Who's the mayor of, say, Chicopee?
Yes, it's Michael Bissonnette. But who's he?
Goodbye to those readers who don't give a shit. To the rest of you, welcome. We need your help.
Below you will find a cursory answer to the Mike Bissonnette question and another 11 who's who items like it. For some of you, our skeletal profile will be, if nothing else, more than you knew before. For many others, our offering is woefully inadequate. And that's where you come in.
In the era of the Internet, you might think that a quick Google search would yield volumes of biographical information on just about any public person, particularly elected officials. Alas, this is not the case. Wikipedia is great—indeed, it is the closest model we have for this project we're undertaking—but for small-town mayors like Bissonnette, and even national-profile pols like Congressman Richard Neal, the Web's "free encyclopedia" falls short. Access to a robust newspaper archive such as Lexis-Nexis helps, but even then you'd have to slog through hundreds of newspaper articles to compile something close to a meaningful dossier.
The items you'll find below are just a beginning. We ask readers who'd like to fill in the gaps in these mini-biographies to go to our website, www. valleyadvocate.com, and add their comments. In the weeks and months to come, we will refine what begins as a fairly crude process, resulting in what we hope will be a large and growing database of information about local people and issues in the news.
