Jun 3, 2009
Heartwarming print journalism quote of the day
For my article in today’s paper about the renovation and re-opening of the Polish Home Hall in Curtis Bay, I interviewed Catherine Benicewicz, a 90-year South Baltimorean and a child of Polish immigrants.
Mrs. Benicewicz is, for starters, adorable (when I asked how to spell her name, she said, “Be Nice W-I-C-Z”), but she also had a steel trap memory and wonderful stories to tell me. The best, however, was about her father, Anthony Tanowski, who was on the board of the Polish cultural society that owned the hall.
Tarnowski came to the U.S. on a boat in 1906 or 1907, Benicewicz said, from Czarist Poland. There, he was forced to speak Russian in schools, and learn to read and write the Cyrillic alphabet, even while speaking Polish at home. When he got to America, at age 16, the first thing he did, she said, was to buy a handwriting manual to improve his penmanship in the Western alphabet. The next thing he did was buy a copy of The Evening Sun, and was a loyal devotee of that newspaper for decades to come.
“Over there, you can’t even learn your own language in school,” she said, “but over here you have the right to be informed, to know what’s going on.”
Take note, all you Internet newspaper freeloaders: A 90-year-old Polish lady in South Baltimore just schooled you in the art of learning to appreciate what you’ve got right in front of your nose.
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Uh huh. DR aside, these days we mostly get informed about how wonderful-super-peachy-keen President Obama is. Yay! Meanwhile, the new delivery person doesn’t seem to know where our house is, and we haven’t gotten a paper in two weeks. Mixed blessing.
After I got through reading your post, I noticed this, from Joel Achenbach, on The Washington Post column you keep on the right:
“Newspapers have to start charging online. Maybe magazines too. It’s all about timing and the Sherman Act. And I guess what they call the Prisoner’s Dilemma, no? There’s short-term advantage in letting the other guy go first. But the best results come from collaboration (but not collusion, naturally!).
“I don’t doubt that there were good reasons for giving away content for free back in the mid-1990s. But there’s something twisted about a business model that won’t let people pay, even if they want to. Here’s former newsman Michael Connelly in an interview with the Nieman people [via Romenesko]:
“‘I would pay up in a heartbeat (and then write it off as a business expense.) I no longer live in L.A. but I write about it. So I need to know what is happening there. I read the L.A. Times everyday but haven’t paid for it in five years. The L.A. Times website is my homepage, the first thing I see when I go online. So I guess that makes me part of the problem. But it’s not my choice. The Times made the choice. I would gladly pay but I’ve never been asked.’”
Me again: Maybe the era of the news freeloader has an expiration date?