Debbie & Me, or, How to Write a Q & A and Not Get Ripped by the Public Editor

Posted on January 13, 2008 by admin

Back when I was still a slave to newspaper deadlines, I got worked up about a thrashing delivered to New York Times Magazine writer Deborah Solomon by the paper’s hired dean of conformity, Public Editor Clark Hoyt.

My view on this matter is no secret to friends in the Oakland Newsroom of the Detroit Free Press. I sounded off at the time about the hypocrisy and outright stupidity of condemning a writer for doing what the paper, through its unwritten code of deadlines and story length limits, forces writers to do: Namely, shorten everything, including direct quotations, and re-arrange them for dramatic effect and logical continuity. I’m writing about this situation in my journalism textbook, SHOESTRING REPORTER: HOW I GOT TO BE A BIG CITY NEWSPAPER REPORTER WITHOUT GOING TO J SCHOOL, AND HOW YOU CAN DO IT TOO! Watch for it!

Deborah Solomon was pilloried by Clark Hoyt for what I and many other writers do all the time. We condense, we delete, we re-arrange direct quotations.

Horrors!

He admits that in writing?

You betcha. And I would have written about it at the time, except back then I didn’t own my own newspaper. Now I own joelontheroad.com and print what I please.

No, I didn’t write this at the time and submit it to the Free Press. You might chide me for this: Since I didn’t write the essay and submit it to the paper, how can I say for sure that it wouldn’t have been published?

Good question. Glad I thought of it. Okay, here’s my response: I can’t be sure. But I promise you, my readers, small in number though you are, that in the near future I will begin posting as occasional features ACTUAL STORIES that I did write and submit to the Free Press, which censored them. And to the journalists who might be reading this, please think back through your careers. Have you ever had stories censored? I’d like to read them, hear the circumstances. I’m writing another book, BLUE NEWS: STORIES TOO HOT FOR AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS TO PRINT.

But the threat of censorship is not the only reason for not submitting that story to the paper. The other factor is control, or loss thereof. Once you send the story to a newspaper, you have no control over where or how it is played. You have no control over any changes editors might impose. As a staff writer, you have very limited power. If editors want those changes, even if they make the story inaccurate or stupid, you can argue, but you can’t change what they’re going to do.

Did I say argue?

Be careful! Argument can be construed as “insubordination.” The I-word can bring on discipline. I know a reporter who was fired at the Detroit News for slinging the f-word at an editor. Now to a lay reader, that may sound like intolerable behavior on the part of that reporter. But anyone who has spent half an hour hanging out in any newsroom in the country knows that foul language permeates the atmosphere, and that particular word is number one in the oral editorial lexicon.

Stories of how reporters are punished are common. Even before I joined the Free Press, I was hearing from reporters that my assignment to the Western Wayne Bureau was a second-class position. Staffers were put there for supposed misbehavior. Out of sight.  I always believed, though I can’t prove, that my tranfer to the Wayne County government beat in the early 1990s was punishment for arguing with an editor. Suburban bureaus were a trusty purgatory for uppity reporters.

Other punishments, well-known, were assignment to the night cops beat, which in the old days meant simmering in an overheated room in Detroit police headquarters competing for crime tidbits with the Detroit News reporter who sat at a desk about four feet from yours. Again, the unpopular reporter was out of sight of editors who lacked sufficient cause to fire him/her.

My first day at the Free Press, Nov. 12, 1984, an editor who forgot where I was assigned referred to the “Siberia bureaus.” I began my career with a demotion and worked several years in the Western Wayne Siberia Bureau. I thought I was immune to further demotion. Rob Musial, a former Free Press reporter, used to wisecrack, “What more can they do to me? They put me in Macomb.” I was wrong. They stuck it to me by putting me on Wayne County and making me work Sundays for two years.

You might call these prior restraints. Newspaper-imposed limits on writers’ free speech. Can’t put you in the stocks or flog you, but look out, or it’s night cops! I wrote a whole novel about this kind of behavior. It’s called CROSS PURPOSES: IF NEWSPAPERS HAD COVERED THE CRUCIFIXION. I’ll publish it one of these days, or maybe put it on joelontheroad.com as an e-book.

But what about Deborah Solomon?

Well, first, I’m not acquainted with her. As for Clarkie Hoyt, I am acquainted with him to the extent that we both worked for the same news organization at the same time. But while Clarkie was a big-wig executive at Knight-Ridder, I was merely a grunt reporter. While he went to meetings, I put stories in the paper. In other words, I never met Clark Hoyt. But look at us now: Knight-Ridder is dead and gone, a footnote in the history of American journalism. But joelontheroad.com is spiraling downward faster than Alvah Chapman ever dreamed for the Free Press. (More about the joelontheorad.com/Detroit Media Partnership later — talks are ongoing. More about the proposed Joint Operating Agreement later, but just remember you read about it first in JOTR!)

Oh yes, Deborah Solomon. I didn’t know her when I worked for the Times. Maybe that’s because it was ca. 1979 and the two freelance, no-byline stories ($75 each) I wrote for the Times were written in the attic office of our little house in Berrien Springs where my only colleagues were not Debbie Solomon, but a golden retriever named Lady Jessica Dog and a black and white cat we called Sancho Panza. Yes, I wrote a novel loosely based on this experience, too. It’s called STRINGER. Can you guess why?

Anyway, Deborah Solomon’s crime, as near as I can figure, was trying to make her writing conform to two opposing demands by her paper. First, she is required to be pithy, interesting and brief. Second, she must interview her question-and-answer subjects at length, so as to mine those pithy, interesting remarks which she must then somehow condense into the very few lines allotted to her in the Times magazine’s tightly-controlled news-space budget. She must take what might add up to hours of audio-recorded conversations complete with ands, buts, ums, ers and ahs, plus the odd cell phone ring, clinking of silverware and background noise if the interview is conducted over lunch with a drawn-out argument over who gets the check; then she must sift through all the verbiage for the pithy, interesting parts, try to massage some grammar into them while keeping the meaning, then compress it all into the tiny space her editors choose to alot her. It’s a lot of work, folks, and it takes a lot of sifting and compressing.

Now I want to say right here that it’s not right, fair or honest to misconstrue someone’s remarks. It is an immutable rule that we never quote someone in a way that inaccurately reflects his or her remarks.

But apparently Deborah Solomon ran afoul of interview subjects who got mad because not every wise mot they spoke showed up in the Q & A she wrote, or at least (since editors have lots to do with the final appearance of a story) the way it looked in print. Moreover, and this was perceived as a great sin in her case, the writer of the Q & A piece might actually include a question he or she failed to ask during the interview.

My God! What a terribly dishonest thing to do!

Not!

I did it now and then when I wrote my Free Press Five Questions pieces. What if you interview someone and they start talking about something you didn’t think to ask them about? Later, while writing, you think, Hey, that was interesting. But this is a Q & A. It’s so rigidly formatted that you can’t just plop somebody’s statement in there without the required question. In normal writing, you could, but in the tight Q & A, the subject’s remark has to be construed as the answer to a question, and if that is so, well, it better be preceded by a question. But you didn’t ask the question, and in Deborah’s case, it’s not on her recording. It would never be on mine, because I never record those interviews. I make hand notes, but that’s for another column. So what do you do? No question, so don’t use the remark? Not if I could help it. The solution is simple: Figure out the question that would have provoked the subject’s statement as an answer if it had been an answer to a question, which we know it was not. In short, you make up the question, which is, strictly speaking, fiction, so that the answer, which is strictly speaking fact, can follow naturally.

Dishonest? No. So long as the statement conforms to the subject’s meaning, it’s legitimate. The question is not more made up than the Q & A format. Sure, you could ban this practice of backing into questions. The effect would be Q & A essays that are less interesting. The reader would lose. If the quotation is correctly stated, nobody is hurt.

What we have, then, is a writer (actually writers, plural, because Deborah Solomon was not and is not the Lone Ranger in this practice) trying to please readers, editors, at the same time cramming as much information and pith into a short space as she can so she can go home and have a life.

Here’s what it comes down to: Anyone, and this includes editors as well as the public, who thinks these newspaper Q & A pieces are verbatim interview transcripts needs a quick trip back to first grade for a short course in reading.

Note: I wrote many, many Five Questions articles. True, some of the people I interviewed were dead, but that wasn’t my fault. Fact is, nobody, subject or reader, ever complained that I misquoted my interviewees.

Nor did anyone ever complain that I concocted questions to fit the answers.

Even though I did.

Now, I promised to tell how to write a Q & A and not get ripped by the public editor. Here’s how: It’s obvious that some of these editor-appointed ombudspeople need remedial help. Well, help is here, and it’s free. Simply sign up Clark Hoyt, or whoever your public editor happens to be, for a free subscription to joelontheroad.com and refer him/her to Joel’s J School. It’s called an RSS feed. Simple as that.

You may contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

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Election coverage then and, well, then again

Posted on January 9, 2008 by admin

I thought this would not be about the Future of Newspapers. I was looking at the Detroit Free Press headline today, Jan. 9, 2007, that would have us readers believe that “Clinton, McCain win in night of comebacks” with the subhead, “New Hampshire victories cool red-hot Obama, stun Romney.”

As I opened the Free Press and pushed the button on the coffee maker, I assumed that Hillary Clinton must have left some double-digit dust for Barack Obama to chew on in yesterday’s New Hampshire primary.

“Hillary Clinton scored a stunning victory over Barack Obama on Tueday,” wrote the Free Press Washington correspondent.

The reality, muffled a few paragraphs down, is that Clinton topped Obama by three percentage points, 39 to 36 percent. If anyone got trounced, it was John Edwards, with 17 percent of the vote.

But this article, little different from stories in the elite New York Times, gives Edwards little thought. Maybe that’s why he trails so far behind.

My first thought was that this was not about the Future of Newspapers, because this is the typical horse-race writing we’ve come to expect from newspapers for generations.

A rational person would hardly interpret a three-percentage point spread between two candidates as a “stunning” victory for one and dramatic defeat for another. If this had been an opinion poll, the margin of error might have been as much as five percentage points, in which case a three percent difference would mean nothing.

Let’s step back a mnute. What did I write about in that last paragraph? A “rational” person? Are political correspondents rational people? Hardly. They are too busy comparing notes with each other, building each other’s expectations, to remember that the people they are writing down to are also the ones who buy their papers. Well, some buy them. More and more read the papers for free on the web. Maybe it’s not just because those readers cheap. Maybe they at last are realizing the value of what they get in their paper newspapers and rejecting the talking-head political correspondents who do more to build each other’s expectataions than to interpret to us lowly early morning coffee drinkers what is actually happening in the world of national politics.

In short, they are writing for their own class of political writers, shoring up each other’s fantasies and forgetting the reality. The reality is that the so-called victories of Republicans and Democrats have occurred in states with minuscule populations. It is the hype that lends these early primaries importance all out of realistic perspective.

Who is creating the hype?

Why, those very institutions that, as we know, are struggling for survival. Wouldn’t you think they’d hear themselves bleating the same old horse-race blather? Wouldn’t you think the pundits would realize maybe their customers or potential customers or FORMER customers have gotten sick of putting their heads to these thundering ear trumpets and are turning to Internet alternatives out of desperation or worse — boredom?

So this column IS about the Future of Newspapers, after all. Because if reporters and editors don’t figure out that dishing up the same-old, same-old political palaver that worked in their distant past is as phony as it is fantastical,and moreover doesn’t serve readers the reality they deserve, they can kiss their future good-bye.

Contact me at joelthurtell(a)gmail.com

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Radiating against the odds

Posted on January 6, 2008 by admin

My wife’s eyes narrow or close entirely when I talk about what I call my ham radio hobby, though she thinks it’s an obsession. Her reaction tells me that excessive conversation about radio bores most people. But I can’t help myself. There were times when, as a Detroit Free Press reporter, I found things about the hobby so fascinating that I wrote newspaper stories about it. Over the course of 30 years, I guess I wrote a dozen or so newspaper articles about ham radio. I also wrote more specialized articles for the ham magazines like QST, CQ and Electric Radio. This is all by way of warning you that another ham radio yarn is on its way. If the subject doesn’t resonate, you might want to wait for my upcoming features on how I got my first boat, or the Ann Arbor News’ latest invention, a “police vaccine.”

Right now, though, I’m stuck on this amazing thing that happened yesterday in my ham radio station. The thing that has me in awe is not the fact that I logged my first contact from my home station since Jan. 6, 2004, though I was pretty surprised I’d been off the air four years.

I thought I’d lost interest in the hobby. I’d piled boxes of files from my recently terminated newspaper career so high they blocked me from operating the radios. Adding to the clutter, there’s a box with bottles of homebrew beer my son, Abe, and I are aging. There’s even a 5-gallon carboy of our latest Pilsner sitting in that room, whose temperature is somewhere in the 40s, just right for a German-style lager.

But something happened Friday, Jan. 4, that revved my engines. I talked to an auctioneer who agreed to drive a truck to my house and cart away dozens and dozens of old radios — inventory I amassed as The Radio Finder during the Great Newspaper Strike when I created a job as a dealer in old radios to eke out a living. After returning to the Free Press in 1997 following more than two years on strike, I gradually wound down the radio business, and when my radiofinder.com website accidentally went down in 2004, I decided it was good riddance and devoted my time to journalism or writing novels and other non-technical pursuits. I have the radios stored in my half of the garage. The agreement in this household is that my wife must be able to park her car inside. It is thus barely possible to squeeze a Windstar into her half of the garage if any passengers disembark before the big minivan enters the building.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to empty my side of the garage, not to mention our new shed, also crammed with radios, the loft over the garage, repository of boxes and boxes of vacuum tubes, plus the old ramshackle shed, supposed to have been dismantled long ago, but still intact because it houses additional radios, and all the basement space consumed by boxes and boxes of radio books, magazines and equipment manuals. The thought of unloading all that stuff in one fell swoop and collecting some money made me giddy. Now, admittedly, I don’t covet the garage space to house my little Honda Civic. No, no, no. I want room to restore a wooden boat, don’t you know.

So excited was I, in fact, by my talk with the radio auctioneer, that I ventured out with the temperature in the 20s and began listing my current inventory on a legal pad. As I did so, my enthusiasm for off-loading this collection started to, well, not fade, no, I’m still committed to a one-time riddance with, hopefully, a sizable check to replace the goods. But I also started another list: “Radios To Keep.”

This list was a mistake. First, it was a mistake to leave it on the kitchen counter where my wife spotted it and wondered how committed I really was to dumping all that junk — I mean, inventory. Second, it was a mistake because it keeps getting longer. At this rate, the list of “Radios To Keep” could equal the list of ones to jettison, nulling out the whole effort.

No chance of that. Getting rid of all those radios spells a sort of freedom. As I basked in the thought of how much space I’ll have to work on boats, it occurred to me that I might dig out some room to enter my radio room and play with two of my favorite radios. For the radio aficianados who might tune in, the transmitter is a 1961 Central Electronics 200-V and the receiver, same vintage, is a Central Electronics 100-R. The 100-R is a prototype, the only one of this line ever built, and it’s about as rare a radio as you’ll come across. I’ve written beaucoup about it in the ham mags. (Suffice it to say, this is on my list of Radios To Keep) It also works extremely well. Right now. It wasn’t working for a long time. All it would do was emit a lout hiss. But on Friday, in addition to my exciting talk with the aucitoneer, I had another breakthrough — I actually fixed a computer problem all by myself. Yes, without recourse to calling Abe, our computer guru son, I managed to make a computer work that had been on the blink. (Actually, it wasn’t on the blink at all; the original problem was due to operator error — mine — but since I figured out and solved the problem, I feel I deserve credit for “fixing” the computer even though it wasn’t broken. Hey, we have to pump our morale any way we can!)

Getting a screwed-up computer to work is, to me, worth many moments of self-congratulation and inner feelings of triumph. Empowered with this recent record of success, I cleared access to my favorite radios, turned on the receiver that had not worked in years and voila! I heard voices, and it wasn’t because I’m off my meds! Wowee!

One reason why I didn’t mess with my radios, I now realize, was the increasing sense of busy-ness with work I felt over the years. I was aware of the increasing pressure to produce that has been mounting at the Free Press simultaneous with the scramble to survive as an industry, but I’m certain that the energy level I needed to maintain to keep pumping out five stories a week undermined my will to take on radio or boat projects in my spare time. And too, there was that book — actually several books — but one in particular, the Rouge canoe story which I’ll be writing about on and off starting soon — that took up loads of time and still does.

So finally, on Friday, after five weeks of retirement and winding down, having cleared a path to my radios, I very slowly and systematically thought through the connections I needed to make between antenna, peak-reading-wattmeter, transmitter-antenna tuner, receiver and transmitter. I did this with the full knowledge that at the end I would not have an antenna able to radiate my transmitter’s 100-watt signal or any signal at any power level. My antenna is a mess, having been hit by several windstorms. One leg of the dipole was knocked down a year or two ago and I coiled the copper wire at the foot of a big maple tree, trying to avoid ripping into it with the lawnmower during successive summers. The other leg of the dipole also had fallen down and lies on the roof of our house under a thick layer of snow and ice.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk to anybody, but at least my receiver could hear stations sufficiently for me to know that I had an integrated station ready for the time — come spring — when I could fix my antenna.

But just for fun, I tried to transmit. What’s this? Forward power, that is, watts radiated from antenna, very high. Reflected power, watts pointed back to the sender, extremely low? These are the kind of readings you might dream for with some expensive commercially-built antenna. I ran out of time Friday, but on Saturday, after a pleasant lunch at the Waltz Inn (about which more later) and an afternoon spent perusing the wares at the astounding outdoor gear emporium in Dundee, Mich. known as Cabela’s, I came home and fired up the radios. The receiver gave me some trouble. Initial hissing, but I jiggled it and that made it work. Seriously. Then I called my friend Ken Sands, a ham in Plymouth who lives, oh, maybe at most three miles away, and asked him to listen around 3,920 kilohertz. He heard my signal, and it was very strong!

For the better part of an hour, Ken and I chatted, and I wondered at the fact that my antenna wire runs down the side of a maple tree to a coil of wire lying on the ground atop snow, while another part of it lies under snow on the roof.

It’s a snowtenna!

But now it’s thawing. Will my antenna work without snow?

Okay, enough radio. What about this “police vaccine”?

Contact me at joelthurtell(a)gmail.com

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The Future of Newspapers, Part 1.1

Posted on December 30, 2007 by admin

By Joel Thurtell

When I started this blog, I fully intended to turn it into a carbon copy of the Detroit Free Press community newspaper whose pages ran my stories for the past several years. That was before I understood what I was getting into with the blog. Maybe I should say that was before I realized how entrapped my brain was in the newspaper’s peculiar and, from my new perspective rigid manner of thinking.

Yes, I planned to write “cover stories” similar to the ones I banged out for the good old Free Press. But that was then. Which is to say less than a month into this brave new world, I’m starting to realize that I’ve stepped into a dimension where I am free to re-invent my writing and myself. I don’t HAVE to write cover stories. Wow, what a thought. I like to think I pushed the envelope by writing first-person accounts of my experiences trying out things — blowing glass, carving an ice sculpture, playing a church organ, rowing a shell in the Detroit River and so on. But no matter how I tried to free myself from the constraints of mundane journalism, I was ensnared in the paper journalist’s rule book.

If there is to be a future for newspapers, their owners had better toss that rule book out. Problem is, they don’t understand there is a rule book. Worse, it’s really hard to figure out the rules in this new game called the Internet.

Here’s what I mean about freeing myself from those old, arbitrary and, yes, irrational, rules. Imagine that you are assigned to crank out five stories a week about a geographic area that for some reason is called “Downriver” and another one called, seemingly more reasonably, “Plymouth-Canton-Northville.” You get an idea for a story in a Downriver community, say, River Rouge. Great. But you can’t write it. Why not? Well Downriver is not Downriver, as far as your newspaper is concerned. Example: To all the world, River Rouge, a town situated just south of Detroit at the confluence of the Rouge and Detroit Rivers, seems to me is as Downriver as a town can get. But your newspaper has chosen not to deliver your Community Free Press weekly section to River Rouge. ny story you write about the town will not be read there. Thus, according to the perverse logic of your newspaper, River Rouge is NOT Downriver. And because it’s not Downriver, even though it IS Downriver, you can’t write about it.

See what I mean? It’s whacky, but we had to train ourselves to think that way. It was the same under Knight-Ridder, before Gannett bought the Free Press and Knight Ridder vanished into thin air.

It was Newspaper Think, and it’s why the papers are in trouble. How can you reach out to people, cajole them into buying your paper and paying for your ads, when you pretend they’re not there?

It wasn’t new to the Free Press. When I came back from the strike in 1997, a fellow reporter and friend at the Free Press warned me that certain suburban communities weren’t being covered, he believed because so many of their inhabitants had stopped subscribing to the paper because they sympathized with the strike. Some of these communities were Downriver, some were in western Wayne. I sat through a meeting with editors who put little stickers on the county maps. Favored communities got “platinum” stickers. Upon my return in ’97, I was assigned to the Oakland Bureau in Royal Oak. I was to cover the various Bloomfields and Pontiac, but the city editor told me not to bother with Pontiac because what he wanted was coverage of the “moneybags” in the Bloomfields.

Who wins in a situation like that? Not the people of River Rouge. Not the people in Pontiac. Not even the people in the Bloomfields we were supposed to suck up to. Maybe they would LIKE to read about Pontiac.

Not the people in other Downriver towns who might like to know what’s up with their neighbors. Not the newspaper, for that matter, because it’s not faithfully representing communities even though it claims to be covering them. And when a reporter has to explain to someone with a legitimate story idea that it can’t be done not because it’s a bad idea, but because it’s happening on the wrong side of the tracks, both sides know the situation is ridiculous. Isn’t there a word for it in banking and insurance? “Redlining,” I believe it’s called.

But that is the newspaper mind set, and a reporter has to self-censor his or her articles to conform to the delivery map of the paper’s production department.

Compare this to the web. As a blogger, I can write that River Rouge story. When I visit my son in Los Angeles, I’ll write about what I find there. As a blogger, you see, I don’t have to be concerned about printing and delivering physical papers. It was that huge assignment — every day running presses and trucking paper products all around the state and beyond — that so limits the imagination of newspaper managers that they can’t possibly do the creative thinking they need to do to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve made for their businesses. And since I’m not selling ads, I have no incentive to discriminate by geography.

Little by little, I’m understanding how chained my imagination was, how snarled up in absurd territorial-think I was. And so gradually, I find that I’m thinking of stories not only beyond my old geographic limits, but also topics into which I never before dared stray.

For instance, have a look at my piece on Joe Haydn and how I geek myself, energize myself, in the morning. You wouldn’t have seen that in the Free Press. Watch for more of these faux-music critiques. Why not? So what if I lack the credentials of a musical Authority? What difference does it make that I think the circle of fifths is a container of booze? I’ll write about the music I like when I like. That’s one difference between blogging and newspapering.

There are other differences. I just haven’t figured them out.

Send me a line at joelthurtell(a)gmail.com

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Jump-starting us retirees, or, That Joe Hadyn sure was one hyped-up guy!

Posted on December 27, 2007 by admin

So it’s a bit after six in the morning, I’m brewing coffee, reading the NY Times and writing up my day’s “to-do” list. When I get to a dozen entries, my head starts to spin. Which one do I start on first? But wait — I’m retired! No deadlines! Well, forget that. I’m so busy in my so-called “retirement” that I’m more beat at the end of a day than if I’d been grinding out cover stories for the good old Free Press.Getting started in the morning is a big deal. Coffee’s not doing it. Caffeine probably stresses me. I need a strong countervailing force here. But I know what to do.Head for the CD player. Choice of music is critical. You want to jump-start the day, don’t play dirges. Know what I mean?Something constantly upbeat, imbued with heavy doses of musical energy, that’s what I need. Man, that will get me moving.Here’s what I’m spinning these days: First, Franz Josef Haydn’s piano sonatas. My CD is called “Haydn: Klaviersonaten Nr. 32, 47, 53 & 59” and it has Emmanuel Ax playing on a Sony disc, SK 53 635. Solo piano, great melodies and always upbeat. No adagios, please!The Haydn gets me moving away from the Paul Krugman column in the Times and all that depressing world news and straight into my own writing. Key words: “Allegro,” “presto.” Quick melodies that make you want to dance.Why, the middle movement is marked “Menuet.”Once I’m in the swing of whacking away at writing, I need a change of pace. Musicians call this “modulation,” I believe. Fancy way of saying “transition.” What I do, see, is modulate from Papa Joe Haydn to Grampa Bach. Good rousing Bachian organ music really gets me stirred up. My favorite CD for this is “The Biggs Bach Book,” with organist E. Power Biggs at the keyboard on a CD by CBS Records, MK 30539. Nothing beats Bach, but he has his match in Georgie Boy Haendel, so once I’m working really hard, nobody around except Patti the dog, I crank the volume up and spin my way into a three-disc set called “Handel: Complete Organ Concertos” recorded by the English Concert directed by Trevor Pinnock with Simon Preston on the organ and Ursula Hollinger playing harp. It’s an Archiv set, Digital Stereo 289 469 358-2 and it will keep you hopping for all of 199 minutes.By the time Papa Joe and Grampa Johann and Uncle Georgie have spun their course, it’s time for lunch. Maybe a snooze. I am retired, you know.I’ve actually been playing this same line-up for weeks, and it’s nearly time for a change. I’ll let you know the new list when I’ve thoroughly lab-tested it.In the meantime, need some get-up-and-go? Try Papa Joe!

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Ms. Kitty’s miracle

Posted on December 25, 2007 by admin

Ms. KittyI thought our story, a true one, about our family’s loss and later recovery of our cat, Putty-Tat, couldn’t be beat.

Until I heard Donna MacDonald’s equally true story of what happened to her family’s cat, Ms. Kitty, shortly before Christmas 2007.

There are common threads in these two tales of cats gone missing, and there is a very obvious moral to both stories.

Our story occurred several years ago, when our two sons, Adam (now 27) and Abe (now 24), were both in elementary school. This would have been in the early 1990s. We were in the habit of letting Putty-Tat run free in the neighborhood. That’s a practice I now know is not wise, at least in the suburbs with their busy, cat-lethal streets and, yes, greedy humans. But we had migrated to Plymouth from such small southwestern Michigan towns as Marcellus (pop. ca 1,100 in 1980) and Berrien Springs (pop. ca. 2,000) , and we’d lived in the country for several years on farms where dogs and cats were allowed to roam.

When Putty-Tat failed to come home, Adam and Abe were distraught, and so were we. Several days went by, and there was no sign of Putty-Tat. We were afraid she’d been hit by a car, but we didn’t see any cat corpses in our neighborhood.
One day, a friend of Adam reported seeing a sign on a utility pole near West Middle School. It said a cat had been found and gave a phone number for its new home.
I called, and was invited to bring the boys over to see if they could identify the cat as Putty-Tat. The boys got in the car, and we drove to the house, several miles from our own. Too far for Putty-Tat to have roamed. Seemed strange. As soon as we saw the cat, we recognized Putty-Tat. And Putty-Tat knew the boys. She was very happy to see them, ran to them and wanted to be picked up and loved.

Putty-Tat’s new “owners” were a bit taken aback. I don’t think they expected a successful reunion. Gradually, the story emerged. They had seen Putty-Tat walking across the parking lot of a church near our house. “A stray!” they exulted, and scooped her up. Once they had Putty-Tat home, they decided the “stray” needed shots. They took her to a veterinarian, who told them this was no stray or feral cat. Her coat was sleek and she was obviously well-fed and in excellent health.
In short, the cat belonged to somebody. She had a home. Kids to play with. Kids and their parents who missed her, worried about her.

So they put up the sign on a telephone pole, and we called. We took Putty-Tat home that day. The story had a happy ending.

But a few years later, I had an insight into the kind of thinking that drives people to decide a cat on the street is a “stray” that they are morally compelled to adopt. It was summer 1995, and I was on strike at the Free Press. A crew of us striking reporters and assistant city editors were picketing outside a Detroit Newspaper Agency distribution building in Livonia. A very pretty, well-groomed cat would visit us as we stood talking around five or so in the morning. One of our members was convinced this cat had no home. She wanted badly to take it. I looked at the cat. Like Putty-Tat, this cat appeared well-nourished and in no need of help. But my friend was insisting the cat was a stray. It was wishful thinking. I argued, and eventually succeeded in convincing my friend that what she proposed was not a “do-good” act, but catnapping pure and simple.

Donna MacDonald works at Wayne State University’s Institute of Gerontology, and our mutual friend Cheryl Deep suggested she tell me her amazing story. Here, in Donna’s words, is the story of how kids, Anna, 14, Erica 12, Olivia 6, and Aidan 4, lost their calico cat, Ms. Kitty, as she patrolled their neighborhood in Novi. She tells me “Erica and Aidan are in the picture as they are the ones who went all out to find the cat. The cat actually was Erica’s Christmas present last year so we used Ms. Kitty again this year as part of her gift”.

“On the evening of November 28th, my husband’s birthday,” Donna wrote, “Ms. Kitty took off out of the house as soon as the kids held the door open long enough. It wasn’t the first time, so we weren’t worried because she had been outside many times before. When she didn’t come home by morning, I was worried and my daughter Erica and I put out about 400 e-mails to all the people in our school community and also hung about 30 posters around the four adjacent subs as well as our own. We didn’t hear a word about Ms. Kitty until I received a phone call from my friend and then the story unfolded.

Ms. Kitty safe at home“My friend called on December 12th and calmly asked if I had found my kitty. I told her “no,” and she said she had a story to tell me. She said that a man in my subdivision had found a stray cat and had taken it in his home to keep. This man kept the cat about a week or so and found out that he had allergies to cats and thought he needed to find a home for this wonderful, loving cat that he had found. He went down to his work place at Compuware in downtown Detroit and told people down there that he was looking for a home for this stray cat he had found and there of course was a cat lover in the group who said, “Sure, I’ll take it”. This lady happens to live in Royal Oak so the lady came to Novi and took the cat to Royal Oak. A few days later, this lady had her parents over for dinner and of course this couple fell in love with the cat and the daughter said they could take it home with them.

“The couple who live in Dearborn Heights loaded Ms. Kitty in their car and away she went. This elderly couple took the kitty to the vet, got her shots, bought a big bag of toys for the cat and provided many hours of lap holding. They happened to be talking to their daughter-in-law on the phone and were telling her of how they came upon this new love in their life, Ms. Kitty, and their daughter-in-law said, “That’s funny, my friend in Novi
is missing a calico cat”.

“She forwarded the e-mail I had sent with Ms. Kitty’s photo on it and sure enough, her in-laws had my cat.

“After a couple of phone calls to clarify that it was my cat and get directions, I went down the following day to pick up Ms. Kitty from the elderly couple who had fallen in love with Ms. Kitty. I felt guilty taking this cat from them, but my own four children had been depressed over our missing pet. It is funny because the day I got the news that Ms. Kitty had been found I had just forwarded my application to adopt a new kitty for my children. Things work in mysterious ways. You talk about six degrees of separation and here is a true story of it, six people away from knowing someone.

“I found out yesterday, when I spoke with my Novi friend, that the man who had Ms. Kitty only lives about seven houses away, which tells me kitty was not lost. She was just visiting, as cats always do.

“Point is, never pick up a stray, they have a home, you just don’t know it. Not sure why this man did not respond to one of the many posters in our subdivision, it could have prevented heart ache on the parts of my children and this elderly couple.

“I did recommend to the couple to look at Oakland County Senior Services who have an adoption program for cats and they pay for the food and kitty litter for two months and at that point you just have to pay the license fee of $8.00. Not sure if they will follow through, but working at the Institute of Gerontology, I felt compelled to help this little couple out.”

There is another cautionary side to these three stories of aborted catnappings. Chance and the sharp eyes of a friend brought about the homecomings of our and Donna’s cats. My pointed arguments dissuaded someone from stealing a third cat. But how many cats that “disappear” actually were pilfered by people who no doubt pat themselves on the back for being great humanitarians, when in fact they’ve stolen a car beloved by some family?
There are a couple lessons here — first, don’t let your cats roam where they might run afoul of predatory humans, drivers that see them too late, rival cats and your neighbor’s (or your own) rat poison.

The main lesson is for those good-hearted folks in need of animal companionship. That “stray” cat or dog most likely has a home with people who love it.

If you want to adopt a real stray, try the animal pound or the Humane Society.

Contact Joel Thurtell at joelthurtell(a)gmail.com

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Tangent what?

Posted on December 15, 2007 by admin

It didn’t make sense when I first heard it.Tangent life?

As in TangentLife.com, a website written by Deb Madonna, Beth Stewart and Brian West and created by Brian and his Plymouth-based conceptfactory.com public relations and branding firm.

It just sounded so weird.

TangentLife.

Beth assured me that Brian was a math major and could explain it in mathematical terms.Fortunately, he didn’t do that. Instead, he told me the story of how local arts people had attended a gathering of arts and culture mavens from around the state and learned that promotion and branding of the arts and art institutions pretty much ended at Dearborn, with a bit of satellite activity in Ann Arbor.

Detroit is the hub, in other words, and the burbs aren’t even last.They’re kind of off on a tangent.But as we all know there’s life in them thar burbs.

Life on the tangent. Tangent life.

TangentLife.com had its beginnings more than a decade ago, in the mid-1990s when the Internet was not so well-known and Deb Madonna was trying to parse out the social lives of her kids.There were all these students at the (then two, now three) Plymouth-Canton high schools, but nobody, most of all parents, seemed to know what was happening when and where.

So Deb started what amounted to a newsletter about happenings in the high schools.That modest effort has evolved into the website, TangentLife.com designed by Brian. Deb and Beth are what we newspaper people (well, I’m a former newspaper guy) call editors. They choose what press releases will appear. They decide what events and issues will see the light of pixels.

They call it an online cultural and arts website, but their eyes are on just about everything happening in Plymouth, Canton and Northville that involves schools, arts, business, service organizations and the future of the three communities.Look at the site right now and you’ll see a listing of scholarships in the public schools, an ad for a private school, a calendar of events and hey, what’s this? My own mug and a note saying I’ll be contributing to TangentLife.com.

I walked into a meeting with Deb, Beth and Brian at a table in the back of the Book Cellar, the cozy downtown bookstore that is Plymouth’s answer to the big box book emporiums. Doggone that Brian, he had the sig (newspaperese for the little cutoff photo beside a personal columnist’s byline) from my old Free Press column cleverly pasted onto the TangentLife.com home page.

Now how could I resist?

Answer: I didn’t. Actually, I planned all along to do something with this team. I’d heard about TangentLife over breakfast months ago with Jennifer Philpot-Munson, executive director of the Plymouth Symphony Orchestra.

Deb and Beth were doing a community calendar, Jennifer said. Wow. I’d been thinking of creating a website to perpetuate my erstwhile Free Press columns, but the one thing I didn’t want to do was put together a calendar. Pain in the butt, far as I’m concerned. If people were already doing that online, I wanted a part of it.

In fact, there was a second thing I didn’t want to do: Sell ads. But we’ll see.

More on that later.Meantime, what I learned in the Book Cellar is that these three people have a progressive vision for the future of this area that I like. I plan to send them one of my columns each week. Actually, they’re free to pick whichever one they like, though the choice at times may be between one column and nothing.We’ll see.Joelontheroad.com will link to TangentLife.com and vice versa and we’ll be part of the same community picture.

“The main idea,” Brian told me, “Is to help arts and cultural organizations to get the word out that we’re under-served by news institutions.

“TangentLife.Well, my life seems off on a tangent.So, tangent life.

I think I get it.Contact Joel Thurtell at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

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From printing press to blogthink

Posted on December 15, 2007 by admin

It’s hard to shake off a way of thinking that goes back to the late middle ages and a Bible printed by a guy named Gutenberg. My work was not about Bibles, but for something like 30 years, it was about newspapers. Come to think of it, there is a kind of religion to journalism, but I’ll save that for another episode in this hopefully often-recurring session I’m calling Bloggery in honor of the new form of communication I’ve adopted. Post printing press. After Gutenberg.Two weeks into blogging, I’m beginning to realize how encased (should I say “trapped”?) my thinking has been within the form of the printed medium. When I say “form,” by the way, I have a very real image in my mind of those steel forms we used to literally wrap or encase the slugs of lead that were spat out by the Linotype machine at the Lowell Ledger, the weekly paper where I worked for a summer in 1961 as a backshop printer’s helper. Not many of us hot metal old fogies left, but when I say I’m finding my thoughts stuck in the Oldthink of newsprint, it should be clear that my memories go back to the REAL newspaper days when we got to breathe the fumes of melted lead. When I approached this blog project, I was consciously thinking of it as a replacement for my newspaper columns. A newspaper story can jump inside and, I thought, so can a blog story. Well, sort of. Except there’s really no inside for a blog story to jump to. I’ve been frustrated, you see, by what seem to be the limitations of the blog form. I’m accustomed to having my writings live on a broadsheet stretch of paper, with several stories kind of playing off each other. Pages anchored by photos. Can’t do that much with the blog.And then, I get diplomatic goadings from my sons: Abe, computer science major at the University of Michigan, tells me very diplomatically that most bloggers write short pieces. My pieces are LOOOOONG! Well, yeah, of course, because my blog is a NEWSPAPER! Then Adam, my urban planner son out in Los Angeles, calls and offers to copy edit my column. He’s noticed some typos and other goofs that he’d like to fix. Okay, buddy, have at it. I never said I don’t need a copy editor. Just can’t afford to pay you.Watch for changes in the way I think about this blog. Such as shorter pieces. Oops, Abe may be on my case — this has gone on a bit long! How do I know? The editing software seems to have chopped off a section. Don’t worry, I’ll wedge it in later.Adam, your turn — clean up those typos! Contact Joel Thurtell at joelthurtell(a)gmail.com 

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Hoffa story re-runs

Posted on December 11, 2007 by admin

E Entertainment plans to run its piece with me pontificating on the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa four more times. Dec. 12 at 8 p.m.Dec. 14 at 9 a.m.Dec. 15 at 1 p.m.  

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The Future of Newspapers, Part I

Posted on December 11, 2007 by admin

Seems like the demise of newspapers is on people’s minds. I stopped at the Plymouth shop of glass blower Don Schneider, who gave me his take on the Detroit dailies’ apparently unstoppable descent toward doom.

The Free Press and the News have blown it, he told me. Blown it multiple times in their ill-begotten Joint Operating Agreement, forcing a strike from which they never recovered and now downsizing themselves nearly out of existence.

After my talk with Don, I opened an email from a former Free Press colleague who’s still at the paper. She told me how a manager explained that the recent departure of 16 Free Press staffers through buyouts won’t add to the workload of those who remain because Gannett has a plan: The gurus in Virginia who own Michigan’s oldest daily will simply reduce the paper’s size so there’s less copy to write and edit and less space for photos.

Presto — less work! What geniuses! That’s on top of what I estimate as a 35 percent reduction in news space since mid-2005. You can’t help wonder if readers notice.

Of course they do!

People are, generally speaking, pretty doggone smart.

Today, 12-11-07, I opened an email asking if if I’d talk to a group of suburban women who badly want someone in the news industry to explain to them what’s going on with their newspapers. Well, I’m retired from the news biz, but I’m always glad to talk.

It happens that early this year I was asked to speak to a group of community college students about, guess what? “The Future of Newspapers.” I gave the talk at Schoolcraft College. Here, with a few changes, is the speech on “The Future of Newspapers.”

Man, that’s a killer. Who came up with that topic, anyway? I’d like to meet that person. No, I’d like to…Never mind. I agreed to talk about The Future of Newspapers, so here I am. But wait a minute. What do we mean by newspapers? Are we talking about newspapers that are printed on actual, real, feel-it-and-the-ink-slides-off-on-your-hand paper? Or are we talking about this new-fangled gizmo, the electronic, or digital, whatever – computerized Internet news that has no connection to paper at all?

I’m going to assume we’re talking about both – the whole kit and kaboodle.

Great. Now, who am I to talk about such a weighty topic? What is my expertise? I’m just a beat reporter. Some days, with all these electronic advances, like how do I do this audio and video recording or coping with clogged email, I feel real, real beat.

If we’re talking about the future of newspapers nationwide, or worldwide even, I probably know less than some or maybe even all of you. I’m not taking a class on the topic. To be candid, I’ve never taken any kind of journalism class. So who am I to talk about the future of newspapers?

Well, not having formally studied the topic, it’s possible that I might see things somewhat differently. I do believe that what we are talking about is a very simple thing: How to persuade people to buy newspapers and how to persuade those people and maybe others as well to purchase advertising in our papers. Paper or electronic, it doesn’t matter. Unless we’re being subsidized by some rich foundation, we need to sell papers as the vehicle for the ads that we also sell, and together, that is what ensures that our paychecks don’t bounce.

I know a little something about this. A long time ago, I was editor of a very, very small circulation weekly newspaper. It was called the Journal Era and it circulated with a very weak pulse to begin with in Berrien Springs and Eau Claire, two towns in southwestern Michigan. In 1979, I became editor of the Journal Era. That meant that I reported and wrote all the news, wrote editorials, an occasional column, features; I took the photos and developed the film, printed the negatives, laid out the pages, answered the phone, sold an occasional ad and watched the publishers cull deadwood. What I mean by deadwood is that they were slowly figuring out which subscribers had not paid and were on the mailing list simply to puff up the circulation figures for the former owner so he could defraud the new owners when he sold the paper to them. Gradually, the new publishers discovered that the paper did not have the 2,000 paid subscribers the old owner had touted. It’s a good thing we didn’t know at the outset that only 700 people thought enough of our paper to pay for it.

In little over a year, we had pumped the numbers up to a real 2000 paid subscribers. We had some things going for us. First, we lacked credibility because the former owner had squandered it. This was good. It gave us contrast against the past. As we struggled to regain what the previous owner had frittered away, people slowly realized we were different. We created our own identity. The contrast was dramatic. People came to trust us. Credibility. Very important. Another thing we had going. We were curious. If it seemed interesting to us, we would find out about it and write about it. No matter how goofball the topic. None of us were journalists, so we didn’t know what was the norm for news. We had courage. We investigated and broke stories that made life uncomfortable for some people, including us. We alienated neighbors and big wigs who benefited from secrecy. We had flexibility. We could try something one week, see if it sold papers. If it didn’t, we could stop it pronto, no recriminations, no layoffs.

From 700 to 2000 – that’s a 285 percent increase. Pretty heady. I felt like a real dragon slayer. Now around that time in Detroit, in 1981, the paid daily circulation of the Detroit Free Press was said to be 622,129. I joined the Free Press as a reporter in 1984. I had great ideas about how I could make a difference. Detroit – wow! This was the Great Newspaper War. I sent a memo to the executive editor, Dave Lawrence, outlining my plan for printing the Free Press on the presses of out-state dailies and really eclipsing our arch rival, the Detroit News. I quoted Ulysses Grant on the art of war. Find the enemy, hit him fast and hard and move on. There was bitter rivalry between the News and Free Press in those days. I worked hard to break hot stories. It was not as easy as it was at the weekly, though. It was weird. It was supposed to be war, but it seemed like we pulled our punches. There were committees of editors who could blunt a story or stop it entirely.

By 2007, Free Press circulation was 318,000. That’s a decline of 49 percent from 1981. Man, I feel like a failure. I’m kidding, of course. Back in 1984, I got my audience with the big boss. Dave Lawrence listened politely and explained why each of my ideas was harebrained. Notice, however, that out-state dailies are now printing the Chicago Tribune and New York Times. What if the Free Press had done that back in the eighties? Little did I know that I was tilting against culture. At the Free Press, the state edition was considered a throwaway, of no interest to advertisers. But think of the circulation they could have built. My plan also called for bureaus in towns like Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids. Oh well. There’s not much one person can do as we hear that those kinds of declines are being reflected across the country.

I’m trained as a historian, not as a journalist. So I am loath to predict the future. But I believe that if we look at the past, we can learn some important lessons that may help us understand where we are headed. If we ask the right questions.There is too much generalizing about the future of newspapers. Their general demise is prematurely predicted. The general does not explain the particular, nor does the particular necessarily explain the general. If newspapers are all losing readers, how is it that the Philadelphia Inquirer just reported a circulation increase?

Certainly, the experience in Detroit is unique. In that span of time between 1981 and 2007, we have seen major disruptions. Nothing to do with the Internet. First, there was the Joint Operating Agreement in 1989. Gannett at the News and Knight-Ridder at the Free Press actually had an amazing thing – 40 percent of readers took both papers. And the companies wanted to get rid of the duplicate readers. Circulation declined after the JOA and directly because of the monopoly. Deliberate self-sabotage and incompetent implemention drove readers away. Did I say self-inflicted injury? Just wait. In 1995, the companies provoked a strike. Circulation went down by roughly a third and stayed that way. Self-inflicted. I still find people who refuse after nearly 12 years to re-start the Free Press. Recently, circulation at the Free Press and News has plummeted. The Free Press went from 342,000 readers in January 2006 to 318,000 in January 2007, an eight percent decline. The Detroit News went from 217,000 to 193,000 in the same period, an 11 percent drop. One year!

The JOA and the strike carved huge numbers of readers away. So it would seem. But we have to question everything. Remember that deadwood I mentioned at the Journal Era? When I came to the Free Press in 1984, I was shocked to see the Detroit News telling advertisers it was selling 1,000 copies a day in Berrien County. I knew that was a lie. I used to string for the News, and I couldn’t buy the paper in Berrien Springs. I had to drive to Benton Harbor, where it was sold at one newsstand only. We heard tales of whole semi-loads of the News being dumped daily, of huge quantities of the News being found in ditches. I was sure they were lying about their numbers. I was outraged. In my Ulysses Grant memo to Dave Lawrence, I urged the executive editor to investigate the fraud at the News. A pal at the Free Press laughed at me. He predicted nothing would be done because, he claimed, the Free Press was fudging its numbers, too. This was the Great Newspaper War, remember. Think about this: In 1981, both Detroit papers were claiming a combined circulation on Sunday of more than 1.5 million copies. Today, the lone Sunday paper, the Free Press, claims 631,000 subscribers. A 58 percent loss. Wow. But is it possible that the 1981 figure is bogus? And if those earlier numbers were inflated, that means the decline in circulation now being lamented was not nearly as dramatic as it’s being portrayed. I don’t know. But I think some Ph.D. candidate in history would find a very interesting dissertation topic questioning the very foundation of our fears. What if the baseline for our grief over newspapers’ demise turned out to be a mirage? It’s hard to talk about the future if we’re glimpsing the past through a thicket of misconceptions, misinformation and lies.

Nowadays, it seems that the big downward driving factor for circulation is the Internet. Right? Nobody talks about JOAs or strikes or mendacious circulation claims.

I wonder. Over the past 20 years at the Free Press, I’ve listened to editors lecture us in meeting after meeting on how important it is for us to somehow attract young readers. I know young readers. I have two sons, ages 24 and 27. We don’t have to go after them. They read newspapers. But they don’t subscribe to them. They read them online. Free.

Are we wasting time trying to attract readers we don’t have, never will have or already have on the free Internet while shortchanging readers who are actually paying for the paper? I hear from middle-aged and older people now that they are freeloading online, too. Nobody is forcing newspapers to ramp up the money-losing Internet while undercutting the for-pay product. Let’s not blame the Internet.

It appears to me that newspapers are putting more and more effort and time into online reports. But not only are they getting no reimbursement for the news, they’re having a hard time selling ads online. Nationwide, online advertising accounts for only 5 percent of newspaper ad revenues.

The print papers still produce 95 percent of the revenue, yet readers of the print paper are being shortchanged by increasingly smaller news holes and stories that are hastily reported. I think readers know this. Could a decline in quality explain why people are canceling subscriptions? If so, the fault can’t be the Internet. Once again, self-inflicted harm.

I actually have hope for the future of newspapers. Journalists mostly lack originality. They follow the leader. If the decline is more apparent than real, they are not likely to see it unless somebody at a bigger paper begins to say it. Still, there is a breaking from the ranks. Keep your eyes on the papers that are privately owned. Wall Street has a hand in many of the decisions that are ruining the quality of our news. Some newspaper owners seem to realize this and are taking their papers private. Examples are the Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. We see new people owning papers. They apparently see that newspapers are able to return 15 to 20 percent on their investment where supermarket chains are lucky to yield 5 percent. To them, the papers look like a good investment.

The future of newspapers, whether paper or digital, may well lie with those owners who are able to fine-tune their operations without bullying from Wall Street and institutional investors. The future of newspapers may be with those editors and publishers who can think independently, separate their decision-making from the pack mentality and find flexibility to experiment and change quickly.One thing is sure. If newspapers are to survive, whether paper or digital, they need to find more good old-fashioned credibility, curiosity and courage. Forget pandering to age groups or other special interests. Good stories appeal to everyone. If they don’t, people will see no reason to pay for them.

Newspapers will survive. I’m not so sure about the owners of newspapers. But in my next post, I’ll explain why I think newspapers — in the broadest sense — will always be with us.

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