Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

Philadelphia Story

Michael Shapiro has put together a superb short history of the decisions and oversights that have brought The Philadelphia Inquirer to the position it finds itself in today (CJR, March/April). While Shapiro’s vision is comprehensive and his understanding of the impact of editing decisions upon the bottom line is acute, he has overlooked the failures of a succession of publishers to understand ways to market, distribute, and sell advertising in the newspaper. The newspaper failed to market itself, failed to establish a presence in Philadelphia in the way, say, that The Boston Globe is part of that city’s identity.

During the paper’s Golden Age, its publisher failed to build on its reputation by increasing visibility in the community — sponsoring bike races, marathons, the Phillies, restaurant festivals, philanthropic projects, Fourth of July events, etc. At one time, its spokesman on commercials was none other than Leslie Nielsen, an actor known not for credibility or gravitas but for playing the buffoon. The paper also made a short-lived and ill-conceived alliance with a newly formed, underfunded UHF channel’s nightly TV news program. Its salaried advertising staff was known for its long lunches and passive, sleepy attitude. Part of the blame for this must be shared by the union, which fought efforts to move to a commission sales reimbursement strategy. The newspaper’s editors’ and publishers’ failure to understand the moneymaking potential of the Internet continues to this day. I recall a conversation with a publisher more than ten years ago in which I suggested turning the classifieds into an auction along the lines of eBay, a suggestion that was laughed at. The culture of the place was one of standing on your heels, in terms of making money — the exact opposite of its culture in terms of pursuing stories.

All of this said, the newspaper still contains enough talent, and lies within a city diverse and vital enough, to produce journalism worthy of its past accomplishments, should its leadership have the vision to understand the huge moneymaking opportunities presented by the Internet and other media; the judgment to hire the right staff; and the attitude to approach its region with point of view or “voice” to stir and serve its readers.

Henry Goldman
New York, New York
The writer was the Inquirer’s national correspondent in New York from 1982 to 1999.

I cannot vouch for the facts in the rest of the CJR article about The Philadelphia Inquirer, but you got several things wrong about my time as editor there.

1. That a story becomes newsroom folklore and thereby gets reported in the local alternative press does not make it a fact. The anonymous allegation in your article that I was watching Judging Amy on the night of a primary is untrue. Surely you teach your students to give the poor fellow being slammed in their articles a chance to deny any allegations against him.

2. I did not get permission to hire some forty new staffers; I looked at the existing budget and found enough money to hire some forty journalists, the first substantial increase in new reporting blood at the Inquirer in more than a decade. We also added more reporting jobs by reducing the number of people with “managing editor” in their job title from eleven to five and converting twenty-five desk jobs to reporting jobs. Were all those people happy about the changes? Not exactly.

3. While most of those positions were invested in the suburbs, you left out the fact that five of them were assigned to the previously uncovered neighborhoods of Philadelphia, one went to increase the staffing of the investigative team and another went to create a “business of sports” job.

Your article seemed long enough to have included these facts. Can you tell me why it didn’t?

Walker Lundy
Sherrills Ford, North Carolina

The editors respond: By no means did Michael Shapiro rely on “folklore” or the alternative press for anything in his piece. That said, we should have asked him to call Lundy for comment, and are sorry that we did not.

Memoir Methods

Samuel G. Freedman says that a few years ago at a writers’ conference I “let slip” that I had “fabricated” a number of scenes in my memoir, Fierce Attachments (CJR, March/April). He’s wrong on both counts: I didn’t let anything slip, and I never said I had fabricated. I did say that in my book I had, on a number of occasions, made a composite out of the elements of two or more incidents — none of which had been fabricated — for the purpose of moving the narrative forward. These words were not something I let slip — it never occurred to me that such practices would not be seen as entirely within the province of the memoirist. I had said them times without number, at other talks and readings, and in nearly every class I ever taught. To my amazement, they were taken as a “confession,” and a student in the audience rushed to send the scandalous news off to Salon.com. Whereupon (as I wrote in my response to Salon) a Washington book critic was subsequently allowed to denounce me on NPR’s “Fresh Air” as “the latest culprit . . . in a series of similar revelations,” comparing me with Benjamin Wilkomirski, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Jayson Blair.

The giveaway here is this trio of names. I, a memoirist who composed (composed, mind you, not invented) a narrative drawn entirely from the materials of my own experience, was being compared to a psychopath who spun a Holocaust memoir out of whole cloth; a historian accused of incorporating other people’s work into her own without attribution; a dishonest newspaper reporter who substantially made up the stories he sent in to The New York Times. It seems to me that these inappropriate analogies are proof, if proof were needed, that memoir writing is a genre still in need of an informed readership.

To state the case briefly: memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism. It is a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting or in literary journalism. A memoir is a tale taken from life — that is, from actual not imagined occurrences — and related (interpreted) by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. It is what the memoirist makes of what happened that matters more than what actually happened. What actually happened — let me repeat this — is only raw material. As V.S. Pritchett said of the genre, “It’s all in the art, you get no credit for living.”

Some of the greatest memoirs written, if held to the standard of literal accuracy that is required in other kinds of nonfiction writing, would never pass the test. When Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater he led his readers to believe that his addiction was behind him — not true; he was taking opium when he wrote the book, and continued to take it for the next thirty years. To this day, there are readers who cry “Liar!” at one of the most profound descriptions ever given of drug addiction. Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, written in 1907 when Gosse was fifty-seven years old, recounts conversations that purportedly took place when he was eight years old. Upon publication, people who had known the Gosses protested that Edmund made those conversations up (which of course he had); but the book was instantly recognized as a masterpiece of autobiography. George Orwell’s brilliant short memoir of his school days, Such, Such Were the Joys, was also denounced by people who had been Orwell’s classmates (filled with “inaccuracies,” they insisted), yet no one reading that essay today can feel themselves in the presence of anything but truth: real truth: emotional truth.

James Frey is a fraud. He made up experiences he passed off as actual and as his own. For this scam, memoir is taking the rap.

Vivian Gornick
New York, New York

Our Poverty, Ourselves

Re: Voices: November/December 2005. Once again, both the Columbia Journalism Review and its writers conflate race, class, and poverty, while ignoring gender and the powerful role it plays. This remains true despite the fact that 90 percent of the adults receiving Temporary Aid to Needy Families are women caring for small children. This is true despite the fact that the vast majority of the elderly poor are female — impoverished by lack of participation in the paid work force or by lack of adequate wages and pension benefits in the jobs they held. This is true despite the fact that teenage parents, whose horizons shrink from lack of education, are almost inevitably female. I look forward to the day when a respected journalist such as David K. Shipler expands his vision of poverty reporting to include gender. Maybe then others will follow.

Rita Henley Jensen
Editor in chief, Women’s eNews
New York, New York

Discounting Wal-Mart

Many Darts to CJR for the Liza Featherstone commentary on the four Wal-Mart documentaries (CJR, January/February). Featherstone is far from the disinterested party CJR should seek for speaking out for what is right, fair, and decent — as CJR styles its mission.

Yes, CJR did identify her relationship with the Robert Greenwald documentary — Laurel for that — but only at the end of the piece. Subtract the Laurel and add penalty Darts. The title of Featherstone’s book [Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart], also revealed only at the end, suggests she carries ideological baggage beyond what seems to me appropriate for writing an article packaged as dispassionate analysis.

Here is my ideological disclaimer: I am a conservative, probably a zealot, in Featherstone’s view. I like Wal-Mart; I sometimes shop there. Wal-Mart is not perfect; size if nothing else precludes perfection. Wal-Mart and its competitors have wrought massive change in our society. But change is what our society is all about.

Curious about emphasis given each film in light of Featherstone’s relationship with the Greenwald film, I measured the copy directly pertaining to each film. Frontline (Is Wal-Mart Good for America?) got 3.56 inches; Galloway (Why Wal-Mart Works (And Why That Drives Some People Crazy)) 8.87 inches; CNBC (The Age of Wal-Mart) 8.69 inches; and Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price) 16 inches. Coincidence?

Furthermore, Featherstone’s question — “Shouldn’t we be worried when the nation’s largest private employer provides jobs that work well only for people with few needs and low expectations?” — is ridiculous on its face. Clearly a huge majority of Wal-Mart’s 1.3 million U.S. jobs work well for people with various needs and expectations. How else could the company function? Store managers, for example, commonly work their way up. In any case, for the two women cited in the Galloway film — one a ninety-year-old retiree, the other a recovered drug addict — so what? For both, opportunities would seem quite limited. Wal-Mart met those needs. For the former drug addict, a career just may appear.

Indeed, given the title of Featherstone’s book, had Wal-Mart not hired the two women, I suspect she would have been in high dudgeon with charges of oppression and discrimination.

Harold Morgan
Albuquerque, New Mexico

That Liberal Press

Nicholas Lemann’s insightful thoughts about balancing political views in J-schools (“On Balance,” CJR, January/February) are valid and great fodder for discussion, but miss what I believe is the real core of the problem: the very concept of unfettered discussion is liberal in our culture. Journalists’ pervasive view that no one person or group should be imbued with the authority to control access to public information (and ergo thought) is considered heretical and insensibly liberal to those who want to control it. For twenty years, I have espoused to my students that a primary function of a journalist is to move information from the hands of those who have it to the hands of those who should. It isn’t J-schools turning students into liberals. It’s our society labeling what J-schools teach as liberal.

John Gholdston
Cedar City, Utah

Editors’ Note: Three Cheers

This is CJR’s annual Excellence in Journalism issue, in which we urge media outlets to advertise and tell the world about the journalistic awards they have won. So we would be remiss in not trumpeting some triumphs of our own.

■ Our May/June 2005 cover story, “Stations of the Cross: The Rise of Faith-Based News,” by Mariah Blake, has won a 2006 Wilbur Award, given for outstanding work in the secular media on religious issues, from the Religion Communicators Council. The article (find it on www.cjr.org) describes how evangelical Christians are creating an alternative news universe and how that affects the rest of us. The piece is also a finalist for the Templeton Story of the Year award from the Religion Newswriters Association, with winners announced in September.

■ On the digital side, meanwhile, CJR Daily (www.cjrdaily.org), our energetic sister Web site, is one of three nominees for a Webby award for best blog — political. The ten-year-old Webby awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, with winners announced May 9.

■ CJR’s chairman, Victor Navasky, has won the George Polk Book Award for A Matter of Opinion, his 2005 memoir of a life in journalism and reflections on the significance of the small magazine of ideas — like The Nation, where Navasky was publisher and editorial director for years (he is now publisher emeritus), and like the magazine you hold in your hands.

To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.