Category: Blog Post

We were surprised to open up Monday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune to see Jon Tevlin’s article on religion in the workplace.
Surprised, because it was very similar to a feature story that was on
the cover of the New York Times Magazine about a month ago. We’d
noticed Russell Shorto’s feature, not only because it was a compelling
cover story, but because its main subject was a small bank in outstate
Minnesota. Also because the photographs, taken by white-hot Minneapolis
photographer Alec Soth, were wonderful.

We’ve already commented recently
on the phenomenon of follow-on news stories: The New York Times or the
Washington Post do the heavy-lifting on a story, get all the glory for
the scoop, and when the parade has passed, all the local papers shuffle
along shoveling up the remainders, maybe a little ashamed that someone
in Manhattan managed to break a local story under the noses of a whole
newsroom full of local reporters.

Tevlin does acknowledge the
source of his interest in Riverview Bank, after a fashion. Near the end
of his piece, he notes that Riverview Bank, on its website, claims to
have converted Times “freelancer” Shorto during an “interview for a
newspaper article.” (Shorto denies this.) When we emailed Tevlin about
his follow-on article, he told us there were lots of other interesting
loose ends to tie up in the Riverview Bank story, and he was onto them
the day after the Times article appeared. The St. Paul Pioneer-Press,
in the person of business reporter Dave Beal, was also on the story.
They published their own follow-on November 11.

There is nothing
wrong with this practice per se. While we don’t want to inflame
professional jealousies, it would be nice if writers acknowledged where
they get their story ideas, particularly if it’s from other writers. It
is merely vanity that prevents someone from writing “as first reported
in the New York Times.” But this sort of story poaching goes on all the
time; local daily newspapers are especially bad about doing it to
nationals, weeklies, and monthlies. They have done it to us here at The
Rake. (We’ve already given up hope of ever working elsewhere in this
town. Funny how if you write about media in New York, you’re guaranteed
a job practically for the rest of your life. If you write about media
in the Twin Cities, you’d better keep Monster.com bookmarked.) For our
own part, we admit to being allergic to a story if it has appeared
anywhere else our esteemed readers may have been exposed to it. This
falls under the principal of giving your readers a little credit. And,
as we love to point out, a newspaper article and a magazine story are
two very different animals. Tevlin’s story was different from Shorto’s,
though it was clearly provoked by it.

Still, we were surprised that the Star-Tribune photographs
were so similar to Alec Soth’s. One Strib image depicted the exact
scene as the shot on the New York Times Magazine’s cover: An office
wall with a handsome painting that shows one modern businessman
introducing another businessman to the robed and haloed Jesus Christ,
as if to say,”I’d like you to meet my boss, the Son of God.”

The
striking similarity in the photographs seemed a breach. Were we being
naive? We can see how you might make the argument that, just as
Riverview Bank is sitting out there in the public domain for anyone to
write about, their office interiors and personnel are not themselves
copyrighted. And given that Tevlin’s lead specifically refers to this
painting, it falls under the definition of pure documentary
photography, right?

We don’t know. It doesn’t seem possible that
Stormi Greener, an excellent photographer in her own right, was unaware
of Soth’s photos when she shot hers for the Star-Tribune. To our eye,
it seems obvious that someone asked her to take precisely the same
pictures Soth had taken for the Times magazine— photos that are
undoubtedly under license and embargo, and not therefore available to
the Star Tribune or anyone else. You look and see what you think: Here is Soth’s photo for the Times, and here is Greener’s.

We
got ahold of Alec Soth in Paris, and he was a little surprised. “Wow,
that is quite similar,” he said. But he was willing to believe that it
was a coincidence—and that probably an editor at the Star-Tribune
should fall on the sword for this. (We know from experience: It is
ALWAYS an editor’s fault!) Jon Tevlin told us he thought you could send
dozens of photographers to Riverview Bank and they’d have taken the
exact same photo. The Jesus-in-the-executive-suite artwork is a “no
brainer,” he said. Times magazine editor Gerald Marzorarti politely
declined to comment, and Greener has not answered a call and an email.

This
photographic facet of the follow-on story undoubtedly falls into a grey
area, and maybe it illustrates the difference between fine art
photography and photojournalism. Soth’s photo is striking in part
because it is so artful, whereas Greener’s has a solid if unremarkable
gravity as photojournalism—and it’s almost the same picture!

But
it’s the art within the art. When we first saw the cover of the Times
Magazine, we were convinced that a Times art director had pulled off an
amazing illustration. Indeed, the point of both the Soth and the
Greener photos was actually to reproduce the astonishing piece of
framed, evangelical art, in situ. Perhaps the real injured party here
is Nathan Greene. He is the formerly anonymous born-again capitalist
who was responsible for painting “The Senior Partner.” He’ll
undoubtedly get his reward—and maybe his copyright—in the next
world.—The Editor in Cheese

We have very little patience for the ongoing conversation
about blogs and whether anybody cares about them or not. Like most
things, it makes very little sense to judge a whole medium or
phenomenon generically. There are good blogs and there are bad blogs.
(Helpful hint: paid professionals are paid professionals for a reason.
They have a huge advantage over the passionate amateur, because they
don’t have to actually work an honest job for a living. This is no
guarantee of quality; it just guarantees that you can complain to their
bosses if they really stink.)

That
said, there have been lots and lots of first-rate bloggers who have
made the leap to the pros. One thing you can say about blogging is that
it gives a person lots of daily practice in the craft of writing (or at
least summarizing and linking). Exhibit A: James Lileks. We think this
man has entirely gone off the deep end of paranoia, and he should be
ashamed of his chameleon-like conversion to a shrill conservative
alarmist in the wake of 9/11 and fatherhood, whichever came first. But
we are also awed by his command of the language, and the ease with
which he can turn a delightful phrase and a killing joke. Being
professionals around here, we know that good writing trumps bad faith
every day of the week. We count ourselves reluctant fans, but admiring
fans nonetheless.

We launched this daily blog thing about a
month ago, and all along have been kind of openly obsessed with media
and media criticism. This is a beat we don’t cover so much in the
magazine. Seeing as how the blog here is supposed to open a window into
our office (More windows! Open-able! Yes please!), it’s natural that
our “water-cooler” chatter has more to do with the internal workings of
the media business than with what we publish in the magazine.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the blog. Yesterday, we decided to publish exactly the same thing on the blog and at the website,
under the aegis of the magazine. When it was offered in a non-blog
context—without the blogspot.com URL and without the other obvious
visual scaffolding of a blog that you see around you here —we were
suddenly being read all over the internet. Do you know why?

Yesterday’
s piece was a text-book case of blogging. We read three or four
commentaries on media, and then added our own, without any new
reporting or factual information. We just saw some interesting
connections, and we hoped that we were able to convey them in clear,
entertaining language.

Now, we don’t know if we succeeded in
doing that, and we earnestly hope the next paycheck is still on its
way. But we do know that the marketplace is already judging blogs not
on their context but on their content. Folks like Wonkette, Andrew
Sullivan, TMFTML, Dong Resin— these are all amazing writers, all of
whom are now being paid to do what they have a real talent to do.

The
first two were great writers long before the word “blog,” or even the
Web existed; the latter two were “discovered” by traditional media, and
have since been put to work earning their own way. We’ve even been
known to harrass a blogger or two until they’ll take money from us, no
kidding.) We could give you lots of other examples, but then we’d have
to start tracking down URLs, and we hate having to do that. Maybe
that’s what the essential difference is between a blogger and a “real
journalist.”—The Editor in Cheese

In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Frank Rich makes a point we were trying to make ourselves a few weeks ago.
In the aftermath of the election, USA Today had published a story that
suggested Big, Bad, Liberal Media was scratching its collective head,
wondering where it had gone so terribly wrong in understanding the
country–and more to the point, underestimating the electoral muscle of
the anti-intellectual, conservative, white male, NASCAR masses. In
fact, even Frank Rich’s boss, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The
Times, was described in that article as being somewhat flummoxed–so
flummoxed in fact, that the best idea he could come up with was to
reopen the Times shuttered Kansas City bureau.

Yesterday, Rich
looked at the problem as it applies to network TV news, what with the
recent retirements of Rather and Brokaw, and the ascendency of Brian
Williams. He suggests that network news is desperate to win the hearts
of red America, so desperate that they are making a point of decamping
to Toledo and Dubuque and Denver. NBC news is going to great lengths to
establish the bona fides of Williams–hey, he’s a part-owner of a
go-cart track! He drinks Budweiser! He showers AFTER work. (Well, no
maybe not that. But hey, he’s got a mitten loofa too, just like
O’Reilly! Wait, that’s kinda faggy and liberal, innit?) Why would they
do that? Is it because they seriously believe there is news happening
out there that they are ignoring because of their bi-coastal myopia?
What Rich said better than we could ever hope to say was this: They are
chasing an audience, not a news story. And that is a real sign of
declension, and a cause for worry.

Salient, fact-checking
moment: Why chase after Fox News viewers who are rabidly partisan and
reality-challenged, and in any case, are far outnumbered by network
viewers? The problem is perceptions and myths. As Louis Menand makes
very clear in his wonderful story in last week’s New Yorker, the
already unassailable “take-away” from election 2004 was the “values
fallout.” There was no values fallout. Menand points out that this was
strictly a misreading of exit poll numbers with no clear consensus on
why people voted in any particular way. (This is probably, like
everything else, the fault of Democrats. Republicans could care less
why they won–the less said about that the better, as far as they’re
concerned.)

The key to this little conundrum is the very real
frustration that great media organizations like the Times and the New
Yorker and almost any other thoughtful organ of print journalism are
feeling. You can print the facts, the truth, the most compelling sorts
of historiography–but you can’t make that horse drink the water.

We
had the same sinking feeling after reading Rich’s essay that we had
reading all those terrific pre-election presidential endorsements–that
there isn’t one person in the country who’d read it and have his mind
changed. In these fractious times, even the Times is preaching to a
choir. One can certainly forgive them for trying to either expand the
choir a bit, or take their show on the road. (Incidentally,interesting article today covering the same territory with NPR, but with a racial facet;
Tavis Smiley wonders how to get more blacks to listen to public radio.
How is this different from trying to get more conservatives to read the
New York Times? Discuss…)

To have a small but vocal crowd of
knownothings grow into a hateful GOP monopoly of government that has,
in no small way, been underwritten by a deliberate campaign of
falsifying reality and pre-emptive accusations of “liberal bias”– this
has diminished the power of the entire industry of journalism. Facts
are not partisan, but many people don’t seem to believe that anymore.
We guess you just feel the pinch more at the top, where you’re
accustomed to the respect afforded the “paper of record.” When it
develops that the news is not the news, but an exercise in servicing an
audience, you get– well, modern TV news.—The Editor in Cheese

Yesterday at Slate, Jack Shafer
claimed that “the best place to judge journalists is on the printed
page.” That seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to say… if you’re
judging them on their journalism. But that was not the point of his
article—which purported to follow up on an “anonymous tip” regarding
the speaking fees of New Yorker writers. It seems that someone out
there feels that New Yorker writers shouldn’t take money from anyone
but their employer, evidently because it compromises their professional
neutrality. The tipster wanted Shafer to judge whether writers should
take speaking fees, and Shafer sort of deflected—for the right reasons,
in my opinion.

I’m not sure why Shafer persists in sourcing this
“tip” to an anonymous person. It’s hardly a secret that many
journalists do all kinds of moonlighting, and it’s silly to pretend
that their little jaunts to the lectern—or the NPR studio, or the CNN
set—aren’t going to have something to do with their area of interest
and expertise.

It seemed strange to me that Shafer would insist
on attributing the charge of calumny to this anonymous source when all
you have to do is scan your TV guide, or your local University
bulletin, to catch up on who’s having their bread buttered on the
public circuit. But it becomes clear that he’s siding with the
particular writers his “source” tells him to check out—The New Yorker’s
Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki, who are friends and colleagues
of Shafer’s. In other words, he wanted to reassure his powerful friends
on the other end of the ethical microscope that it wasn’t his idea.

Still,
it was a nice essay regarding the ethics of journalism. But the answer,
to us, is significantly less complex than Shafer makes it out to be: If
money compromises journalists, then we shouldn’t pay them anything,
ever. Journalists, like anyone else in any other profession, need to
worry about job security and the value of their personal stock, and
taking a multi-channel approach to reaching your audience is good work,
if you can get it.

Now, that is a much different proposition
than being paid by a subject to write about him, her, or it—which is
that bright red firewall you might have noticed between a piece of
journalism and a piece of advertising. In my view, the media
marketplace does not need the ethics cop that Shafer declines to be. In
fact, I believe it is slightly condescending to think that readers are
too stupid to sort out advertising from editorial content; they
recognize catalog copy from magazine copy.

(This, by the way,
does not mean readers automatically prefer editorial to advertising the
way editors and writers think they do— they just know the difference,
and are capable of enjoying both. Nor does it mean that we should
therefore get lax about distinguishing advertisements from editorial
material, where there is any possible confusion—if that is something we
care about. We do. Not everyone does.)

Not
long ago, I was reading the letters of Harold Ross, the founding editor
of the New Yorker. I was struck by the fact that Ross frequently
exercised his authority even over the advertising side of the magazine.
He was pathologically skeptical of all advertising, considered it a
necessary evil, pored over the advertising copy, complained if he felt
it didn’t comport with the magazine (he was famously squeemish about
ads for toilet paper) or if he felt it made dishonest claims, and even
occasionally nixed advertisements. (Imagine that happening today.) But
if you look at copies of the New Yorker from that era, you instantly
understand why Ross worried so much about it: Advertisments in the
thirties and forties were almost always narrative in form, and were in
many cases almost indistiguishable from the editorial copy adjacent to
it. While there are many contemporary examples of ads like this that
intentionally try to blur that line, I guess it is a blessing in
disguise that ads today have become so strongly image- and logo-driven.

Is
this nervous Nellyism a relic of a bygone era? I think the issue
remains, but has been simplified considerably, for one reason: This is
only an issue if you make it one, if you build your business on a
particular value like “neutrality.” If you are at the top of the
journalistic food chain, through either luck or hard work or fiat, you
will not be forgiven for the sin of putting personal gain ahead of your
employer’s integrity. In other words, you self regulate. Of course, if
your employer has no integrity, then it’s no foul.—The Editor in
Cheese

We don’t normally pay that much attention to the local daily
news. Not in a professional way—it’s too much work for too little
reward, and we’re constantly annoyed at how the paper has become more
about pictures and graphics than about actual news stories.

But
certain broad cultural trends had us interested in seeing the newsroom
flick “All The President’s Men” the other day, and it was fun to see
Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford on the phone so much. Newsrooms, from
what we hear, are intensly competitive places. If you work at the
Washington Post, you first read your own paper to see who among your
collegues have been favored by the makeup editors, and you keep a daily
calculation of a wide variety of grudges and jealousies. Next, you read
the New York Times, for a broader, more ecumenical kind of
self-loathing and professional jealousy. And if you get scooped by the
New York Times, you go to the bathroom and splash cold water on your
face and you curse loudly, and you wonder if you’re in the wrong
business.

We couldn’t help noticing in all the national hype
about the alleged Chai Vang murders—Fox News! LA Times!—that BOTH of
our hometown papers really got scooped in the embarrassing way. Yesterday,
a New York reporter at the Times published a story that had a number of
local Hmong sources saying Chai Vang was, in fact, a shaman in his
St. Paul community—a widely respected religious leader among his people
who on more than one occasion has performed intense religious rites to
exorcise evil demons from those who require such services.

It
became painfully clear that no one at either Twin Cities newspaper had
actually picked up the phone and talked to anyone in Vang’s extensive
circle of friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Judging from Stephen
Kinzer’s story in the Times, it was the worst kept secret in the St.
Paul Hmong community. So how did the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press
manage to not overhear this bizarre and interesting news?

What’s
even more interesting to a layperson like ourselves is that neither
paper has, at this point, acknowledged that contribution to our
understanding of who this controversial figure is. (Today’s Star
Tribune has the groundbreaking scoop
that Vang had a warrant out for his arrest on previous trespassing
charges. Yawn. And Todd Nelson, at the Pioneer Press, does talk to
friends and relatives, and writes a nice profile of Vang—but
this is basically what you’d call a rear-of-the parade followup story
to the Times which does not acknowledge whose shit it was that the
Pi-Press was shoveling a day late.)

Also, it is not uncommon
for the Star Tribune or the Pioneer Press to reprint stories from the
New York Times—but they’re not doing that with this story. Why?
Probably because it would make both papers look pretty stupid to have a
local story reported better from some desk in Manhattan.

Like we
say, we’re just casual observers. We’re not in the news business per
se, so we don’t wish to cast aspersions. We will, though, toss the inky
wretches a freebie here: If you read to the end of the Times piece, you
might notice that a person named Noah Vang was credited with local
reporting from St. Paul. Is this the same Noah Vang who was indicted on
murder charges last year, in a Hmong after-bar knife incident?—The
Editor in Cheese

In our ongoing coverage of Tom Wolfe’s new book, we mentioned
yesterday that we enjoyed Jacob Weisberg’s review in last Sunday’s New
York Times Book Review. What distinguishes good criticism from great
criticism? We’re glad you asked. A couple of things, actually.

First,
we prefer critics to resist the urge to pronounce a simple verdict.
There are great pressures in the “marketplace” of modern media to give
everything a thumbs up or a thumbs down. That has more or less
guaranteed that most critics are all thumbs. They approach every review
with the idea that they have to make an argument either for or against
it; they begin to marshall their evidence and write their punchlines.
The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t often give the reader
or the subject a fair shake. There are not very many flawless
masterpieces being produced these days—in fact, ever. (That’s kind of
inherent in the definition of “masterpiece.”) There IS a lot of crap,
but you can usually find something redeeming about most of it. The
point is, there is a kind of intellectual dishonesty about reducing
everything to an unqualified yes or no.

Second, there are way
too many critical reviews and they are all way too short. This is
related to the first point—marketplace pressures to cover as many
artifacts and events as possible, and to do it decisively, if not very
thoughtfully. Thus our “blurb” culture. Can you find an example of a
magazine or newspaper that DOESN’T have, as a part of its regular
offerings, dozens of instantly forgettable reviews of CDs, books, and
movies? (We can think of one. If you think of the same one, or another
that fits the bill, we’ll send you a Rake T-shirt. Send your answer here. First responder wins). It is not necessary for a good critical review to be long, but it helps.

Third.
This is the most difficult quality to explain and to achieve, but it is
what makes a really good piece of criticism something we tear out of a
magazine and carry around in our breast pocket: the ring of truth. The
beauty of a really good review by someone like Anthony Lane—or Peter
Shjelldahl, or Jacob Weisberg, or Chuck Klosterman—is that you know,
without reading the book, or seeing the film, or listening to the CD,
that the critic hit the nail on the head.

Now, we think
Weisberg hit several homeruns in his piece. He comments that Wolfe’s
descriptions of the modern campus are “excrutiatingly” detailed, but
Wolfe—being a journalist rather than a true novelist—writes like a
reporter. There are no meaningful descriptions of peoples’ motives,
only their actions and their appearances. (This is an editor’s constant
struggle, by the way, and it is what distinguishes a newspaper reporter
from a magazine writer. Reporters are very uncomfortable with subtle
description and analysis. If they can’t find a source to say it, and
another to confirm it, then they can’t write it. Writers have the
opposite problem—finding an authority greater than themselves.)
Weisberg also gets it just about exactly right when he says that
Wolfe’s peculiar magic is his ability to create page-turners; it’s
almost impossible to put Wolfe down, even when he’s at his worst.
Finally, the clencher: Who ever re-reads a Wolfe novel? No one. Running
our own mental check, we find that the only Wolfe book we’ve ever
reread was “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” and that, of course, is
not a novel; it is a work of non-fiction.

Compare “I Am
Charlotte Simmons” to, say, Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” or
Jonathan Lethem’s “Fortress of Solitude.” Both of those books have
short sections which describe life on the modern college campus— but
they are both better books, because they trade in interior, essential
truths rather than surface appearances and incidents. We’ve been
planning to reread both of those wonderful books from the moment we
finished them the first time.—The Editor in Cheese

Jarrett Murphy, in the Village Voice today, complains
that the media was quick to cover the infamous NBA brawl, and to put it
into saturation rotation. He enumerates the coverage in newspapers and
TV broadcasts, inferring that it was as salacious as it was
unwarranted. (Not “hard news!” Not hard news! Foul! Is anyone
listening?) He suggests that this is an example of the media adjusting
to changing times, and taking on a story with heavy “moral” overtones
and ramifications.

As a kicker—an afterthought, really—Murphy
grouses that it would be nice if journalists today would apply the same
hard questions to more serious moral catastrophes like “the war in
Iraq, the scenes of mad shoppers on the first day of the Christmas
shopping season, or other stories not featuring sweaty athletes.” (One
wonders if he reads his own paper, or values it so little as to not count it in his survey of big media.)

See,
this is the type of lazy criticism of “the press” that puts us into a
lather. Murphy carefully compiles all of the most egregious examples of
reporting on the Pacers-Pistons brawl, and then expects us to just
accept his broad generalization that no one anywhere has ever asked
serious questions about Iraq—or, for that matter, Christmas shopping.
Our esteemed reporter might argue that you can’t prove a negative—that
is, it’s hard to enumerate all the articles that have NOT been written.
But that’s only because he hasn’t tried very hard. In this day and age,
when anyone bitches that a story has not been adequately written about,
we have an automatic response: That’s just because you haven’t looked
very hard. (The more subtle and precise answer is this: That’s just
because the story hasn’t reached the critical mass where it assaults
you everywhere you turn—like the NBA brawl story. It’s not that the
story hasn’t been written. It’s that the reading public has not cared.
Sad, but true.)

We’re not crazy about media reporting or media
criticisim—mostly because we can’t escape the feeling that no one
really cares, out there in the real world. And then there is the more
substantive reason: Media criticism is often the most trite,
navel-gazing, uninteresting, and self-righteous sort of writing a
person can have the pleasure of not reading.—The Editor in Cheese

One of the things we miss most about TMFTML was his Monday-morning quarterbacking of the Sunday New York Times. (The critic became the critiqued, and that’s a helluva promotion! We like to believe we beat the Times to the punch bowl, though.)

TMFTML
somehow managed to scan and summarize the whole paper—usually in the
yellow haze of the “worst hangover ever”—from the Magazine to the
darkest recesses of Travel. He was a sort of pissy, Gen-X ombudsman
with a rapier wit.

We are much more piecemeal about the way we
pick through the Times. This is undoubdtedly a character flaw, but we
read the Sunday Times for pleasure, not for business. We often notice,
though, how the Gray Lady’s left hand and right don’t seem to be aware
of one another. We noted yesterday how the Magazine’s cover story on
“the overdesigned” life of American children was almost precisely the
same territory covered by Week In Review’s below-the-fold feature.

These
are great articles, of course, but they also have the strong smack of
trend stories, and speaking as an editor here, we say the fact that
they crop up in more than one place on one particular Sunday sort of
confirms this view. I wonder if there are uber-editors somewhere in the
Times who have steam coming out of their ears—just the way they do when
the New Yorker, or the Washington Post scoops them. (For the record, we
preferred the short and snappy Week in Review piece, which got straight
to the point with solid science and an impressionistic analysis. The
Magazine’s coverage was multi-faceted, practically the entire issue
turned over to a relatively simple conceit: Kids are not spending
enough time being kids anymore, and as a result, neither are they
growing up to be the adults they ought to be. We begin to understand
why one of TMFTML’s perennial complaints was just how trailing-edge the
Times can seem on stories like this.)

Some
other high points came in the Book Review—newly redesigned, with a more
humane display face, the anachronistic return to launching the cover
story right there on the cover, and the notable shift of contributors’
notes away from the column footers to the front of the book, much like
a modern magazine.

In these spiffy environs, we enjoyed Slate editor Jacob Weisberg’s angle on “Charlotte Simons,” and Tom Frank’s overview

of four new titles attempting to dismantle the “red-blue” cultural
divide, although it purported to survey four books, but really only
focused on the internecine squabble Frank wishes to pick with the
writers of “The Great Divide” (the “Metro Vs. Retro” folks).

More
important, we swelled with pride when we noticed the Times recommended
David Lebedof’s “The Uncivil War”— and several pages later, a solidly
positive review of Michael Dregni’s “Django.” Both are local heroes of
Twin Cities publishing, Lebedof a winner of a 1998 Minnesota Book
Award, and Dregni the editorial director of Voyageur Books over in
Stillwater. Nice work, gentlemen.

It’s not like we need to scan the Times in order to feel good about ourselves—well, maybe it is like that. —The Editor in Cheese

We were chatting yesterday with an editor at the New Yorker,
and the conversation turned on the role of design in modern magazines.
The New Yorker, of course, is an old-fashioned magazine that has not
changed in any major way for more than seventy-five years. To be sure,
there were some dramatic touches added under Tina Brown in the late
nineties—photography appeared for the first time, bylines went to the
tops of stories, a table of contents and letters to the editor were
published for the first time. But these were dramatic only in context.
Compared to all other magazines, the New Yorker remained an
intransigent old-timer that persisted in its jazz-age stylings. Most of
us still thank God for that.

Now
it was the view of my New Yorker friend that readers simply do not care
about design the way editors, publishers, artists, and designers do—in
other words, it’s only people in the publishing industry who care about
something so frivolous as page layout. I’m not sure I agree completely
with that view.

It’s easy to say there is little interest in
design when your magazine is the gold standard of narrative journalism
and cartoons, and when the design has not changed in three-quarters of
a century. My friend and I agreed, though, that design that is used to
cover up a lack of substance in a story is a bad thing. But I think it
should be possible to do both at the same time. (There are magazines,
like ESPN, for example, that are emphatically about image rather than
text— ESPN magazine was, after all, modelled on its television
namesake. They play by different rules, of course, or create their own.
Personally, I read Playboy for the articles, but I can see how some
people might look more to the art.)

In most magazines, there is
a rough balance between words and pictures. Good design is what marries
a good story to good art. You can’t just plop down on the page a big,
full-color photo, and then flow a story around it in whatever space
remains and expect it to “work.” It is a careful, exacting thing—more
art than science, surely—to make text and image play nicely and
complement each other. Even at a place like The New Yorker, where text
is king, there are still very serious design quandries every issue.

Their
particular cross to bear is that they don’t fit stories to space, but
vice versa. In other words, a story is written at whatever length it
takes to tell the story properly, and then the space on the page is
fitted to the words. All those clever little postage-stamp drawings?
They are called “space shims” to make a story end at the bottom of a
page, and not some other random place in the magazine. Carmine Peppe
was the legendary layout-editor at the New Yorker , one of its great
unsung heroes. For more than fifty years, he was responsible for the
incredibly delicate craft of space shimming, not unlike a master
carpenter.

So. Even when you think design doesn’t matter, design still matters.—The Editor in Cheese

Last night, the wife noticed that WCAL has now changed hands,
and is being operated by MPR. The wife is a contrarian in all things,
and she said the new announcers sounded “robotic.” But the wife is,
like us, a St. Olaf graduate. She is predisposed to resist change (like
us), especially when it involves her alma mater. Many non-alumni
listeners may be pleasantly surprised to learn that the classical
programming continues—at least for the time being.

Around here, we’ve already received one angry letter for our “Good Intentions”
which mentioned the controversy. In that piece, we did not so much
mourn the passing of WCAL—it’s not really going anywhere, after all.
And if you insist that WCAL IS dead in body and spirit, then MPR is
certainly the best possible heaven you could go to if you were a
deceased radio station. What we were complaining about was St. Olaf’s
decision to sell it in the first place.

It turns out that MPR may be the hero of this story. Despite the broad grumbling we hear among honorable people—
that MPR is growing more conservative and homogenous and powerful—we
suspect that St. Olaf would have sold the station to just about anyone,
so desperate were they to liquidate this asset. (St. Olaf alumni are
familiar with this strategy going back at least to the eighties, when
then-president Melvin George sold many of the priceless Persian rugs
that hung on the walls of Ole Rolvaag Library, just to drum up a little
cash.) In a press release issued yesterday, MPR made it clear that they
bought the charming little station “in an attempt to save the frequency
for public service programming. Other bidders proposed more narrow,
targeted program services.”

Coincidentally, we happened to
pick up Tom Wolfe’s new novel last night. It bears all the earmarks of
a classic Wolfe read— so many details so wrong, so much clanging
language, and yet so irritatingly readable. “My Name is Charlotte” is
set in a fictional college called Dupont. One of the things that Wolfe
gets exactly right is the strange form of loyalty that a good, solid
college generates in its students and alumni. These are, after all, the
formative years of our adult life. If you’re lucky enough to attend a
somewhat prestigious private college, and engaged with it enough to
hold on for four years, its astonishing the things you find yourself
remembering and saying about the experience later.

So our own
attachment to WCAL had quite a lot to do with its affiliation with that
old college on a hill. But it’s useful to remember that many people who
never knew or cared about WCAL’s ownership loved the station for what
it was, sui generis. They can take some consolation that some of the
station’s signature programming will live on, including “Favorites on
Friday” and—something MPR secretly coveted for decades—the St. Olaf
Choir Christmas Concert. Sometimes our self-important view of ourselves
and our institutions actually comports with the outside world’s
view.—The Editor in Cheese