Category Archives: Newspapers

‘Too many chickens coming home to roost’

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Once, I was a hard-news guy. Strictly hard news. I was ready and eager to cover almost any disaster that befell my fellow humans — fire, murder, kidnapping, bank robbery. Even as an editor, I’d desert the newsroom and rush out to the scene to see if my reporters needed a hand covering it.

And yeah, I felt guilty about being enthusiastic about other people’s misery, but (I told myself) I didn’t cause the misery; I just wanted to be the first to tell everybody about it. (And I swear, I never exploited misery by asking a victim “How do you feel?” That kind of “news” coverage always nauseated me. Just the facts, ma’am.)

Once, there was a big bank robbery breaking on deadline, with the scanner telling us the robbers were holed up in a nearby apartment in a complex where I had once lived. Though we were between editions, I rushed to the scene and stood amid the cop cars that were surrounding the building, staring at the doors and windows and waiting for the action to break. Then I glanced to the left and the right, and saw all the cops were taking cover behind their cars, with weapons drawn. I decided to get behind something myself, but in a position where I wouldn’t miss anything.

I had to get back to the office a few minutes later, but don’t fret; I didn’t miss anything. The robbers weren’t there. Bad tip.

Once, my boss told me that I was her “news hound.” I protested that we had a newsroom of 150 news hounds. She said, “No, we don’t.” I say that not to brag, but to set up my point, which is coming soon.

Of course, my main hard news jam was politics — in my newsroom days, and even more so after my conversion to editorial. Politics was the main thing; the others were just interesting breaks in the routine. Political coverage and commentary is why we have the First Amendment protection for the press. Our Framers knew that an informed electorate was essential for our republic to survive, and that meant a free press. Politics was the one hard news thing every citizen could do something about. So they needed a lively, detailed source of reliable information on the subject.

And as long as we had healthy newspapers in our communities, our republic thrived.

But that’s not my point. My point is that our polis, our political community, our marketplace of ideas has now degenerated to the point that I take little interest in the political stuff. Which is why I don’t blog much anymore — and when I do, it’s usually about popular culture or other trivia outside the political sphere. There just seems to me to be no point to delve into what was the important stuff to me for most of my life.

You can inform people all you want, and reflect upon the salient facts as carefully and intelligently as you are able, and it has zero effect. Everyone rejects it vociferously. It’s not only that they are unaffected by the commentary; they completely disregard the facts. If the facts (much less the opinions) are not in agreement with their own prejudices, they sweep them aside with hardly a glance. After all, their own preferences are constantly reinforced by the more comfortable (to them) “facts” and viewpoints fed to them by the sources of information that have replaced serious news coverage.

So I spend more and more time thinking about other stuff. Like sports. Which is particularly ironic, given it’s me. I didn’t say anything to them, but when guys used to tell me, “I just read the sports pages,” it always lowered them a bit in my estimation. And now I’m sort of one of them.

Of course, it’s just baseball, the National Pasttime, but it’s still sports. And while I’ve got you, the latest is that last night, the Red Sox beat the Dodgers (currently the Best Team in Baseball, statistically), to close out the best month Boston’s history. Their won-loss average was .840 in July — 24 and 4. You know how I said, back when Boston took its first step up from the cellar, that all the best sports movies start with the team being in the hopeless dumps, before they climb and climb and climb until they win it all? Well, we’re really getting into the good part now. The final, triumphant reel is rolling.

So that was my favorite thing in the paper this morning. But I’m here to share my second favorite: “Too many chickens coming home to roost.” It was on the Globe’s front page:

Sure, roosters don’t lay eggs and are known to make a racket, so most amateur chick hatchers don’t have any use for them. But, the Wood Family Farm would like you to know it already has plenty, thanks all the same….

But folks in the area keep dumping their roosters there.

This story ties together a number of things that have interested me for some time. My family is into vegetable (and fruit) gardening, but we have to build raised beds because our soil is essentially red-clay brick. And my wife would like to have chickens, but, you know — subdivision covenants. My son, who lives in a nearby community, built a nice coop and got some chickens and his family had “free” eggs for awhile, but all he could keep where he lives was hens.

In populated areas, roosters aren’t allowed because, you know, the crowing. Hey, when we were in Thailand, everyplace we stayed (even Bangkok) had nearby roosters, and it was kind of nice. We always wanted to get an early start on the sight-seeing. But them’s the rules in populated areas.

And the reasons that one Peabody farm was a fave dumping ground for roosters were a) it was in the general Boston metro area (just west of Salem), and b) it was located at the junction of two major roads. And it’s driving Madison Wook, the young woman running the farm, nuts:

“I am just a 25-year-old girl taking care of her family’s farm, and it keeps falling on me to take these roosters in when they’re dumped,” Wood said.

And bless her, she’s sweet-hearted enough that she does take them in, even though there are now 15 of the useless braggarts and she’s not set up to have any. She feeds them and puts them “in her paddock alongside her ducks and cows.”

So I like Madison Wood. And I even have some sympathy for the folks who are inflicting this plague upon her. They care enough about chickens to keep them, and they can’t keep the these guys, but they don’t have the heart to butcher and cook them. (And sure, our farming ancestors would scoff at that, and their hunter-gatherer ancestors wouldn’t even scoff, because they’d be too busy starting a fire and making a makeshift rotisserie. But we are prisoners of our soft environment, so as I say, I’m sympathetic.)

But these folks need to take their Foghorn Leghorns somewhere else now. I hope Madison doesn’t get any more boarders to worry about. But one upside: She’s not going to have any trouble waking up in the morning for awhile…

 

The Philly paper wouldn’t LET me cancel

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Remember my I’ve-had-it-and-I’m-putting-my-foot-down post about canceling my subscription to The Washington Post?

Well, it didn’t exactly work the same way with The Philadelphia Inquirer. Maybe it’s because I lacked the emotional investment. I didn’t have anything against the PI. I had subscribed when they offered me 12 weeks of the digital product for the same amount the Duke brothers bet on whether they could destroy Winthorpe’s life in “Trading Places” — a dollar.

At the time, I thought it might be nice to be able to closely follow my second favorite baseball club through its hometown paper — the way I do with my favorite through The Boston Globe.

But I didn’t. At all. I don’t think I read a single story in the paper in all those weeks. Just too much to do.

So I gave myself a deadline to cancel before I started having to pay the normal rate. The time arrived, and I reached out to the paper. Of course, they didn’t make it easy to find out how to cancel, but I expected that. I persisted until I got as far as an online chat.

How did it go? Here are a few screenshots from the conversation, once I got past the initial bot:

Somehow, I forgot to save the last screen, when she suggested that I simply deal with it next time the same way — by chat, and I responded with something like, “Yeah, because that worked out so well for me THIS time.”

But I wasn’t really irritated. I was impressed yet again by how desperate newspapers are not to lose a single reader — even if it they don’t make any money from it. Of course, when it comes to money, they have begging. Note that part of the first image at the top of the post where it says “Make a Donation.”

They have a special button for that on the homepage:

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Sad, huh?

But hey… the thing is, I don’t like to cancel newspapers. I think of the PI as a really good paper. It was back in Knight Ridder days, anyway. I knew some of the people. So if I can string them along for a few more weeks for just a buck, why not?

Nice work there, Brooke. You got one…

Goodbye to The Washington Post

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As of Friday, I will no longer be a subscriber to The Washington Post.

For me, that’s a big deal. I can’t say the Post caused me to become a journalist — I was already a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal when Woodward and Bernstein came out with All the President’s Men — but it certainly encouraged me at a key point in my development, and I’ve admired the paper ever since.

That is, I admired it until quite recently.

At first, I thought it was a good thing that Jeff Bezos had bought the paper — just as long as he stayed out of news and editorial decisions. That was the proper role of ownership back in the Newspaper Age — certainly at the papers where I worked. Of course, the problem with ownership that knows nothing about newspapers is they don’t know the rules.

I became very concerned when, with the country on the line, the paper didn’t endorse in the critical 2024 presidential election. That was a bad shock. But don’t take it from me. Check out what Marty Baron (former executive editor of the paper, and the guy who was running The Boston Globe when it won its “Spotlight” Pulitzer) said about it at the time. A key quote: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Another one: “Spineless.”

That wasn’t quite enough to make me drop the Post, although it should have been. I have a long history of calling newspapers spineless for failing to endorse in far less important elections than that one. But I wasn’t ready to pull the plug.

I’d just been reading, and enjoying, the paper for so many years before that. So I held back.

Then, there was the abominable editorial reaction to our incursion into Venezuela. I mentioned that before. That’s when I started thinking about cancelling. At the time, I wrote to longtime Post op-ed columnist E.J. Dionne to get his thoughts. He indicated that that was further evidence of the problems that caused him to “switch papers.”

Well, that was embarrassing for me. I didn’t realize he had done that, because I had been reading the Post (and all my papers) less over the last year or two. But sure enough, he writes regularly for The New York Times now. You know, the paper that had a far more rational response to the Venezuela thing.

But here’s kind of the last straw…

Not long after that Venezuela editorial, the Post laid off 300 people from the newsroom. Or, as the NYT‘s The Daily podcast put it, “Bezos Guts The Washington Post.”

This particularly trashed such areas as local news, international coverage (at a time when Trump has decided he’s not an isolationist anymore, and is sending troops out to threaten adversaries and allies alike), and the sports department.

While I’m not the greatest sports fan you’re likely to meet, that last category includes two people who I see as some of the best sportswriters in the country.

Remember when I wrote about Kent Babb, my former colleague at The State who’s been doing such a great job at the Post since 2012? He’s gone. Here’s what Kent had to say about that. I haven’t spoke to Kent about it yet, but I’ve finally started reading his excellent book about a school I attended in the mid-60s in New Orleans. I’m sorry it took this to make me pick it up from my shelves of books I fully mean to read, but I’m glad I’m reading it.

Remember back in the fall when I praised a story by Chelsea Janes headlined, “Shohei Ohtani just played the greatest game in baseball history?” She was the paper’s national baseball writer — the kind of title you’d expect in front of a name like Ring Lardner or Red Smith. And she’s good enough for that.

But they dumped her, too. Fortunately, she got a new job right away. But she’s no longer national baseball writer of what was once one of the best papers in the country.

Normally, while I’d be sorry to hear about this monumental development, it wouldn’t make me turn away. After all, I didn’t drop my subscription to The State when it laid me off. Sometimes things can’t be helped.

But this is a special case. The only good thing about Bezos owning the paper was that he has an income flow that seemed likely to be able to prop up the paper for the foreseeable future without causing him to have to cut back on his grocery bill a bit.

Obviously, he’s decided he doesn’t want to do play that role anymore, so I suppose that makes the Post, for the first time since he purchased it, vulnerable to the economic forces that have wiped out newspapers across the country over the past couple of decades.

So… there were, all along, obvious serious drawbacks to having him at the helm. And now the one good thing about his ownership — his willingness to throw money at the paper to prop it up — has disappeared.

So I’m following E.J. I’m out…

As you may recall, it was a great paper when Katharine Graham had it.

All that really needed to be said about Kirk’s foul murder

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The evening of the day on which Charlie Kirk was murdered — a week ago today — I read an editorial about it in The New York Times that said everything that needed to be said about that appalling event.

Sorry to take so long posting it. The headline was “Charlie Kirk’s Horrific Killing and America’s Worsening Political Violence.” The link on that headline is one of those “gift” links the NYT offers, so you should be able to read it. Let me know if you can’t.

In the meantime, I’ll share some key paragraphs:

The assassination of Charlie Kirk — the founder of a youth political movement that helped revolutionize modern conservatism — at Utah Valley University on Wednesday is a tragedy. His killing is also part of a horrifying wave of political violence in America….

Such violence is antithetical to America. The First Amendment — the first for a reason — enshrines our rights to freedom of speech and expression. Our country is based on the principle that we must disagree peacefully. Our political disagreements may be intense and emotional, but they should never be violent. This balance requires restraint. Americans have to accept that their side will lose sometimes and that they may feel angry about their defeats. We cannot act on that anger with violence.

Too many Americans are abandoning this ideal. Thirty-four percent of college students recently said they supported using violence in some circumstances to stop a campus speech, according to a poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression published a day before the Kirk shooting. Since 2021, that share has risen from 24 percent, which was already unacceptably high. Surveys of older adults are similarly alarming….

The intensity of our political debates will not disappear. The stakes are too high, and the country disagrees on too many important questions. But we Americans have lost some of our grace and empathy in recent years. We too often wish ill on our political opponents. We act as if people’s worth is determined by whether they identify as a Republican or a Democrat. We dehumanize those with whom we differ….

That was the penultimate graf. Since I’ve quoted so much, I might as well give you the last one:

…This is a moment to turn down the volume and reflect on our political culture. It is a moment for restraint, rather than cycles of vengeance or the suspension of civil liberties, as some urged on Wednesday. It is also a moment to engage with people who have different views from our own. When societies lose the ability to argue peacefully and resort to violence to resolve their political debates, it usually ends very badly.

(When I read that editorial that night, I retweeted it with this comment: “NYT ably describes the violent tip of the iceberg of hostility that is sinking America. But we’re all too busy despising each other to bother trying to find a way to save our ship. “)

As for the excerpts above — if the NYT lawyers call, I’ll just have to ask them how much I have to cut to suit their definition of Fair Use. But I just thought it was too important not to share. It was a grown-up editorial. It seems to me to have been written by someone mature enough to remember when this country was healthy enough that we could disagree strongly and vehemently, and then shake hands and walk away as friends — or at least as people who recognized each other as fellow Americans, and not as “the enemy.”

Of course, maybe it was written by a younger member of the board. If so, we have someone to thank for providing that person with an excellent education, and a firm understanding of what made America great, before our country’s recent tragic decline.

Evidently the faculty members who were suspended from teaching at Clemson were not the kind who provide such intellectual enrichment. Their grotesque fulminations are an embarrassment to anyone with. conscience. Doubt me? Here are some quotes from their outbursts. If that link doesn’t work, I’ll be happy for you, because you’ll be happier for not having read them.

Should they have been fired for it? Let me pose a different question. Should people who would have deliberately published such remarks at such a time have been employed in the first place, in jobs that involve shaping young minds? Such irresponsibility is inexcusable. They weren’t courageously outspoken; they were stupid, cruel and hateful.

You would think that in an atmosphere in which more than a third of college students believe violence can be justified to stop speech they don’t like, anyone who teaches them would understand that their responsibility is to model productive speech and behavior. And the responsibility of college administrators is to make sure they hire people mature enough to understand that.

At this point in our increasingly ones-and-zeroes country, we will now start hearing the “what abouts.” What about those GOP politicians who have demanded their firings? Are you defending them?

Are you nuts? Those people are cheap opportunists, trying to make themselves heroes to an angry crowd. Or, worse, they’re trying to make a merely grieving crowd… angry. Stir things up. Because they seek higher office, and Donald Trump has taught them that the approach taken by every president before him — striving with all their mights to pull us together in troubled times by invoking the values we hold in common — is for chumps. You can win by feeding division, by pouring gasoline on the embers, he has taught them. And they’re acting upon those lessons.

Just as others have learned that if you post something stupidly inappropriate — the more hateful the better — on social media in response to any news event, there are thousands if not millions of people like them who will regard them as brave and witty, and clap them virtually upon their backs in congratulation. A certain needy type eats that sort of thing up.

Both categories are unacceptable in a rational society. But they are so richly rewarded — in the currencies that matter to them — that they just keep doing it.

One final word: If you actually believe that anything those disgraced faculty members said about Kirk was justified by his rhetoric, you are just as much a part of the problem as those hungry GOP pols.

Personally, I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before the news of his murder. But I went and looked at a couple of videos of him speaking. The entire thrust of what he said, even in the milder comments, was wrongheaded and objectionable to me. In others, he was utterly offensive. But all that was what I expected, since Trump is trying to canonize him. And all of it is beside my point.

Y’all know I don’t believe in capital punishment. But even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t support summarily executing a man for saying things that offended me. I could never support that. And I could never support or worse, applaud anyone who mocks a human being who has died that way.

Finally, an actual NEWS story…

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I frequently say something here and there about what’s wrong with journalism today (as opposed to what non-journalists tend to think is wrong).

Yesterday’s New York Times offered some good illustrations of two of the main problems with the reporting we now receive from what used to be called “newspapers.”

Not that the NYT isn’t still an excellent newspaper (as the word is now used), and possibly the best left in the country. But while cranking out some wonderful content and doing a better job than most in employing new technology constructively, it still prominently displays some of the worst habits of the medium today.

Before naming them, let me mention the one guiding principle that guided journalism in my day — that is, the late 20th century (and maybe the first few years of the next, but from 2006 on, everything was falling apart). We saw it as our job to inform the reader as much as we could as quickly as we could.

That meant telling the moderately interested reader everything he (or she) wanted to know about a story in the headline — and to tell a reader who couldn’t care less that this was not what he’d picked up the paper for. If you couldn’t do that in the headline, you did it in the first paragraph, the lede. By that time you had communicated the who, what, where, when and how, and maybe even a bit of why. The paragraphs after that were arranged in descending order of importance, in terms of the reader’s ability to understand what was going on. (Think “inverted pyramid.”)

This was based in respect for the busy reader. That respect is now gone, trashed, mutilated, completely irrelevant.

And so we have the present situation. The “murder of the inverted pyramid,” as one blogger has put it. I just ran across that after writing what I did above. Here’s what that writer said:

Once upon a time, when newspapers were both noble and strong, editors and publishers regarded readers’ time as very valuable. Editors and publishers understood that newspaper readers were trying to absorb as much information as possible in the least amount of time. They knew that most readers would not finish most stories. Readers would read until they had absorbed enough of a story to meet their needs, then they’d move on to another story, or move on with their day. Once upon a time, editors and publishers did not try to manipulate readers to rip off readers’ time and attention.

Indeed. Anyway, there are two maddening, insulting, stiff-arming ways that newspapers now play keep-away with the news, day after day, story after story:

  1. The say-nothing headline. You know those little teasers that essentially say, We know something and you don’t, and you have to click just to start to get the tiniest hint of it. They tend to be shockingly frank about this, starting with such phrases as “What we know about…” and “What you need to know about…,” rather than telling you what you want to know.
  2. The “live updates” structure. This is used on the biggest story of the day, and is usually played as the lede on a newspaper’s app or its main browser page. You know the form. You call it up, and the top item is the absolutely latest thing the reporting team (this tends to be on an “all-hands-on-deck” story) have learned. Which means the “story” leads with some low-interest detail that would have appeared in about the 20th graf of a normal, coherent news story — if at all. This is completely useless to a person who has a life, and therefore only a moment to learn about this subject. The only person who could benefit from it would be someone following every hiccup on this story since the instant that it broke — in other words, someone without a life, or someone who is somehow peripherally involved in the story. Everybody else is out of luck, and therefore uninformed, and so more likely, say, to vote for Donald Trump.

Whenever confronted with that second atrocity, if I really want to know the essentials, I look at a sidebar to the main story, and usually find something resembling a news lede within the first few grafs.

Anyway, to illustrate these phenomena, I offer you a big story out of New York from two days ago, as reported by, as I said, probably the best newspaper in the country.

It’s the shooting of three people in an office building on Park Avenue Tuesday evening….

And now, you are missing something you would no doubt find entertaining on a surveillance camera: my head is exploding. Because after starting this post yesterday and getting distracted, I’m going back to grab the screenshots I had saved yesterday to illustrate what I’m talking about. And they’re not on my iPad… or my phone… or my Mac. Well, one of them is… As for the others…

Since the image of the shooting story as it dominated the NYT app yesterday morning is gone, here’s a lesser example of it — the tariffs story currently at the top of the browser version of the Times:

You’ll see examples of what I’m talking about in the shooting case — the incoherent item labeled LIVE in red, and below it the sidebars, the related stories. It’s not a great example because it’s a calmer story; it hasn’t caused the paper to send every reporter all over Manhattan trying to discover what the hell is happening on the park. So it doesn’t lead with a breathless paragraph about the latest minor fact to slip out of a source during a press conference. It even has a nice lede-like summary at the top of it.

But it shows the typical layout. And here is the latest version of the “LIVE” story of the shooting, which now is much calmer than it was yesterday morning. But you see the pointless structure for anyone with limited time — the latest developments, rather than a summary of the important points.

Anyway, with the shooting story, I was more motivated than usual to get to the fundamental facts, because two of my grandchildren were staying with friends in Manhattan. Turning away from the mess in the NYT, I texted my daughter, their mother, who told me that their hosts lived a good distance away. That was reassuring. Not so reassuring was the fact that their daily routine up there took them right by where the shooting happened. But they were fine, thanks be to God.

Meanwhile, I had turned to the sidebars, in search of news. And I found a perfect illustration of the “say-nothing headline:”

What We Know About the Shooting in Midtown Manhattan

After that, it was kind of like a real news story, except for being broken up by subheds into chunks, instead of rationally assembled in inverted pyramid. Subheds like “What happened?” and “Who were the victims?” and “Who was the gunman?” Note how the subheds also conform to the “say nothing” principle.

It was only by accident that later in the day, I happened to run across a real news story about the shooting, with a real headline, in The New York Times. I wasn’t looking for news. I had clicked on the “SECTIONS” link on my app, as a quick way to get to the opinion content

What’s that I see? A real news story?

Look, right there next to Gwyneth Paltrow! A headline! Not a “say nothing” headline, but one that actually relates the essentials! Here’s the story, so you can judge for yourself:

Gunman Fatally Shoots Officer and 3 Others in Midtown Manhattan Office Tower

Presumably, lots of people had managed to find it, or else it wouldn’t have made the “Most Popular” category. But how? I had been looking at both the app and the browser version of the paper, and had seen not a hint of it — at least, not at the times I was looking. All I can guess is that people weren’t looking at the digital version of the “newspaper” at all, but coming in by direct links from social media.

Still, I was glad to see it. It was like discovering an old friend I had thought was dead. Of course, the headline was a bit long, because headline writers today are no longer restricted by limited space. I would have said something more like “Gunman kills four, self, in New York.” You could cram that into a one-column, three-deck format if necessary. It was good that they got the police officer in, though.

I was curious to see what they had done in the print version, under those restricted conditions, but I ran into another depressing fact about newspapers today. Here’s the front of that morning’s paper. If you click on that, don’t bother searching for the story; it isn’t there.

The shooting broke at 6:28 p.m. on Tuesday. But people who bought a paper the next morning wouldn’t see a word about it. That’s because putting out a print version is today an afterthought, something for those few doddering ancients (as opposed to with-it 71-year-old youths like me) who still demand a dead-tree paper. And, to save some of the ungodly cost of producing such a product (that insane $4 rack price doesn’t cover it, folks), the paper rolls off the presses at a stunningly early hour. (Maybe not “stunningly” to i, but to a guy who spent all those years working until 2 a.m. getting out the city edition containing the very latest, it’s unreal.)

(By the way, I currently subscribe to six newspapers, and read them all on my iPad. I’m not going to deal with frustration, not to mention expense, of having a hard copy delivered to my house, just so I can see what happened two days earlier.)

Anyway, as a postscript… of course, the story leads today’s print version. But it now has a second-day, or perhaps I should say third-day, headline. It was still worth four columns, giving more room than the usual one-column lede in the NYT.

Bottom line, as a reader who subscribes to six newspapers, I don’t think it’s too much to expect at least one of them to show me, at the top of its homepage, what I most want to know about the biggest news of the day. But that’s not what the business is about any more…