09.25.2022

A local newsroom goes missing | Don’t hold your breath on falling home prices | Alex Jones gets big boost at local chain bookstores | Quick Hits | About Contrarian Boston |

News tips? Story ideas? Email us at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com

Platform for a madman? Latest book by Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist gets star treatment at Boston-area Barnes & Noble bookstores

Alex Jones mimicked sobbing Sandy Hook parents and called them “crisis actors” while insisting for years the massacre was all a government-concocted hoax. He eventually got the boot from various online platforms.

But some venerable members of the old media establishment continue to roll out the red carpet for the Infowars sicko, who faces tens of millions in damages in defamation lawsuits filed by parents of some of the 20 children murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

That star treatment is on display at Barnes & Noble stores in the Boston area. Jones’ latest unhinged tome, “The Great Reset,” claims that an evil plot is underway to enslave the human race in “a factory farm-controlled system.” And the conspiracy theory nutcase’s latest work is displayed prominently in the current affairs section at the front of the chain’s stores in Framingham, Bellingham and Hingham, among other stores.

(Prime placement for Jones’ book at B&N’s Framingham story)

Jones’ new book is even displayed at the front of the Barnes & Noble in Danbury, Conn., just a few miles down the street from Newtown, where the Sandy Hook Elementary School was located.

Jones has shown little remorse for peddling his vile lies about the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary, lies which fueled years of harassment and threats of parents by unhinged Infowars followers.

Jones declared “I’m done saying I’m sorry” for his Sandy Hook hoax claims in an angry outburst during his defamation damages trial in Connecticut on Thursday.

So what will it take for Barnes & Noble - or for that matter, Simon & Schuster, which is the distributor for Jones’ rather sketchy publisher - to declare they are finished with the Infowars fabulist?

This is not about censorship. Jones is free to write whatever he pleases, but no one is entitled to publish on the media platform of their choosing.

B&N’s decision to give Jones such a prominent place on the nation’s bookshelves is a choice, and an indefensible one at that.

For years the Boston Herald had the city’s liveliest newsroom. Now it appears to have gone missing.

By Mark Pickering and Scott Van Voorhis

The return to the office is here and Globe reporters and editors are now back in their downtown Boston newsroom.

But what about the Boston Herald, the Globe’s crosstown rival? Does the Herald still have an actual newsroom for editors and reporters to return to?

Given the relentless cuts at the once-proud daily by its venture capitalist owner and the shift to remote work, it seemed a simple and straightforward question to ask.

But getting an answer has proven anything but simple or straightforward.

After multiple calls and emails to the Herald’s editor and to executives at MediaNews Group, the paper’s owner, went unreturned, Contrarian Boston decided to hit the road in search of the paper’s elusive newsroom.

For eons, the big-city daily had both a sprawling newsroom as well as a large red-brick printing plant on the edge of Chinatown. In 2012, the paper’s offices were moved to Boston’s Seaport District.

But in 2018, the paper announced with much fanfare that it was moving its offices out of Boston altogether to Braintree, so that’s where we decided to go.

After a short drive down the Southeast Expressway, we arrived at 100 Grossman Drive, a nondescript office building not far from the highway that’s listed as the Herald’s current address.

We entered the lobby and scanned the list of tenants, to no avail. Several people in the building did not seem to know anything about the Herald. “Maybe they’re in another building?” one of them off-handedly suggested.

Another turned out to be more on the mark: “The Herald? They’re long gone. Long gone.”

But on page 2 of the Herald, the publisher’s information box had the needed clue: “Suite 400.”

On the fourth floor, just off the elevators, hanging on the wall in metal relief we found the legendary Herald newsboy, long the symbol of the paper. However, he was looking out on a darkened lobby that was locked up tight. To the left of the main desk was an abandoned classroom.

The main fourth-floor hallway displayed fabulous Herald photos taken by staff photographers. However, they were all from the past – and from before MediaNews Group bought the paper in 2018.

But weirdly, in the middle of a work day, there were no Herald employees and no signs of the paper’s once vibrant and bustling newsroom.

As the fellow in the lobby said, they were all “long gone.”

Mark Pickering is a veteran of the local news business, having worked on the business desk and the opinion pages of the Boston Herald.

Don’t get your hopes up: Falling sales won’t mean relief for strapped Boston-area home buyers anytime soon

The Greater Boston real estate boom is clearly slowing, with double-digit drops in sales of condos and single-family homes.

But a slowdown in sales is not necessarily going to yield a big – and desperately needed – drop in prices.

This somewhat puzzling Boston.com article works hard to suggest that prices are actually falling. In so doing, the piece commits the cardinal sin of comparing the $560,000 median price for a single-family home in August with the same statistic from June, when it smashed records by weighing in at over $600,000.

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. Real estate is highly seasonal, and the only comparisons that matter are year over year. And by that measure, the price of a single-family home in Massachusetts rose 7.8 percent year-to-date through August 2022, compared to the same period in 2021. Meanwhile, condo prices during the same time period rose 8.2 percent, according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

Nowhere enough new housing – whether it’s apartments, condos or single-family homes – is being built in Massachusetts to even come close to meeting demand.

And that likely means that whatever price decreases we do see will be shallower and more superficial than in many other markets across the country.

Quick Hits:

Interesting political play: “Baker allies helped Kim Driscoll win the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor through an unusual super PAC Boston Globe

Inflation stinks, but really? Also, we seriously doubt Carr is clipping coupons: “Howie Carr: Inflation in Joe Biden’s America ‘an inch’ closer to hellhole”    Boston Herald

Uh oh - officials come up a billion short in Cape bridge replacement funds: “Mass. misses on one bid for Cape bridge replacement CommonWealth Magazine

Grim winter ahead: “Region Reaches To Washington For Energy Aid Lifeline” State House News Service

About Contrarian Boston

I have fielded emails over the past couple of months asking what Contrarian Boston is about.

Here’s a link to our mission statement – you can find it in the “about” section.

For a more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts description, read on.

An online newsletter, Contrarian Boston publishes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.

Our focus is:

·      Politics and all levels of governance, good and bad, with an emphasis on state and local, with some national mixed in;

·      Economic growth and business, especially real estate, housing and new development projects;

·      The media and why it does what it does;

·      Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;

·      And whatever else catches our fancy.