Patriot of Barnstable

Trenchant and often trench-coated political correspondent Jack Coleman has left the Cape Cod Times for the virtual reality of blogging on the Cape Cod TODAY Web site. Coleman, who wrote the “Political Notes” column for the daily and covered the Democratic (but not the Republican) convention for the Times, has joined forces with former Cape Cod Technology Council executive director Spyro Mitrokostas.

Mitrokostas is running for Yarmouth’s seat on the county Assembly of Delegates, and Coleman has announce that he’s working as a volunteer in Demetrius Atsalis’s re-election campaign. Will Cape Cod Today offer a blog to Yarmouth’s incumbent delegate, Charlotte Striebel, and Atsalis’s opponent, Ann Canedy?

Coleman is following a well-worn path from the Times newsroom to the Atsalis boiler room. The representative’s chief of staff, Michael Karath, used to report for the daily.

Those who’ve followed the wind farm controversy will enjoy another of Coleman’s contributions to the Web site: “Two Wrights Make a Wrong,” the satiric story of how rich beachfront property owners opposed the Wright brothers’ experimental flights in 1904 through the Alliance to Protect Kitty Hawk. In this alternate reality, the Kitty Hawk Times opposes this “private takeover of public skies” even though this marks “a sharp departure from the paper’s previous support for many technological advances of the era, such as the light bulb, moving pictures and indoor plumbing.” Chalk it up to Times editor Charles Ulmer Farley, “who refuses to dispatch any of his reporters to scheduled flights of the Wrights’ aeroplane, even though two local weekly newspapers have done so.”

Political Potpourri (9/24/04) See original here.

See Jack's cautionary tale here.