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No news is bad news
BY CHRIS WRIGHT
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Until recently, Hadi Madjid didn’t miss reading the newspaper. A physicist from Concord, Madjid has been blind since childhood, so flipping through the pages of the Boston Globe or the New York Times has never been an option. As he puts it, "You don’t miss what you’ve never had." Then, in March 2002, a computerized service called Newsline was launched, and Madjid was able, free of charge, to listen to a total of 94 newspapers over the telephone. "It was amazing," he says. "An entirely different world opened up to me." Madjid, of course, had not been completely wanting for news coverage before Newsline. There was the television and the radio, and another service that allows the blind to listen to news stories at set times. But Newsline marked the first time that he could peruse the articles of his choice, in the papers of his choice, whenever and wherever he liked. "I felt empowered," he says. "I didn’t have to ask anybody for anything. I could make choices. I could go backwards and forwards, faster or slower. If I was in a motel room, I could dial my news and find something interesting and fall asleep. It was very nice." Was being the operative word. Initially, Newsline was available in all 50 states, paid for by a federal grant from the Institute of Museum Services. When that ran dry a year later, advocates for the blind scrambled to secure private and state funding for the program — with varying degrees of success. (Today, the service continues in 35 states.) The money raised in Massachusetts paid for Newsline only through June, and a state Senate bill to secure permanent state funding will not emerge from committee until September at the earliest, with no guarantee that the bill will pass. The money needed to restart and run Newsline is an almost absurdly small sum — $40,000 annually in a state budget that will next year exceed $20 billion — but these are not good times for "non-vital" public services. "This is a vital service," says James Gashel, director of government affairs for the National Federation of the Blind, the organization that developed Newsline. "Our public libraries spend thousands of dollars to provide people who can see with access to newspapers. There’s no reason why a service like this shouldn’t be funded." Joe Collins, executive director of the Massachusetts Association for the Blind, is equally determined to see Senate Bill 775 — "An Act Relative to Telephonic Reading" — become law. "This is an equal-access issue," Collins says. "Blind people should have access to the news the way that you and I have access." For his part, Hadi Madjid couldn’t care less what kinds of equal-access issues are involved or where the funding ultimately comes from — he just wants his daily paper back. "I feel deprived," he says. "I feel really deprived and lonely. I sit here next to the phone in my chair, and then I remember. I really miss it. Gail [his wife] will walk by with the Globe and I’ll feel jealous. It’s like a pain almost. There are things in the world that I want to know about and I can’t do it."
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