Endless Knots

Helen Thomas: "Thirty women reporters had to sit on the floor"

Helen Thomas

It isn't often that a small number of people has the chance to meet, listen to, and sit so close to a force as great as this pioneering journalist, who's covered every US president since Kennedy, who was there when Khruschev banged his shoe on the table ("We will bury you!"), and who has so many firsts to her name that no American woman journalist is really her peer.

The Center for New Words sponsored a brunch with Helen today and some 75 or so people turned out to listen in the lovely Brookline home of one of CNW's board members.

Helen began by saying that "it's the worst of times for America and yet the signs of democracy are strong" with the election of Obama, allowing "black people to stand taller" and white people "to feel they've done the right thing."

She didn't shy away from the tough topics - she wants the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan now, believing that those countries have it in them to solve their own problems.

She "believes in Medicare for everyone," i.e. a single payer healthcare system. When people call that "socialism," she says, "What about roads, schools, and bridges?"

She is devastated by the demise of the newspaper industry, calling it the "greatest tragedy" of the economic meltdown, because "there's no democracy without a free press." She also pointed out what all serious reporters know: blogging is not journalism. We need editors for that and this ain't that.

"Words count," she said, more than once (how I love writers) and implored all of us, including Obama, to understand that "this is the time for quantum leaps," not careful steps.

She ended by responding to some questions about her career. "There's no such thing as making it," she said. "There's always another mountain to climb." When she came to Washington as a reporter, she couldn't join the National Press Club. It took Khrushchev's coming to Washington -- and a concerted effort on the part of women reporters -- to even be allowed to attend National Press Club functions.

Where were the women journalists invited to sit at the Khrushchev press conference? "Thirty women were allowed to sit on the floor at the National Press Club," she reported. "Everything has been a struggle. And I'm still carrying that anger."

Report on, Helen. We in your wake thank you so for what you've endured.

Relentless: Is Gladwell's basketball piece really about basketball?

Malcolm Gladwell, whose triple-header of best-sellers, leaves the rest of us poor-schlep authors, well and gladly, speechless, has a thought-provoker in this week's New Yorker that's causing quite the dust-up around the old hoops. "How David Beats Goliath" uses a team of 12-year-old basketball players as its central trope.

The girls are not the world's best basketball players. They're not the fastest or the tallest or the anything-est other than this: they play against the conventional rules. They maintain a full-court press for the whole game, which Gladwell documents as being counter to popular wisdom except in certain unusual situations--like when the team has been coached by Rick Pitino, the legendary winning University of Kentucky coach (as well as having a less-than-stellar career as the coach of our beloved Boston Celtics).

Anyone who plays or watches basketball (ahem) knows that the full-court press is reserved for the clutch. Keeping up that amount of pressure for four periods is exhausting even to think about, changing the rhythm of the game to resemble something closer to ice hockey than the elegant dribble-down-the-court choreography of traditional basketball.

Basketball-bloggers are taking Gladwell apart for his lack of knowledge of the game, even dissecting his facts. According to one enraged commenter, Gladwell's contention that only one of Pitino's players went to the NBA is truly off the mark - apparently, a whole slew of them did. I could go on with how up-in-their-nets the basketballers are about the article but that would only prevent my getting to my opinion.

Basketball aside, Gladwell's key point -- and what I took to be the theme of this whole issue of The New Yorker, whether intentional or not -- is that "when underdogs break the rules," the article's subtitle, they win.

Underdogs are relentless. They try things no one else thinks of - like Lawrence of Arabia who suffered through 600 miles of desert to overwhelm (and surprise) the Ottomans. Who does that--rides camels, sleeps near cobras, and survives essentially without water? Underdogs.

Likewise, one small David, who stunned one big Goliath by realizing that he'd never win through traditional warfare but needed something completely different. And thus was born guerrilla warfare (and I say this knowing the military historians will be as upset as the basketball mavens).

I'm closing in on my conclusion here. What leapt out of Gladwell's article time and again was the notion that unlikely winners are relentless. He only uses the word twice in the article but its underlying them is, shall we say, relentless. Fits with one of Gladwell's conclusions about "outliers," those among us who are truly extraordinary. They practice. And practice. And practice. Whether circumstances are advantageous or onerous. Even the Beatles practiced, Gladwell says in this Fora.TV interview, "who before they came to America and take the world by storm in 1964, they spend this incredibly long period of time as a house band in a strip club in Hamburg...playing eight hour sets seven days a week for months at a stretch." (Who knew?) The Beatles were relentless. They practiced.

Get back to work, everyone. And read the article. It's no more about basketball than it is about Alan Greenspan, real-time processing, or puff adders, all of which figure prominently as well.

"Specter, of course"

This is not a post about Arlen Specter, the senator who switched party affiliations due to certain sharp turns by his part for the past gazillion years. It's about an affectionate memory I have from my early days as a reporter.

The Pottstown Mercury (according to Wikipedia, the smallest circulation newspaper in the US to win two Pulitzer Prizes and where I had my first job as a journalist) was then a "feeder paper" for the Philadelphia Bulletin (it lives no more). What this meant is that aspiring reporters cut their teeth at The Mercury, covering a wide range of stories and writing columns, before moving up to the big city 35 miles southeast of our small shtetl. The newsroom was small - and we were packed in together, leading to our getting to know one another quite well.

To this day, I remember precisely where everyone sat, as the desks were pushed together, leaving us face-to-face and side-by-side. To my left, Dolly Smith, who ran the "Social Page," what's now called "Style" in most papers; to my right, Charles Carter, who covered religion, which was quite big as it is/was in most small towns. Across from me sat Paul Levy, not the Boston one, in fact his physical opposite. In addition to his incredible output - he churned out more stories than anyone else - what was truly remarkable about him was his typing faster than anyone I've ever known with two fingers on a manual typewriter! I can still hear his key pounding.

At the next bank of tables was Bob Boyle, the editor whose shirt was always covered with ashes, the copyeditor, whose name I've repressed as he committed suicide during my second summer there, and the copyboy, Billy March, whose job was principally to rip stories off the wire machine and bring them to Bob, whose principal job, from my perspective, was teasing me.

Beyond that bank of desks - and the point of my indulging this reminiscence - was Gordy Griffiths, hands-down the best reporter for the paper, and one of the consistently happiest people I'd ever met. Although everyone was nice to me (I was only 16 when I started and thus a bit of an oddity, being one of only two "women," if you could call me that at that age, in the newsroom), Gordy stood out. He was interested in my ideas, gave me suggestions, and once wrote a lovely essay, expounding on one of my stranger ideas: dry rain.

Simply put, there are two kinds of rain - the drenching kind that requires protection and the drop-here, drop-there, not-very-wet-kind, which I believe to this day exists. Now there's probably a real science to explain this but Gordy listened to my exigesis one day as if what I was saying made actual sense. The next he presented me with his interpretation of my thinking, which I still have somewhere on crumbling newsprint and which was called something like, "The Theory of Dry Rain."

I don't know how old Gordy was at the time - maybe early thirties, much, much older to the eyes of a 16-year-old, and his engaging with me as a peer meant a lot. And I loved his work, which was consistently good and creative. He covered the hard news of our small town and wrote columns.

I worked at the paper for four summers, going back to high school in between, and when I came home for vacations, always stopped into the paper to say hi, sometimes writing columns on my adventures during the year. Which brings me to explaining the title of this post. One day when I came back to visit, there was Gordy, as usual, with his adorable grin, the kind where lips are tight together and the side of the mouth scrunches down, as if the person is about to burst out laughing. On his lapel a button: "Specter, of course."

Being about 18 at the time, I barely knew who Specter was, but it turned out he was the now-famous senator, running for DA in Philadelphia. I did know that he was more conservative than my parents, Roosevelt Democrats, and I remember saying to Gordy, "Specter?" And he said, with that smile, "Of course."

Gordy was managing Specter's first campaign, or at least that's how I remember it. Perhaps he was just his press secretary. Regardless, he was deeply involved, thought "Arlen" was great, and, as was the case in those days, suffered no job consequences at the newspaper for being involved in a political campaign.

Gordy died young. I can't remember when or how and a search on his name brings up no information at all. But every time I see Senator Specter - and walk in dry rain - I think of Gordy.

What Ian's saying about The Globe

Ian Lamont, managing editor of The Industry Standard, has a sharp eye for what works online and what doesn't. Even as its company struggles to avoid capsizing completely, hard workers at the Boston Globe are trying new things. Ian says their latest, the renovation of their community forums, tacks precisely in the wrong direction: "Boston Globe relaunched forums, but they're doing it all wrong."

Key points, with which I agree: big hairy topic categories are old-fashioned, become extinct quickly, and are too all-pervasive for people to use them. Further, untended forums, i.e. without some kind of gentle prodding from bloggers (or moderators) generally dwindle to nothingness quickly. In the event "Director of Community Publishing Teresa M. Hanafin and her team miss the message," Ian republishes his thinking in his post.

Great observations, Ian.

Paper Cuts - ouch, someone's keeping track

For those following the Blog Rally to help the Boston Globe and the life-threatening diseases plaguing the newspaper industry, try this with your morning coffee: Erica Smith, who does multimedia and print design for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, provides a public-service project on her own time/dime, Paper Cuts. She's tracking the dwindling numbers of newspaper employees through pink slips and buyouts. (Thanks, Erica.)

The running total for the first 99 days of 2009? 8091 or approximately 82 jobs per day. That would mean about 30,000 jobs by the end of the year, excluding jobs that dissolve after someone leaves but is not replaced.

Paper Cuts' total "does include all newspaper jobs, from editor to ad rep, reporter to marketing, copy editor to pressman, design to carrier, and anyone else who works for a newspaper."

OK, you say, what's the news here, Jessica? We all know that the newspapers could be spokespeople for some miraculous diet drug, would that newspapers were people and they wanted to shrink.

Here's the scoopy part: Journalism school applications are up! Significantly! According to Lauren Streib's Forbes article, Journalism Bust, J-School boom, "Columbia, Stanford and NYU applications increased 38%, 20% and 6%, respectively, from the previous year. Same thing at state schools. The University of Colorado (up 11%), University of North Carolina (up 14%) and University of Maryland (up 25%) all saw gains."

And, ready for this? "According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2016 the number of positions for entry-level reporters and news anchors will increase 2%, while those for experienced writers and editors will grow 10%. Expect trade publications, freelance work and digital media to supply the bulk of the jobs."

Kudos to Ian and The Industry Standard

Huge congrats to Ian Lamont, whose work with The Industry Standard has been recognized this week with three awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers! Ian's awards are in "three online categories for small websites:" Projects (his ongoing series called "Where Are They Now?");  Creative Use of Online ("10 'Net services that will succeed (and 10 that will probably fail"); for his own blog posts, where four of his best pieces are called out.

Diligent readers know that I've done some writing for The Standard so I'm particularly pleased to see this publication and its fine editor get such well-deserved recognition.

Shirky: "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

Clay Shirky's Friday the 13th essay on his blog, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," is being linked left and right because it is original and provocative. I call it an essay because it's way more than a post, extraordinarily thoughtful. It's got the whole package - the history of newspapers, never mind the printing press, and the central point that, regardless of how the information reaches us, we need journalism, even if we don't know precisely what vehicle will deliver it in the years to come. A very nice follow-on to my tearful post about the demise of The Rocky.