William Zantzinger, the subject of Bob Dylan’s song “The Lonely Death of Hattie Carroll,” has died at the age of 69. A truly miserable human being, Zantzinger was caught — many years after caning Ms. Carroll to death — collecting rent from black families who lived in shanties he didn’t even own.
Category: Uncategorized
The iPod of her generation
The photographer Elsa Dorfman has a terrific column in today’s Boston Globe, pegged to the demise of Polaroid film, on the place that Polaroid instant cameras once held in our culture. She writes:
The Polaroid camera was my generation’s iPod, our BlackBerry, our GPS, our Kindle — that piece of technology that wows and then becomes an extension of the hand. And Dr. [Edwin] Land, always called Dr. although he didn’t have his PhD, was our Steve Jobs. He was a brilliant scientist who got Ansel Adams, Marie Cosindas, and Walker Evans to use his instant cameras with panache.
Check out Dorfman’s Web site.
Northeastern student on the scene
Jared Molton, a student in my Reinventing the News course at Northeastern this past fall, was on the scene today following that fatal fire-truck crash on Huntington Avenue. He wrote it up for his blog and posted a slideshow to Flickr. His work then got picked up by Universal Hub.
Photo copyright (c) 2009 by Jared Molton.
Kirk Davis’ latest challenge
It looks like GateHouse Media has done something pretty smart: the community newspaper chain has named Kirk Davis (right) as its president and chief operating officer, the number-two position in the company. Davis, who currently runs GateHouse Media New England, will be replaced by his own number-two, Rick Daniels, a former top executive at the Boston Globe.
GateHouse owns some 400 newspapers nationwide, and more than 100 in Eastern Massachusetts. The company is currently involved in a nasty legal dispute with the New York Times Co. over GateHouse’s and the Globe’s competing online strategies.
I’ve interviewed Davis several times over the years, including, most recently, this past fall for a piece I wrote for CommonWealth Magazine. He is smart, passionate and an inveterate optimist.
I’m not sure anyone is up to the task of saving GateHouse — or, for that matter, the newspaper industry in general. But Davis is not someone I’d bet against. (Thanks to Walter Brooks of Cape Cod Today for blasting out the press release.)
Photo of Davis is from a video on the GateHouse New England Web site, which you can see here.
Finneran flashback
The Boston Globe today reports that Tom Finneran is seeking a pardon from President Bush, and that four former Massachusetts governors are supporting his bid. In 2005, Harvey Silverglate explained in the Boston Phoenix why Bush should grant Finneran’s request.
I’m not sure Finneran deserves to be pardoned for the lame talk show he hosts (now co-hosts) on WRKO Radio (AM 680). But the former Massachusetts House speaker is no criminal.
The art of the obit
Something for which the Boston Globe deserves a lot of credit is that it treats local obituaries with the seriousness they deserve. I especially like the way its obits shine a spotlight on the lives of ordinary people, who often turn out to be not ordinary in the least.
Today the Globe’s Bryan Marquard tells us about the life of Stella May Brown Weaco, a lovely soul of dubious sanity who died on Dec. 31 after many years of homelessness, which ended only after she became ill. Marquard writes:
Obituaries usually confer honorifics, but what title could capture Stella? Given occasionally to delusions, she offered no clear explanation of how she acquired the name Weaco, which is not on her birth certificate. Was she married or a mother? Workers at Women’s Lunch Place hope a relative will read this and inquire about Stella.
Born in Coffeeville, a small Mississippi town some 90 miles south of Tennessee, she spoke of having lived in Memphis. She also said she was born in Jerusalem, was a member of the Rockefeller family, “and was part of a very select group,” [Boston Health Care for the Homeless president Jim] O’Connell said. “And I think that last part was true.
“Among the homeless, he said, “she was an aristocrat.”
I tell my students that obituaries are the most important part of a newspaper, at least for friends and family members. But telling isn’t the same as showing, which Marquard does on a regular basis.
More: Mike Stucka rightly notes that Steve Landwehr of the Salem News has been performing similar journalistic artistry with obits.
A more optimistic take on the Times Co.
No one doubts that the New York Times Co. is in financial trouble, or that the Times as we know it will someday cease to exist.
But Rick Edmonds, who analyzes the news business for the Poynter Institute, has done a great job of demonstrating that there’s no there there in an attention-grabbing piece in the Atlantic arguing that the Times Co. is rapidly running out of money — and, in a worst-case scenario, could shut down as early as this May.
The Atlantic article, by Michael Hirschorn, is pegged to the writings of financial analyst Henry Blodget, who has been sounding the alarm about the Times Co.’s cash woes for some time now. Hirschorn says even the drastic measures that the Sulzbergers might consider could fall short of being enough: selling their share of the Red Sox (already under way, supposedly), selling About.com (even though it’s one of the few bright spots in their portfolio), even shutting down the Boston Globe.
But Edmonds carefully walks us through the numbers, demonstrating that the payment-due deadline the Times Co. faces in May is not at all what Hirschorn seems to think it is. Edmonds writes:
Long story short, the company will be able to meet the May deadline. And corporate finance is not like an auto loan, in which the repo man comes if you miss a few payments…. [C]reditors typically renegotiate the terms — as they have done to much sicklier newspaper companies than the New York Times Co.
Edmonds also shows that Hirschorn’s comparison of print and online readers isn’t just “not apples-to-apples,” as Hirschorn himself acknowledges, but more in the nature of apples to cinder blocks. In other words, Hirschorn doesn’t even come close.
There are three problems with the newspaper business right now: (1) the Internet is destroying its business model; (2) too many newspaper companies took on way too much debt in building their empires; and (3) the worst recession since the early 1980s, if not the ’30s, is wiping out the advertising that Craigslist didn’t already grab.
Right now, it’s the recession and the debt that are taking the biggest toll on the business; without those, newspapers might have some hope of making a downsized but successful transition to online.
The Times Co. took a couple of small but important steps this week, unrolling lucrative front-page ads in the Times and announcing that it will soon do the same in the Globe. The future of legacy media is going to look very different from what we’re all accustomed to, as Edmonds himself acknowledges. But the Times Co. should be able to make it through the recession. After that, we’ll see.
Photo (cc) by Steve Rhodes and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Nat Hentoff signs off, vows not to retire
Nat Hentoff has written his farewell column for the Village Voice after his unconscionable layoff. Hentoff quotes Tom Wicker’s tribute to I.F. Stone: “He never lost his sense of rage.”
I’ve called Hentoff and Molly Ivins the two best columnists never to win a Pulitzer. It’s still not too late for Hentoff, who, at 83, vows not to retire.
Cell-phone spam
Just got my first spam text message via cell phone — a Viagra come-on. What gives? Why haven’t I gotten any of these until now? What can I do?
Those WBZ Radio cuts
I’ve been looking for a point of entry to comment on the recent cutbacks at WBZ Radio (AM 1030), which have claimed talk-show hosts Lovell Dyett, Steve LeVeille and Pat Desmarais, as well as sports reporter Tom Cuddy. It looks like Scott Fybush’s blistering commentary ought to do the trick.
Unfortunately, I never got to hear those shows, as they were on during a time when I simply never listen to talk radio. Sorry to give fuel to CBS’s fire — no doubt the company’s research showed that I was pretty typical.
But live and local ought to be part of any radio station’s mandate. As Garrett says, if CBS doesn’t want to live up to its responsibilities, let it find a buyer who will. (Via Universal Hub.)