But what about ethnicity? “I kind of felt like an outsider any place I ever went,” Pergament allows. “When I first came to Boston, there were definitely some real rigid striations, if that’s the word. I think my mentality is simply one of insurgency. And when something gets too stable, I’ve got to go.”
Ultimately, this may be the best explanation of what drives Pergament into and out of the newspaper game. The ancillary motivations for his return to Boston are also worth noting, however: taking on Metro yet again, creating a new newspaper model, making more money, rejoining his wife and son in Newton after commuting to New York for three years, adding another notch to his outsider’s belt of Boston conquests. But in the end, Pergament’s return might come down to this: he needed something to do — and launching BostonNOW was an ideal way to get his preferred fix.
“There’s a lot of adrenaline connected to a start-up,” he says near the end of our conversation. “And I think you get addicted to the adrenaline. Then I think there comes a time, maybe three, four years down the road, that my particular skills are less necessary.
“You look at the incidence of heart attacks of American men — the disparity of Monday-morning heart attacks is really something. So many guys hate their jobs: they get up and they just drop dead. That won’t happen to me.”
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Adam Reilly's Media Log: http://www.thephoenix.com/medialog
