NamedPipe

(A friend suggested that I should go back to writing things here after I suggested shutting down the blog. Luckily the following came to my doorstep on Sunday.)

I suppose this is all due to a New Yorker who’s first name was Truman. But you decide if this journalism or great literature:

Outside Jaipur, young men virtually bonded into labor hack with primitive tools at old tires. They work in an archaic assembly line beside the highway, chopping the tires into pieces and loading them onto trucks so they can be burned as toxic fuel at a brick kiln. The tent camp they call home splays out in dirty disarray behind them. A brutish overseer verbally whips them to work faster.

“Please take me out of here,” Rafiq Ahmed, 21, whispered as he bent in the darkness to lift another load. “My back hurts.”

On the revamped road next to him, the darkness has been banished by electric lights overhead. Auto-borne commuters race along six silky lanes toward the Golden Heritage Apartments, the Vishal Mini-Mart, the Bajaj Showroom featuring the New Pulsar 2005 with Alloy Wheels, all the while burning rubber that will eventually fall to the young men, hidden by night, obscured by speed, forgotten by progress, to dispose.

Or how about this paragraph.

To drive it is to gain momentum, to not want to stop, and not have to. Drivers no longer pass through towns, but by them, or where the highway soars into the air, over them. The rural landscape, formerly painted in pointillist detail, becomes a blur, an abstraction – a vanishing trick that may portend things to come.

While all this prose is beautiful if we were reading Hemingway or Zadie Smith, but this is the New York Times – read more if you want.

I’m generally a fan of the NYT, but this writing is overboard. The editors need to remind the journalists they are writing for newspapers, not novels. The sad part is the story is amazing by itself, India has only built 334 miles of new 4-lane roads in the last 50 years (Des Moines to Chicago) and the country – come on, India is more than 1/3 the size of the U.S. And now they are building and upgrading 40,000 miles of roads. This story doesn’t need metaphoric prose to interest the reader – the facts alone are worth reading.

Two things converged for me this week about newspaper leadership. First, I ran across a very old article about concerns of newspaper executives circa 1996. Next I read Byron Calame’s Public Editor column in the Sunday New York Times about what the Times’ editors know about their readers. The article about newspaper executive concerns has this:

The second most commonly voiced need is for understanding broad marketing principles and market forces affecting their newspaper or corporation. Half of all publishers and CEOs select this from a list of nine management areas. The top concern, with 55% naming it, involves efficient use of current technological resources.

Publishers don’t know who their audience is and they think marketing can help them figure that out (note, this article is written by a market researcher). But traditional product marketing doesn’t work at newspapers – at least not with respect to subscribers. Subscribers are looking to newspapers to be better and more compelling – and those are things that come from taking risks, not market research. Now contrast this with what the editor of the New York Times Magazine thinks about his readers:

"I imagine my reader is a late-thirties-something woman, a lawyer or educator or businesswoman. She’s busy with work, and also with family matters, but Sunday morning is a time she’ll allow herself to read something that is not work related, or kids’ homework related. She’s got 45 minutes, an hour. She wants to lose herself in a story, one big story – 8,000, 9,000 words. My hunch is she wants to read not something escapist but something substantive – something that holds a mirror up to her own life or opens a window onto a pretty troubled world."

The point is, you’re not going to get happy readers unless you can do what the editor of the NYT Magazine did – paint a picture of who the reader is. Newspapers have gotten so far removed from their readers that they need market research firms to tell them who buys their paper. Some of the success of blogs has been due to their more personal connection with readers – something newspapers just don’t get anymore.

Of course, the Wall Street Journal is considered the newspaper of record for U.S. business. But about once a week they go about picking on the wallets that pay their salaries. I’d guess that most of the WSJ staff is filled with Ivy League graduates who feel they’re a just a bit smarter than their friends who opted for a career in business. Here is the latest proof:

There are thousands of corporate aircraft flying the skies over the U.S. Most companies say these planes are necessary to conveniently and securely transport employees to distant facilities or meetings. Top executives “are really 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week people,” notes Mike Nichols, an official with the National Business Aviation Association, a trade group. “These are really flying offices.”

But a comparison of golf scores and flight records, some of which are available from commercial aviation-data services, shows that companies also use their jets for another purpose: as airborne limousines to fly CEOs and other executives to golf dates or to vacation homes where they have golf-club memberships.

At some companies, hundreds of flights in recent years have involved golf, played either for business, pleasure or both. Among companies whose top executives have flown on corporate jets to golf destinations are Alltel Corp., Motorola Inc., General Dynamics Corp., McKesson Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., SLM Corp. (Sallie Mae), U.S. Steel Corp., Cintas Corp., PNC Financial Services Group Inc. and National City Corp.

I’m sure glad the WSJ has a Saturday edition so they can publish important investigative reports like this one. I least had a good laugh while reading it.