Corrections or additions?
This article by Richard K. Rein was prepared for the December 11, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
On the Sunday New York Times
I read the Sunday New York Times this week and found
a few interesting items in it. What follows, of course, will not
be news for those who plow through the Times every Sunday, starting
out at the newsstand itself, thumbing through each section just to
make sure there’s nothing missing. It won’t be news for those who
scan the Book Review to see which of their neighbors got a review
— hey, there’s a write-up of Johnny McPhee’s new book on shad
and daughter Jenny’s novel, "The Center of Things," gets a
mention in the noteworthy column next to the paperback bestseller
list. My little piece won’t mean much to those who romp through the
"women’s sports pages" (weddings and engagements to the rest
of you), sifting through the pedigrees of those who made the cut.
No, this column won’t mean much to dedicated readers of the Sunday
New York Times. But it’s not for them: it’s for people like me, and
maybe even you — people who long ago gave up even trying to read
the Sunday Times. For me it was a slow decline. In the beginning I
turned every page of every section as if it were required reading
in a freshman literature course. Eventually I began to discard sections
that I probably would not read (Automotive was the first to go). Then
I started separating out the sections that I would read, or hoped
to read (the Magazine was always in that short pile, along with Business
and even the New Jersey section).
Then the day came: The paper was purchased and set aside as another
busy Sunday came and went. Soon thereafter I was staring at not one
but two and sometimes three weeks’ worth of virgin Sunday Times’s.
That was maybe a decade ago. I have kept up a little with the daily
New York Times — that gets delivered to the office. But I have
had no idea what the Sunday editors were doing. Then this Sunday,
December 8, a friend stopped by for a cup of coffee — and left
behind a complete Sunday Times.
For all the rest of you who have turned your back on this woolly mammoth
of American journalism, I decided to get back on the beast, and see
what we all have been missing. First the good news — the sports
section is still just as weak as it was a decade ago — if you
haven’t been reading the Sunday Times you haven’t missed much there,
I suspect. The Week in Review seems about the same as well.
Money & Business, even with the separate Job Market section, seems
less substantial than I recall it — though this may be the result
of the current recession and the corresponding drop in advertising
for business publications. If I had to pick one or the other, I would
settle for the business sections in the five weekday papers.
On the other hand, the Sunday Times has grown in several ways. Those
color presses are screaming on Saturday night at the Times printing
plant. For me the most vivid impression of the color was in the Arts
& Leisure section, not in the editorial columns but in the full page
ads.
Those weddings and engagements, which I recall being tucked at the
end of the regular news section 10 years ago, used to tell you the
players: "Katherine Cody Westerbeck and Jacob Matthew Lewis, magazine
editors, were married yesterday," the December 8 issue reported.
An Amherst alumna, she is the managing editor of Self magazine. He’s
only UC Santa Cruz, but is being promoted to managing editor of the
New Yorker on January 1. Impressive.
That’s the score, but now the Times gives you the feel of the action
in the trenches. After an initial face-to-face meeting that "was
a bust, romantically speaking," this lucky couple stayed in touch
as friends for a few years. Then, the Sunday Times declared, "during
a trip they took together to Los Angeles in November, 1997, they crossed
the Rubicon to romance."
One section that seemed remarkably unchanged in the past decade is
the Book Review. I was at first dismayed at the high proportion of
books mentioned that were written by New York Times reporters, but
that was before I read the "Rubicon to romance" item above.
Nevertheless I spent more time reading the Book Review than I did
any other section.
And I actually jotted down a few titles that I might seek out the
next time I drop in at Micawber Books. There was a correction to a
review of a book on the Wright brothers, and I thought my boy Frank
might enjoy it — he was writing about the Viking mission to Mars
for a third grade class and the conversation turned to the first flight
in 1903. A notable holiday book for children was "Emily Dickinson’s
Letters to the World" — my boy Rick just dissected a Dickinson
poem for his fifth grade class.
And then there was a reference to "July, July," a novel by
Tim O’Brien about a 30th reunion of a college class of 1969. My class,
I thought, and maybe in this instance I have changed more than the
Times. Maybe I could make time to read a book for myself.
But I looked around, pondered the clutter, and imagined that book
taking a place on the floor where a Sunday New York Times was once
buried. I needed to think about it.
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