On occasion, Gaffin’s mordant wit manifests itself in full-on screeds. Here’s Gaffin in November 2007, after the Globe ran two consecutive lifestyle-porn stories on A1:
Yesterday, the Globe gave us an insightful front-page look at those modern-day pioneers forsaking their six-figure financial-services salaries and Back Bay condos to become Vermont cheesemakers. Today, the Globe once again awakens us from our complacency with a front-page expose on the travails of another breed of pioneers: people buying million-dollar condos at the Natick Mall.
Usually, though, it’s showcased in his bitingly apt headlines. One example, from a post linking to a Jamaica Plain Gazette article on Felix Arroyo’s plan to start a nonprofit: “Disorganized former city councilor wants to organize people.” That’s an Arroyo biography in eight words.
Unexpected success
U-Hub pulls in around 3000 readers each weekday. But that modest tally doesn’t fully capture its significance. For example, Lisa Williams — who founded both the Watertown-focused online community H20town and Placeblogger, which seeks to build similar communities around the country — cites Gaffin as a major influence.
“I started reading Universal Hub long before I knew the word ‘hyperlocal,’ before I was even thinking about doing a local blog, and I really liked what he was doing,” says Williams. Gaffin’s willingness to let users create their own posts at a time when two-way content was rare impressed her; so did U-Hub’s comprehensiveness.
Charley Blandy, a founder and editor of the widely read political blog Blue Mass. Group, is similarly effusive. “Reading the slice-of-life stories from around the Boston blogosphere is interesting, but Adam weaves in the big stories — politics, violence, police reports, etc. — putting the quotidian stuff in context with the bigger stories,” he says via e-mail. “When people realize their stories are not unique . . . stuff starts to happen.”
Given Gaffin’s status as a local Web celebrity — as well as his capacity for acerbic commentary — his real-world persona is a bit unexpected. I expected him to be a cocky, Gen-Y techno-hipster. In fact, he’s a 49-year-old father with a self-deprecating mien and a perpetually worried look.
He also has deep old-media roots. After leaving Brooklyn to attend Brandeis, Gaffin went on to work as a reporter for the now-defunct community daily Middlesex News for a dozen years. Then he jumped to Network World, an IT-trade publication, where he’s now online executive editor.
In the early ’90s, when the Internet was still in its popular infancy, Gaffin started a site called New England Online. The goal was simply to create a master list of Web sites dealing with the region. As the Web grew, the site’s focus narrowed; it became Massachusetts Online and then Boston Online.
U-Hub was born when, in the course of working on Boston Online, Gaffin concluded that the growing number of Boston blogs deserved a site all their own. The ensuing site was initially dubbed Boston Common. But when that name became problematic — too many people were going there for information about Boston Common — he switched over to universalhub.com, which operated on a different server and platform, and gave readers the chance to become authors.
