Worcester Business Journal Names Cop Hating Communist With Substack Account To Power 50 Most Influential Professionals List
The Worcester Business Journal purports itself to be a serious media outlet that writes about important news regarding business in the Worcester area. Every year they do a story on the most influential professionals in Worcester business community, which they call the “Power 50.” According to their most recent list they considered 1,100 different “professionals” this years.
Each year, the WBJ Editorial staff undertakes the impossible task of deciding who are the 50 most influential people in the Central Massachusetts economy for the past 12 months. We spend more collective time working on this print edition than we do any other throughout the year. At one point for this 2022 Power 50 list, we had 1,100 different professionals under consideration. After five months of proposals, evaluations, vetting, counter proposals, and re-evaluations, the 50 profiles you read below are about the most influential professionals in the Central Massachusetts business community.
Unemployed burger flipper Bill Shaner, who was fired from his $28K a year job writing about me incessantly for Worcester Magazine.
Just a reminder that this is the person they are honoring as an influential business leader:
Bill was fired from Worcester Magazine because he posted about his desire to kill cops. He then started a Substack that a couple hundred people give him $5 a month for and began flipping burgers at Ralphs. He was fired from there for being lazy and now works as a landscaper where he gets paid money to to do work on the lawns of Worcester’s richest people.
It’s interesting to see a man who claims to despise the wealthy and wants to see massive redistribution of their wealth getting paid by them to do grunt work on their estates. He’s a real revolutionary. I remember when Che got his first summer job too.
I wonder if the company he works for knows that he’s posting pictures of client’s homes (that house is the most expensive house in Worcester) on social media. Also wonder if they know that he’s openly bragging about “infiltrating Worcester’s inner circle,” by having access to a client’s home, when in fact he’s really just accepting their slave wages to throw down some mulch like the unskilled laborer that he is. It’s almost as if Bill can’t keep a job because he hasn’t yet learned how to be a grownup and refrain from posting incendiary things on social media.
Here’s what WBJ had to say about him:
Bill Shaner provides a counterpoint to this strategy, by giving voice to negatively impacted groups, who are mostly low-income and/or long-time city residents, and decrying the loss of cultural resources, such as when the Bridge Academy & Community Center was shut down in favor of 21 new apartments.
A former Worcester Magazine writer, Shaner quit in 2020 after WoMag was acquired by the Telegram & Gazette, which would no longer let him mix his opinions with his reporting. Through his Substack newsletter Worcester Sucks and I Love It, Shaner provides a voice of critical dissent using his unique brand of opinion journalism
He was unabashedly in favor of the Massachusetts Nurses Association union during its 300-day strike with Saint Vincent Hospital, investigated when the city government destroyed a homeless encampment near Walmart, and provided the only voter guide for the 2021 city council election.
Breaking news: Local communist shares opinions on Internet. Officially declared influential professional for doing so.
To be clear, Bill has a very small following and posts on his blog once or twice a month. People like Tracy Novick give him $5 a month mostly out of pity, but also because he’s a useful tool for the ruling class who currently run the city because he never speaks critically of them.
But his Substack account has no real influence on anything, he doesn’t interview any of the people he writes about, and he’s never had an interesting or surprising scoop that has led to any newsworthy stories. He simply complains about successful people doing successful things and nothing happens as a result of his writing.
This is why Bill wrote about Turtleboy almost 100 times while employed at Worcester Magazine. He saw that Turtleboy was having actual real influence in Worcester (Mosaic Cultural Complex getting defunded, Mike Gaffney nearly becoming Mayor) and he didn’t like that because we matter and he doesn’t.
On the bright side, the 31 year old looks like he might have finally got his first girlfriend, who looks exactly as you imagine his first girlfriend would look.
So it looks like his newfound fame as one of the Power 50 is working out quite well for him.
