A Most Unusual Phone Call

Unless I'm pimping a story at the Fitchburg Pride website (which you should visit, and sign up for the e-mail breaking news alerts -- they're good and good for you), rarely do I talk about newspaper/journalism stuff. But today there's enough interesting politics involved that I figured it was worth writing during an otherwise slow, hot July week.

This has nothing to do with Fitchburg, except that Deval Patrick is governor here, too.

On Monday morning, the governor held a conference call with local reporters to discuss some economic development grants. And it wasn't one big statewide call. It was a series of calls with reporters from different regions receiving grants. Each session was about 15 minutes long (based on the fact that a Patriot Ledger reporter jumped on the call after about 15 minutes of our call, and was told to hang on for just a minute).

So, for 15 minutes, a reporter from the Telegram and I had the governor to talk economic development in Leominster (you can read the story here if you wanna). As a local reporter, it was a valuable opporunity to get the governor on the phone. As a reporter who has been covering local and state politics for almost 15 years, it was unheard of.

I was a reporter at the local and state level during the Weld, Cellucci, Swift and Romney administrations. The first three were pretty accessible to the State House press corps (Weld was the best when he was engaged and ready to have fun). Romney would look right through unless you had a TV camera or were from New York or Washington (to the point where last year, Mrs. Save Fitchburg and I were in Florida and watching a news report about Romney in a nearby community. She covered the Romney campaign and the first year or so of his administration. We agreed if she bumped into Romney on a beach he'd have no clue she was -- an example of his ridiculousness, and not Mrs. Save Fitchburg's greatness, mind you).

Anyway, none of the above were hopping on a conference call to yak with weekly newspaper reporters, who are usually only useful during campaigns, and even then they have minimal value, truth be told. But Patrick is making an effort here, and it's uniqueness is worth noting.

And it's working. Usually these announcements come in press release -- often through a state department or the local representative or senator's office. In those cases, the governor's name is buried or completely eliminated. But check out my story, and the Telegram's. Patrick is at the top of both. How can he not be? He's making the announcement, and he is the governor, after all.

It's a savvy move by Patrick, and fits the grassroots style he fashioned during his campaign.

It will be interesting to see if this was a one-off, or if it's something he'll be doing more often (I vote for more often).

Finally, I'm particularly intrigued by this because in my last job, I was working on a political campaign where we cleaned up with endorsements and solid stories in the big media, but were absolutely croaked by the small-town newspapers. In the end, we lost, and at the time I wondered if big-media influence was dying, and that screaming from the local rooftops was the way to go. Perhaps Patrick is thinking the same thing. I don't know, but I think while the topic of Monday's conference call was typical boilerplate grant announcement, the politics of the thing was interesting and worth noting.