The Longreads Blog

Is It Ever Too Late to Pursue a Dream?

Brendan Burden

Matt Giles | LongreadsMarch 2019 | 28 minutes (6,730 words)

Dry heaves racked Dan Stoddard’s body as he bent his 6-foot-8, 325-plus-pound frame awkwardly over a toilet, shaking as he vomited up the Gatorade and other fluids he had consumed in an attempt to stave off dehydration. The 39-year-old hadn’t slept well in days, and even when he did manage some shut-eye, it was only for a few hours at a time before beginning the first of his two six-hour shifts driving a bus for Ottawa’s OC Transpo public transit system. Stoddard had never felt this exhausted, but he couldn’t rest — down seven points at halftime, his team needed him.

It only took the first 20 minutes of this early February 2018 game against Seneca, one of the Ontario Colleges Athletic Association’s top teams, for Stoddard to realize his body was fully gassed. Algonquin had lost 10 of its first 14 games, so the final outcome — an 80-71 defeat — was immaterial, but Stoddard had joined the team to finally act on the lifetime of regrets he had accumulated, and he didn’t want to add another disappointment to the ledger.

In September 2017, Stoddard enrolled as a freshman at Algonquin College, one of Canada’s largest public colleges. Not long after, the accounting major joined the basketball team. But Stoddard wasn’t just acting on a whim, a loosely conceived midlife crisis outfitted in size 14 Air Jordan 8s: Stoddard, who is known around campus as “Old Man Dan,” has serious hoop dreams. “You can call it lunacy,” he told me over tea with honey at Tim Hortons on campus. “I’m not saying I’ll make the NBA or go play overseas, but I want to get to a point where I can do it.”

He knew others would think this experiment was crazy — during the Thunders’ preseason schedule, Stoddard heard the laughter from opposing coaches and players — and he even realized that his endeavor reeked of desperation, but he never felt the pull of quitting. “If I’m not talented enough, I can live with that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to put in the effort to be the best player I can be,” he told me. “I don’t want to be wasting time hemming and hawing thinking about it.”

Most of Stoddard’s teammates are at least two decades younger than he is; at first, they thought of him as something of a sideshow, but Stoddard’s commitment to training earned him respect: “They see me on Instagram at the gym at 5 a.m., and they see me in practice every day, and they understand how dedicated I am to the team.”

According to Trevor Costello, Algonquin’s head coach, “All Dan cares about is getting better and better. This fucker is constantly in pain. He sprained his ankle before last Christmas, and after a twelve-hour shift driving a bus, his foot down on the ground the whole time, his foot was the size of a watermelon. He’s just so dedicated. Fuck, if he was a real stud, he’d get us thirty points a game. But he’s working — he’ll be better next year.”

Photo by Brendan Burden

Yusuf Ali, Seneca’s guard, didn’t initially understand Stoddard’s passion. He was taken aback when the two teams first met in November — “[Stoddard] looked so old, it was very confusing,” he told me — but before the February rematch, he congratulated Stoddard: “I told him it was an honor to play against him. I know people out there are scared of the risks to pursue their dreams, so he is a hero in my eyes. This doesn’t happen every day.”

At the start of his freshman season, Stoddard experienced something of a 15-minute burst of fame in the Canadian press; several outlets featured his journey for the same reason — his story touches the very base emotions of our human core — but then the novelty of his quest wore off. Now, he’s just a player with immense hustle in a changing body still growing accustomed to the grueling athletic demands of a college athlete.

‘All Dan cares about is getting better and better. This fucker is constantly in pain.’

The now 40-year-old is more than a publicity stunt, and although he’s taken it to the extreme, Stoddard’s career is part of a trend of competitive athletics taking hold among adults well into and beyond their 30s: Of the 2,500 or so adults surveyed for  a 2015 study commissioned by Harvard, NPR, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, only a quarter said they’d played or participated in some sport in the past year. But of that quarter, a large majority played once a week or more. The majority play mostly because they enjoy doing so, but 23 percent said they played mainly for health reasons. Stoddard’s quest is emblematic of this shift. Not only does he plan to keep attending and playing for Algonquin for the next three years, after which point he will be 42 years old, but he has also already lost nearly 150 pounds pounds in a 12-month period and hopes to drop nearly 200 pounds total by the time he graduates.

Where Stoddard differs from those other midlife warriors, though, is that he would actually like to continue playing beyond Algonquin — to explore the possibility of becoming a pro athlete. Stoddard claims ex-pros have been encouraging, and his stats, were they those of a 19-year-old are promising: Through 21 games of his sophomore season, the center averaged 6.4 points and nearly five rebounds per game, and his field goal percentage (54.7) was  fourth-best in the conference. During a November win against Georgian College, Stoddard barely missed a double-double (10 points, nine rebounds), hustling up the court in a high-paced (77 possessions) game, which he could never have done when he joined the team.

But still, the facts are glaring. Stoddard has spent decades willing his body across eastern Ontario; stabilizing badly sprained ankles with tightly bound boots while working a 100-hour week at a construction site; falling 22 feet from a ladder and breaking his hand, only to cut the cast off to avoid unemployment. Stoddard estimates he has had about 60 jobs since graduating high school; construction, sewer maintenance, a bouncer who once fought off a knife-wielding assailant — you name it. The work has put an untold amount of stress on his body. It has, in other words, been through the wear and tear that everyday life requires.

“To jump in at the top rung without developing one’s body fully is a recipe for disaster,” said Andre Deloya, a retired sports trainer with the Minnesota Timberwolves. “The predictive formula is not rosy. Our bodies are developing, evolving, and positively growing until the age of twenty-five, which is the peak of the mountain. After that, we all start to deteriorate.”

Stoddard is aware of the risks, but to his mind, they make his current moon shot all the more enticing: Who could have possibly conjured up a tale of a bus driver to the Algonquin hardwood (and potentially beyond)? “The reality is that when growing up, you see the NBA, and that’s where you want to be,” he said to me when I met him in February 2018. “It’s the best, and you strive for the best. You don’t just want to be the guy no one remembers. That’s all I’m trying to do.”

He added, “So what if it happened at forty-two? Who gives a shit. I’ve always said age is a number, but that’s bullshit. We all know it’s old, especially when it comes to basketball. But if you can play, you can play, and I just want to have the definitive answer, to have someone tell me I don’t have the talent to make it at the highest level. It’s just to know.”

***

According to his Ottawa-Carleton (OC) Transpo colleagues, Stoddard’s a “big teddy bear,” someone who “shoots the shit” in the locker room between his daily bus routes. “I’m always honest and I don’t beat around the bush,” he told me, detailing his childhood in what he calls the boondocks of Ontario, helping his father to build houses for a burgeoning community on what previously had been acres and acres of farmland. Stoddard had a sheltered upbringing: If he wanted to visit friends, he biked several miles to the next town, which explains why he didn’t take to basketball until high school. “I was a teenage kid doing nothing,” he explained, adding that until the Vancouver Grizzlies and the Toronto Raptors expanded north of the border in the mid ’90s, he had never watched a basketball game on television.

Stoddard started playing a bit early in high school, but in 11th grade he sprouted and added several inches to his frame. While he lacked coordination and his understanding of the game was limited, a player with his size — by then 6-foot-8 — was very much in demand. “My center of gravity was thrown off,” he said, “and after six months of being messed up, I had to retrain my body’s balance. I was just a tall guy.” Stoddard flunked out of high school before he could improve upon his burgeoning basketball skillset, and his biggest regret, he told his family, was that he didn’t play organized basketball beyond high school. That failure gave way to a chip on his shoulder, one fueled by a sole thought: Why didn’t he succeed on the court? No matter the highs in his life, the nagging perception remained. I spent a long part of my life not knowing what I wanted to do, or how I wanted to be perceived, or the legacy I want to leave behind,” he said.

“Once I achieve a limitation or a goal or an understanding of what I’m doing, I get bored quickly,” he continued. “I tend to drive myself a thousand miles a minute.” And off the court, that chip was a hindrance — dropping out of college after a semester or two, he rebuffed his father’s offer to take over the family’s construction business. “It felt like he was encroaching on me, and I couldn’t be bothered,” said Stoddard.

Stoddard forced himself to do things for the health of his own family — working those 100-hour work weeks to not only provide for his son and daughter but also to help pay for his wife, Amanda, to get a nursing degree in palliative care. Basketball was his one outlet that provided unfettered joy; it was his lone constant and getaway from the demands of life. “You fend for yourself, and you take care of yourself,” he said. But on the court or at the playground, he wasn’t a construction worker, a sewer company employee, a garbageman, a nightclub bouncer, or a husband married at 20 years old and father of two teenagers.

Photo by Brendan Burden

He could be found on the playgrounds of eastern Ontario at least four nights a week, finally “doing something for me, and not for the family.” All those reps had an added bonus, transforming Stoddard into an immovable center with an unguardable skillset. His hulking frame — “I told people that I weighed 386 pounds, but that’s only because it was the last number on our scale, so the notion I weighed somewhere around 400 pounds isn’t far-fetched” — belied a pick-and-pop nimbleness with a soft touch around the basket. By 2017, he was “crushing” guys with backgrounds more advantageous than his.

Each summer, Stoddard participates in a high school alumni tournament. It’s very low-key: #BallIsLife during the two-day round-robin setting, burgers and beers at night. Stoddard’s team — a roster of mid-’90s graduates, the group’s name is “We’re So Old It Doesn’t Even Matter” — was typically good enough for a win or two but unable to compete with others in their athletic prime. But few teams had a player Stoddard’s size, and even fewer had a player of Stoddard’s size who, prior to the tournament’s tip, was balling a dozen-plus hours a week.

As Costello watched Stoddard torch players — some at least two decades younger than the hulking center — the coach jokingly blurted out, ‘Look at the size of you! You could play for my team.’

When he isn’t coaching the Thunder, Costello supports himself through refereeing (he also works at an elementary school as an educational assistant and spends his nights overseeing a group home), and he was refereeing Stoddard’s alumni tournament that summer of 2017 when he first spotted the ultimate diamond on the blacktop. Stoddard’s play was a revelation to the coach, who was about to coach his 18th season at a school that had once been the crown jewel of the Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association but recently tumbled down the rankings. “The best Canadians who don’t cross the border to play college basketball play in the OUA,” said Costello. “That’s the dream for most kids”.

He added, “The last few years haven’t been good. I don’t want to demean it, but Algonquin is a last chance resort. It’s tough to get kids.” Three players Costello expected to join the team bailed before ever arriving on the Ottawa campus, and his lead recruiter had taken a new job, which prevented him from working Algonquin’s sidelines.

As Costello watched Stoddard torch players — some at least two decades younger than the hulking center — the coach jokingly blurted out, “Look at the size of you!” recalled Stoddard. “You could play for my team.” The more he thought about it, the more the coach began to formulate a different sort of recruiting pitch. Yes, Stoddard was clearly overweight, but few teams in Algonquin’s conference had a taller player. On a team whose prospects were already dim for the upcoming season, inviting Stoddard to try out didn’t seem much of a gamble. “I’m all about winning games,” explained Costello. “Dan was far from a sideshow. I’m hardly getting paid enough to do this as a goof. Did I know he would ultimately end up starting for us? That might be pushing it. His upside is far from that of a twenty-two-year-old, but his brain is working so much harder.”
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The Fertility Doctor’s Secret Children

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As a fertility doctor in Indiana in the ’80s, Donald Cline helped bring many children into the world, though no one knew he was donating his own sperm to the cause. While this is clearly immoral, as Sarah Zhang reports at The Atlantic, Cline was only prosecuted for obstruction of justice — for attempting to cover up his crimes — because there is no law in Indiana or in many other states that prohibits a physician from using his own sperm in fertility treatment.

The people now sending her messages said they were Cline’s secret biological children. They said their parents had also been treated by Cline. They said that decades ago, without ever telling his patients, Cline had used his own sperm to impregnate women who came to him for artificial insemination.

According to her DNA, Woock, too, was one of his children.

In the time since Woock’s half siblings got in touch with her, they have broken the news dozens more times. The children Cline fathered with his patients now number at least 48, confirmed by DNA tests from 23andMe or Ancestry.com. (Several have a twin or other siblings who likely share the same biological father but haven’t been tested.) They keep in touch through a Facebook group. New siblings pop up in waves, timed perversely after holidays like Christmas or Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, when DNA tests are given as well-intentioned gifts.

Like Woock, many of her new siblings learned that they were donor-conceived from a DNA test. (Woock’s parents eventually told her they’d gone to Cline for donor insemination, but they’d had no idea he was the donor.) And in their shock, many also thought the initial messages explaining the situation were part of a scam. But eventually they found news clips laying out that, yes, this doctor deceived his patients, and yes, he used his own sperm, and yes, this is really happening.

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The Power of a Neighborhood’s Name

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Sometime in the late 2000s, Google Maps started calling Buffalo, New York’s Fruit Belt neighborhood “Medical Park,” even though long-time residents didn’t call it that. Home to Buffalo’s black working class, Fruit Belt residents feared this digital erasure was part of the city’s attempt at rebranding in order to sell it out from under them. For Medium’s tech channel, OneZero, journalist Caitlin Dewey writes about how data threatened this African American community, how residents are fighting to save it, and what Google Maps’ renaming reveals about the flawed ways data collection works. Many people deny that the renaming is part of any calculated rebranding, but what is clear is that data is not neutral. Neither are those who use Google Maps.

Worst of all, in May 2018, a young realtor named Kim Santana posted a glamorous Instagram post of herself standing on the corner of High and Lemon Streets, holding a large coffee cup. “Whether you call it the fruit belt or the medical park neighbourhood, this is a great opportunity to be part of the buffalo renaissance!” her caption read. (“I really believe that the Medical Campus is going to bring some attention to the formerly known Fruit Belt neighborhood,” Santana told me by email.)

Residents who saw the image seethed. India Walton, the co-founder of the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust, ticks off the many ways the Instagram post offended her: the tone, the use of the reviled Medical Park name, the presence of a “chai latte or whatever.” Walton includes the image in a presentation she gives to other activists around the country about the dangers of gentrification. The post proves, Walton says, that developers and realtors seized on Google’s mistake to market the Fruit Belt to rich white kids.

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How the Guardian Went Digital

Newscast Limited via AP Images

Alan Rusbridger | Breaking News | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | November 2018 | 31 minutes (6,239 words)

 

In 1993 some journalists began to be dimly aware of something clunkily referred to as “the information superhighway” but few had ever had reason to see it in action. At the start of 1995 only 491 newspapers were online worldwide: by June 1997 that had grown to some 3,600.

In the basement of the Guardian was a small team created by editor in chief Peter Preston — the Product Development Unit, or PDU. The inhabitants were young and enthusiastic. None of them were conventional journalists: I think the label might be “creatives.” Their job was to think of new things that would never occur to the largely middle-aged reporters and editors three floors up.

The team — eventually rebranding itself as the New Media Lab — started casting around for the next big thing. They decided it was the internet. The creatives had a PC actually capable of accessing the world wide web. They moved in hipper circles. And they started importing copies of a new magazine, Wired — the so-called Rolling Stone of technology — which had started publishing in San Francisco in 1993, along with the HotWired website. “Wired described the revolution,” it boasted. “HotWired was the revolution.” It was launched in the same month the Netscape team was beginning to assemble. Only 18 months later Netscape was worth billions of dollars. Things were moving that fast.

In time, the team in PDU made friends with three of the people associated with Wired. They were the founders, Louis Rossetto, and Jane Metcalfe; and the columnist Nicholas Negroponte, who was based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who wrote mindblowing columns predicting such preposterous things as wristwatches which would “migrate from a mere timepiece today to a mobile command-and-control center tomorrow . . . an all-in-one, wrist-mounted TV, computer, and telephone.”

As if.

Both Rossetto and Negroponte were, in their different ways, prophets. Rossetto was a hot booking for TV talk shows, where he would explain to baffled hosts what the information superhighway meant. He’d tell them how smart the internet was, and how ethical. Sure, it was a “dissonance amplifier.” But it was also a “driver of the discussion” towards the real. You couldn’t mask the truth in this new world, because someone out there would weigh in with equal force. Mass media was one-way communication. The guy with the antenna could broadcast to billions, with no feedback loop. He could dominate. But on the internet every voice was going to be equal to every other voice.

“Everything you know is wrong,” he liked to say. “If you have a preconceived idea of how the world works, you’d better reconsider it.”

Negroponte, 50-something, East Coast gravitas to Rossetto’s Californian drawl, was working on a book, Being Digital, and was equally passionate in his evangelism. His mantra was to explain the difference between atoms — which make up the physical artifacts of the past — and bits, which travel at the speed of light and would be the future. “We are so unprepared for the world of bits . . . We’re going to be forced to think differently about everything.”

I bought the drinks and listened.

Over dinner in a North London restaurant, Negroponte started with convergence — the melting of all boundaries between TV, newspapers, magazines, and the internet into a single media experience — and moved on to the death of copyright, possibly the nation state itself. There would be virtual reality, speech recognition, personal computers with inbuilt cameras, personalized news. The entire economic model of information was about to fall apart. The audience would pull rather than wait for old media to push things as at present. Information and entertainment would be on demand. Overly hierarchical and status-conscious societies would rapidly erode. Time as we knew it would become meaningless — five hours of music would be delivered to you in less than five seconds. Distance would become irrelevant. A UK paper would be as accessible in New York as it was in London.

Writing 15 years later in the Observer, the critic John Naughton compared the begetter of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with the seismic disruption five centuries earlier caused by the invention of movable type. Just as Gutenberg had no conception of his invention’s eventual influence on religion, science, systems of ideas, and democracy, so — in 2008 — “it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought.”

The entire economic model of information was about to fall apart.

And so I decided to go to America with the leader of the PDU team, Tony Ageh, and see the internet for myself. A 33-year-old “creative,” Ageh had had exactly one year’s experience in media — as an advertising copy chaser for The Home Organist magazine — before joining the Guardian. I took with me a copy of The Internet for Dummies. Thus armed, we set off to America for a four-day, four-city tour.

In Atlanta, we found the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), which was considered a thought leader in internet matters, having joined the Prodigy Internet Service, an online service offering subscribers information over dial-up 1,200 bit/second modems. After four months the internet service had 14,000 members, paying 10 cents a minute to access online banking, messaging, full webpage hosting and live share prices.

The AJC business plan envisaged building to 35,000 or 40,000 by year three. But that time, they calculated, they would be earning $3.3 million in subscription fees and $250,000 a year in advertising. “If it all goes to plan,’ David Scott, the publisher, Electronic Information Service, told us, ‘it’ll be making good money. If it goes any faster, this is a real business.”

We also met Michael Gordon, the managing editor. “The appeal to the management is, crudely, that it is so much cheaper than publishing a newspaper,” he said.

We wrote it down.

“We know there are around 100,000 people in Atlanta with PCs. There are, we think, about one million people wealthy enough to own them. Guys see them as a toy; women see them as a tool. The goldmine is going to be the content, which is why newspapers are so strongly placed to take advantage of this revolution. We’re out to maximize our revenue by selling our content any way we can. If we can sell it on CD-ROM or TV as well, so much the better.”

“Papers? People will go on wanting to read them, though it’s obviously much better for us if we can persuade them to print them in their own homes. They might come in customized editions. Edition 14B might be for females living with a certain income.”

It was heady stuff.

From Atlanta we hopped up to New York to see the Times’s online service, @Times. We found an operation consisting of an editor plus three staffers and four freelancers. The team had two PCs, costing around $4,000 each. The operation was confident, but small.

The @Times content was weighted heavily towards arts and leisure. The opening menus offered a panel with about 15 reviews of the latest films, theatre, music, and books – plus book reviews going back two years. The site offered the top 15 stories of the day, plus some sports news and business.

There was a discussion forum about movies, with 47 different subjects being debated by 235 individual subscribers. There was no archive due to the fact that — in one of the most notorious newspaper licensing cock-ups in history — the NYT in 1983 had given away all rights to its electronic archive (for all material more than 24 hours old) in perpetuity to Mead/Lexis.

That deal alone told you how nobody had any clue what was to come.

We sat down with Henry E. Scott, the group director of @Times. “Sound and moving pictures will be next. You can get them now. I thought about it the other day, when I wondered about seeing 30 seconds of The Age of Innocence. But then I realized it would take 90 minutes to download that and I could have seen more or less the whole movie in that time. That’s going to change.”

But Scott was doubtful about the lasting value of what they were doing — at least, in terms of news. “I can’t see this replacing the news- paper,” he said confidently. “People don’t read computers unless it pays them to, or there is some other pressing reason. I don’t think anyone reads a computer for pleasure. The San Jose Mercury [News] has put the whole newspaper online. We don’t think that’s very sensible. It doesn’t make sense to offer the entire newspaper electronically.”

We wrote it all down.

“I can’t see the point of news on-screen. If I want to know about a breaking story I turn on the TV or the radio. I think we should only do what we can do better than in print. If it’s inferior than the print version there’s no point in doing it.”

Was there a business plan? Not in Scott’s mind. “There’s no way you can make money out of it if you are using someone else’s server. I think the LA Times expects to start making money in about three years’ time. We’re treating it more as an R & D project.”


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From New York we flitted over to Chicago to see what the Tribune was up to. In its 36-storey Art Deco building — a spectacular monument to institutional self-esteem — we found a team of four editorial and four marketing people working on a digital service, with the digital unit situated in the middle of the newsroom. The marketeers were beyond excited about the prospect of being able to show houses or cars for sale and arranged a demonstration. We were excited, too, even if the pictures were slow and cumbersome to download.

We met Joe Leonard, associate editor. “We’re not looking at Chicago Online as a money maker. We’ve no plans even to break even at this stage. My view is simply that I’m not yet sure where I’m going, but I’m on the boat, in the water — and I’m ahead of the guy who is still standing on the pier.”

Reach before revenue.

Finally we headed off to Boulder, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rockies, where Knight Ridder had a team working on their vision of the newspaper of tomorrow. The big idea was, essentially, what would become the iPad — only the team in Boulder hadn’t got much further than making an A4 block of wood with a “front page” stuck on it. The 50-something director of the research centre, Roger Fidler, thought the technology capable of realizing his dream of a ‘personal information appliance’ was a couple of years off.

Tony and I had filled several notebooks. We were by now beyond tired and talked little over a final meal in an Italian restaurant beneath the Rocky Mountains.

We had come. We had seen the internet. We were conquered.

* * *

Looking back from the safe distance of nearly 25 years, it’s easy to mock the fumbling, wildly wrong predictions about where this new beast was going to take the news industry. We had met navigators and pioneers. They could dimly glimpse where the future lay. Not one of them had any idea how to make a dime out of it, but at the same time they intuitively sensed that it would be more reckless not to experiment. It seemed reasonable to assume that — if they could be persuaded to take the internet seriously — their companies would dominate in this new world, as they had in the old world.

We were no different. After just four days it seemed blindingly obvious that the future of information would be mainly digital. Plain old words on paper — delivered expensively by essentially Victorian production and distribution methods — couldn’t, in the end, compete. The future would be more interactive, more image-driven, more immediate. That was clear. But how on earth could you graft a digital mindset and processes onto the stately ocean liner of print? How could you convince anyone that this should be a priority when no one had yet worked out how to make any money out of it? The change, and therefore the threat, was likely to happen rapidly and maybe violently. How quickly could we make a start? Or was this something that would be done to us?

In a note for Peter Preston on our return I wrote, “The internet is fascinating, intoxicating . . . it is also crowded out with bores, nutters, fanatics and middle managers from Minnesota who want the world to see their home page and CV. It’s a cacophony, a jungle. There’s too much information out there. We’re all overloaded. You want someone you trust to fillet it, edit it and make sense of it for you. That’s what we do. It’s an opportunity.”

Looking back from the safe distance of nearly 25 years, it’s easy to mock the fumbling, wildly wrong predictions about where this new beast was going to take the news industry.

I spent the next year trying to learn more and then the calendar clicked on to 1995 — The Year the Future Began, at least according to a recent book by the cultural historian W. Joseph Campbell, who used the phrase as his book title twenty years later. It was the year Amazon.com, eBay, Craigslist, and Match.com established their presence online. Microsoft spent $300m launching Windows 95 with weeks of marketing hype, spending millions for the rights to the Rolling Stones hit “Start Me Up,” which became the anthem for the Windows 95 launch.

Cyberspace — as the cyber dystopian Evgeny Morozov recalled, looking back on that period — felt like space itself. “The idea of exploring cyberspace as virgin territory, not yet colonized by governments and corporations, was romantic; that romanticism was even reflected in the names of early browsers (‘Internet Explorer,’ ‘Netscape Navigator’).”

But, as Campbell was to reflect, “no industry in 1995 was as ill-prepared for the digital age, or more inclined to pooh-pooh the disruptive potential of the Internet and World Wide Web, than the news business.” It suffered from what he called “innovation blindness” — “an inability, or a disinclination to anticipate and understand the consequences of new media technology.”

1995 was, then, the year the future began. It happened also to be the year in which I became editor of the Guardian.

* * *

I was 41 and had not, until very recently, really imagined this turn of events. My journalism career took a traditional enough path. A few years reporting; four years writing a daily diary column; a stint as a feature writer — home and abroad. In 1986 I left the Guardian to be the Observer’s television critic. When I rejoined the Guardian I was diverted towards a route of editing — launching the paper’s Saturday magazine followed by a daily tabloid features section and moving to be deputy editor in 1993. Peter Preston — unshowy, grittily obstinate, brilliantly strategic — looked as if he would carry on editing for years to come. It was a complete surprise when he took me to the basement of the resolutely unfashionable Italian restaurant in Clerkenwell he favored, to tell me he had decided to call it a day.

On most papers the proprietor or chief executive would find an editor and take him or her out to lunch to do the deal. On the Guardian — at least according to tradition dating back to the mid-70s — the Scott Trust made the decision after balloting the staff, a process that involved manifestos, pub hustings, and even, by some candidates, a little frowned-on campaigning.

I supposed I should run for the job. My mission statement said I wanted to boost investigative reporting and get serious about digital. It was, I fear, a bit Utopian. I doubt much of it impressed the would-be electorate. British journalists are programmed to skepticism about idealistic statements concerning their trade. Nevertheless, I won the popular vote and was confirmed by the Scott Trust after an interview in which I failed to impress at least one Trustee with my sketchy knowledge of European politics. We all went off for a drink in the pub round the back of the office. A month later I was editing.

“Fleet Street,” as the UK press was collectively called, was having a torrid time, not least because the biggest beast in the jungle, Rupert Murdoch, had launched a prolonged price war that was playing havoc with the economics of publishing. His pockets were so deep he could afford to slash the price of The Times almost indefinitely — especially if it forced others out of business.

Reach before revenue — as it wasn’t known then.

The newest kid on the block, the Independent, was suffering the most. To their eyes, Murdoch was behaving in a predatory way. We calculated the Independent titles were losing around £42 million (nearly £80 million in today’s money). Murdoch’s Times, by contrast, had seen its sales rocket 80 per cent by cutting its cover prices to below what it cost to print and distribute. The circulation gains had come at a cost — about £38 million in lost sales revenue. But Murdoch’s TV business, BSkyB, was making booming profits and the Sun continued to throw off huge amounts of cash. He could be patient.

But how on earth could you graft a digital mindset and processes onto the stately ocean liner of print.

The Telegraph had been hit hard — losing £45 million in circulation revenues through cutting the cover price by 18 pence. The end of the price war left it slowly clawing back lost momentum, but it was still £23 million adrift of where it had been the previous year. Murdoch — as so often — had done something bold and aggressive. Good for him, not so good for the rest of us. Everyone was tightening their belts in different ways. The Independent effectively gave up on Scotland. The Guardian saved a million a year in newsprint costs by shaving half an inch off the width of the paper.

The Guardian, by not getting into the price war, had “saved” around £37 million it would otherwise have lost. But its circulation had been dented by about 10,000 readers a day. Moreover, the average age of the Guardian reader was 43 — something that pre-occupied us rather a lot. We were in danger of having a readership too old for the job advertisements we carried.

Though the Guardian itself was profitable, the newspaper division was losing nearly £12 million (north of £21 million today). The losses were mainly due to the sister Sunday title, the Observer, which the Scott Trust had purchased as a defensive move against the Independent in 1993. The Sunday title had a distinguished history, but was hemorrhaging cash: £11 million losses.

Everything we had seen in America had to be put on hold for a while. The commercial side of the business never stopped reminding us that only three percent of households owned a PC and a modem.

* * *

But the digital germ was there. My love of gadgets had not extended to understanding how computers actually worked, so I commissioned a colleague to write a report telling me, in language I could understand, how our computers measured up against what the future would demand. The Atex system we had installed in 1987 gave everyone a dumb terminal on their desk — little more than a basic word processor. It couldn’t connect to the internet, though there was a rudimentary internal messaging system. There was no word count or spellchecker and storage space was limited. It could not be used with floppy disks or CD-ROMs. Within eight years of purchase it was already a dinosaur.

There was one internet connection in the newsroom, though most reporters were unaware of it. It was rumored that downstairs a bloke called Paul in IT had a Mac connected to the internet through a dial-up modem. Otherwise we were sealed off from the outside world.

Some of these journalist geeks began to invent Heath Robinson solutions to make the inadequate kit in Farringdon Road to do the things we wanted in order to produce a technology website online. Tom Standage — he later became deputy editor of the Economist, but then was a freelance tech writer — wrote some scripts to take articles out of Atex and format them into HTML so they could be moved onto the modest Mac web server — our first content management system, if you like. If too many people wanted to read this tech system at once the system crashed. So Standage and the site’s editor, Azeem Azhar, would take it in turns sitting in the server room in the basement of the building rebooting the machines by hand — unplugging them and physically moving the internet cables from one machine to another.

What would the future look like? We imagined personalized editions, even if we had not the faintest clue how to produce them. We guessed that readers might print off copies of the Guardian in their homes — and even toyed with the idea of buying every reader a printer. There were glimmers of financial hope. Our readers were spending £56 million a year buying the Guardian but we retained none of it: the money went on paper and distribution. In the back of our minds we ran calculations about how the economics of newspapers would change if we could save ourselves the £56 million a year “old world” cost.

By March 1996, ideas we’d hatched in the summer of 1995 to graft the paper onto an entirely different medium were already out of date. That was a harbinger of the future.

On top of editing, the legal entanglements sometimes felt like a full-time job on their own. Trying to engineer a digital future for the Guardian felt like a third job. There were somehow always more urgent issues. By March 1996, ideas we’d hatched in the summer of 1995 to graft the paper onto an entirely different medium were already out of date. That was a harbinger of the future. No plans in the new world lasted very long.

It was now apparent that we couldn’t get away with publishing selective parts of the Guardian online. Other newspapers had shot that fox by pushing out everything. We were learning about the connectedness of the web — and the IT team tentatively suggested that we might use some “offsite links” to other versions of the same story to save ourselves the need to write our own version of everything. This later became the mantra of the City University of New York (CUNY) digital guru Jeff Jarvis — “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.”

We began to grapple with numerous basic questions about the new waters into which we were gingerly dipping our toes.

Important question: Should we charge?

The Times and the Telegraph were both free online. A March 1996 memo from Bill Thompson, a developer who had joined the Guardian from Pipex, ruled it out:

I do not believe the UK internet community would pay to read an online edition of a UK newspaper. They may pay to look at an archive, but I would not support any attempt to make the Guardian a subscription service online . . . It would take us down a dangerous path.

In fact, I believe that the real value from an online edition will come from the increased contact it brings with our readers: online newspapers can track their readership in a way that print products never can, and the online reader can be a valuable commodity in their own right, even if they pay nothing for the privilege.

Thompson was prescient about how the overall digital economy would work — at least for players with infinitely larger scale and vastly more sophisticated technology.

What time of day should we publish?

The electronic Telegraph was published at 8 a.m. each day — mainly because of its print production methods. The Times, more automated, was available as soon as the presses started rolling. The Guardian started making some copy available from first edition through to the early hours. It would, we were advised, be fraught with difficulties to publish stories at the same time they were ready for the press.

Why were we doing it anyway?

Thompson saw the dangers of cannibalization, that readers would stop buying the paper if they could read it for free online. It could be seen as a form of marketing. His memo seemed ambivalent as to whether we should venture into this new world at all:

The Guardian excels in presenting information in an attractive easy to use and easy to navigate form. It is called a “broadsheet newspaper.” If we try to put the newspaper on-line (as the Times has done) then we will just end up using a new medium to do badly what an old medium does well. The key question is whether to make the Guardian a website, with all that entails in terms of production, links, structure, navigational aids etc. In summer 1995 we decided that we would not do this.

But was that still right a year later? By now we had the innovation team — PDU — still in the basement of one building in Farringdon Road, and another team in a Victorian loft building across the way in Ray Street. We were, at the margins, beginning to pick up some interesting fringe figures who knew something about computers, if not journalism. But none of this was yet pulling together into a coherent picture of what a digital Guardian might look like.

An 89-page business plan drawn up in October 1996 made it plain where the priorities lay: print.

We wanted to keep growing the Guardian circulation — aiming a modest increase to 415,000 by March 2000 — which would make us the ninth-biggest paper in the UK — with the Observer aiming for 560,000 with the aid of additional sections. A modest investment of £200,000 a year in digital was dwarfed by an additional £6 million cash injection into the Observer, spread over three years.

As for “on-line services” (we were still hyphenating it) we did want “a leading-edge presence” (whatever that meant), but essentially we thought we had to be there because we had to be there. By being there we would learn and innovate and — surely? — there were bound to be commercial opportunities along the road. It wasn’t clear what.

We decided we might usefully take broadcasting, rather than print, as a model — emulating its “immediacy, movement searchability and layering.”

If this sounded as if we were a bit at sea, we were. We hadn’t published much digitally to this point. We had taken half a dozen meaty issues — including parliamentary sleaze, and a feature on how we had continued to publish on the night our printing presses had been blown up by the IRA — and turned them into special reports.

It is a tribute to our commercial colleagues that they managed to pull in the thick end of half a million pounds to build these websites. Other companies’ marketing directors were presumably like ours — anxious about the youth market and keen for their brands to feel “cool.” In corporate Britain in 1996, there was nothing much cooler than the internet, even if not many people had it, knew where to find it or understood what to do with it.

* * *

The absence of a controlling owner meant we could run the Guardian in a slightly different way from some papers. Each day began with a morning conference open to anyone on the staff. In the old Farringdon Road office, it was held around two long narrow tables in the editor’s office — perhaps 30 or 40 people sitting or standing. When we moved to our new offices at Kings Place, near Kings Cross in North London, we created a room that was, at least theoretically, less hierarchical: a horseshoe of low yellow sofas with a further row of stools at the back. In this room would assemble a group of journalists, tech developers and some visitors from the commercial departments every morning at about 10 a.m. If it was a quiet news day we might expect 30 or so. On big news days, or with an invited guest, we could host anything up to 100.

A former Daily Mail journalist, attending his first morning conference, muttered to a colleague in the newsroom that it was like Start the Week — a Monday morning BBC radio discussion program. All talk and no instructions. In a way, he was right: It was difficult, in conventional financial or efficiency terms, to justify 50 to 60 employees stopping work to gather together each morning for anything between 25 and 50 minutes. No stories were written during this period, no content generated.

But something else happened at these daily gatherings. Ideas emerged and were kicked around. Commissioning editors would pounce on contributors and ask them to write the thing they’d just voiced. The editorial line of the paper was heavily influenced, and sometimes changed, by the arguments we had. The youngest member of staff would be in the same room as the oldest: They would be part of a common discussion around news. By a form of accretion and osmosis an idea of the Guardian was jointly nourished, shared, handed down, and crafted day by day.

You might love the Guardian or despise it, but it had a definite sense of what it believed in and what its journalism was.

It led to a very strong culture. You might love the Guardian or despise it, but it had a definite sense of what it believed in and what its journalism was. It could sometimes feel an intimidating meeting — even for, or especially for, the editor. The culture was intended to be one of challenge: If we’d made a wrong decision, or slipped up factually or tonally, someone would speak up and demand an answer. But challenge was different from blame: It was not a meeting for dressing downs or bollockings. If someone had made an error the previous day we’d have a post-mortem or unpleasant conversation outside the room. We’d encourage people to want to contribute to this forum, not make them fear disapproval or denunciation.

There was a downside to this. It could, and sometimes did, lead to a form of group-think. However herbivorous the culture we tried to nurture, I was conscious of some staff members who felt awkward about expressing views outside what we hoped was a  fairly broad consensus. But, more often, there would be a good discussion on two or three of the main issues of the day. We encouraged specialists or outside visitors to come in and discuss breaking stories. Leader writers could gauge the temperature of the paper before penning an editorial. And, from time to time, there would be the opposite of consensus: Individuals, factions, or groups would come and demand we change our line on Russia, bombing in Bosnia; intervention in Syria; Israel, blood sports, or the Labor leadership.

The point was this: that the Guardian was not one editor’s plaything or megaphone. It emerged from a common conversation — and was open to internal challenge when editorial staff felt uneasy about aspects of our journalism or culture.

* * *

Within two years — slightly uncomfortable at the power I had acquired as editor — I gave some away. I wanted to make correction a natural part of the journalistic process, not a bitterly contested post-publication battleground designed to be as difficult as possible.

We created a new role on the Guardian: a readers’ editor. He or she would be the first port of call for anyone wanting to complain about anything we did or wrote. The readers’ editor would have daily space in the paper — off-limits to the editor — to correct or clarify anything and would also have a weekly column to raise broader issues of concern. It was written into the job description that the editor could not interfere. And the readers’ editor was given the security that he/she could not be removed by the editor, only by the Scott Trust.

On most papers editors had sat in judgment on themselves. They commissioned pieces, edited and published them — and then were supposed neutrally to assess whether their coverage had, in fact, been truthful, fair, and accurate. An editor might ask a colleague — usually a managing editor — to handle a complaint, but he/she was in charge from beginning to end. It was an autocracy. That mattered even more in an age when some journalism was moving away from mere reportage and observation to something closer to advocacy or, in some cases, outright pursuit.

Allowing even a few inches of your own newspaper to be beyond your direct command meant that your own judgments, actions, ethical standards and editorial decisions could be held up to scrutiny beyond your control. That, over time, was bound to change your journalism. Sunlight is the best disinfectant: that was the journalist-as-hero story we told about what we do. So why wouldn’t a bit of sunlight be good for us, too?

The first readers’ editor was Ian Mayes, a former arts and obituaries editor then in his late 50s. We felt the first person in the role needed to have been a journalist — and one who would command instant respect from a newsroom which otherwise might be somewhat resistant to having their work publicly critiqued or rebutted. There were tensions and some resentment, but Ian’s experience, fairness and flashes of humor eventually won most people round.

One or two of his early corrections convinced staff and readers alike that he had a light touch about the fallibility of journalists:

In our interview with Sir Jack Hayward, the chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, page 20, Sport, yesterday, we mistakenly attributed to him the following comment: “Our team was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.” Sir Jack had just declined the offer of a hot drink. What he actually said was: “Our tea was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.” Profuse apologies.

In an article about the adverse health effects of certain kinds of clothing, pages 8 and 9, G2, August 5, we omitted a decimal point when quoting a doctor on the optimum temperature of testicles. They should be 2.2 degrees Celsius below core body temperature, not 22 degrees lower.

But in his columns he was capable of asking tough questions about our editorial decisions —  often prompted by readers who had been unsettled by something we had done. Why had we used a shocking picture which included a corpse? Were we careful enough in our language around mental health or disability? Why so much bad language in the Guardian? Were we balanced in our views of the Kosovo conflict? Why were Guardian journalists so innumerate? Were we right to link to controversial websites?

In most cases Mayes didn’t come down on one side or another. He would often take readers’ concerns to the journalist involved and question them — sometimes doggedly — about their reasoning. We learned more about our readers through these interactions; and we hoped that Mayes’s writings, candidly explaining the workings of a newsroom, helped readers better understand our thinking and processes.

It was, I felt, good for us to be challenged in this way. Mayes was invaluable in helping devise systems for the “proper” way to correct the record. A world in which — to coin a phrase —  you were “never wrong for long” posed the question of whether you went in for what Mayes termed “invisible mending.” Some news organizations would quietly amend whatever it was that they had published in error, no questions asked. Mayes felt differently: The act of publication was something on the record. If you wished to correct the record, the correction should be visible.

But we had some inkling that the iron grip of centralized control that a newspaper represented was not going to last.

We were some years off the advent of social media, in which any error was likely to be pounced on in a thousand hostile tweets. But we had some inkling that the iron grip of centralized control that a newspaper represented was not going to last.

I found liberation in having created this new role. There were few things editors can enjoy less than the furious early morning phone call or email from the irate subject of their journalism. Either the complainant is wrong — in which case there is time wasted in heated self-justification; or they’re right, wholly or partially. Immediately you’re into remorseful calculations about saving face. If readers knew we honestly and rapidly — even immediately — owned up to our mistakes they should, in theory, trust us more. That was the David Broder theory, and I bought it. Readers certainly made full use of the readers’ editor’s existence. Within five years Mayes was dealing with around 10,000 calls, emails, and letters a year — leading to around 1,200 corrections, big and small. It’s not, I think, that we were any more error-prone than other papers. But if you win a reputation for openness, you’d better be ready to take it as seriously as your readers will.

Our journalism became better. If, as a journalist, you know there are a million sleuth-eyed editors out there waiting to leap on your tiniest mistake, it makes you more careful. It changes the tone of your writing. Our readers often know more than we do. That became a mantra of the new world, coined by the blogger and academic Dan Gillmor, in his 2004 book We the Media8 but it was already becoming evident in the late 1990s.

The act of creating a readers’ editor felt like a profound recognition of the changing nature of what we were engaged in. Journalism was not an infallible method guaranteed to result in something we would proclaim as The Truth — but a more flawed, tentative, iterative and interactive way of getting towards something truthful.

Admitting that felt both revolutionary and releasing.

***

Excerpted from Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger. Published Farrar, Straus and Giroux November 27, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Alan Rusbridger. All rights reserved.

Longreads Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

Our Words Will Save Us and Set Us Free

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Jackson Bliss | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,149 words)

1.

In 2002, when I was living in Portland, Oregon, I got a call from a friend of a friend who worked for an immigration lawyer. One of her colleagues needed a French interpreter in a pinch. Could I help out? I met with the asylum lawyer and a refugee who I’ll call Yacoub to go over a few things in his family history and adapt to each other’s accents. Yacoub and I were listening to words we already knew, but couldn’t always recognize coming out of each other’s mouths. He had a Mauritanian accent and like most West Africans, he rolled his R’s. According to most French speakers, I had a Belgian or Swiss accent. As we spoke, we became victims of dialect, urgency, and defamiliarization, but we pushed on with our flawed cultural exchange because his life depended on it.

On the day of Yacoub’s asylum interview, we met in the lobby of the I.N.S. building. The air was stagnant like in every government building, filled with the weight of human words, confessed and unspoken, official and unwritten, stamped and erased. After all, this federal agency was a de facto dictionary of American citizenship, defining Americanness in the sense that what was called American and what wasn’t (i.e., who became American and who didn’t), was continuously defined, interpreted, and redefined here, not by linguists, philology scholars, or grammarians, but by civil servants carrying suspiciously thin folders that reduced human struggle to bullet points. Above the x-ray machine, the dual portraits of Bush and Cheney practically snickered at me. There could have been dialogue bubbles coming from their mouths that said, Good luck kid. This country isn’t a free ride and we don’t give a shit about Mauritanians unless they bring over a corporation. I grabbed my satchel from the X-Ray machine and took the elevator to the 9th floor, my feet tapping the ground to break up the silence. As Yacoub’s translator, silence meant loss and loss meant deportation. For both of our sakes, I vowed to fight that silence and defeat my own self-consciousness to the very end, so that I could be the advocate he needed. This moment forced me to reconsider the power of my own words.

2.

Eight years earlier, after spending an entire summer in college working on a coming-of-age novel and some shorter nonfiction pieces, my mom mentioned my prodigious output to my brother, who got annoyed and blurted out that my writing was “just a bunch of words.” That slogan became forgotten artillery ordnance in a proxy war of identity, language, and vocation until the first explosion. The delayed violence of those words was disguised to me until the exact moment I tripped over them unwittingly. For seven years, whenever I started seeing myself as a writer, even for a brief moment, I’d hear his barb again and watch the world around me detonate into rubble. The fact that my brother and I have been extremely close since I was in junior high didn’t diffuse the explosiveness of his words. I was too vulnerable to criticism and afraid of failure. I was sensitive to his dismissal because my writing career had always been suspect at best and aspirational at worst. It was only after a stint in the Peace Corps and a series of volunteer gigs working with refugees that I learned the power, the necessity, and the redemption of language, the way it could literally help some people achieve cultural reincarnation in America.
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A Rare Toy Heist, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Original Star Wars action figures at the Monroe County Local History Room in Sparta, Wis. (Peter Thomson/La Crosse Tribune via AP)

In the world of Star Wars memorabilia and toy collecting, one of the rarest collectibles is said to be a 1979 prototype action figure: a Boba “Rockett” Fett that came with a spring-loaded backpack that fired a plastic missile. But it was never released. After a child choked on another toy with a similar missile, toy company Kenner scrapped the design — but not before several of these original figures had already been made.

Today, an enthusiastic Star Wars fan community buys, sells, and collects “Lucasian memorabilia,” often going to great lengths to track down rare items. When Zach Tann got a text in 2017 from a fellow collector, Carl Cunningham, about purchasing this coveted Rocket Fett, things began to get fishy.

At Popular Mechanics, Alexander Huls recounts one of the biggest scandals in Star Wars collecting history.

Tann was one purchase away from a unicorn. The offer was too good to pass up, and Tann paid Cunningham the asking price. “I’d been working my butt off for four years, and I felt like, finally, I found my guy that’s going to hook me up with a lot of great stuff,” Tann says. “This is what every collector dreams of.”

Cunningham was away in California at the time but promised he’d get Tann his collectible once he returned home. But a little over a week later, Tann’s phone vibrated with another notification, this time a Facebook message from a friend.

The message contained a screenshot of a post on the forum Rebelscum.com, a popular Star Wars collector website. Titled “My Proto Rocket Fett was Stolen,” the post received over 26,000 views and shocked the community. “Man this is horrible. I could just imagine the gut wrenching feeling, the pitfall in your stomach. Wow. That is messed up,” said one typical reply.

The Rebelscum post was written by prominent Star Wars collector Philip Wise, whose 20,000-item collection is a place of pilgrimage for many Star Wars collectors. Wise detailed how his Rocket Fett prototype had been taken sometime in the last two weeks from his private Star Wars museum, where it was prominently on display. He made a plea: “If anybody should hear anything about a Fett like this floating around, please contact me.”

Wise’s words punched Tann in the stomach. Cunningham couldn’t be the thief, right? It wasn’t his Rocket Fett, was it?

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Freddie Gray mural, Baltimore, Maryland
A mural of Freddie Gray near the location where he was arrested in Baltimore, Maryland. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alec MacGillis, Chloe Cooper Jones, Adam Serwer, Emma Marris, and Mik Awake.

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Alternative Reality: ‘Three Wrongfully Convicted Men, 40 Years, and a City That Still Refuses to be Honest With Itself’

Wiley Bridgeman, left, of Cleveland, embraces his brother Ronnie, now known as Kwame Ajamu, as they walk from the Justice Center in Cleveland following Bridgeman's release from a life sentence for a 1975 murder. The two brothers, who were exonerated after spending decades in prison for a 1975 slaying, have sued the city of Cleveland and the detectives who investigated the case. The federal lawsuit suit, filed Thursday, July 2, 2015, names three Cleveland police detectives and a sergeant and the estates of a sergeant and three other detectives who have since died. (AP Photo/Phil Long, File)

Kyle Swenson was a young reporter at the Scene, Cleveland’s alt-weekly, when he started investigating the wrongful conviction of three black men who were imprisoned in the 1970s for a murder they didn’t commit. The men — Kwame Ajamu, Wiley Bridgeman, and Rickey Jackson, who served a combined 106 years behind bars — were exonerated in 2014, thanks in part to Swenson’s reporting, which informs his new book on the subject, Good Kids, Bad City. Swenson, now a reporter for The Washington Post, recently returned to the pages of the Scene with a long essay, included in the list below, that looks back at the conviction and indicts the city he once called home.

Swenson’s reporting is a testament to the value of local newspapers, as Alec MacGillis, who covers politics and government for ProPublica, points out in his largely positive Times review of Good Kids, Bad City. “One can’t help wondering what life-shattering injustices might go unaddressed in the future,” he writes, “for lack of a curious reporter to take a call or open an envelope.”

MacGillis, who lives in Baltimore, knows about the contraction of the local news industry firsthand. Two years ago, Baltimore’s City Paper, founded in 1977, was shuttered by the Baltimore Sun Media Group. Weeks after its closure, a pair of enterprising editors founded the Baltimore Beat, a print alt-weekly. But the paper couldn’t support itself through advertising revenue and it closed four months later. Now, however, the Beat is back, resurrected as an online-only operation in early March. (One of the outlet’s first new feature stories is listed below.) It is being run as a non-profit, and its editors — Lisa Snowden-McCray and Brandon Soderberg — say they hope, eventually, to revive the print publication.

It’s an audacious act, starting a print publication in 2019 — and recent attempts haven’t boded well for the industry. The Knoxville Mercury, for instance — founded after the city’s longstanding alt-weekly, Metro Pulse, was shut down — closed in 2017 after just two years in print. But there is something about paper, it seems, that lends gravitas and legitimacy to a media outlet.

At the beginning of March, Indianapolis’ alt-weekly, Nuvo, announced that it would no longer be publishing a print edition, and a number of editorial employees were laid off, including Nuvo’s editor, Laura McPhee. Fortunately, the publication will live on as a website, and it will refashion itself as a member-supported non-profit, which sounds promising, despite the staff cuts. 

Still, I get anxious when newspapers trade in paper for pixels. That’s not because I’m a print nostalgist; it’s because these decisions can portend disaster. I think, for example, of The Village Voicethe ur-alt-weekly, which stopped publishing its print edition in September 2017. Though the Voice continued to do good work online, it seemed to me that, without an accompanying print product, it was like a neutered beast. A year later, the Voice went out of business, thanks to the brilliant business mind of retail heir Peter Barbey, whose name I curse every time I pass a New York street corner only to find Time Out and AM New York. 

It’s depressing to me that the city I live in no longer has an alternative newspaper, though I take comfort in the fact that a number of alt-weeklies around the country are still publishing good stuff, including the The Stranger, the Metro TimesOrlando WeeklyTriad City Beat, and Monterey County Weekly — all featured in this reading list.

 
1. “Out For Justice is Out For Change” (Lisa Snowden-McCray, March 8, 2019, Baltimore Beat)

Lisa Snowden-McCray, the editor of the newly revived Baltimore Beat, profiles an organization that advocates for the incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated, who often have trouble transitioning from jail. Out for Justice is led by Nicole Hanson-Mundell, who spent a year in jail. This legislative session, in Annapolis, the organization is advocating for “two bills urging state lawmakers to support pre-release centers for women,” Snowden-McCray writes.

It’s tireless, often thankless work. But Hanson-Mundell recognizes how important it is. That’s why it’s so important that the pre-release legislation gets passed.

“How can I deny a woman who just came home and she needs housing? I can’t say ‘Miss, I don’t provide direct services, you have to go somewhere else,’” she said. “I have to tap into my resources and find out who offers housing to newly released women with children. I have to use my connections and advocate for her.”

2. “This Is the Final Thing You’ll Ever Need to Read About Howard Schultz” (Rich Smith, February 27, 2019, The Stranger)

The Stranger has no kind words for Howard Schultz, who, as you probably know, is entertaining a bid for the presidency, much to the chagrin of, well, pretty much everybody. Rich Smith describes the former Starbucks CEO as “Seattle’s most successful bean juice salesman” in this deft takedown.

He has no idea who we are as a country now, no idea how Trump became president, and so much palpable fear that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to tax his Frappuccino dividends at a reasonable rate that he’s willing to hold the country hostage unless a moderate wins the Democratic nomination.

So much for hometown pride.

3. “Defiling the temple” (Jordan Green, February 21, 2019, Triad City Beat)

Triad City Beat, which covers North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad — including the cities of Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem — has a long story on Kenneth Fairbanks, a pastor and community leader who was also involved with charitable work in Nairobi. “But four criminal indictments allege that for much of the time Fairbanks was operating his ministry, he was also sexually abusing children,” including his own daughter, Jordan Green writes.

While Kenneth Fairbanks’ supporters cast him as a victim of familial treachery, his daughter, Christa, alleges that he sexually abused her for years, along with other girls, while isolating her to exert control and extorting her silence by admonishing her against ruining God’s plan for their family.

4. “Speed Trap” (Xander Peters, February 20, 2019, Orlando Weekly)

Orlando’s alt-weekly takes a sobering look at meth abuse in Florida, particularly among gay men. Xander Peters’ piece centers on a 29-year-old meth addict named Matt, who declines to give his last name. He got into the drug through Grindr, the dating app.

Matt’s genesis story isn’t uncommon in the community of men who have sex with men, or MSM. LGBTQ-focused dating apps have tried to suppress drug abuse in recent years, even banning certain terms such as “PNP” (“party and play”) and the capitalization of certain letters in members’ bios, such as the capital letter T (“Tina.”)

The depressing kicker to this story leaves little hope that Matt will ever overcome his addiction.

5. “Three Wrongfully Convicted Men, 40 Years, and a City That Still Refuses to be Honest With Itself” (Kyle Swenson, February 20, 2019, Cleveland Scene)

Kyle Swenson, now a reporter for The Washington Post, reckons with the lessons from his new book, Good Kids, Bad City, which examines the story of three black teenagers in 1970s Cleveland who were wrongfully convicted of murder, imprisoned for decades, and then exonerated.

“Good kids, bad city.” I am defensive about the title. The title implies values—the kids are good, the city is bad. I know Cleveland is a proud town but touchy, easy to injure; as I wrote, I had an invisible Clevelander in my head, belligerently asking why I had the temerity to slap the label “bad city” on the town. Was that fair? What makes a place bad, or good? I spent many an hour not writing, arguing with this invisible but touchy Clevelander, justifying the title.

Swenson more than justifies the title in this engaging and thought-provoking essay.

6. “How adult nights at Detroit’s roller rinks are keeping black skating culture alive” (Imani Mixon, February 20, 2019, Metro Times)

As a recreational activity, roller skating is a vital part of black social life in Detroit, according to Imani Mixon’s illuminating piece for Metro Times. I particularly enjoyed Mixon’s description of “Detroit-style skating,” which I knew nothing about.

Detroit-style skating is characterized by its smooth rolling motion that is heavily influenced by the Motown sound that was gaining traction around the same time that skating became a popular pastime. According to skaters who have been on the scene for decades, Detroit skaters don’t ever really stop rolling and if they do, they use the rubber toe stops on their skates, another signature marker of a Detroit skater. The basic move that every Detroit skater has to learn, whether solo or in groups, is the half-turn, which involves turning a smooth 180 degrees for a few beats then turning back in place to continue on the original skating path.

7. “Monterey Bay fishermen catch salmon as far away as Alaska. A proposed copper mine there poses a local threat” (Matt Koller, February 21, 2019, Monterey County Weekly)

Matt Koller does a good job laying out how a proposed copper mine site known as the Pebble Deposit could very well imperil the livelihoods of Monterey fisherman who spend their summers in Alaska’s Bristol Bay angling for sockeye salmon. The mine, if approved, risks contaminating the bay with discarded waste rock.

Fishermen have always accepted a certain degree of risk. But the salmon are certain. A renewable resource, they will keep returning to spawn. Yet Bristol Bay fishermen, including those from Monterey Bay, see the presence of the Pebble Mine—which seeks to extract a non-renewable resource—as a threat to their industry because it has the potential to alter these natural cycles in a fundamental way that will not balance out in the end.

The mine, Koller writes, threatens “the last great sockeye salmon run in the world” as well as “an entire way of life.”

8. “The Story of Chaney Lively” (Laura McPhee, February 21, 2019, Nuvo)

For one of its final print cover stories, Laura McPhee — until recently the editor of Nuvo — pieces together what little information there is about Chaney Lively, the first free woman of color in Indianapolis. She arrived in 1821, in what was then a frontier town, with Alexander Ralston, a Scottish surveyor “tasked with laying out the new city.” Chaney, 21, was Ralston’s housekeeper, though she had originally been his slave, most likely purchased in Louisville. Ralston died six years later, at which time Chaney inherited land.

When Chaney moved into her own home in 1827, there were less than 60 people of color—men, women, and children—living in Indianapolis out of a population of a little more than 1,000. She was the only Black female head of household in the 1830 census, and the first woman of color to own property in the city, most likely the first person of color, male or female, to do so.

In the process of excavating details about Chaney’s life, McPhee also paints a stark portrait of African-American life in Indianapolis before and after the Civil War.

***

Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Columbia Journalism Review.

How the Shock Jock Became the Outrage Jock

Ben Hider / Invision / AP, Jeff Chiu / AP, Charles Dharapak / AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,111 words)

In the past, the bow tie seemed to hold him together, kind of. Tucker Carlson had always been as red-faced and obstreperous as so many other conservative pundits, but he had never been known to be “cunty” or “faggot”-level offensive. Still, it wasn’t much of a shock earlier this week when progressive watchdog Media Matters unearthed him spouting slurs like that — a couple of racist remarks rounded out the misogyny and homophobia — during a series of appearances on Bubba the Love Sponge Clem’s radio show between 2006 and 2011. From Monday to Tuesday, after the first recordings surfaced, Tucker Carlson Tonight hemorrhaged almost half its advertisers.

That bow tie had been a flourish of propriety: a strip of cloth separating him from a loudmouth like Howard Stern, the “shock jock” who looks and acts like a dollar store rock star, grabbing his crotch for whoever will listen. But he dropped it the year he appeared on that radio show. It was Stern who hired Bubba the Love Sponge Clem (yes, that’s his legal name) in the mid-2000s to host a show on his second satellite radio channel, and it was on that show that Carlson crossed the line. That was where the shock jock and the political commentator proved that they were one and the same — the former played off conservatism, the latter played it up, but both relied on its foundation. “Well, you’re talking about God and illegals,” Carlson told Clem. “I thought we were just going to be talking about blow jobs.”

But what’s the difference, really? Blow jobs were once used for shock value. Now it’s “illegals.” The punch line being that neither one of them is transgressive in the end.

* * *

No one used the words shock jock for Joe Pyne, the host of It’s Your Nickel (that’s a reference to pay phones, kids, and I’m including myself here) who pioneered in-your-face talk radio in the ’50s and went on to create TV’s The Joe Pyne Show, which sometimes devolved into actual physical altercations between him and guest. No one really knew what to make of him. His unconventional style — dressed-up to dress down “pinkos” and “women’s libbers” and riff on, rather than read, reports — was neither news nor entertainment. It seemed to be best described (well, The New York Times and Time both did anyway) as an “electronic peepshow.” The personality-free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest, but Pyne, with his syndicated show on more than 200 radio outlets, was the most Machiavellian. “When it comes to manipulating media,” Icons of Talk author Donna Halper told Smithsonian Magazine, “he was the father of them all.”

Pyne briefly descended from his soapbox in the mid-’60s — for a week’s “vacation” — after bringing a gun to his show during the Watts riots, suggesting the world wasn’t quite yet ready for his kind of conservative appeal. It took until the mid-’80s, when the FCC was no longer so hard-assed and political correctness was all the rage, for Howard Stern to turn the shock jock into a thing. The idea was that PC America was muting real America, and personalities like his were there to liberate our ids … usually on the way to work. “They were pushing the limits of what you could hear on the public airwaves,” TALKERS Magazine publisher Michael Harrison told Thrillist of mavericks like Pyne and Don Imus, who set the stage for Stern. “That was the key to the whole thing: that it was on the ‘sacred public airwaves.’”

Full disclosure: I have always hated Howard Stern. His banality offends me: “The closest I came to making love to a black woman was I masturbated to a picture of Aunt Jemima on a pancake box” — that’s the kind of joke he makes. It’s the sort of quip that leaves a dumb bro stuck in 1992 in stitches. To be offensive your words have to have power, and his … don’t. He swears a lot and cajoles his guests into talking about fucking and snorting and it’s all very Free Speech, Motherfuckers! He can be sexist and racist and classist, because, hey! He’s sexist about men too! He’s racist to everyone! He drags every class!

Sorry, I just fell asleep.

The rebellion is a pose, because at the heart of Stern and all the other shock jocks is conservatism — 2.1 kids, strong moral fiber. They can joke about fucking and inhaling, because they ostensibly aren’t doing either. So what positions itself against PC America, in fact, at its core, feeds into it — the conservatism is the rebellion. Knowing that, you can see how Don Imus calling the members of Rutgers’ women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” can happen as late as 2007 on his radio show Imus in the Morning (he was fired by CBS and NBC, then hired by ABC). As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker 10 years before Imus’s offense, personalities like Stern and Mancow Muller and Opie and Anthony appeal to the “audience that feels put upon by a new set of rules — sexual harassment guidelines, the taboo against certain kinds of speech — and wants release, if only in the privacy of the drive to work.”

The audience meaning white heterosexual men. The shock jock industry itself is predominantly white men (Stern’s foil, Robin Quivers, is a black woman, but she has never been the star attraction). Which is not to say that women can’t be as “offensive,” it’s just that the people in charge of hiring them would prefer them to be barefoot and pregnant. There are shockingly few exceptions. Wendy Williams, who rode the wave of ’90s hip-hop and shamelessly confronted celebrities like Whitney Houston with tabloid gossip (she also had a bad habit of trying to out rappers) was christened by New York magazine in 2005 as the “shock jockette.” She was “the black Howard Stern” right down to the middle-class moralism. Other than Williams, the female media personalities who cause offense — Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham — tend toward conservative commentary, presumably because the men on the top floor think they will be less likely to break a nail in those environs. “The complaints of Western feminists look like petty self-absorption when you line them up against human rights abuses in Third World military dictatorships,” is a thing Ingraham came up with — a misogynistic comment cloaked in doublespeak.

This genre of radio personality was dubbed by my colleague Ethan Chiel as the “outrage jock,” the political version of a culture and entertainment-aligned predecessor, who arose in the late 1980s after the FCC regulations on political talk became less clear. This is where a bow tie comes in handy. The outrage jocks market themselves as transgressive, but instead of fighting conservative America, they uphold it, a stance they brand subversive in a sea of progressive liberal media. Rush Limbaugh, who has the most popular talk radio show in America — 15.5 million listeners, according to Talk Magazine — was dubbed by National Review as the “Leader of the Opposition” back in the ’90s. “Rush took radio at a time when the norm was basically NPR. He comes into that church and blows it up,” radio host John Ziegler told The Washington Post in 2015. “Our presidential politics have become a kind of church. The media says, ‘You’re not allowed to say this, or this, or that, because we’re in church.’ People are sick of that.”

So: Stern 2.0, except instead of shouting about pussy, Limbaugh — not to mention Glenn Beck and Michael Savage — shouts about policy. You may remember him calling women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke a “slut” in 2012 for advocating for contraceptive insurance coverage. “She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception,” said the man who has been married four times. “She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.”

Limbaugh needs a brushup on his sex work nomenclature, among other things. But if you want to talk about pimp: Janet Jackson’s nipple ultimately killed the shock jock. In case you aren’t old, it happened during a performance of “Rock Your Body” at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show in 2004, when Justin Timberlake tore off the right cup of Jackson’s bustier, exposing her breast. (Per Jackson, the red bra underneath the rubber was supposed to stay behind, but came away accidentally.) In response, more than 500,000 complaints, all of them from people presumably with nipples of their own, were reportedly lodged with the FCC. President Bush responded two years later by signing the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which raised the penalty for broadcasting “indecency” tenfold. With that, Howard Stern fucked off to satellite radio and the rest of the shock jocks kind of followed suit. Tucker Carlson was what was left behind.

* * *

“Does she have a good body? No. Does she have a fat ass? Absolutely.” Tucker Carlson did not say that. That was Donald Trump in 2013 talking to Howard Stern about a pregnant Kim Kardashian in a radio show appearance that reemerged during his election campaign. On the same show, across almost two decades, the future president also agreed that his daughter was “a piece of ass” and dismissed flat-chested women and women over 35 (thank God). For all his work to divide the nation, Trump had a big hand in bringing shock and outrage jocks together, dissolving any sort of wall (!) between them. “If the political class is appalled by the notion that anything from the morass of ’90s shock-jock radio could become part of a presidential race,” wrote Virginia Heffernan in Politico in 2016, “it may be just as surprising to Stern’s fans, who proudly embraced the outsider-ness of a guy who couldn’t seem further from inside-the-Beltway political chatter.” TALKERS’s Harrison has called Trump “the first shock-politician.”

By the time Trump entered politics, shock jocks were no longer defining the culture and conservative commentators were filling the vacuum. They entered the mainstream on networks like Fox and the intellectual dark web via Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin. “The shock jocks weren’t defeated,” wrote Dan Jackson at Thrillist. “They went viral.” This is where Tucker Carlson fits in. He called his resurfaced xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic comments from Bubba the Love Sponge’s show (he described women as “extremely primitive,” supported child rapist Warren Jeffs, and compared the behavior of Muslims to animals) “naughty,” then equated contrition with betrayal. “We’ve always apologized when we’re wrong and will continue to do that,” he said on Tucker Carlson Tonight Monday. “That’s what decent people do; they apologize. But we will never bow to the mob.”

Almost 70 years after the first shock jock hit the air, Carlson was toeing the same party line as his predecessors. “They claim that they’re just entertainers and yet they deliver this toxic mix of pseudo journalism, misinformation, hate-filled speech, jokes,” Rory O’Connor, author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio, told The Guardian in 2009. “It’s all bound together so when it’s convenient for them to be entertainers they say, hey, it’s all just a joke. But when it’s not, they say they’re giving you information that you need.” Carlson’s comments were only shocking because they veered so sharply away from Beltway politics; with his regressive approach no longer couched in policy, they revealed him for the person he is. And even though advertisers have pulled out of his program, the notion that he could disappear like Stern is one from another time — conservatism is the status quo and there’s always room for it now, particularly when it masquerades as information rather than entertainment.

After Megyn Kelly left Fox, Tucker Carlson took her spot, and if Carlson were removed, a new version of him would sprout in his place. This whack-a-mole quality to outrage jocks extends, more troublingly, to their politics — if they are not outraged about one thing, they will immediately find another. They are as adaptive as comedians like Stern, use facts as props to play journalists like Cronkite, and influence voting and policy just as seriously. As Jon Stewart scolded Carlson and his cohost in 2004 on the CNN show Crossfire: “You’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate.” And without the FCC to shut them down for good, or at least out them as entertainers, the only hope is that their audience will realize that the most transgressive thing to do is to stop listening.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Revisiting My Grandfather’s Garden

Dusty Pixel / Getty, Greg Hill / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Mojgan Ghazirad| Longreads | March 2019 | 17 minutes (4,133 words)

In a cul-de-sac, I hear the purring of a gas stove and the popping of boiling tomato juice bubbles on the surface of a cauldron. The tomato paste aroma saturates the air. It’s August and it’s high time for making pastes and jams in Tehran. My grandmother kept us busy this time of the year. “Let’s put those little feet into work,” she used to say to my sister and me as she emptied buckets of Vine tomatoes into deep basins. We removed our socks, rubbed the bathing brush on our feet, and rinsed until the last cluster of soap bubbles vanished into the drain. She watched our brushing ceremony and inspected our feet for any specks of dirt. When she was satisfied with the whiteness of our soles, she hoisted us into the basins. We jumped up and down and stamped the tomatoes to extract the juice. Vine tomatoes squished and screamed under our feet. Their plum, tender and succulent, painted our legs. She boiled the juice and the ambrosial aroma of the boiling tomatoes wafted in the garden. The thickening tomato juice boiled over the sides of the hot cauldron, smearing the tiles of the terrace. When my grandmother removed the gas stove, a striking corona of fiery red drops of paste remained on the tiles. I thought those red coronas were the reason they named my grandparents’ street “the Sun Street”

How I wish I could enter that garden one more time to see those fiery rings. In 2018 I plan a return trip. But my mother tells me — before I go back — that the Sun Street is closed to the public. Nobody knows what has happened to that house since the Islamic government took it from us.
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