Endless Knots

The virtual winner: The first Pulitzer to a distributed news organization

In a way, all news organizations are distributed, i.e. you can't really get most breaking news stories without showing up. But newsrooms have been the energy drinks for reporters for forever. As previously reported, I started my reporting career at the Pottstown Mercury in a rectange of six steel desks, three facing three. And keys to the newspaper car in order to go on assignment.

But until this year's Pulitzers were awarded, a truly virtual news operation had never received one. Here's a great story from NY Times reporter Brian Stelter on InsideClimateNews's virtual operations. They received the award for national reporting with their journalists in Washington, Boston (dear beloved city), and New York. Here's their "about" and the description of their wild celebration (plus a couple of other lines0 from Stelter's Times story:

'We’re a virtual organization,” said the publisher of the six-year-old Web site, David Sassoon, from his office in New York. So the celebration took place in a telephone conference call; whatever Champagne flowed, flowed in separate locations.

InsideClimate News may be the leanest news start-up ever to be presented with a Pulitzer, journalism’s highest honor, a prize that is typically awarded to regional and national newspapers. It beat out 50 other entrants and two finalists, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, for the prize.

With a full-time staff of just seven and a nonprofit business model, InsideClimate News exemplifies a new breed of news organization that depends on donations, both from rich charitable foundations and a handful of ordinary readers.

 

 

A woman as editor of the Boston Globe?

No, I've got no inside info nor am I starting a rumor (not deliberately anyway :) but...how 'bout it? With Marty Baron going to the Washington Post where he's replacing a man and whereas he replaced a man here in Boston and as only one newspaper of a major city (New York Times, interestingly the owner of the Globe) has a woman as editor, e.g. Chicago Sun-Times, Miami Herald, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, and...need I go on...all have men as editors AND insofar as we've just elected our first senator who is a woman in Massachusetts PLUS our neighbors to the north have a slate of all women representing them, one has to ask: Isn't it time?

(And before someone pipes up with this: Yes, women have been publishers of major papers for a long time.)

Ever since Margaret Fuller nabbed the greatest number of headlines of her time (famously writing 250 articles in 18 months for the New York Herald Tribune following her stint as the first editor of The Dial), the path to the editorial top of newspapers has been paved with testosterone, often very good testorsterone, mind you, but still, it is 2012.

A little googling reveals that a woman did edit a Boston newspaper at one time. 170 years ago, according to the New York State Library's Women in Journalism: Newspaper Milestones:

Cornelia Walter was editor of the Boston Transcript and the considered to be the first woman to edit a major newspaper in the United States. One of her reporting highlights came on August 3, 1842, during a race riot in Philadelphia, in which she chronicled the plight of the black citizens who had been victimized and left homeless.

Meanwhile, I'm very happy to report that the paper where I got my start, The Pottstown Mercury, has as its editor, Nancy March.

So, Boston Globe Search Committee, how about it? Can you live up to the great standard set by The Merc? (Yeah, I know, The Times is a tad more impressive to some of you rubes...)

 

Reading the Sunday paper

And who says newspapers are dead? Not these two-yr-olds.

 

What's wrong with this picture?

Do you see what I see?

And now from the inventor of crash blossoms, "snailpapers"

Further to my "Crash blossoms" post, I received this comment below from Dan Bloom, inventor of the meme, a comment that is just so delicious that I've elevated it to its own post. Now he's invented "Snailpaper," which takes about a quarter of a second to figure out. Terrific. Go, Dan!

As the goofy guy who coined Crash blossoms , and i am named BLOOM, a blooming idiot if ever there was one, here's my latest coinage and please blog on this too it is MORE important than crash blossoms and i was JOKING about the term and it took OFF, i have no idea why.... DAN BLOOM in Taiwan...I wrote THE SNAILPAPER STATEMENT today, and here's a preview:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that while the Digital Age is upon us fast and furious, the print newspaper -- hereafter dubbed the "snailpaper" -- shall persevere as a good daily read, a fascinating look at the world around us and a valuable tool for understanding oped pundits and above the fold headlines. Sure, the dear snailpaper will also be seen as a useful tool

for wrapping fish at the Fulton Fish Market or lining the bird cage in the den, but all kidding aside -- har! har! -- the daily snailpaper can hold its head high and be certain of its place in the culture. While news migrates in pixels and bytes to the Internet at an exponential rate, piling breaking story upon breaking story and turning everyone and his mother into a 24/7 news freak and RSS aggregator, the plodding snailpaper will nevertheless remain the bedrock of analysis and insight, from sea to shining sea, delivered at a snail's pace, yes, read at a snail's pace, yes, and absorbed, word for word -- on glorius printed paper! white newsprint reflecting inked letters! -- at a snail's pace, yes, as long as the Republic of Letters shall live."

Full blast here:

http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/02/snailpaper-statement-mini-version-by.html

Stop(ped) the presses at 140 papers and counting

Ian Lamont, editor of The Standard, alerts us to this great/concerning/comprehensive "Best blog on the business of news(papers): Reflections of a Newsosaur. If you're not reading it, start now." I've done a few tear-stained posts here, including referencing Paper Cuts which the Newsosaur mentions as its blogger, Erica Smith, is keeping a map of where newspapers are disappearing. As per the title, 140 in 2009 gone, kaput.

For any of us who got our start getting high on newsprint and printers' ink (legal but so addictive that at 16 I preferred reporting from 3-11 at The Pottstown Mercury to going to the drive-in to meet boys), the transformation from packed newsroom and the ca-thunk of presses churning out papers to sitting alone and googling for sources--while charming in its own right and oh-so-efficient--is nevertheless unnerving and filled with loss.

In defense of Margaret

Clip of review of Margaret Fuller's 1845 book, The Broadway Journal

Thanks to Princeton, Massachusetts, Town Moderator Harry Pape, I've learned that my letter to The Boston Globe, standing up for the reputation of Margaret Fuller, saw the light of print on Sun, Nov. 8. For reasons unknown to me, it doesn't seem to be online so I hereby offer it--and the original, a study in editing for those who like to learn about such things. Either way, I am very pleased that June Wulff, who writes and edits for The Globe, plucked mine from the slush.

As published, "Fuller in full," Boston Sunday Globe, Section N, P. 2, November 8, 2009:

Matthew Guerrieri Guerrieri identifies Margaret Fuller, the brilliant, widely published author from the 1840s, foreign correspondent for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, editor of The Dial, the translator of Goethe, and author of "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," as the "sexy muse" of the Transcendentalists ("Beethoven's Early Believers," Arts & Entertainment, October 25). Trivialization hardly describes his dismal description. Fuller has been the subject of doctoral dissertations and biographies, has an academic society devoted to her, is taught as a major figure in American literature, and will be honored next year on her bicentennial. Sexy muse? In your dreams.

JESSICA LIPNACK
Co-chair, Margaret Fuller Bicenten-
nial Committee in New England
West Newton

As submitted:

To the editor:

No offense but is Matthew Guerrieri a bit of a "tool?" Fair's fair: In "Beethoven's Early Believers," October 25, 2009, Guerrieri identifies Margaret Fuller, the brilliant, most widely published author of the 1840s, the foreign correspondent for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, the editor of The Dial, the translator of Goethe, and the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, along with many other books, as the "sexy muse" of the Transcendentalists.

Trivialization hardly describes his dismissal of the woman around whom intellectuals and artists of the 1830s and 1840s, both in the US and in Europe, revolved. Not to mention that Fuller has been the subject of numerous doctoral dissertations, has an academic society devoted to her, is taught as a major figure in American literature, and will be honored on her bicentennial next year, 2010.

Oh, I almost forgot. She did all of this without benefit of a long life (she only lived to forty), wrote entirely by hand (sorry, Mr. Guerrieri, unlike you, she didn't have a keyboard to make it go fast or the web to look up salient details), and spoke six languages.

Sexy muse? In your dreams.

Jessica Lipnack
Co-chair, Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee in New England, and author of The Persuasion, a novel about Fuller
West Newton, MA

Don't think about an elephant or read this article

Matthew Guerrieri appears to be a perfectly competent journalist and, judging by this article, a good writer. Why, then, does he revert to juvenile trash talk in describing Margaret Fuller? Won't repeat how he describes her but ... it's typical. A brilliant, forceful woman reduced to being a trinket for the men around her. Really, Mr. Guerrieri. Made me so mad I wrote a Letter to the Editor of The Boston Globe. We shall see, we shall see...

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.

"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.