Mike's blog: May 2006 Archives

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May 25, 2006

Take 2

Maybe you read the quotation in today’s paper from New Hampshire author Howard Mansfield about his interview yesterday for C-SPAN-2’s Books TV program.

“You always come away from these things rewriting what you said in your mind,” Mansfield said.

I was one of the other authors interviewed at Gibson’s Bookstore, but it had been a while since my last such appearance. I had forgotten this “what I should have said” aspect to the process. Of course, it washed over my brain right after the interview.

But this was my fault, not the fault of the process. I was talking for the first time to a reporter about a book I have been working on for three years in my spare time, a book that is due at the publisher next week.

What I had failed to do was prepare. Preparation in this case means distilling what the book is about and the two or three most important points you want to make about it before an interviewer asks you about it.

Shortly after yesterday’s interview, I knew just what to say.

Since I probably won’t get a second chance on radio or TV for months, please allow me to rehearse here.

The book is Too Dead To Die: A Memoir of Bataan and Beyond. I am the co-author with Steve Raymond, who actually survived the Bataan Death March and 3½ years as a POW of the Japanese.

The theme of the book is survival. Steve endured horrific hardships. He ate bugs, rats, silkworms and rotten fish guts in hopes of getting protein in his diet. He suffered cruelty, desperation, illness and indifference and witnessed death so often he became inured to it. He was in Japan when B-29s rained bombs on its major cities. And he lived to tell about it.

The Bataan story is an old one, but rising generations probably know little or nothing about it. Steve kept a diary during captivity and first drafted his memoir beginning in 1946, before time had smoothed over his memories of the experience. When I first laid eyes on the manuscript, its authenticity and immediacy jumped off the page. I knew I had been entrusted with a historical account that should be not only preserved but also published.

World War II soldiers are dying off rapidly, many without having shared their stories. This is one that will soon be told, and I am grateful for the chance to help make it happen.

Posted by Mike Pride at 06:03 PM | Comments (2)

May 24, 2006

My year as a blogger

I recently celebrated my first anniversary as a blogger by not posting an entry. Lazy me.

But this is my 149th entry since my first posting last May. I expected to do more, but life got in the way.

Here are five thoughts from a year of blogging.

1. It isn’t easy.

By nature a blog is quick writing. Readers don’t expect fine-tuning and polish. But as a journalist and writer, I cannot lower my standards too much. For one thing, my favorite high school English teacher reads my blog. To borrow a phrase from Robert Graves, she’s the reader over my shoulder.

The secret of writing well is to make it seem effortless. And that takes a lot of effort.

2. Reader response is gratifying.

I knew this from writing for the paper. But after a blog entry, it’s fun to hear from people I know and people I don’t, people from around Concord and people from any of the many and ever-shifting communities that frequent the internet.

Although fewer people write than I’d like, I’ve posted more than 200 responses during the year, so in sheer numbers readers were more productive than I was.

3. Readers like the personal stuff best.

I don’t have the emperical data to support this assertion. In fact, personal entries in the blog sometimes draw negative comments (“Save it for your diary!”) if they draw any at all. But when I hear about the blog from readers close to home, it is almost always after entries about a swim with loons, leaf-raking or my granddaughter Grace's first day of preschool.

4. Blogging is a good way to explain newsroom decision-making.

I’ve made entries here about suicide coverage, photo selection, front-page story choices and many other issues of news judgment. I like the two-way immediacy the blog provides: the ability to recount a decision almost as soon as it is made and the chance this gives readers to share their thoughts.

I wish there were more back-and-forth, but I thank the readers who have weighed in.

5. I’m still not sure what a blogger is.

I don’t read enough blogs to be an expert. Based on a year’s experience, I’d say my blog is a hybrid: an inside look at the Monitor, a little politics, some personal stuff, reflections on the news (and sports), mini-book and movie reviews.

In terms of writing the blog, several oughtas occur to me often. I oughta report more. Shoe leather is never to be underestimated. I oughta link to more other things on the web. I’m not sure any reader has ever clicked on any of the links I’ve provided, but linking seems like an important aspect of blogger world.

And, most of all, I oughta write more often.

Or maybe not, you’re thinking.

Posted by Mike Pride at 09:25 AM | Comments (2)

May 19, 2006

What makes news?

Visitors to the Monitor are often curious about how we decide what is news. Everyone knows a flood is news, but what about when there are no floods? What about when editors and reporters have some discretion over what makes it into the paper?

Between raindrops this week, editors had two meetings that might shed light on this question from very different perspectives. One dealt with our coverage of arts, entertainment and lifestyles, the other with mental health care in our city and around the state.

With leadership and good work from editors Allison Steele and Vanessa Valdes, we’ve been talking about arts and lifestyles coverage for months. It is an important phase of our content-driven redesign. Like other phases, this one began with a questionnaire asking readers what they wanted. We learned a lot about where local people go and what they do for entertainment. Readers also told us what they enjoy reading.

Next Thursday and Friday, we’ll debut the new sections, which are titled A&E and Friday. Mark Travis, a longtime Monitor editor, will have a column in Sunday’s paper giving some details about what readers can expect.

This week’s meeting was a brainstorming session. We kicked around ideas about the content of the first few weeks’ sections. While it’s important that the sections be informative, we hope readers will have as much fun reading and looking at them as we did planning them.

A somewhat different group of editors and reporters met the day before to talk about mental health coverage. This was a logical follow-up to a session several days earlier with three officials in the field, including Louis Josephson, who runs the Riverbend Community Mental Health Center in Concord.

What we learned during that session startled us – or it startled me anyway. Years ago, to its great credit, New Hampshire went from a state that was warehousing mentally ill people to a state that was a leader in community-based treatment. We are a leader no longer.

Too many mentally ill people cannot get the care they need when they need it. Too many are on long waiting lists for housing that is too scarce. Too many are homeless. Too many very young people who may be mentally ill are waiting too long to be diagnosed and treated.

Our meeting at the Monitor this week was another brainstorming session to answer this question: How can we best inform readers about this major public issue? We wound up with a good list of story ideas and a resolve to fit them in over the next several months.

I wish we could focus even more attention on this issue and move more quickly to inform readers about it. But in this business, there is always more to do than we can get done. That is both a joy and a frustration.

Posted by Mike Pride at 06:24 PM | Comments (1)

May 17, 2006

Flutie to Phelan

It is a play every New England football fan has seen so many times it is hard to know whether we really remember it. Doug Flutie to Gerard Phelan, Nov. 22, 1984.

Flutie retired the other day after a 21-year run as a pro. He is one of the class acts in sports. A Heisman Trophy winner, a 40,000-yard passer and three-time Grey Cup champion in Canada, a Patriot three times, a scrambler, a runner, a thrower, the last – or latest, at least – of the drop-kickers, a little man in a big man’s world.

Off the field, he started the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism. He was as well-spoken, wholesome, candid and interesting as an athlete can be. For New Englanders, it was hard not to root for Flutie, even when he came to town wearing the wrong colors.

For all that, it is the Miracle in Miami that fans will never forget.

He and his roommate Phelan had come to the Boston College team as a quarterback and a running back at the bottom of the depth chart. As Phelan told the Daily News at Brandeis University last year, after a linebacker knocked the wind out of him, an assistant coach asked if he wanted to switch to receiver. When the coach told him he would be fifth-string, Phelan figured it was a promotion.

Flutie and Phelan were fanatics about practice and conditioning, and by their senior year, their work ethic and talent had made them stars.

The game against Miami, the defending national champion, was a doozie. When it reached that fateful final play, Flutie had already completed 33 passes for 428 yards and Phelan had caught 10 for 178. Six seconds remained and BC trailed 45-41. Flutie lined up the Eagles at the Miami 48.

Here is how Gerald Eskenazi of the New York Times described what happened next:

“In the huddle, Flutie called the ‘Flood Tip’ play. In theory, there would be two other wide receivers besides Phelan in the end zone. Phelan’s job was to tip the ball to them. Flutie scrambled back, all the way to his 37, and then, under pressure, went to his right. . . .

“Phelan, one of several receivers lined up right of center, was 1 yard past the goal line when the ball arrived. In front of him, three defenders tumbled over one another, attempting to get to the ball. But the other receivers were not nearby. So Phelan caught the ball himself.”

In memory, it is impossible that little Doug Flutie heaved the ball so far. It is impossible how long the ball hung in the misty air. It is impossible that Phelan had broken free just past the goal line or that the ball Flutie threw was the same one that descended into Phelan’s hands. And it is impossible that Phelan’s soft hands received the ball and held it, almost seeming to do so without touching it.

Flutie will be missed, but we fans will always have Miami.

Postscript

Two entries ago, I wrote about the most popular content on Concord Monitor Online and how knowing what online readers like influences our news judgment in the daily print edition.

I used the May 10 numbers as an example. On that day, the story on our American Idol panel was at the top of the list with 2,833 readers. The second-place story had 2,295.

We’ve been watching reader use of the Monitor website closely during the floods.

On Monday, the four most popular online stories were flood-related, topped by the governor’s declaring a state of emergency, with 6,170 readers.

Yesterday, the 16 most popular stories were flood-related. Thousands of people used our interactive map of flood events. The No. 1 destination that day was “Our pictures, your pictures.” This is the collection of flood-related photographs shot by both our photographers and our readers. It provided a quick way to tool around the area and see the damage. On that day alone, 4,677 users of Concord Monitor Online did just that.

Thank you to the many visitors to the website. Y’all come back.

And thanks again to all the readers who sent us pictures. We’ll be asking for your help in the future. It’s good to know there are so many of you out there.

Posted by Mike Pride at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2006

Flooded

Thank you, Sherrel Sandoe. Thank you, Dick Hanson. You, too, Dale Roy. And Mallory Parkington, Lenny O’Keefe and Ry Amidon. Thanks to all who, like these people, contributed flood photographs to our website yesterday. And, please, keep them coming.

Today was an extraordinary day in the life of the Monitor. But then it was also extraordinary for many of our readers. Flooding forced people to evacuate their homes. Impassable roads closed many schools. The police, fire and rescue radio crackled all day long, sending public servants to deal with all manner of troubles. At St. Paul’s School, rising waters threatened historic buildings and caused what may be millions of dollars worth of damage. Students there were sent home two weeks early.

The newsroom was alive with the challenge of covering this huge story. Our photographers – Photo Editor Dan Habib, veteran staffer Ken Williams, freelancer Alan McRae and intern Brian Lehmann, who just flew in from Nebraska over the weekend and was working his first day – fanned out throughout the area. Artist Charlotte Thibault set to work on graphics to help tell the story.

Reporter Meg Heckman rode a school bus with evacuees. Annmarie Timmins toured Concord and covered the flooding at St. Paul’s School. A regional team – Walter Alarkon, Laurie Dorgan, Anne Ruderman. Joelle Farrell and Liz Walters – checked out the towns around Concord. Chelsea Conaboy, who covers the environment, reported on why the drenching rains of the last few weeks had caused such a calamity.

Editors became reporters. Allison Steele went to Hooksett, Manchester and other hard-hit areas south of our circulation area. Managing Editor Felice Belman gathered material to assemble what we call the roundup for tomorrow’s front page – our effort to put the big picture in a single story. Ralph Jimenez hit the road to collect color for tomorrow’s editorial.

Our director of product development, Mark Travis, directed the development of the online edition on the fly. All day long he and Don Hollen posted live updates on the flooding. Along with reporters in the field, staff writer Margot Sanger-Katz fed them material. Travis also used a new feature to collect photos from readers – and they responded. You can link to their contributions from our home page.

You can also link to an interactive map, which was primarily the work of Geordie Wilson, our publisher. If you click on a highlighted spot on the map, you can find out what happened there and, in some cases, link to photographs. Here, for example, is the link attached to the pointer to St. Paul’s School: “St. Paul’s School is sending students home. The rector reports significant damage to the Kittredge complex, Ohrstrom Library, Clark House, the Post Office and Hargate. The central heating plant is underwater and has been shut down. The sewage pumping station is also underwater and not functioning. See photos.”

Our night desk arrived in mid to late afternoon to figure out how to play the material our staff had gathered in tomorrow’s paper. The challenge is bigger than on most days because the story is so huge. The night editors’ job will be to decide photo play, help the reporters shape their stories and put it all together in a cogent package that encapsulates the day.

As I write, Dan Barrick is working on the front page and the local pages inside the A-section, and Nick Kershbaumer is doing the B section, with the cover page devoted to flooding coverage. The night wire editor, Jeannette Beltran, was evacuated from her apartment in Newmarket, and Belman told her to take the night off. (Beltran did feed Belman material from east of here that will be in the roundup tomorrow.) Bill Platt, pinch-hitting for Beltran, is assembling, editing and laying out the world and national coverage inside the A-section. Habib will be back after dinner to help lay out the photos.

We see our website as a great new tool for carrying out our mission of giving readers timely and reliable information that affects their lives. Stories like today’s are a crash course in learning to use Concord Monitor Online. What we can do with it, Travis told me late today, seems limited only by our imagination and by how much time we devote to it.

We’re still a small newspaper, and covering a story like this flooding is a huge challenge. We’re doing our best to use the new technology to augment the old, but the ethic that guides us remains the same: We come to work each day knowing that readers will judge us by tomorrow’s paper.

Posted by Mike Pride at 07:01 PM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2006

Voting with your fingertips

Most days, I get a report of which Monitor stories are most read on this website. You can see a less detailed version of this report on our homepage under the label “Most read stories.” The only difference in my report is that it lists the number of readers for each story. For instance, the report for Thursday began like this:

Our ‘Idol’ panel checks in (05/10/06) 2833

Who’s afraid of Stephen Colbert? (05/09/06) 2295

Ready for a mega-store in Hooksett? (05/10/06) 1326

Man sentenced in drunken driving death (05/10/06) 1234

Fire chief put on leave (05/10/06) 1154

Gas – and a niche (05/10/06) 1115

. . . and so on. My list had 20 more entries, including six obituaries and two letters to the editor. The one common denominator was that every story was local. While Concord Monitor Online is a different medium, its core mission shares one all-important value with the mission that the print newspaper has always had: Local is the franchise.

As editor, what do I learn from seeing what is most read on the website each day?

First, and you wouldn’t know this from seeing one day’s list, our online readership is going up, up, up. We like that, especially since newspaper circulation is also rising. We’re in the information business, not just the newspaper business. The more readers, the better. We’re trying to add web-only content that pushes this trend along.

Second, readers flock to stories about fires, accidents and crimes. In this, they are no different from traditional newspaper readers.

Third, shopping and other consumer-related stories are extremely well read.

Fourth, people like to know what their neighbors think about things that matter to them. That’s why the Monitor’s American Idol panel is at the top of the list. It’s why the letters that make the list tend to be the sharpest opinions on the hottest topics.

Fifth, the readership numbers are prone to the quirkiness of the web. That’s why Katy Burns’s column last Sunday on Stephen Colbert remained second most read on the website four days after it ran. Colbert’s performance at a Washington correspondents’ dinner made the talk-show circuit, and Burns’s commentary about it struck a nerve. Someone out there in cyberspace found it and shared it widely. I don’t have the data to prove it, but I’m certain most of the many thousands of web readers of the column were from out-of-state.

I read other things into the story rankings, but those are the main ones. Overall, I see the list as a good, if imperfect, guide to what readers want. And what readers want is an important component in deciding what we give them in the daily paper.

I’m aware of the danger of pandering to readers. Local television news does this to a fare-thee-well with its drumbeat of violent deaths, arrests and accidents interrupted briefly for self-promotion and feel-good features. This coverage gives viewers a sense of local life that is very different from what most of us experience every day. It also contributes precious little to the informed citizenry upon which democratic government depends.

There is no danger that the Monitor will take a similar ratings-driven approach to the newspaper. In our content, we’ll remain heavily invested in public affairs, from politics and government to education to health care to business. We’ll continue to provide a forum that allows a wide avenue for public discussion of issues that matter.

On the other hand, we can’t ignore the online readership numbers. As I suggested above, web readers are no different in their druthers from traditional newspaper readers. They are voting with their fingertips, and we’d be foolish to dismiss what they’re telling us about our content.

Posted by Mike Pride at 07:31 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2006

A dark and stormy night

Abe Rosenthal’s obituary in today’s New York Times included the adjectives “stormy,” “combative,” “self-centered,” “intimidating” and “abrasive.” This was no surprise to me. I first encountered – I won’t say met – Rosenthal in 1985, when he addressed my class of Nieman Fellows. He was the executive editor of the Times, and I was on sabbatical as editor of the Monitor, finishing an academic year of soaking up all I could at Harvard.

Rosenthal came to dinner one night, and we fellows, all journalists, expected a cordial but frank discussion with one of the lions of our profession. Instead, Rosenthal was cranky. He also probably drank a little too much wine at dinner, even while crabbing about its quality.

When we sat down afterward to talk, Rosenthal had no opening remarks. He just wanted to answer our questions and converse with us. Or so he said.

Joseph C. Goulden interviewed several of us about this session for his 1988 book, Fit to Print: A.M. Rosenthal and His Times. Rather than relate what happened that night from memory, I’ll just quote Goulden's passage about it:

“The nastiest exchange of the evening began when Ed Chen of the Los Angeles Times asked Rosenthal if he had read a recent New Republic article by Fred Barnes saying The New York Times had become neo-conservative. Rosenthal said he had not read it, then he ‘flew into a tirade about how no one had called him, and how dare anyone venture an opinion of the Times without calling him,’ Mike Pride recollected. Howard Simons [curator of the Nieman program and former managing editor of The Washington Post] sent for a copy of the article, and Rosenthal skimmed part of it. . . . This guy never talked to me, he repeated, and we would never do a thing like this in The New York Times without talking to the head guy. That kind of journalism would never appear in The New York Times.

“To the surprise of most persons in the room, Pride spoke up. The other fellows considered him the most mild-mannered member of their group, the unlikely person to challenge Rosenthal, especially given Rosenthal’s visibly mounting temper. But Pride had heard enough.

“ ‘It occurred to me that what he was saying was absurd. I said to him, ‘Hey, wait a minute, your newspaper runs play reviews, book reviews, without talking to the authors. You run political commentaries, opinion pieces, without talking to the principals. Although I haven’t read the Barnes piece, it seems to me The New Republic is a journal of opinion and commentary. . . .

“ ‘I don’t think I got all this out before he turned on me. His denunciation was loud and personal. “Maybe that’s the way you do it in your newspaper, but we never allow that kind of crap in The New York Times.”

“ ‘I tried to restate my question, but he shouted me down, so I just sat back, a little red-faced, and clammed up. . . . There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before Howard Simons jumped in to cool things down and change the subject.’

“The evening broke up, and several fellows commiserated with Pride. ‘I didn’t see much reason to take Rosenthal seriously. He had no basis for criticizing me or my paper.’ Simons called the next day. ‘He said Abe had asked him to apologize to me. Howard said Rosenthal knew he had gotten out of hand and wanted me to know he was sorry I had borne the brunt of it. I thanked Howard and told him not to lose any sleep over it.

“ ‘For me, the editor of a 21,000-circulation newspaper in the rock and ice of northern New England, this was a humorous outcome worth the moment of discomfort the night before. Here was the former managing editor of The Washington Post calling the editor of the Concord Monitor to apologize for the executive editor of The New York Times over an argument about an article neither of us had read.’ ”

In the ensuing years, I had other more positive encounters with Rosenthal, but of course this is the one I remember best. Reading his obituary today, I recognized that his testiness and imperiousness that night were typical of his authoritarian management style. Some might say that this style, combined with his ambition, brilliance, experience and principles, served him well in transforming the Times. I think he’d have been even better without it.

Posted by Mike Pride at 10:04 AM | Comments (2)

May 09, 2006

Lapdogs?

Here is a paragraph from a letter to the editor that will appear in tomorrow's Monitor responding to Katy Burns’s column in today’s paper. Burns’s subject was Stephen Colbert’s appearance at the recent White House Correspondents Association's dinner in Washington, D.C. Here is what the letter writer had to say:

“Colbert was equally justified in his criticism of the mainstream media, which enjoys full lapdog status. Never has it seemed less independent, less committed to the discovery and reporting of truth or less willing to be healthily skeptical of what it is told by those in power. In short, it accepts truthiness over actual truth. Its cravenness is confirmed by its tsunami of twaddle about whether Colbert was funny while it frantically flouts calls for self-examination.”

I had two reactions to this statement.

First and foremost, the writer is dead wrong about the lapdog press. During the last year, newspaper reporters have exposed the Jack Abramoff scandal, chased the corrupt Rep. Duke Cunningham out of office and found massive corruption in Ohio state government. Reporters have shown how badly FEMA works and how ill-served the flooded Gulf Coast was by government at all levels. They have risked their lives to get to the truth in Iraq, an increasingly difficult and dangerous assignment. They have covered the human costs of the war. More to the letter writer’s point, reporters have told the public about Bush administration policies that include a string of secret prisons and the secret wiretapping of American citizens.

Lapdogs? I don’t think so.

But . . .

It has long seemed to me that the White House press corps is much too big. I’m talking about the people who travel with the president and follow his every move. I understand why metropolitan newspapers all want to have their own reporters at the White House (ego, partly), but it is a great waste of talent.

I’ve known and respected a few White House correspondents. It’s a big job that people earn through succeeding in other beats. But when I see a huge roomful of reporters quizzing the president at a press conference, at least three-quarters of them are superfluous. Their readers would be better served if they were elsewhere digging up important information.

So, lapdogs, no; misused talent, yes.

Posted by Mike Pride at 05:39 PM | Comments (4)

May 08, 2006

Sight and sound

In June’s high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reaching for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said.
“You light the candle.”
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.

This is “Summer Kitchen” from Donald Hall’s new book of selected poems, White Apples and the Taste of Stone.

On Friday, I drove Hall down to Cambridge. This was our annual pilgrimage to a session with the Nieman Fellows at Harvard. I am the chauffeur and introducer, and Don reads poems and talks with the Fellows about poetry. “Summer Kitchen” was one of the poems he read.

During the discussion, Bob Giles, curator of the Nieman program, mentioned how much like a painting the poem seemed. To him, it was a scene told through the poet’s eyes, much as an artist might observe and paint it. I thought this was a keen observation. The poem made me think of certain Dutch and Flemish artists of centuries past. I could see Vermeer looking into that kitchen in the light of late afternoon and painting a woman licking sauce from her fingers. Like Hall’s poem, Vermeer’s paintings often portray women who seem not to know they are being watched. The artist is not so much a voyeur as an observer stopping time to preserve a domestic act that a lesser eye might not even see.

Hall’s answer to Giles surprised me. No, Hall said without a pause, he remembered how this poem had begun and what had driven it, and it had nothing to do with the scene in the poem or even with the sense of sight. For Hall, it was all about sound. Without referring to the text, he rattled off “high, light, wine, sunshine.” He spoke of how he worked “candle” and “miracle” into the rhyme scheme. He mentioned that fellow poet Hayden Carruth had suggested that he add the word “her” to the last line of the second stanza, even though it introduced an extra beat. Originally the line had read: “And tasted sauce from fingertips.”

I have heard Hall talk about sound many times. He once scoffed at a well-known biographer who had written a life of Keats without discussing the sound of his poetry. Thomas Hardy is one of Hall’s favorite poets, and he often quotes from a Hardy poem to demonstrate the way a poet uses sound.

What I liked about the discussion of “Summer Kitchen” was the way Bob Giles’s perception of it and Hall’s perception of it both seemed right to me. That is one of the joys of poetry. You can go back to a lovely little lyric like this again and again and see it in different lights. As good as it is to know that Hall was obsessed with sound while creating it, the reader needn't stop there.

Postscript

If you’ve ever wondered how our local good gray poet plays outside of New Hampshire, a couple of clues showed up in print recently. The poet Billy Collins gave Hall's White Apples and the Taste of Stone a warm and thoughtful review in the Washington Post last month. And in The New Republic, Rochelle Gurstein’s joint review of memoirs about their late spouses by Hall and Joan Didion reminded readers that the real recent masterpiece on mourning was Hall’s book of poems on Jane Kenyon’s death, Without.

Posted by Mike Pride at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2006

Naming names

For at least 20 years, I’ve been collecting funny names. Funny to me, that is. Not necessarily funny to those who have to live with them. Which is why, in spite of an itch to do so, I have not uttered a public peep about my list. Until now.

Here’s what changed. A friend forwarded me a blog about a New York lawyer named Sue Yoo. Funny, eh? At least as good as the Car Talk guys’ fictitious Dewey, Cheetham and Howe, and Sue Yoo is an actual lawyer.

The blog about Sue Yoo suggested that there is a whole class of names, called aptronyms, that inadvertently describe their bearers’ occupations.

After adding Sue Yoo to my list, I quickly spun through it in search of other aptronyms. I found a few. And I found some close calls. And I thought, heck, let the readers decide.

Ernest Shepherd, the onetime Concord minister, is surely an aptronym. At the time of Carol Cordial’s listing, she worked in support services in the governor’s office; assuming she was indeed cordial, her name might be an aptronym.

But what about the board of plumbing nominee Wayne A. Fishpaw or the beer industry lobbyist William Pitcher? Or nurses Cheryl Woundy and Nicy Ladd? Or Lt. Col. R. Geoffrey Pine-Coffin, who led a British parachute unit on D-Day?

I’m pretty certain Texas A&M economist Tom Saving is an aptronym, but I wonder about Hope Butterworth, the angel who has run the Concord soup kitchen for so many years.

On my list, there is a starting nine for a baseball team, chosen entirely for their names. I don’t think they’re aptronyms. Closer to onomatopoeia but not quite that either. For one thing, only two of them are or were real ballplayers. Can you guess which two? Here’s the lineup:

Buzz Chew
Spud Patch
Biff Poggi
Chop Pough
J.J. Putz
Roman Knuckles
Rinker Buck
Frank Bonk
Bart P. Snarf

And, warming up in the bullpen, Wacko Hurley.

(The manager is Brick P. Storts III.)

There is the travel writer Sandy Shore, which may be an aptronym, and the PR specialist Rebecca Wind. Because the names of copy editors Karl Muench and Gary Ruff doubtless do not reflect the quality of their work, they are probably not aptronyms.

Crystal Ball might be an aptronym if she read palms. Alas, she is – or was – a North Country restaurateur. Polly Ester, a lifeguard, could be one, too, but you’d have to see the suit.

Then there are John Minor Wisdom, the judge, Kelly Blizzard, the spokesperson for highways, and Woody Fogg, who tracked hurricanes for the state. And how about Caroline Welcome, the cemetery trustee? Not quite aptronyms, do you think?

There are situational rather than occupational near-aptronyms, too. I think of Maureen Nix, who protested a spending article at a school meeting, and Lance Lalumiere, who was arrested for arson.

That’s enough for now. Maybe more names another day, if the opportunity presents itself. I’ve become more selective over the years, but my list is nearly 200 names long. As I said, I collect them for fun and don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. On the other hand, there are plenty of categories – a list of mellifluous names like Florville Larmony and Miranda Fulleylove, for example. Or, shall we say, Victorian names like Cantwell F. Muckenfuss III, Cromwell Schubarth and Tewksbury (Tooky) Crapster. Or names with risqué connotations like . . .

Well, as I said, maybe another time.

Posted by Mike Pride at 01:46 PM | Comments (3)

May 02, 2006

May 01, 2006

Questions 7 and 8

Two questions posed last week in a blog response and in letters to the editor:

No. 7, from the blog: “I know that newspapers are concerned about attracting young readers. That was my thought when I got over my shock at seeing an article on the front page of the Concord Monitor announcing that a readers’ panel had been formed to comment on the American Idol competition. C’mon – since when should the Monitor stoop to this kind of pandering?”

I disagree with the premise of this question. There has long been more to the Monitor’s front page than war, politics and crime. We always try to put at least one story out there to lighten readers’ day.

Sure, the American Idol panel is frothy stuff. But we know from listening to readers that the opinions of their friends and neighbors are important content. And American Idol is a hit with the young at heart as well as the young.

It’s hard for me to fathom, but 47.5 million calls were dialed to vote after last week’s competition. I’d never call myself, but I do like the show. I’ve learned from it that to become a star takes more than just being able to carry a tune in the shower. Singing isn’t easy even for people with talent. In this celebrity culture of ours, the show also demonstrates how people grow or recede in the spotlight. My favorite episode was the American Songbook two weeks ago, and my thinking is that the competition will come down to a duel between Katharine McPhee and Chris Daughtry.

Maybe the front-page play of the Monitor’s panel is pandering – pandering to the editor. But it isn’t pandering to readers.

Question No. 8, also from a front page last week: Why did you allow a picture showing the body of a drowned man to appear on page one?

This was the case of a man who left his car late one night, jumped over a fence and fell down a rocky cliff into the Suncook River, where he drowned. In the photograph, shot from high above the scene, rescuers in wetsuits were about to retrieve his body, which was just below the surface.

The main reason we chose the picture was that it showed better than any other we had what had happened – and what was happening. The cliff, the river, the sad work of the rescuers: It was all there.

And one more thing: The body was hard to see. You had to look very closely to see it. When editors reviewed the photograph and others at the news meeting the day of the drowning, many of us could not make out the body until Photo Editor Dan Habib pointed it out to us. Even then, people could barely see it.

To use the photo was something of a close call, but we decided it was a grim picture that conveyed grim news, not a picture that sensationalized it.

The news decision was as simple as that, but another thought lurked in the back of my mind. Almost every spring in and around Concord, people (usually young men) do foolish things and wind up drowning in a river or lake. If, after taking a close look at this sobering image, just one young person thinks twice about being reckless on or near the water, using the picture would be worth whatever objections readers raised to its publication.

That is not why we used the picture, but as the editor, I admit to having the thought.

Posted by Mike Pride at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

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Concord Monitor, New Hampshire