Trib Losing Perspective?
“The idea is to create a section that’s provocative and more readable than Perspective used to be, and not just a dumping ground for stories that didn’t have a home in the rest of the paper,” Blau told me. “And also to have a little bit of fun–that’s the mission. The mantra has been to do all of that riding on the shoulders of the news, so it doesn’t become just a freestanding feature section the way Tempo was. Every story should have a voice, a point of view, but should be focused squarely on news events and be inspired by the news.”
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Brown even ignores that rule of thumb when she feels like it, and I wish she would (or could) just let the section revert to what it was. Staff writer Anne Keegan used to write a lot of gritty, street-smart stories about cops. It’s been an adjustment, Brown allowed, but Keegan has met the new Tempo halfway: at the time she was working on a story about cops who write books. (To be followed by what–cops who watch cop shows? cops who polka on Saturday night?)
The “ideal solution,” she said, would be a Tempo that could live up to its responsibilities and run reviews of opening-night performances the following morning. But for technical reasons Tempo is printed days in advance. Overnight capacity is an item high on everyone’s wish list. “It’s one of the things everyone’s looking forward to,” Brown said. “It’s not imminent.”
Readers see newspapers making change for the sake of change and wonder why. But writers and editors thank God. The Reader’s always looked good, but to the staff it stopped looking interesting years ago. The design became too just so: a place for everything and everything in its place. This inflexibility also exasperated the staff in a practical way: it ruled out a front section that a reader could page through in more than one gear. A New Yorker reader can discover what features an issue holds while riffling through for cartoons, but no little oddities drew in impatient Reader readers. Kate Friedman’s new design is fixing that deficiency good. Some readers may think we look too busy and messy now. I rejoice.
The biggest international story this past Monday was the secession vote that day in Quebec, which threatened the unity of Canada with God knows what ultimate impact on the political map of North America. That morning’s Sun-Times didn’t carry a line. Though to be fair, the Sunday paper the day before had carried a nice Los Angeles Times piece on page 33.
