Written Pyramids

This week's this American Life is titled "This I Used to Believe," based off of the "This I Believe" Web site, which lead me back to the blog post that has been gnawing, tickling the back of my brain and the back of my throat.

It's been almost two years ago since I graduated, two years ago since I wrote "the nervous feeling that it’s going to be a long time before I find another paper that will be able to make me cry and laugh."

In the last month, this blog has been dominated by my sappy, unhelpful cries to save the Boston Globe. I have a post in the works about my actual critiques of that newspaper and the role it could and should play. But for now, a quick reflection that while the Boston Globe has yet to make me laugh the same way my college newspaper did, it certainly has made me cry.

Last week my friend sent me this excerpt from a column on ESPN.com.

For the past few years, as newspapers got slowly crushed by myriad factors, a phalanx of top writers and editors fled for the greener pastures of the Internet. The quality of nearly every paper suffered, as did morale. Just two weeks ago, reports surfaced that the New York Times Company (which owns the Globe) was demanding $20 million in union concessions or it'd shut down the Globe completely. I grew up dreaming of writing a sports column for the Globe; now the paper might be gone before I turn 40. It's inconceivable.

I think this is a little hokey, but who knows, the ether of the Internet may actually save the Globe. As I said earlier, I love that paper (maybe I will treat all of my readers to the book review I wrote for the Globe in 1994. I was ten). I love it enough to participate in an eye-roll inducing "blog rally" so here goes:

"We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here's your chance. Please don't write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe's community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you."

I love the Boston Globe. It has gotten thinner over the years, and it runs more wire stories, but it has some incredible local coverage and it is the paper for which I dreamed of working for years.

When I was in fourth grade, I had the thrill of seeing my photo and my words in the (now defunct) student pages. That 100-word book review was my first newspaper clip, and lead to a loyalty to that newspaper that has lead me to give sources who leak stories to them some slack, and has left me dreaming of working their even when their staff shrivels.

The New York Times Co. is considering closing the paper. Even though it seems the web staff can't code for their lives (that article is absurdly hard to read because of all the random symbols that seem to fill in for punctuation), please keep the paper alive.

When I was little -- in second or third grade--there was a large sign at the end of my block that was, for months, covered in black cloth. Once, sitting in the car, I confessed to my mother that I was endlessly curious about what the sign was. We threw a few ideas back and forth, and then she pulled over, and held me up so I could look under the cloth. It was hard to see, but a few days later, it was revealed: "END ROAD WORK" it said.
But the mystery was not over.
Who would be protesting roadwork, I wondered, and why would they have waited so long to launch their protest?
The road work protesters remain a mystery until this day.

P.S. In college, my paper ran a banner headline, "Protestors Storm The Stage." Protestors is an alternate spelling, but it is not the accepted newspaper spelling, so the horrified head copy editor wrote a large sign "Protesters NOT Protestors." A few days later, the EIC saw the sign, and blanched as he held up the newspaper in question and the sign. "How did this happen?" he asked incredulous. He calmed down when we explained that at least it was a spelling. A little. I remember his horrified face and that sign every time I type the word "protesters".

A year ago, almost to the day, I mocked the Spiderman 3 movie, in particular its take on corrections.
"Also, who issues retractions off of their front page with a half-page headline "Sorry Spidey"?" I wrote.
The answer, it seems, is the Boston Herald, who ran an even larger "SORRY PATS" headline off its front page.
Bostonians like their sports teams. The paper is struggling (how sad is it that a city paper has only 10 metro reporters?). The story generated all sorts of attention--including senatorial-- (Why??) and it's own __gate name (Spygate? Really?). But there is really no excuse for this.

It should be noted though that I will forever have a soft spot in my heart for the Herald, since it generated this graf in the Post:

"Tabloids in some cases say what other papers only think," says Convey, the Herald's editor, whose office faces a freeway separating the paper's unfashionable neighborhood from the blue-collar enclave of Southie. "If you don't have fun putting out a tabloid, you're brain-dead."

The award for clever headline goes to this article: Lawmaker cuts budget to $3 a day
Get it? Because that's what lawmakers do all the time, but he just did it for himself. The article comes with money quotes like "I love food," and "The chicken was OK. The rice was gross -- soggy and cold." and this graf is incredible because it comes across as sad in its honesty:

They were accompanied by expert shopper Toinette Wilson, a single mother of three on food stamps who is earning a cosmetology license. Wilson offered tips: Buy bags of pasta, rice, and frozen vegetables.

The award for shrug-your-shoulders-and-walk-away-headline goes to this article: An uneventful ride on the Greenbush line

Granted it's an unexciting brief but....One of my favorite editors would read boring headlines or ledes, and if the headline sounded like this one, he would shrug his shoulders and say "You don't want me to read this article? OK. I won't." Let's hope the Times finds something more exciting when (if) the Second Avenue Subway line gets running.

And, best lede that accidently sounds funny: "BLOOMINGTON, Ill. --One of two eggs laid by a bald eagle at a central Illinois zoo is missing and authorities think the culprit could be a raccoon or a human.

A racoon or a human? Really? They've narrowed it down to two similiar culprits!

Boston's Metro (the newspaper. The subway system in Boston is called the T.) ads make me nervous. Metro is not a good paper because it has to make all of its news bite-sized regardless of how complicated it is. Readers will only hold on to the paper for as long as it takes them to get off the T (which, in Boston, could be quite some time) and so all the news gets essentially boiled down to briefs. Is that news? I'm going to be really sad if Metro is the only type of news that fits my life. Is that life? I'm not one for waking up early in the morning, but I still relish the idea of a newspaper and a cup of copy before work (or even sneaking a peek at the newspaper once you get to work). Is putting out that paper newspapering? Can't you find time to sit down with a real newspaper? Please?

Note: This blog was supposed to be about both newspapers and books, but it's easier to write about media. But I've managed a post about a book. It's long, but bear with me. It's a little bit cheating because the author was a NYTimes reporter, won a Pulitzer, and the book is non-fiction. But it is a book.

I've been called out on the fact that actually I live in a suburb outside of Boston, and when I say that I am from Boston I am lying and somehow diminish the experience of all those people who actually live there. I've sort of shrugged it off, because saying "I'm from Boston" and then fielding questions about why I say "Harvard" and "yard" just like everyone else seems easier than saying, "I'm from somewhere outside of Boston. Unless you are from the area, you've probably never heard of it, because though it's a nice town and the Boston Marathon runs through it, nothing actually happens there."

But I started reading Common Ground this week, and it made me really uncomfortable about saying I am from Boston. Or rather, it made me proud to be from Boston and made me realize how little I knew about the city, how much of a suburbs, private school girl I really am.

The book follows three families from MLK's assassination (with plenty of flashbacks to earlier) through 1974 riots that followed the court ordered busing in Boston's public schools. I've found it addictive and fascinating.

I am only a couple of pages in but some things that made me think:

On Martin Luther King Jr.'s visit to Boston and push for integration of Boston public schools from the eyes of one of the black men profiled in the book:


Excerpting this part seems a little but unfaithful to this part of the book which is through the eyes of a man who--in the wake of MLK's assassination-- reflects on how quickly he became disillusioned by King's belief in non-violence, but the passage gave me shivers. Despite the controversial busing program, (scroll to the time line. It doesn't really do the controversy justice, but hits the important points) Boston's schools, are still not really integrated, and performance rates vary extremely from district to district and can and often are linked to socio-economic disparities. So, in that sense, we might as well be back in the spring of 1965. Except, I wonder what a protest would look like today. Could it be conveyed on the page that eloquently? Would it send shivers up the spine of a Jewish suburban girl? Would people be able to convey how much they cared? I hope so, but I don't know.

On John F. Kennedy's run for a Congressional seat as background for one of of the Irish Catholic Bostonians reflecting on Kennedy's assassination:


I always thought of JFK as thoroughly Boston, sure I knew that he was the exception that proved the rule about the famous Boston accent often being linked to economic class, and I knew that he was a Harvard grad (he worked for The Crimson at some point), but I also knew that he died with his Massachusetts driver's license in his pocket, having never changed his address.

The pages that follow chronicle his rise to stardom and the way that women fell for his charm and good looks from the very start. But they also chronicle how hard he worked to be counted among Boston's Irish Catholic. He did not walk into a welcoming Boston. (Though his district would re-elect him to Congress and then vote overwhelmingly for him when he moved to the Senate and then to the White House.) Huh. If JFK couldn't call himself a Bostonian, I--who has never been to Fenway-- might need to find a different city. Or get my act together and figure out how to drop my R's.