It’s been a long year, so I’m going to let you in on a little piece of Jezebel workplace culture that would otherwise belong only to us. We, as a group, are positively devoted to the Boston Globe’s Twitter account.
We have a lot of little obsessions with things that bring us glee—the movie Carol, Fiona the hippo, gummy candy —and this is one of them. I hate to toot my own horn,* but I take credit. I’m not even from Boston!
Since I’m guessing you saw Spotlight with your dad over Christmas 2015, I won’t spend this time explaining how great the Boston Globe is, generally, but trust me when I tell you that I freakin’ could. (If you haven’t read their excellent series on racism in Boston yet, go do that.) I love this paper. But I don’t always read it. What I do read, day in and day out, are its tweets.
The great thing about the Boston Globe’s Twitter is that it’s half general interest news and world reporting, and half local reporting about road closures in Alewife and industrious groups of Braintree moms. Although they have accounts for various sections (sports, metro, etc.), they don’t do that thing that other national papers do where they sort of filter out metro and human-interest reporting by having an account that’s just for that. For Globe followers, you get it all. Would you like to know why Trump wants to move Israel’s capital to Jerusalem and also how trains are running out of Wollaston? The Boston Globe’s Twitter is just the thing.
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I know what you’re thinking: Kelly, I hate you and you are stupid because this is how every local newspaper works. You really need to leave New York more and become more media-literate! Save it, because the above is not the only reason to love the Boston Globe’s Twitter.
The tweets from this account do what a sort of local, sort of national paper is supposed to do. It gives readers news of the world and news on their front lawns. Watching this all unfold on Twitter, when there are so few functioning papers like it left was a genuine pleasure to discover. Also, the names in these freakin’ headlines, man. Very Boston.
Twitter is, generally speaking, a Republic 2.0 hellscape of such aggressive filtration that we can pretty much count on hearing only from people and entities whose viewpoints are, if not agreeable, then at least relevant to us. As a kind of antidote to every other damn thing in my Twitter feed this year, which always seemed to be about this media kerfuffle or that fucked up thing Trump did, all of which seemed to demand personal participation from me, or at the very least a like or tweet of agreement or outrage—I took immense pleasure from hearing about Boston-specific stuff that had nothing to do with me. I didn’t need to engage in any way. I didn’t need (or want) to read the whole article. I just wanted a taste.
Oh also, this is both an ode and roast because Boston is really easy to make fun of. No offense, but it’s true. That the Globe surely knows it has readers outside the Boston area but still tweets this from its general account is just begging me to read it in Julianne Moore’s accent from 30 Rock:
All year long, the Globe tried to find the Boston angle on everything, and I loved every second of it. At times, it was to poignant effect; the truth is that things like Trump’s Muslim ban affect people who live everywhere, including Boston. To state how something national impacts a specific place is powerful in its simplicity. At other times, it tried to insert Boston where no one really asked Boston, or take a needless dig at New York. It was always talking about how cold the weather was, how to correctly use a pressure washer, and self-owning at an alarming rate. Let’s celebrate some of this account’s most Boston moments together.
*I love it.
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