BY DAN VALENTI This is a campaign year, and in the City of Pittsfield, it promises to be wild, wooly, wet, and wanting. Wild because several would-be incumbents are now lame ducks (Ruberto, Lee, Lothrop), wooly because the hair will fly as campaigns have become more caustic each year, wet because voters will again get […]
BY DAN VALENTI The local banking scene can always be used as a thermometer of an area’s economic health, a separate question from a region’s economic development. As we can see in Berkshire County, particularly Pittsfield, the local banks are strong while economic development, as measured by a shrinking tax rate, is weak. So what […]
BY DAN VALENTI Welcome back from Super Sunday, and greetings from Day 1 of the rest of your week. Today we present an assortment of news and views culled from confabs with our various spies, agents, confreres, and partners in truth, justice, and The Planetary way. The Planet has a “community newsroom,” with news hounds […]
BY DAN VALENTI As this site manages growth, we shall carefully watch “hours in versus benefits derived” (HvB). That’s what a systems analyst (and acquaintance) told The Planet about the future (What, you were expecting Nostradamus, already?). She took me through the math of HvB, a buzz-wordy management tool, not because we needed it but […]
BY DAN VALENTI Part 2 of a Two-part Series Up, down, and in between, many have made much of The Planet’s recent analyses and criticisms of the Berkshire Eagle, dubbed by this site as the Boring Broadsheet. Be clear. Our concern takes the form of tough love. Growing up in Pittsfield in the 50s and […]
BY DAN VALENTI In Septmber 1995 Denver-based Media News Group purchased the storied Berkshire Eagle from the Miller family. A bad combination of a faulty real estate purchase and switch over to color presses left the Millers deep in debt. They had leveraged almost $18 million at a time when the market was going south. […]
BY DAN VALENTI In my weekly op-ed column this week for the Pittsfield Gazette, I shall be writing about the Berkshire Eagle. I shall comment on its sad descending from winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 to its present-day toothlessness, a situation prompted by an out-of-state chain ownership that cares nothing about Pittsfield, Mass., except […]
BY DAN VALENTI The Mayor Responds The Planet heeds Mayor Jimmy Ruberto’s call to let the DPW land deal “cool down,” since the project has “taken on a life of its own.” First, though, we share the mayor’s comments on Patrick Sheehan, sent to The Planet this afternoon. Dan: “Sorry for the delay. (1) It […]
