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By media farm

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The Globe unveiled its short-term post-Bailey business page game plan last week. Steven Syre's Boston Capital column shifted from Thursday to Friday, with Tech Lab, a new technology column by Hiawatha Bray, taking Syre's Thursday slot.

The latter is surely great news for anybody who's into technology but can't, for whatever reason, access David Pogue's stuff on NYTimes.com. Or Gizmodo. Or, you know, the rest of the internet.

Was that too mean? (There's little written in this space that isn't.) Bray does cover his beat well and all. Here's the problem: He's not the best in the game. And, if they're not already, writers like Bray will soon be worthless to papers like the Globe.

Midsized newspapers' resources continue to shrink, so they're going to have to respond by making hard choices, devoting precious dollars to their strengths, and cutting bait with the rest. The money to do it all just doesn't exist anymore, and soon—if not already—you'll only be able to afford what you do best, what makes you unique, and therefore, what makes you worth picking up in a global news market.

For most city papers, this means saturation-coverage of local news and business and culture. In the Globe's case, what you do best also includes maintaining an enterprising, Pulitzer-winning Washington bureau, and publishing Ideas online and in print. The paper's film writing also is top-notch, but it's untouchable anyway, since it's tied to ad dollars.

What gets left behind? Anything else that's superfluous and duplicative—not just in a regional market, but nationally as well. Tech Lab wouldn't have been a bad idea eight or nine years ago. Today, the column's target readership already gets its tech news online, from better, more established sources. Based on Thursday's debut, that won't change. And at this point, no paper—especially the Globe—can afford to walk into a fight it can't win.

DID ANYONE ELSE find it utterly hilarious that last Friday's Herald—a paper normally filled with breathless denunciations of pervs—was absolutely littered with pouty jailbait photos of teenage cheerleaders? Talk about mixed messages. You'd do less damage handing car keys and a shoe full of blow to Lindsay Lohan.

THE PHOENIX'S annual 100 Unsexiest Men list—a vehicle for artificially inflating its web traffic stats for months on end without having to actually do anything approaching creativity, hard work, etc.—didn't rank among the paper's most-read or most-emailed stories when Media Farm went to press. So good for you, Boston, for not falling for that shit again.

Now if you all could stop clicking on that wretched two-year-old Suicide Girls story, we'd be all set.

OF THIS WE'RE SURE: The Globe loves trend stories about women. And blogs—short for web-logs!

Here's what we've learned about the fairer sex over the past year or so, courtesy of a tittering, never-ending parade of awful, awful trend stories. Women blog on the internet. They DJ. They hunt. They get elected mayor of their city or town. They go bowling. They shoot pistols. They drink sake. They go ice fishing. They are police. They have shoe clubs. They attract the interest of gadget-designers. Just like normal people! But mostly, they just blog.

Mind you, blogs aren't just for women. They're also for people who watch TV news, are black, have cancer, like home design, live in Iran, ride the T, or represent some confluence thereof, to name a few.

Can somebody please email us a copy of the directive instructing Globe staffers to write more about women and blogging, and combining the two into one wired gender-positive megatrend whenever possible? There's got to be a conscious effort to keep green-lighting this shit. It's not real journalism, and there's neither real feeling nor intellectual honesty behind it, but it's been a long-ass time since the paper reported, "Blogs have helped women to find their voices," and they keep recycling the "story."

Like on Saturday, when the paper teased, "When Girls Blog: The Internet is their new personal diary." On A1. And guess what? Girls know how to use the internet! Who knew???

They use their blogs to rollick and rant and reminisce, perhaps with less attention to the niceties of word choice and spelling and grammar than they invest in their English papers. They write about prom dresses and college acceptances and the joy of dancing to "Out Tonight" in the school parking lot. They complain about teachers and ex-boyfriends and feeling blue, sometimes using profanity for emphasis.

For emphasis: Fuck you all.