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February 09, 2006
The rail
In my mail stack yesterday was a letter from Irene Ackley of Concord. Here’s how it began: “In 1939, Vincent Lombardi was hired to coach football at my small high school – St. Cecelia’s – in Englewood, N.J.”
Regular readers of the Monitor will quickly guess why Mrs. Ackley was writing to the paper about her brush with the man whose name adorns the Super Bowl trophy. Her account will soon run on page B1 as part of “Seeing stars,” our irregular series in which local readers tell us about their encounters with famous people. The latest in that series – Tom Laurie’s two-hour 1974 conversation with Jimmy Stewart – ran earlier this week.
I can’t imagine readers not enjoying these personal accounts. As time goes by, I expect we’ll receive many more letters and calls with stories like Mrs. Ackley’s.
“Seeing stars” appears in what it known internally as “the rail.” This is the one-column strip down the left side of lead Local & State page. Before we introduced our new type faces last November, that column was called Noteworthy. Just one problem with that: Little noteworthy ever showed up there.
As we worked on the Monitor’s content-driven redesign, we set out to make the rail a must-read – something readers would look to even on their busiest days to be informed and entertained and to learn something new about their neighbors and their place. Sometimes a short piece of interesting breaking news appears there, too.
But the key has been to turn the rail into a variety show. We want readers to come to it with high expectations but to be surprised by what they find. Yesterday, in our “5 questions” series, the subject was a woman who had gone swimming for charity (br-r-r-r) last weekend. Some days you’ll see an unusual New Hampshire eBay item in the rail. Others you might learn an interesting tidbit of local history.
The Ed Sullivan of our variety show is Hans Schulz, the Monitor's longtime city editor. With plenty of help from the entire staff and contributions from readers, it is up to him to keep the rail fun, informative, quirky and interactive.
When we introduced the rail four months ago, some of us – including Hans – worried about whether we’d be able to keep it up. So far, so good.
And as we move forward with our overhaul of content in the Monitor’s arts and entertainment coverage, you can bet we’ll be trying to involve and engage readers in similar ways.
Posted by Mike Pride at February 9, 2006 06:36 PM