a fairly amateurish editorial on small clusters of land-based wind turbines. They support them, where "inobtrusive". But who gets to decide where inobtrusive is? Their favorite sacred cow; the Cape Cod Commission. What a surprise.

The Times has gotten good at not mentioning the Alliance in their editorials. They even sneaked in a plug for "No Wind Farm in Nantucket Sound", not quite N-I-M-B-Y, but close enough.

But this piece was a little timid, like it lacked the courage of conviction.  Makes you long for the days of  "one in a series of occassional …" vitriol from the former Editor. Cliff if you’re reading this, we miss you. We really do.   SM

Giving offshore wind the bird

Is it my feverish imagination or is the seagull mascot of the Cape Cod Times flying perilously close to that looming turbine blade ...?

With barely concealed disdain

Several possible metaphors came to mind for Emily Dooley's story in the Sunday Times about local bloggers before one came to mind that clicked - Ms. Dooley as missionary, traveling to an exotic culture where she must spend some time with the natives, not too long fortunately, just long enough for her to examine their  inexplicable practices and then hurry back to civilization where she can take her fingers off her nose and resume  breathing.

It turns out that this particular tribe has gotten perhaps a tad too much attention elsewhere in the media - some have even gone so far as to suggest that they are changing the nature of media anthropology itself, turning it upside down by having news percolate from the ground up rather than be dictated to the masses by an anointed few.

Then again, maybe it's just this decade's version of CB radio.

In a nod toward bloggers' potential importance, Dooley quotes a couple of talking heads saying things to that effect, then gets to what she really thinks about the matter.

"The blogosphere is the land of plenty, a letters page of infinite space, with nary a filter," Dooley wrote. "Nary"? What next - "nevermore"?

Another filter or two probably would have helped the story, because at one point Dooley wrote that "Popular local bloggers include Peter Porcupine, Otis the town drunk and BeggerBlog."

Problem is, only one of the three is a blogger - Peter Porcupine. "Otis the town drunk" is a pseudonym used by someone who frequently posts comments to what is written on the blogs at capecodtoday.com.

As for "BeggarBlog" - not "BeggerBlog," as in the story - this is another pseudonym used by someone who has posted comments all of once or twice, and not until it made the rounds that Dooley was working on the story.

An example of Tom Friedman's flattening world

... rising early to work on a story about Minerals Management Service's new oversight of the Cape Wind project, sending the story via e-mail to Walter Brooks in Vietnam, and seeing it come online after Walter publishes it just after 6 a.m.
Still hard for me to believe we can do this.

The Times plans a story on local bloggers - while the person who has done more than anyone to give them a voice is on the other side of the world

No wonder readers are giving up on daily newspapers

Many people probably first heard about the terrible accident in Centerville that claimed the life of an elderly woman and injured three people, including Barnstable Town Council President Gary Brown, in comments posted here Tuesday,  the day of the crash.
Details were sketchy and it was the first thing I looked for yesterday morning at the website of the Cape Cod Times.

For a story that could not be more local, about an accident that ended one person's life and dramatically altered the lives of three others, including a prominent local figure, an article about the crash was an obvious choice for the front page of Wednesday's Times.
But the editors at the Times thought otherwise, because they put the story on top of page 3 instead, with the bold headline, "Brown involved in crash." ("involved"? Why not "injured"?).

So what went on page 1 instead?
The centerpiece was about former Falmouth police officer John Busby appearing before state legislators to ask that they extend the statute of limitations for assaults against police, and apparent links between the shooting that nearly killed Busby in 1979 and the murder last May of Shirley Reine.
That looks like it should go out front, as should the story about two Mass. Maritime cadets facing disciplinary action for a late-night Halloween swim that led to a search effort. 
A wire story about President Bush proposing a $7 billion  strategy to prepare for a possible global super-flu pandemic - sure, makes sense for that to get prominent play, given the severity and scale of a potential outbreak.

Which leads to the last two stories on page 1 - one of them, another wire story, ran above the fold under the headline, "Panel urges simpler tax code" (your eyes are glazing just reading that, aren't they?).
"A special presidential tax-advisory committee yesterday recommended a bold plan to simplify and restructure the tax code, proposing to change the tax treatment of everything from home ownership to health care," the story began.
Operative word - "recommended."

As for the last story, on the bottom of the page, it's a judgment call. "Helicopter pilot walks away from bog crash," reads the headline for a story about a helicopter that crashed Tuesday in Cataumet.
But while the pilot was not injured, fortunately, he is also not from the Cape - he lives in Middleboro. The story also points out how the pilot "came within a few feet of landing his crippled chopper" before he losing control and coming down hard into a cranberry bog.
On any given day at the Times, this same incident would be reported in a three-paragraph item in the police log.

What elevated it to front-page status, however, was a great photo taken at the scene by Steve Heaslip.
The story on page 3 about the Centerville crash also had a photo, this one by Ron Schloerb, of both vehicles. But car accidents are so common that photos of them no longer convey much of a shock, unless you can't tell that these mangled heaps of metal and glass were once vehicles. That wasn't the case here.
Helicopters, on the other hand, crash far less frequently and a photo of a local crash is not something often seen. So even though the pilot wasn't hurt and he's from off-Cape, I can see this story going on page 1 as well.

By process of elimination, this leaves the wire story about the tax code as the best choice to be bumped inside and the Centerville crash story placed out front instead.
Why didn't the editors at the Times do this?
My impression of the Times, based on years of reading it before I worked there from 2000 to 2004, and from continuing to read it since, it that local coverage is not its forte. Instead, it is trying to carve out a niche as a regional-national paper, the Cape's version of The Boston Globe, and the people managing it are wasting their time, at least in my opinion.
If the editors at Times want to keep the readers they have - and all most dailies hope for these days is to stop the bleeding - they better reacquaint themselves with what local readers want.
And any editor who thinks  readers prefer a wire story about the federal tax code instead of  a local story about a fatal accident involving the president of the governing council of the largest town on Cape Cod is in the wrong line of work. 

Who are Walter & Pat Brooks?

Biographies:

Walter and Pat Brooks are the principals of Cape Cod TODAY. They also founded Best Read Guide, and eCape.com. They have spent thirty years in media, mostly at newspapers and for their own companies.

In 1988 they founded Best Read Guides, and today these pocket-sized, four-color, coated-stock vacation guides are the largest network of vacation magazines in America with over twenty million annual circulation in dozens of different editions from coast to coast and in Europe.

Lifelong Newspaper people

Before starting their own companies here on Cape Cod, Walter and  Pat had spent decades in the newspaper industry and are frequent contributors to the travel sections of eastern daily newspapers. Walter has held nearlyevery position in newspapering including classified manager, retail advertising manager, managing editor, promotion/marketing director, art director, photographer, and publisher. Among their newspaper ports of call have been The Village Voice, New York Post, Greenwich CT Time, Naugatuck CT Daily News., Amherst MA Journal-Record, Enfield CT Press, The Cape Codder and MPG Communications. He was educated at the Taft School, Culver Military Academy and University of Connecticut and has been a frequent lecturer on newspaper design and promotion and niche publications.
 
The World Wide Web

Since 1995 they have launched dozens of Internet travel sites including a unique "Gateway Travel" site located at www.BestReadGuide.com which links to all the on-line editions of Best Read Guide. In 1996 they launched www.CapeCodTravel.com which receives over three million hits a month and recently added a local Newspaper-online at www.CapeCodTODAY.com, and a print and a new eCommerce clearinghouse site at www.eCape.com.

Travel Writers as well

It is a natural extension of launching a half dozen new travel guide editions each year to write about other destinations, ones which may soon host an edition of Best Read Guide. Their columns and travel articles have appeared in The Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, MPG Newspaper Group, Editor & Publisher magazine and many others. Today each article is also forwarded to the dozens of newspapers in North America which publish editions of their magazines.

Walter and Pat, his photographer wife live on Pleasant Bay in Harwich.