Goodbye, local paper

I live in a town where people take — not subscribe to — the local newspaper. But after twenty-five years, I can no longer take it.

Our paper has never been very good, but it was until recently at least dependably mediocre. When I first began taking the paper, it was something of a print version of UHF television: a reliable source of strange and fleeting entertainments. Colorful personalities shared the streams of their consciousness in weekly columns, several of which became the stuff of tipsy reading with friends on New Year's Eve. The religion page featured helpful explanations of why all but a few readers would be going to hell. The paper was never big on reporting, investigative or otherwise: when a local state employee constructed a small palace of nepotism at taxpayers' expense, it was the college paper that told the story, in articles by an ace student-journalist (who has since established a national reputation). The local paper followed that student's lead, usually publishing the scandal's latest developments a day later. I long ago learned not to rely upon the local paper for much in the way of reporting on local reality.

In the past year or so though, our paper has begun a sharp and almost certainly irreversible decline. There is less local reporting than ever, with whole pages turning into press releases ("Chiropractor Honored") and photographs of people holding checks ("Wal-Mart Makes Donation"). With early voting having begun in Illinois, the paper has offered not one article detailing the positions of candidates in local elections. Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore have disappeared from the editorial page, so that the paper's writers must digress and meander and pad to get the columns that they are writing to have enough words and be long enough to reach the bottom of the page and not leave empty space with nothing to fill it, which would be a problem and not look good. Photographs and headlines have grown larger, and the comics page has become a travesty of layout, with some strips arbitrarily enlarged, as the paper pays for fewer and fewer comics. Frequent full-page displays proclaiming the relevance and well-being of newspapers are reminders that there is no there there — no articles, no advertising.

And faced with declining revenue, our paper seems to have made a play for what it imagines to be its base, shading its selection of Associated Press articles with increasing obviousness. Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention received no coverage, while Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the Republican convention received a front-page article, followed by a long personality piece with an extra-large photo of the governor, her husband, and their youngest child. This selective representation of reality has continued: a reader who depends on the paper alone for news would not know about John McCain's melodramatic campaign suspension. Nor would that reader know that polls of independent voters have given all three debates to Barack Obama. In August, the publisher gave press credentials to a non-journalist friend, who went to the Democratic convention to provide a Republican perspective on events. And still, no coverage of Obama's acceptance speech, or of much else from the convention. (In case it doesn't go without saying: there was no paper-sponsored Democratic observer at the Republican convention. And a friendship with a non-journalist offering a "Republican perspective" is exactly what the publisher acknowledged in a brief printed statement — to avoid, he said, any accusation of bias.)

But the worst move the paper has made is to "go interactive," with articles, editorials, and letters to the editor now online as bait to draw comments (pseudonymous or otherwise) and thus increase page hits and ad revenue. The result is ugly, very ugly, with anonymous attacks (from all quarters), name-calling (from all quarters), and thinly disguised displays of racism. While the paper claims to moderate comments, there's little evidence that it does so. One bright spot, sort of: with local news, one can often learn more from comments (what used to be called "town-talk") than from the articles to which they're appended.

So after twenty-three years, I'm out. I'll read obituaries and reports on City Council meetings online and follow all other usual sources for news and analysis (and comics). Goodbye, local paper.

Andy, Henry, Ron

Three for Barack Obama.

"The new narrative"

The upcoming New York Times Magazine story on the everchanging narrative of the McCain campaign is now online. An excerpt:

The new narrative — the Team of Mavericks coming to lay waste the Beltway power alleys — now depended on a fairly inexperienced Alaska politician. The following night, after McCain's speech brought the convention to a close, one of the campaign's senior advisers stayed up late at the Hilton bar savoring the triumphant narrative arc. I asked him a rather basic question: "Leaving aside her actual experience, do you know how informed Governor Palin is about the issues of the day?"

The senior adviser thought for a moment. Then he looked up from his beer. "No," he said quietly. "I don’t know."

The Making (and Remaking) of McCain (New York Times)

Trading places

I've asked my freshman composition students to read the 2007 National Endowment for the Arts report To Read or Not to Read, which is filled with thought-provoking bits of detail about the fate of reading in contemporary American culture. Here's an example, presented in the report without explication (the analysis that follows is mine):

[Click for a larger view.]

Notice how categories trade places over eleven years. The reading level of the 1992 high-school graduate (268) becomes that of the 2003 high-school graduate who has completed a post-high-school course of study (268). The reading level of the 1992 student with a two-year degree (306) becomes roughly that of the 2003 student with a four-year degree (314). And the reading level of the 1992 college graduate (325) is virtually the same as that of the 2003 college graduate who's had some graduate study (327).

These numbers suggest that acquiring genuine readerly competence is increasing a do-it-yourself matter: simply going to school, whether it's high school or college, guarantees less and less. For the prose literacy test cited above, proficiency equals a score of 340 or higher (out of 500). Thus by 2003, even students with graduate study were falling short as proficient readers.

That's why I'm asking my comp students to read words, words, words (and the occasional chart).

I early voted

Yes, I early voted. And I've proof.

(How odd early sounds before a verb.)

There were fifteen people in line when I arrived, late in the day. Most were students, registering and voting on the last day to register in Illinois. Go students!

"[T]hey're in charge of the United States Senate"

I'd say that the push to accept the use of they, their, and them with singular nouns just had a setback, in the form of Sarah Palin's reply today to a third-grader's question about the job of vice president:

"That's a great question, Brandon, and a vice president has a really great job, because not only are they there to support the president's agenda; they're like a team member, the team-mate to that president. But also, they're in charge of the United States Senate, so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom, and it's a great job, and I look forward to having that job."

Socialism! Communism!

These accusations — so ridic. I remember Eugene Chadbourne's hilarious rant "Bo Diddley Is a Communist":

It was Socialism!

Communism!

Bo Diddley!

(from Chadbourne's 1987 LP Vermin of the Blues)

Frank O'Hara and Mad Men again

Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency reappeared last night in Mad Men, in Anna Draper's house, as the subject of four sentences' worth of conversation:

Dick/Don: "You read it?"

Anna: "I did. It reminded me of New York. And it made me worry about you."

Thus far, FOH's book seems to be a MacGuffin. But the series seems to be promising more, as the season's upcoming final episode is titled "Meditations in an Emergency." My guess is that what will prove relevant is the last line of the poem "Mayakovsky" ("perhaps I am myself again") or simply the book's title, serving as a metaphor for a moment of crisis and decision in Dick's/Don's life.

Related posts
Frank O'Hara and Mad Men
Mad Men and Frank O'Hara (not again)
Violet candy and Mad Men

Dave McKenna (1930-2008)

Dave McKenna was a brilliant, generous, and self-effacing pianist. I am fortunate to have heard him play at the Plaza Bar at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, in 1984 or '85. (That was where you went if you wanted to hear Dave McKenna.) I joined the handful of people close to the piano and asked McKenna if he'd play "About a Quarter to Nine," a tune from his 1982 LP The Dave McKenna Trio Plays the Music of Harry Warren (Concord). He obliged, and added "Would You Like to Take a Walk?" and "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me," which followed on the LP. How generous was that?

Dave McKenna, Pianist Known for Solo Jazz Work, Dies at 78 (New York Times)
Dave McKenna (A family-run site)
Dave McKenna on YouTube

If you've never heard Dave McKenna, try YouTube's "Nagasaki."

Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan

On Meet the Press this morning, Colin Powell addressed the claim that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim:

I'm also troubled by not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said: such things as "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is "He is not a Muslim; he's a Christian." He's always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is "What if he is?" Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: "He's a Muslim and he might be associated [with] terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine.

Powell went on to describe this photograph, of Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, one of eighteen photographs in "Service," a photo-essay by the photographer Platon, in the September 29, 2008 New Yorker.