Like many in the alternative press, we pride ourselves on being ahead of the game. Sometimes, of course, that means we're wrong about what might be coming down the pike — that's part of the risk of being "out front" and not just reacting to the news as it happens.
But as we celebrate our 10th anniversary, we thought we'd look back to see how we did. Herewith, this sampling of what we've covered, how it's gone, and what's new in those areas.
New technology
Over the past 10 years, our technological lives have changed dramatically. The Phoenix has tried to keep up. Consider Michael Joseph Gross's November 1999 article about cell-phone etiquette, which advised users not to give their cell numbers out to friends, to keep their phones off as a rule, and to "always tell people, at the beginning of a call, that you're on a cell phone." No mention of sexting.
A few years later, in August 2003, Jess Kilby went "wardriving" (as "the search for wireless internet networks" was dubbed) around Portland. "Though WiFi (wireless fidelity) is enjoying a boom in popularity among early adopters . . . it's hard to discern exactly how much the average computer user knows about wireless technology," she wrote. Clearly iPhones were not even conceivable.
And then in May 2004, Kilby tried out beta Gmail; she praised the now-ubiquitous e-mail program for how swiftly it processed attachments, the automatic and "elegant" spell-check, and address auto-complete. She wasn't so keen on the lack of a simple "Delete" button, and had trouble navigating Gmail's trademark threaded-conversation interface. She did not evaluate what many consider to be Gmail's best feature — its search function; nor did she explore the social protocol of keeping your G-chat window open throughout the workday.
Moderation in Maine
We have the same two senators now that we did 10 years ago — Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. And they're (mostly) pulling off the same difficult brand of bipartisanship that they have been for a decade. On issues like gay rights, balancing the federal budget, health care, and gun control, "the limits of Snowe's and Collins's moderation becomes apparent," Dan Kennedy wrote in an inaugural-issue analysis of Maine's "moderate" Republican senators. "Still, [they] stand out as the kind of Republicans whom progressives can live with, if not enthusiastically endorse."
We've covered Snowe's and Collins's tricky balancing act several times over the past decade. More recently, in a 2006 piece about how their Supreme Court votes would affect women, Sara Donnelly pointed out that Maine's senators "were the only pro-choice women in the Senate to vote for Alito. So much for girl power."
