PORTLAND: 'Personal crises become real only when they
happen to New York editors'
by Sandra Mims Rowe, Editor, The Oregonian

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, crafted a "Talk of the Town" item during World Series week that contrasted the fun and games of the series with the serious mischief going on around the world. Of New Yorkers, he wrote: "wallowing in exquisite nightly drama and unapologetic self-regard, New Yorkers seem for the moment to need nothing, and no one else, in the world."

So, what's new? I wondered, seizing the snarky Left Coast lens with which I now view New York.

Yes, even way out here at the edge of the continent, we see The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as the gold standard for the newspaper world. We read both every day (No, they don't come out weeks later by Pony Express; they actually deliver that day's edition every morning on your doorstep if you choose). But much as we read, rely on, and revere the New York-based media kings, they are occasionally so culturally out of touch with the rest of the United States that it's fine sport for us to skewer them.

Certain crimes do not occur until they occur in New York. The city's crime news -- whether about a child beating, an attack with a brick on the street, murder at a Wendy's, or a shooting by cops -- gets disproportionate national coverage. Similar incidents happen all over the country and get little coverage. The concentration of big media in the city sometimes distorts news stories, making them larger than life.

Cultural trends never happen until they happen in New York. Even personal life crises only become real when they happen to New York editors. An Oregon editor who left the Center of the Known World for the West Coast (and whose friends assured her when she moved she would, for all practical purposes, cease to exist), swears she can track the personal lives of about a dozen top New York editors by what social phenomena appear in news features on the front pages of the Times or The Wall Street Journal. When The New York Times discovers that Spanish lessons are all the rage for Manhattan toddlers, she knows just whose child is now learning how to lisp uno, dos, tres.

Or when she notices an authoritative piece on chiropractors, she suspects she knows whose back is acting up. And when she reads about fair ways to split 401(k) assets between feuding spouses, she wonders if she-knows-who is contemplating you-know-what.

Ethical issues also receive attention when they come up in the New York media world. I got into a tiff last year with Steven Brill when he sent around his proposal for voluntary restrictions on covering the bereaved after the deaths of loved ones. He identified this as a problem only after the death of New Yorker John Kennedy Jr. It sent me over the edge. Out here in the real world the rest of us inhabit we deal with this on a regular, up-close-and-personal basis, I wrote him. We actually live with the people we cover, grappling with coverage issues around funerals when police officers fall in the line of duty, when young drivers with more confidence than skill manage to kill themselves and others, even when sick children take guns into schools and open fire. It sounded to me as though Brill had never wandered into the world where folks go to Rotary Club meetings, attend raffles to raise money for community projects, and find social life revolving around youth soccer games.

I've always wondered what it must be like for the many top editors who have spent their entire lives working and living in New York City where doormen walk dogs and supers fix sinks and dinner is delivered in white cardboard boxes by men on bicycles and only the insane talk to the people they pass on the streets. Is it any wonder in their anthropological forays into the real world, New York journalists "discover" the quaint practices of the natives? Editing by Braille, I call it.

Sandra Mims Rowe was with The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star in Virginia for twenty-two years before moving to the Oregonian. She is a member of the Pulitzer Prize board.