OUR VERY SPECIAL PHOTO ISSUE

DEAR READER,

As somebody who runs a newspaper and loves every minute of it, I try to avoid complaining about the punishing workload. But that’s exactly what it is, punishing—those of us who put this thing out every week work Monday to Monday, June to June. Fifty-two weeks a year. There’s no break. At all. Only deadlines. We pretend to take vacations every now and then, but the work never ends. And so I sent the following note to friends and contributors last month:

As some of you may remember, the defunct Boston Phoenix cousin Stuff@Night used to do something every year called “One Night In Boston,” in which its editors asked friends and photographers to document a single evening, while the Dig’s similar ritual, “Five Drink Minimum,” featured reporters and photogs going around to bars, getting wasted, and writing about it.

In that general spirit, on Friday, January 18, the Dig shall do a new sort of hybrid we’re calling “Oh, What A Night!” The concept is simple—it’s going to be a series of photos taken across Greater Boston on the same evening. Think of it as a curated collage that will take over an entire subsequent issue. Here are the details:

We just want any slice of life as you see it. If you’re at a restaurant, bar, club, or bowling alley, that’s great. But if you’re just taking the train and snap a pic of the scene on the platform, that’s also great.

Other than that, there aren’t really any rules, other than that we are more looking for pics of things you see rather than of you and your friends popping bottles. Think fly on the wall. So yes, a pic of other people popping bottles would probably be spot-on.

Basically, this issue takes a major load off of us for a week so we can plan for all kinds of upcoming excitement. In the meantime, we hope that you enjoy this time capsule of a region we love so much that we commit innumerable hours every week to covering it.

CHRIS FARAONE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF