Crime of the Century (Spokes Person Division)

HONOLULU, Hawaii--"A 20-year-old man who tried to rob a man at a Kalihi bus stop Saturday night was arrested riding a stolen bicycle, police said." 
   This mystifying lede appeared in the first item of the "Police Blotter" in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser yesterday. The story went on: 
   "A 21-year-old man refused to give up his property at the bus stop at 9:45pm, police said.
   "He was then assaulted by the 20-year-old man, said police.
   "The suspect fled but was stopped a short distance away, riding a bicycle that had been reported stolen from a 57-year-old woman at a nearby store, police said.
   "The man resisted arrest but was subdued by officers, police said."
   The "Police Blotter" is endemic to newspapers in small communities. It calls to mind the sort of place in which everyone knows everyone and, when not on the job, the police chief sells used cars and trucks. 
   "Police Blotter" items often are written by the most junior member of a paper's staff. This person is learning, on the job, how to write in journalese, a language which resembles English not hardly a'tall. 
   For this bicycle-related item, the green reporter evidently wasn't aware that after noting in the first graf that police were the source of information ("... riding a stolen bicycle, police said"), he or she no longer needed do so. It is understood that all following facts derive from the same source unless otherwise indicated. 
   Still, our earnest correspondent showed a bit of flair in the third sentence. After twice writing "police said," he/she stepped out on a limb to write "said police." But reason swiftly reasserted itself. The nascent Hunter S. Thompson-esque rule-smashing newcomer once more prudently used the more conventional "police said." 
   That being said, we have nothing but good wishes for our intrepid if inexperienced reporter, even if he/she only exists in the fevered First of All imagination. To enter upon a career in journalism at this juncture in the Fourth Estate's enduring fadeout is brave beyond compare. Soon all journalists will be writing short pieces using sticks on leaves which they'll float down the river to the next village. But it will be called "Tweeting." 
   Oh, wait. Never mind.
   If it turns out our "inexperienced" reporter is in truth a broken-down alcoholic writing "Police Blotter" items in the final days of a long and storied career, well, so much the better. Good on ya, old-timer. You were there when dinosaurs roamed the land. First of All, a proud dinosaur, salutes you. 
   One last thing: robbing a man while riding a stolen bicycle? Seriously? 
   The burglars of yore would be aghast. 

The Fading Power of the Fourth Estate (Shoo-bee-doo-bee-doo Division)

SACRAMENTO, Ca.--It is not exactly, well, news that falling revenues and flagging readership continue to send the newspaper industry yet deeper into its current merciless tailspin.
   The decline has propelled newspaper executives to experiment with wide-ranging strategies to retain readers, including... well, lots of things, all of which we are simply too lazy to look up. 
   One paper evidently has decided to take an aggressively avant-garde approach: at the Sacramento Bee, reporters now write in Esperanto. 
   At least that's the conclusion to be drawn from reading the lede of a Dec. 24 Bee story reporting heavy snowfall in the Lake Tahoe area: 
   "Bing Crosby should come to Lake Tahoe. With a fresh heap of snow blanketing the landscape, the classic 'White Christmas' crooner couldn't have dreamed it any better. Nor could the area's tourist industry." 

   It would be cruel to unmask the miscreant who wrote this. It is the holiday season; we are determined to look kindly upon our brethren and sistern. For the sake of conversation let us call the Bee reporter by a randomly chosen name, one unassuming in the extreme, a name like, oh, we don't know, maybe something such as, let's say, Ed Fletcher (efletcher@sacbee.com).
   Mr. Fletcher may go unmasked; his lede shall not. It should be placed, like a severed head, atop a tall stick and paraded from town to village to burgh and back as a perfect example of exactly what not to do should you one day find yourself in the unenviable position of having to top a snow-related story with a catchy opening paragraph. 
   First off: Bing Crosby? Really? That rustling you hear is the sound of tens of thousands of Americans, ages sixteen to fortyish, scratching their heads as they murmur, "Bing who?" (Answer: the third most popular movie actor of all time, by box office numbers. Nevertheless...)

   But of course Mr. Fletcher name-checked Mr. Crosby. Recent studies have shown that the average age of newspaper readers is a hundred and sixty-five; the average age of reporters is roughly double that. 
   In recognition of these alarming facts, newspaper bigwigs have employed all kinds of tactics in the past decade to get those laptoppatizin', Tweetereezin', Facebookatatin', text-sendin' young folks to visit the ink-stained horse 'n buggy barn. Just last month, with an eye to creating an staff-wide understanding of the "youth demographic," New York Times editor Andrew Rosenthal ordered employees to be dosed with psilocybin and forced to wave glow sticks, suck on pacifiers and dance without respite for sixteen hours to drum 'n bass hits of the nineties. 

   But try as these media leaders might to hip things up, the Ed Fletchers of the world continue to fire bullets into their desperately dancing feet. When dreaming of a captivating snow-story lede, the best Ed Fletcher can do is to conjure Bing ("Who?") Crosby, a performer popular two and one-half centuries ago and best known for his mellifluous voice and his penchant--no offense to Crosby friends, family and fans across the globe--for beating his children.

   For an Ed Fletcher lede, however, a Bing Crosby reference is a mere warmup. What follows seems, on the face of it, a rather pleasant suggestion: that Mr. Crosby "should come to Lake Tahoe." Mr. Crosby used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area; no doubt he enjoyed many Tahoe trips. It is not difficult to believe that he would be game for another were it not for the fact that he is, in truth, entirely dead. 
   Crosbyesque Tahoe trips are therefore out of the question even were Mr. Crosby willing to strap skis to the maggot-chewed bones of his feet. 
   Mr. Fletcher, alas, soldiers on. Why should Mr. Crosby, dead or alive, come to Lake Tahoe? "With a fresh heap of snow blanketing the landscape, the classic 'White Christmas' crooner couldn't have dreamed it any better." 
   The way that sentence is constructed, if that sentence can be said to have been "constructed" (it cannot), suggests that Mr. Crosby himself has a fresh heap of snow blanketing some... landscape. The word "landscape" occasionally is used euphemistically to refer to, for example, parts of the body that would best be left unmentioned in polite society were there still such a thing as polite society. It immediately strikes First of All that there are most definitely "landscapes" of Mr. Crosby's badly decomposed body that we simply do not wish to picture (e.g., the anus). 
   Ahem, ahem. All right, children, gather round. Uncle First of All is now going to decode, phrase by phrase, the rest of that sentence for you:


   *"...the classic..." In addition to being a famous movie star, Mr. Crosby was an extremely popular singer. But when Mr. Fletcher writes that Mr. Crosby was a "classic" singer, he is not, kids, referring to what you think of as classic; that is to say classic rock, the music of the sixties that all but killed the careers of the Mr. Crosbys of the land. No, Mr. Fletcher means "classic" in a way that would make sense only to your average newspaper reader, age one hundred and sixty-five.

   *"...'White Christmas'..." A reference to a song, written by Irving Berlin in 1942, the lyrics of which set a nostalgic, elegiac tone: "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones I used to know." Mr. Crosby sang the song in the movie musical Holiday Inn. (Executives at Paramount Pictures nixed his plan to perform it in blackface. They felt that audiences would simply be baffled by the sight of an African-American Bing Crosby singing, "And may all your Christmases be white.") The World War II-era song became a hit with soldiers overseas and their families at home. Mr. Crosby's version was so popular that a movie of the same name was made in 1954. It starred Mr. Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and a dancing gorilla. No, wait: that gorilla part is wrong. It was a dancing dwarf. 
   *"...crooner..." The nineteen forties and fifties singing style known as "crooning" was practiced by velvet-voiced male singers (Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Jack Jones, et cetera) whose job was to: a.) seduce chicks; x.) cut a compelling, if compellingly bland, fashion figure; and 12.) create music that was the aural equivalent of Valium--just the ticket for a generation rattled by World War II and by the thunder in the distance that would come to be known as rock 'n' roll. 
   *"...couldn't have dreamed it any better." See "White Christmas" lyrics, above. 


   Well. We have now spent roughly eleven hundred words dissecting--flaying?--poor Mr. Fletcher's no doubt rush-written lede. We can hardly be said to be carrying the Christmas spirit, white or otherwise. So we will leave well enough--and bad enough--alone, and wish you all a happy holiday season. May your  snow always arrive in fresh heaps and your landscapes always be, uh... well-showered?

---------------------------------
PS: We are painfully aware that our little blackface joke was in poor taste. We apologize. 
   Thank God Mr. Crosby habitually displayed more discernment than we do. He would never have stooped so low even as to joke about blackface, much less appear in it, because... 
   Wait a minute. 
   In the 1943 film Dixie, Mr. Crosby played a young Kentucky songwriter who tries to bust into the big time first in New Orleans and then in New York. At some point during this cinematic tale, Mr. Crosby appeared thus (ha-ha, ho-ho, we win): 

   
   
   
   
   

Crime of the Century (Questionable Reporting Division)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – A man who was discovered to have stood in for his twin brother in a May 4 court appearance was sentenced to six months in jail for “direct criminal attempt” – an offense a judge witnesses in a court.

  Marcus Mauceri, who is thirty, claimed under oath to be his brother, Matthew, and agreed to be fingerprinted to establish his identity.

  When the procedure revealed the truth, Marcus said he’d appeared to aid his brother, whom he knew would be late.

   This is all you need to know about this story, but it is nothing you’d know if you read the first seven paragraphs of May 5 story posted on tampabay.com, the Web site of the St. Petersburg Times:

  Something just didn’t seem right to attorney Jimmy Thomas when he talked to his client before his fraud trial Tuesday.

  The 30-year-old man did not seem to remember basic aspects of the case they had discussed.

  Thomas knew that his client, Matthew Mauceri, had a twin brother named Marcus.

  Thomas had represented both men in court, and the two often changed their appearances – sometimes [wearing] beards or goatees, sometimes clean-shaven.

  Could the man in court Tuesday be the twin?

  Thomas faced an ethical pinch few lawyers have encountered: Should he reveal his suspicion that his client was an imposter?

  Ultimately he did, and his suspicion was correct.

  Only in the eighth paragraph do we encounter what in journalism is known as the “nut” graph – the paragraph with the story's true news nugget:

  Marcus Mauceri had taken the place of his brother, Matthew, at the trial. The reason: He claimed his brother was flying in from out of state and couldn’t make it to the courthouse on time.

  In news reporting, the “lead” – a story’s first paragraph – is meant to include that nugget. More than one press critic has lamented the inroads made by flash storytelling into simple who-what-where-when-why-how reporting. One wrote:

  Among the major menaces to American journalism today (and there are so many that it hardly seems worth while even beginning this little article) is the O.Henry-Irvin Cobb tradition. According to this pretty belief, every reporter is potentially master of the short-story, and because of it we find Human Interest raising its ugly head in seven out of every eight news columns and a Human Document being turned out every time Henry H. Mackle of 1356 Grand Boulevard finds a robin or Mrs. Rasher Feiman of 425 West Forty-Ninth Street attacks the scissors grinder.

  Copy readers in the old days used to insist that all the facts in the story be bunched together in the opening paragraph. This never made for a very moving chronicle, but at least you got the idea of what was going on. Under the new system, where every reporter has his eye on George Horace Lorimer, you first establish your atmosphere, then shake a pair of doves out of the handkerchief, round off your lead with a couple of bars from a Chopin etude, and finally, in the next to last paragraph, divulge the names and addresses and what it was that happened. …

  Most of the trouble began about ten years ago when the Columbia School of Journalism began unloading its graduates on what was then the N.Y. Tribune (retaining the best features of neither). …

  Fine writing in news stories was actually encouraged by the management and daily prizes were offered for the best concealed facts. The writer of this article was a reporter at the time – “the worst reporter in New York City” the editors affectionately called him – and one day he won the prize with a couple of sticks on the funeral of Ada Rehan. This story consisted of two paragraphs of sentimental contemplation of old-time English comedy with a bitterly satirical comparison with modern movie comedy, and a short paragraph at the end saying that Ada Rehan was buried yesterday. Unfortunately the exigencies of make-up necessitated the cutting of the last paragraph; so the readers of the Tribune never did find out what inspired this really beautiful tribute to somebody. …

  A picture of the City Room of [one New York paper], by one who has never been there, would disclose a dozen or so nervous word artists, each sitting in a cubicle furnished to represent an attic, sipping at black coffee, with now and then a dab of cocaine, writing and tearing up, writing and tearing up, pacing back and forth in what the French call (in French) le travail du style. One feels that back copies of [that paper] should be bound and saved for perusal on rainy days when the volumes of “Harpers Round Table” have begun to pall.

  The writer quips that soon such a style will creep even into the reporting of overseas news, and concludes:

  When this has happened, we can have newstickers installed in our homes and let the newspapers give themselves over entirely to the belles lettres.

  This was written by Robert Benchley for The New Yorker.

  In 1925.
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ADDENDUM (9 May 2010): As incisive as is Mr. Benchley's dissection, things changed at the magazine in the next decade, according to Genius in Disguise, Thomas Kunkel's 1995 biography of The New Yorker founder and editor Harold Wallace Ross. 
  Kunkel writes that there was a "happy development that distinguished The New Yorker of the late Thirties. This was the explosion of reporting talent at the magazine, and the growing prominence of their journalism. These new voices belonged to young writers, most with newspaper experience but all with freer, more interpretive writing styles that was typical of the dailies. They drew on the fiction techniques of narrative, character development, shading and irony to tell their stories - stories that just happened to be true. Their so-called literary journalism was a hybrid of a very high order." 
  These writers, Kunkel adds, "probably did the most to advance the innovative, literate reportage that became a New Yorker trademark. They set the standard for all the great New Yorker reporters who followed, as well as the so-called New Journalists of the Sixties." Kunkel is referring to writers such as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson, among many others. 
  So, you see, one man's disdain is another decade's Big Bang. 

Yesterday's Fish Wrap Today

   We just read Nicholas Lemann's Dec. 7, 2009 New Yorker review of the autobiographical My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, by former London Sunday Times editor Harold Evans. (Yes, Dec. 7. First of All is catching up on its reading. So sue us.) 
   The piece contains a startling passage sure to jolt the deadened nerve-ends of any seasoned journalist. Contextualizing Evans' early-1970s ascension to the Sunday Times editor's chair and his encouragement of assiduous investigative journalism, Lemann writes: 


   All this was happening at roughly the same time as Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the early glories of magazine "new journalism" in the United States. Evans and the people he worked with were major contributors to a super-charged new conception of what journalism could be: at once powerful and devoted to the powerless, literary and intellectual, glamorous and dutiful, quasi-governmental in its status but in perpetual opposition to government. "No intelligence system, no bureaucracy, can offer the information provided by free competitive reporting," Evans exclaims at one point [in the book]. 


   We put down the magazine and wiped a (glycerine crocodile) tear from our eye. So there was, after all, a reason that tons of us entered journalism in the mid- to late-seventies. (Four words: All The President's Men.) 
   Well, whatever. Things change. As Lemann later rightly points out, "One can think of 'My Paper Chase' as a potent exercise in escapist nostalgia - as an intoxicant that's bound to produce, at least in journalists, the irresistible high of revisiting the halcyon era of the mainstream media." He adds, "Surely, if [Evans] were young today, he would be operating in the digital world, and surely that world is still full of nascent Harold Evanses, as determined to rise as he was." 
   Four words: Drudge Report Huffington Post