All Warm & Comfy Now?

December 12, 2004 8:05 AM

Bowed by Age and Battered by an Addicted Nephew'They went out late. It was ugly weather. Six below zero in the Brooklyn night. Wind took garbage into the air. A blizzard was in the forecast. It was Lincoln's Birthday, 2003, in Brighton Beach. Not a night for humankind, but the sisters, one 73 and the other 70, didn't get holidays off, didn't get snow days. In years of miserable low points, it was one of the lowest. As they had done the day before and the day before that, Lillian and Julia hobbled out to Coney Island Avenue, a lineup of chromatic storefronts, to beg from strangers in their cars. They were known out there, regulars among the mendicants. The money was for their bilious nephew and his crack habit, their own blood who was smoking up their lives. He had already cost them their house, their savings, their dignity. "I need one more," he would tell them when he desired a hit, "one more." Not comply and he would fly into crazed tirades, blacken an eye, bruise their ribs. It had been this way for years, since their lives stopped being comprehensible. ' [From the New York Times; they'll want registration, if you haven't already.]
posted by davy (18 comments total)

I liked the story and was moved by it, but it is written in that dreary miniminalistic "we're trying for awards" style.
posted by Mo Nickels at 8:07 AM on December 12, 2004

While I can appreciate remarks about style etc, what paper other than the NY Times runs so many pages to reveal the plight of elder abuse in addition to so much coverage on so many other things?

A sad and moving story which we can readily dismiss by suggesting that kin should simply be tossed out and told to go theilr way...not that simple, though.
posted by Postroad at 8:10 AM on December 12, 2004

A sad and moving story which we can readily dismiss by suggesting that kin should simply be tossed out and told to go theilr way...not that simple, though.

Why not? I don't see it.
posted by gd779 at 8:24 AM on December 12, 2004

Well, duh.
posted by y2karl at 8:49 AM on December 12, 2004

Dreary minimalism? I think it's beautifully written. In shades of purple, that wouldn't have been at all as effective.
posted by CunningLinguist at 9:08 AM on December 12, 2004

Twelve pages... so by the end, the reader is both elderly and feels bludgeoned over the head. Therein lies the genius of the piece.
posted by stonerose at 9:21 AM on December 12, 2004

MetaFilter: where we think only smart people should have rights (and of course we're the smart people, right?), and when you show us a story about beaten-around old people we criticize the writing style. "It's all about community!"
posted by davy at 9:31 AM on December 12, 2004

Hey, we also beat up on religion.

Where was the church that should be protecting its flock?
posted by CunningLinguist at 9:37 AM on December 12, 2004

MetaFilter: where we think only smart people should have rights (and of course we're the smart people, right?), and when you show us a story about beaten-around old people we criticize the writing style. "It's all about community!"

Think of it as the MeFi crack habit.
posted by Reverend Mykeru at 9:54 AM on December 12, 2004

Twelve pages... so by the end, the reader is both elderly and feels bludgeoned over the head.

Now, there's a sad reaction. This is real journalism - a well-researched story, told with depth and humanity, that takes exactly as long as it needs to in order to completely flesh out its topic. This is what makes the Times stand out among papers - a willingness to dedicate that much column space to a subject that is most definitely depressing (and unlikely to sell a lot of Broadway tickets or Saks Fifth Avenue purses and shoes).

The danger of preferring shortcut journalism is that we continue to trend toward a shallower and shallower information culture. Want shorter stories? Fox and USA Today will be very happy to provide that -- cheap! All it'll cost is our understanding of the difficult nuances and true complexity of any story, and the trade-off of a broad and wide-ranging perspective on the world for the stories a few corporations consider worth reporting.

Rejoice that the Times publishes long stories. In series-es. In 8-point type. With not a lot of pictures. The idea that the public is too dumb to handle it -- insulting. Take a look at a nineteenth-century paper sometime - great long grey strings of words, and yet the unwashed masses were reading papers more often in that era. How long does it take to read the Times daily, as compared to the time it takes to browse through a day's MeFi (or similar site's) posts? How much would you have learned at the end? Much as I love MeFi, my money's still on a world-class paper to be more informative per hour spent reading . . and require less wading through the inevitable dross. No, it's not that we're too dumb/hip/21st-century/moderate to read stuff like this; just too lazy.
posted by Miko at 10:19 AM on December 12, 2004

Calm down, Miko. It was a joke. I like the article. Here, have a smiley :-)
posted by stonerose at 10:54 AM on December 12, 2004

I think it's worth reading, but it's certainly not "minimalist". All those adjectives alone disqualify it.

It's not what I'd call "journalism" either, though a precise definition of that is elusive. It is journalism in the sense that it's a story written for a newspaper, which reports on some facts. But it isn't "news." Events like those reported have been going on for thousands of years, are unlikely to stop, and no real case is made that their nature has changed. The particulars of these peoples' stories are new to us, but then so would be those of a few billion others; most of which would be equally novel. One popular definition of "news" is "whatever gets printed in newspapers", just as one definition of "journalism" is "anything that a journalist intends as such." Those definitions strike me as perfectly useless. Anyway, I would rather classify this story as biography, or less charitably but probably more accurately as gossip. It's a longer-than average form of the usual reporting on specific cases of perfectly normal events in other peoples' lives that newspapers thrive on. The famous stories of Charles Dickens were also used to sell newspapers, and I would say this is in effect precisely the same thing. That the details are based on specific real people rather than fictional ones makes no practical difference to almost all readers. That, in my opinion, is what distinguishes this from actual news.

Anyway, for those who prefer brevity...

Minimalist version: "Julia and Lillian are two elderly ladies, who were relatively happy with a quiet retired life until their nephew Frank's crack addiction moved into their lives. He showed them little respect, beat them, and forced them into begging on the streets to feed his habit. Some people tried to help, but with little success. His drug of choice was costly, and they lost their home and possessions to it. Eventually, thanks to the efforts of a police detective who was determined to help, Frank was confined to a rehab center. This intervention changed all their lives for the better."

Minimalist pseudo-journalistic version: "Being old and unwilling to stand up for themselves leaves many people vulnerable to abuse from violent and agressive people who may be present in their domestic situations. When you add poverty to that situation, things are very sad. It isn't easy to help people trapped in this kind of self-destructive pattern of abuse, even for the family. Often, the legal authorities are unable to intervene until too much damage has already been done. Since it often goes unreported, it is unknown how widespread this type of problem is among the elderly. "

Version that reports only the news content of the article: "Nothing to report today."

Hypothetical actual news: "200 cases were reported last year to the elder abuse unit of the Kings County district attorney's office, which serves a population of 400,000 elderly people. This is x% more than last year, and may indicate an unexpected acceleration of the rising trend that has seen average annual increases of y% since statistics were first recorded in 1987. [analysis as to what extent this increase is due to declining social conditions, increased reporting, or whatever other factors.] [comparisons with other parts of the country.]"
posted by sfenders at 5:34 PM on December 12, 2004

Journalism:

1.The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts.
2. Material written for publication in a newspaper or magazine or for broadcast.
3. The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.
4. Newspapers and magazines.
5. An academic course training students in journalism.
6. Written material of current interest or wide popular appeal.

As described above, the idea of journalism has, for about two hundred years, been quite a bit more inclusive than straightforward 'news writing'.

Here's more: The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society.

In other words, much journalism is driven by content other than news as narrowly defined. The activity of journalism incorporates editorial commentary, humor, photography, features on ongoing conditions or existing people, reviews, information on events upcoming or just past, essays, investigations, polling, and more. All the content you find in your daily paper is journalism - not just the news stories.

Journalism, as seen by reporters, editors, and publishers, is the art of finding (or, as with op-eds, creating) and then disseminating information which may be informative or useful to their readership, in a regularly published periodical (the 'journal').

Calm down, Miko. It was a joke. I like the article. Here, have a smiley :-)

Oh well. I saw one of my favorite axes lying around, so I picked it up and ground it.
posted by Miko at 9:25 PM on December 12, 2004

The dictionary I looked at (M-W) had "the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media" as its first definition for journalism.

It does also include "writing designed for publication in a newspaper", but like I said I find that description useless. Newspapers have printed all kinds of things, and if all of them count as journalism then the term becomes essentially meaningless. I suspect that most journalists would agree that advertisments designed for newspapers are not journalism.

While this NYT story fits in with some of the goals of journalism as described in that journalism.org effort to define the art, I think it is far from the "central purpose" they propose. Its information content is trivial. It is primarily an emotional appeal. While that kind of writing is valuable, popular fiction does it at least as well, and is thus a more appropriate place for it.

"While journalism should reach beyond such topics as government and public safety, a journalism overwhelmed by trivia and false significance ultimately engenders a trivial society."

Events like those in the story are deeply significant for those involved, but a news media filled with the intimate details of other peoples' lives inevitably trivializes them. While it may make for good entertainment, it is affective rather than informative, propaganda rather than information, and it undermines the "central purpose of journalism" -- the presentation of practically useful information.

To the extent that readers were unaware of the basic facts of human life, I suppose this story could be seen as filling them in on a few: that crack cocaine can influence people to do bad things, that victims of abuse are often psychologically dominated and unable to escape. I suppose it is worth being reminded of those things from time to time. My objection to calling this "journalism" was in part based on my perception that news media generally includes far too much of a random sample of traumatic incidents that are of no practical import to those not directly involved, without any effort to put them into a more general perspective of any broad social situation that might be relevant to the audience. That this article focuses on one such incident which is of a type that is generally not so over-reported does at least put it slightly closer to the journalistic ideal than much of the trashy "look, another murder!!!" news reporting with which I automatically associate it.
posted by sfenders at 8:14 AM on December 13, 2004

A great story from a newspaper that despite its many well-publicized shortcomings and mistakes, remains the best newspaper in the United States.

Decent journalists don't tell sad stories of people's lives to wallow in schadenfreude. It's an attempt to make readers give a hoot about societal problems that most would ignore or dismiss as non-important.

If I tell you "Many elderly people are abused by younger relatives," it's easy to shrug off. It's harder when you carry the image of a battered grandma begging for change on a streetcorner in subzero weather, to buy her crackhead nephew a few seconds' distraction.
posted by sacre_bleu at 8:36 AM on December 13, 2004

I'm glad someone posted this. I missed it on yesterday's tour through MeFi. I wasn't able to make it through the entire article, so I would throw my vote in with those who think this could have been better-told. Editors tend to think in inches, and probably felt a story this heinous deserved a good 160 or so column inches, and Kleinfeld wrote to fill the space. The length (and the placement, of course) signals the story's importance, which maybe isn't the best way to do it, but this is quite an important story.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 8:56 AM on December 13, 2004

Newspapers have printed all kinds of things, and if all of them count as journalism then the term becomes essentially meaningless.

False, because newspapers (unlike most of the web) are edited. Thus there is a human intelligence and philosophy directing what appears in print, determining the direction of the paper's coverage, deciding what would be worthy of publication, and rejecting plenty of writing. The term is not meaningless because once a piece of writing appears in print in an edited periodical, it has been judged worthy of meeting one or more of the definitions of 'journalism' in which that periodical specializes. Obviously, this varies with the editorial philosophy of each periodical.

As for ads -- when I responded earlier, I just knew the next sfenders gambit would be to bring up ads. In fact I had something in my post about it, then deleted it because I thought you might not actually go for that red herring. Ads don't normally go through the hands of the newspaper's editorial board before approval, and thus aren't subject to the newspaper's editorial philosophy. Exceptions would be when the ads might break regulations regarding hate speech or are from an unattributed source.

Finally, the only reason I posted those definitions is not that I contested the basic idea behind your definition; I just wanted to show that your definition a) cited no source other than your own idea of the meaning of the word, and b) used only the narrowest sense of a word that has five or six senses, at least. Your definition of 'news' and 'journalism' are personal ones, and are far, far narrower than those which are found in effect at any major newspaper. And with that I shall end my part in this exchange, rather than spend any more time arguing for the near- tautology that the New York Times publishes good journalism.
posted by Miko at 9:40 AM on December 13, 2004

I just knew the next sfenders gambit would be to bring up ads

yeah, well. When I wrote that post I had a long list of stuff other than ads in mind, but figured that belaboring the obvious would be unneccessary. Apparently not, but never mind.

My ideal of journalism is hardly universal, but I do thank you for posting that link to journalism.org which considerably strengthens my belief that there is one, and that it's based on something more substantial than "whatever the editors think is appropriate."

A contrasting approach based on good journalism rather than emotionally compelling narrative, and on a similar theme, is easily found in the article on infant mortality rates in Brooklyn, linked at the bottom of the NYT story.
posted by sfenders at 10:52 AM on December 13, 2004