Think of it as a scavenger hunt, where you don't know what you're looking for, or even, necessarily, that you're in the game.
Yes, dear reader(s), I guess I do like playing with myself. Have since adolescence.(Sorry if that embarrassed my kids.)
As I.F. "Izzy" Stone (where is he when we need him?--which is always!) once famously said about the Times (more or less; maybe a reader can fine tune the precise quote): the interesting thing is, you never know where you will find that day's front page story...
Stone is a personal hero; I did get to encounter him once when I was in school. His range extended well beyond the Vietnam War reporting that first brought him to my attention, from a book on his travels with Jewish D.P.s from war torn Europe to Palestine, to his reconsideration of the trial of Socrates (after teaching himself Greek in his later years, if I remember the story correctly).
See comments for a suggestion that Stone was a proto-blogger, and his Weekly the first blog by a citizen-journalist.
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4 comments:
OK, if you insist, I will add that extra label.
Which label?
Huh?
From Inside Higher Ed (ripped out of context, but it will serve. I really have to learn how to do those links!)
IF Stone’s Weekly
I wonder what Stone would think about the internet. In a very real sense, IF Stone’s Weekly was the first blog. Though a professional journalist, his newsletter was a pioneering work of citizen journalism. If he were active today, it is not too hard to imagine there would be a lot of people linking to IFStone.com
Jonathan Cohen, at 7:25 am EDT on October 12, 2006
Another variant: ripped from Christopher Hitchens in Slate several years back:
I.F. Stone used to say that the Washington Post was a great newspaper because you never knew on what page you would find the front-page story. I find this rule to be highly variant in the case of the New York Times, which frequently puts great stuff on its front page but which often prints it upside down.
And yet another variant:
I love to quote legendary journalist and muckraker I.F. Stone, who is alleged to have said, "The great thing about The New York Times and The Washington Post is that you never know where you'll find a front page story." Besides being a rather amusing thing to say, this comment has a lot of meaning, so much so that it has inspired a brand-new Nygaard Notes feature, which I plan to call "Off The Front Page." In every issue--or, whenever I feel like it--I will point out a story or two that I think should have been on the front page, but that I actually found in a lesser location in the Mainstream Corporate For-Profit Agenda-Setting Bound Media.
It's beginning to sound a lot like apocryphal. Front page mention to first reader to tie it down.
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