Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Morning Update XXVIII: The Dead Tree Edition


McSweeney's Issue 33
The San Francisco Panorama
Here.

Over at The Columbia Journalism Review, Miles Corbin pens a fascinating look at the journalism of the young Gabriel García Márquez (via Ezra Klein at The Washington Post):

In 1955, eight crew members of a Colombian naval destroyer in the Caribbean were swept overboard by a giant wave. Luis Alejandro Velasco, a sailor who spent ten days on a life raft without food or water, was the only survivor. The editor of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador assigned the story to a twenty-seven-year-old reporter who had been dabbling in fiction and had a reputation as a gifted feature writer: Gabriel García Márquez.

The young journalist quickly uncovered a military scandal. As his fourteen-part series revealed, the sailors owed their deaths not to a storm, as Colombia’s military dictatorship had claimed, but to naval negligence. The decks of the Caldas had been stacked high with television sets, washing machines, and refrigerators purchased in the U.S. These appliances, which were being ferried to Colombia against military regulations, had caused the ship to list dangerously. And because the Caldas was so overloaded, it was unable to maneuver and rescue the sailors.

In addition, the life rafts on board were too small and carried no supplies, and the Navy called off the search for survivors after only four days.

By the time the series ended, El Espectador’s circulation had almost doubled. The public always likes an exposé, but what made the stories so popular was not simply the explosive revelations of military incompetence. García Márquez had managed to transform Velasco’s account into a narrative so dramatic and compelling that readers lined up in front of the newspaper’s offices, waiting to buy copies.

I think the public may have just liked all the really graphic and awkward descriptions of underage sex.


I joke, I joke.


Intrigued? Go, read.


You may or may not have heard that San Francisco is without a newspaper. Oberlin has three; suck it San Fran! McSweeney's, a literary journal based in San Francisco, is also responsible for The Believer and McSweeney's Rectangulars, a publishing company.


Well, now, they've published a 320 page love letter to the newspaper industry: a full Sunday issue of a non-existent newspaper, and it's one of the more interesting reads I've had. I haven't finished it, but it's sitting on my table, and every day I read a few more pages. It's absolutely fascinating.


Of course, it isn't a viable business model--it cost about $20, which is probably a little more than people are willing to pay for a newspaper daily. Of course, there is something to what they've been doing. Full, two broadside-sized sheet spreads with images and diagrams are something you can't get on the internet. Large-scale design and layout are things you can't get on the internet.


If the newspaper industry is going to survive in dead-tree form, then they need to have things that the internet can't have.


Intrigued? Go to the library and read.


Speaking of San Francisco newspapers, I read Richard Rodriguez's amazing essay in the November 2009 Harper's about the rise and fall of the San Francisco newspaper. It's part memoir, part historical essay, and part elegy, and, since it's Rodriguez (who also wrote Brown and a host of other good books), its prose is unfailingly moving.


He writes:


A scholar I know, a woman who is ninety-six years old, grew up in a tin shack on the American prairie, near the Canadian border. She learned to read from the pages of the Chicago Tribune in a one-room schoolhouse. Her teacher, who and no more than an eight-grade education, had once been to Chicago--had been to the opera! Women in Chicago went to the opera with bare shoulders and long gloves, the teacher imparted to her pupils. Because the teacher had once been to Chicago, she subscribed to the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, which came on the train by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest.

Several generations of children learned to read from that text.

Beautiful, yes. Sentimental, yes, but not altogether illuminating on what it means to have--or not have--a newspaper. Of course, that's just the opening paragraph. There's more:


The day after I was born in San Francisco, my tiny existential fact was noted in several of the papers that were barked through the downtown streets. In truth, the noun "newspaper" is something of a misnomer. More than purveyors only of news, American newspapers were entrusted to be keepers of public record--papers were daily or weekly cumulative almanacs of tabular information. A newspaper's morgue was scrutable evidence of the existence of a city. Newspapers published obituaries and they published birth announcements. Thy published wedding announcements and bankruptcy notices. They published weather forecasts (even in San Francisco, where on most days he weather is optimistic and unremarkable--fog clearing by noon). They published the fire department's log and high school basketball scores. In a port city like San Francisco, there were listings of the arrivals and departures of ships. None of this constituted news exactly; it was a record of a city's mundane progress.

Two things of note. (1) Go mimesis! (2) This function can be much more easily accomplished on the internet. Unfortunately, to aggregate it requires resources. Who has the resources to do such a thing now? He continues:


In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance had placed proximate to them. So, I suppose, it is incomplete to notice that the San Francisco Chronicle has become remiss in its obituary department. Of four friend of mine who died recently in San Francisco, not one wanted a published obituary or any other public notice taken of his absence. This seems to me a serious abrogation of the responsibility of living in a city and as good an explanation as any of why newspapers are dying. All four of my friends requested cremation; three wanted their ashes consigned to the obscurity of Nature. Perhaps the cemetery is as doomed in America as the newspaper, and for the same reason: we do not imagine death as a city.

We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. ... We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with "I." ... The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

...

Another friend, a journalist born in India, who has heard me connect newspapers with place once too often, does not dispute my argument, but neither is he troubled by it: "If I think of what many of my friends and I read these days, it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and forwarded in bits and pieces on email--a story from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffington Post, something from the Times of India, from YouTube. It is like a giant newspaper being assembled at all hours, from every corner of the world, still with news but no roots in a place. Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore."

So what is lost? Only bricks and mortar. (The contemptuous reply.) Cities are bricks and mortar. Cities are bricks and mortar and bodies. In Chicago, woman go to the opera with bare shoulders.

I hope my excessive excerpting, clips and all, retains some of the beauty and insight of Rodriguez's essay. For that matter, I hope it retains status as fair use.


I remember, growing up, that The Minneapolis Star-Tribune would come on rainy days wrapped in plastic bags: blue, white, or yellow. We used those to pick up our dogs shits when we took him on walks. I remember they would come bound by a rubber band, and we would peel the band off and keep it next to the innumerable others in a drawer--the only real record of receipt that stood the test of time. We still have a drawer with rubber bands--hundreds maybe. Except the Sunday issue--it was too big to use a rubber band. It came heavy and flat, and carrying it in with my young and untrained hands, I would often let sections drop from the middle--coupons and comics and supplementals.


I remember on summer mornings, my father would take the paper outside on the deck and read it and eat his cereal. I remember the spats over who gets which section. My mother always felt my father took the A section too quickly. My father would slink away with it. When caught, he gave it up and took the business section. Sometimes, he took the crossword, which only made the situation worse.


What does it mean that Oberlin has three papers? Freshman year, my friend Ellen partied until she vomited, and Safety and Security came and made sure she was all right. When The Oberlin Review came out, she clipped her entry in the Security log and taped it to her wall. It became a ritual for us all.


Perhaps place and paper are interconnected and perhaps newspapers make cities as much as cities make news.


Techno-puritanism that wars with the body must also resist the weight of paper. I remember that weight. It was the weight of the world, carried by boys.

...

In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers--the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three of them together equal what I remember.

Intrigued? Go, read (it may be subscription only, in which case go to a library; it's worth it).