What's Up, Doc: Emrick Has Another Gold Medal Run Calling Olympic Hockey

And You Don't Have To Believe In Miracles to Get Excited

As the USA's 5-3 stunner Sunday over Canada in Olympic men's hockey continues to sink in, thoughts inevitably wander to the Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid 30 years ago. Even if it was edited and on tape delay, and some of us found out the score too early (thanks, Rene Poussaint at WJLA!), it was still a great moment and one that will define the already-considerable career of Al Michaels.

So, it was pretty classy of him to tell Richard Sandomir in The New York Times how he was hardly wistful about not being behind the mic calling the games in Vancouver.

“Here’s the reality: Mike Emrick might be the best guy to ever call hockey,” he said, referring to NBC’s play-by-play announcer. “I can’t do it one-tenth as well.”

Which tells you all you pretty much need to know about Emrick, who the diminishing number of New York-area hockey fans have been able to enjoy in his regular job as the TV voice of the New Jersey Devils.

There have been other stops along the way, but the Devils gave Doc (he has a PhD in broadcasting from Bowling Green) a much broader canvas on which he paints eloquent word pictures that are at once intelligent, insightful, and in perfect tempo with the pace of the game. He's an exquisite student of hockey, but he's never a show-off. The knowledge is parceled out only when needed. It's always about what's on the ice, not him.

Sandomir noted that Emrick said following a particularly frantic period of play: “It’s kind of nice to have it peaceful right now. I hope I’m not yelling too much.”

Not to worry.

More recently, he's been calling Stanley Cup games and the Winter Classic on New Year's Day for NBC, so he's hardly a poorly kept secret. It's not like he only brings his A material for the network. He has no B material.

But viewers who only watch hockey once every four years will notice just how good hockey can be. And Emrick will be a big reason for that, no matter what the final score is.

New Music Channels on DirecTV: Sonic Crap

DirecTV Dumps Sirius XM To Save Dough and Latches on to Pale Imitator

While it's far from perfect, I have always found much to like on satellite radio, particularly what was put out by XM. Even after it merged with Sirius, there was still plenty to keep me listening for the adult album alternative and singer-songwriter tracks I gravitate to most often.
Given that only one of our cars -- the one I'm usually not driving -- has XM, I usually listened via DirecTV. Spectrum, The Loft, and The Coffeehouse were often on in the house. No more. A couple of weeks ago, DirecTV dumped SiriusXM for something called SonicTap, programmed by an outfit called DMX Music that, among other things, puts together music channels for cable systems.
DirecTV never said why it made the switch, so you can assume money was the overriding issue. It can't be because DMX is delivering a better product when just the opposite is the case. It's what happens when you have a computer program a channel instead of a person. Algorithms may work on Pandora, but DMX shows no signs it's invested in R&D to offer an intelligent music mix.
To wit: Spectrum is now called, stultifyingly enough, Adult Alternative. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
The Loft, which was laden with a very deep playlist and quirky, compelling specialty shows from the likes of David Johansen and Lou Reed, along with New York radio legends Vin Scelsa and Meg Griffin, is now called Singer-Songwriter. Unfortunately, these singer-songwriters are usually heard on adult contemporary stations. Again, no clue.
As for The Coffeehouse, the channel is now called Coffeehouse Rock. But the lunkheads at DirecTV and DMX apparently never heard the channel, which is devoted mostly to acoustic performances and alternative versions of well-known tracks. It was the perfect accompaniment to reading a book chapter before bed. Now it is the aural equivalent of a double espresso rather than the soothing decaf it once was.
So, now I have a good excuse to turn off the TV a little sooner. Time to get reacquainted with the stereo and the CD collection. I'd rather DIY my music choices than DMX them any day.

Killing the Tigers in Order to Save Them

Fascinating Wall Street Journal Piece Opens Rare Window to Chinese Tiger Farms

Today's Wall Street Journal has an item about a proposal by two economists to legalize sale of tiger parts in China to combat poaching and reduce the rate that the habitat for wild tigers is shrinking.
And these parts would come from farm-bred tigers. That's right, farm-bred, which is legal in China, where 6,000 tigers are bred in captivity. I was initially in a bit of denial when first wondering why there are tiger farms in the first place.
Were that that many zoos out there that needed to restock? Nah. The article by Beijing correspondent Shai Oster notes that some farms exist for research. After all, wild tigers in China have been virtually hunted to extinction. Then there are those that tourists can visit and feed the tigers live cows and chickens.
But it appears they really exist to harvest parts for use in traditional medicines, parts that can sell for up to $70,000 on the black market when taken from one animal. Yes, these sales have been banned since 1993, but Oster reports some farms have freezers filled with hundreds of carcasses in case the ban is lifted.
It's a fascinating story, one that makes a good case for why newspapers need their own foreign reporters and not rely on wire service reporters who are too caught up in the day-to-day work to do too much enterprise reporting.

Casting a Pall

Death of Luger Nodar Kumaritashvilli Leaves Media at a Loss for Other Words

The papers that came to my door this morning read as follows:

Luger's Death Casts Pall Over Start of the Winter Games--Wall Street Journal

Luge Athlete's Death Casts Pall Over Olympics--New York Times

The death of a Georgian competitor in the luge during training cast a pall over the opening of the Vancouver Winter Olympics.....(opening of refer on A1 of Financial Times)

Pall.

It actually has several definitions. But the apt one here for the horrific death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvilli is "anything that covers, shrouds, or overspreads, esp. with darkness or gloom," according to Dictionary.com.

A pall can also be a cover for a coffin, bier, or tomb. That will come later.

Obviously, the athletes, officials, dignitaries and journalists at the Vancouver Games were shocked and saddened by the crash, which is now being attributed to human error. In other words, Kumaritashvilli didn't have enough experience to handle a challenging curve on a highly technical track while going nearly 90 mph.
But while the tragedy is unmistaken, after watching the opening ceremonies last night -- and no, you didn't need to stay up late to know Gretzky was going to light the flame -- you have to wonder if there was really a pall. It was a deservedly festive affair, understated, dignified and entirely appropriate. Very Canadian indeed.

I didn't sense a pall. It would have been easier as well as more accurate to describe the incident as one that "momentarily tempered" or "muted" the celebration, especially when the Georgian team entered the stadium and, later, when a moment of silence was held for the fallen luger.

And Kumaritashvilli's death doesn't appear to have cast a pall at the luge track either, where today -- aside from a "change in the ice profile -- it's business as usual.

For another interesting take on how papers handled the crash, Charles Apple looks at it from the perspective of a graphics editor, asking whether this really needed to go on A1. The answer he reluctantly comes to, I much less reluctantly come to, is yes.

How Willie Mays Hustled Leo Durocher

Sure, Durocher Was a Father Figure, but Say, What the Hey, It's Just Money

Before he's going, going, gone, Willie Mays finally decided to cooperate with a biographer. It only took him to age 78 to realize this was a good idea, before more baseball fans than not had heard of him. Borderline blasphemy, I know, but these kids nowadays, no sense of history.
Anywhoo, Bruce Weber's story in yesterday's New York Times had an interesting nugget that will make "Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend" (out next Tuesday) a keeper if there are a lot more stories like the one about his first Giants' manager, Leo Durocher, who Mays regarded as a father figure.
To help keep Mays out of trouble, Durocher would have him room with his 7-year-old son Chris and look after him on the road. Chris told Dad he was eating a lot of soul food and Durocher gave wanted his son to eat steak.

"And I said, 'well give me steak money then.' And Leo would whip out four or five hundred and stick it in my pocket. And we'd go somewhere, and I'd ask Chris, 'you want a steak?' and he'd say 'No, I'll eat what you eat.' I never told Leo."

As anecdotes go, that's a home run. Let's hope there are another 659 like them in the book.

Game Change Cover: Prescient or Pretentious

We Know The Heilemann-Halperin Blockbuster is Good, But This Good?

My copy of "Game Change" made a surprise arrival tonight after Borders.com told me it was on backorder and I'd have to cool my heels for at least a couple of weeks.
So, before I started to devour the many political morsels contained within, I noticed at the top of the cover it said "#1 New York Times Bestseller."
That's fairly recent news. And even more remarkable given that I opened the book and discovered that it was a first edition.
So, maybe HarperCollins knew something we didn't. Or maybe they were just cocky.
Either way, they were right.

Haiti Quake: Being There for the Big Story Has Its Price

Post-Katrina Pattern of Personal Reporting the Order of the Day. NPR's Jason Beaubien Offers a Textbook Example

No doubt, when a big story breaks most journalists want to be where the action is, even if they never leave the newsroom. Resources, experience, maybe even a little chutzpah, often determine who hits the road.
So, you have your cadre of reporters who show up in war zones and natural disasters. They want to be there, not because they're paid to, but because that's where the story is, where what their work can be a game-changer, misery and reward worked into one.
Yet, it is the Haiti quake that has been a game-changer for some, who have seen some of the worst that fellow man and Mother Nature can dish out. This one is different.
That was evident yesterday in a report on All Things Considered, when NPR's Jason Beaubien was doing a Q&A with anchor Melissa Block outside a hotel, talking about a badly wounded girl bandaged but otherwise lying untended. As he looked at her and described her condition, Beaubien began to cry.

"She keeps lifiting her head and her lips are shaking .... Sorry, Melissa," he said amid tears.
"That's OK," she quietly replied."
"It's heartbreaking, what is happening here," Beaubien continued, quickly regaining composure. "There are people just in the streets everywhere."

This is no journo-tourist. Before becoming Mexico City bureau chief, Beaubien spent four years in Africa for NPR, reporting from 27 countries, where war, famine, and AIDS were a prominent part of his landscape. He's also been to Haiti before, covering the aftermath of hurricanes.
It was interesting that Beaubien was interviewed by Block, who filed report after gripping report from China, following the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province in 2008. She was a human being first, a reporter second. And that's how you get the story right, not to mention a shower of awards that came her away, along with co-anchor Robert Siegel and their team.

Beaubien's the father of two boys. When he gets home, there are bound to be lots of hugs.

It's hard to say who will need them more.

Evening Newscasts Not Dead Yet

Still, Don't Expect Metamucil and Depends to Stop Advertising Anytime Soon

From TV Newser comes good news for those who toil in and around the likes of Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, and Brian Williams.
Some 27 million people watched the network newscasts in the first week in January, with ABC/Sawyer putting up a good fight against NBC, though Brian Williams is still top dog by a good margin.
That's not to say those numbers will be as robust throughout the year, especially as the weather gets warmer. But still extremely decent by any measure.
A caveat: only 8 million or so of that number is linked to the 25-54 demo. So, the bulk of the audience is still older boomers and/or their elderly parents. And contrary to advertising myths, they still spend money, and not just on the prescription drugs that account for so many of the ads between 6:30-7.
The tough part will be finding new viewers as the old folks start aging out, something newspapers have failed miserably at. The nets have an advantage in that they don't charge for their product. The larger question remains how many will continue to need it. Short-term, that's not a worry for the news divisions. Twenty-seven million viewers have seen to that.

Now It's Being Called the Muff, Instead

Dam it, Canadian magazine The Beaver Changing Its Name

Canadian history magazine The Beaver was founded in 1920, back when a beaver was just, well, a beaver.

Ah, how times and dirty minds have changed.

Seems double entendres take their time making their way across the border, hence a belated name change of the magazine to, yawn, Canada's History.

Love this quote from editor Mark Reid:

"Market research showed us that younger Canadians and women were very very unlikely to ever buy a magazine called The Beaver no matter what it's about. For whatever reasons, they are turned off by the name."

It must have been a serious problem as Reid used "very" twice, which I take as the Canadian equivalent of Defcon 4 in the publishing business. The women part I can understand. Younger Canadians? Not so much. If anything they'd just be pissed off when they find out the magazine is about history and not, um, you know, wildlife.

A Delicate Marketing Dance: DNA Testing Goes Mainstream

So Where Do These Kits Go In the Drug Store, the Condom Aisle?

I stumbled upon an ad the other day for a swab-at-home DNA Paternity Test from a deftly named company called Identigene.

Apparently, it's the only over-the-counter test of its kind. As such, it's a little weird to see a product like this being touted in a magazine let alone on a store shelf. Then again, we don't think twice anymore about ads for condoms, douches or vaginal-itch cream.

Ads like these, for better or worse, have become a fact of life -- literally so, for Identigene.

In case you were wondering, the collection kit goes for $29.95. The test itself is another $119.

Sort of.

As the kit's website points out, there's a difference between this test and a legal test, in other words, one that would be admissible in court. The testing methodology is the same; the only is it involves an independent party who would verify identification and witness the collection. That'll run you another $250.

Interestingly, Identigene is playing to people who want both outcomes. On the home page is a link to the ABC show "Find My Family," a Kleenex-fest where long-lost family members are reunited, kids looking for birth parents, etc. Identigene provides the DNA testing for the show.

Next to that link is one for a New York Times magazine from November about men who find out through DNA testing that they weren't the father of their children after all, and how a negative paternity test isn't necessarily the end of the story.

Either way, Identigene is there to help -- for $149-$399, of course.

New York Post Gives Us The Sizzle and Steak on Plane Bomber

And the winner of front page of the day is.....

Of course, it's easy to have a laugh now, but.....

Decision by Wall Street Journal to Cancel Wine Column Leaves a Bad Taste

Departure of Dorothy Gaiter and husband John Brecher Leaves Big Hole in Journal's Lifestyle Coverage

The Wall Street Journal wine column from husband-and-wife team extraordinaire Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher was destination reading for me every weekend in the Wall Street Journal.

As I became more interested in wine, I always looked to them to help become more educated about vintages and varietals, a massive undertaking that Dottie and John pulled off impeccably. Obviously, they knew a lot more about wine than you or me, but were never uppity about their expertise. Their knowledge was easily imparted, freely shared.

So, it was with more than a measure of sadness that they mentioned, almost in passing in Saturday's column, that it was their last one. No explanation, but as the Vinography blog adeptly notes, most likely an economic one.

Until now, I had appreciated the Journal's decision to keep the wine column humming, as I noted in a posting last year. After all, the paper had to pay two salaries as well as the tab for the dozens of bottles of wines sampled for each column. But the couple showed they were worth it.

Dottie and John were nothing if not thorough. Maybe too thorough for Murdoch's beancounters.

What made their column truly great was how their passion for wine was intertwined with their love for each other. Discovering wine and telling us about their great finds was a grand adventure for them that we were privileged to be a part of.

Their column and family life often intersected -- a trip to Disney World with their daughters also included sitting at the chef's table and drinking expensive wines at the resort's top restaurant -- meant readers felt like we knew them as well. That's why I'm referring to them by their first names, just like they did in the columns.

Whether it was a $6 bottle of Vinho Verde or a $1,500 Chateau Latour, they showed us how drinking wine can at once be a deeply personal, fun, and wholly subjective experience. Their "yuck" could have been your "delicious," or vice versa, and that was perfectly fine.

Dottie and John often got some of their biggest responses for the annual "Open That Bottle Night," which occurred at the end of February, and encouraged people to uncork some wine that had a special meaning or significance. This communal gathering celebrated wine for wine's sake, not to glorify oenophilic snobbery.

That's something you can't take for granted nowadays in wine journalism. All the more reason to hope that Dottie and John land elsewhere. I'll drink to that.

No Business Like Snow Business on New York TV

Nothing Like a Blizzard to Get the Competitive Juices Flowing, But....

From my perch in Westchester County, the first big snow in the New York area was so-so.
We got a mere eight inches, compared to the rest of the family blitzed by at least 21 inches on Long Island, where Newsday captured this picture. Other areas got more. In other words, the kind of story that keeps people glued to their TVs. Nothing like having reporters do live shots in a blinding storm to tell you it's snowing so you don't have to find out for yourself.
Not surprisingly, the stations trotted out a lot of their first-string anchors and weather guys. Chuck Scarborough is usually anywhere but a studio on a Saturday night, but there he was on WNBC-TV with Melissa Russo, while regular weekend co-anchor DeMarco Morgan was booted outside to do stand-ups from Times Square. Talk about being big-footed.
WNBC has slashed and burned its staff, and shed many a veteran reporter as it cut costs concurrently with its plunging ratings. But it was relatively game last night. While I didn't see it because I have DirectTV, the station had a continuous storm broadcast on one of its digital side channels anchored by David Ushery.
From what I can gather it was solid, public-service journalism, more akin to what you'd get from an all-news radio station. But what WNBC really should have done was put that broadcast on the main channel. It's not like there was a compelling need to run WWE wrestling when the area was being bodyslammed by the snow.
I didn't find out until almost after the fact but WNYW/Fox 5 trotted out Ernie Anastos and Rosanna Scotto for a 9 a.m. broadcast this Sunday. It may have been lightly attended given the station normally is running religious programming in that slot, so if you weren't watching the 10 p.m. news the night before, you were likely somewhere else. Like WABC/Channel 7, the usual clock cleaner in New York when it comes to news ratings and staff.
The station had the equivalent of a weekday complement of reporters in the field, with at least eight checking in for live spots, with two weather anchors, including weekday mainstay Lee Goldberg pulling duty Saturday and Sunday.
The coverage was solid, workmanlike fare if somewhat limited by the predictable nature of the story itself. But they made the most of what they had. The only one who came up short was weekend weather anchor Heidi Jones, who was dispatched to the LIRR station in Mineola to report on the myriad delays on that system.
Only problem: Jones really didn't know what she was talking about. First, she kept talking about suspensions of service at places like Far Rockaway, Long Beach and West Hempstead. True, but those are also the names of branches on the line, which meant about 20 stations had no service. She repeatedly showed she didn't know the difference and nobody bothered to correct her.
Ditto for when she kept talking in the present tense about a train that broke down overnight, and how passengers were still stuck on the train when Newsday.com reported the train had been towed to a station and passengers were placed on another train.
That's when producers come into the picture. If a reporter is stuck doing stand-ups, somebody actually has to be making calls to ensure the information is correct and current. It was a rare misstep for a news operation that otherwise sets the table for how TV news is covered -- or not -- in this market.
P.S. Memo to the staff at NBC New York.com, the website for channel 4: this picture was taken in Maryland, not New York. Thought you might want to know.

Fairies Sprinkling Dust at Wall Street Journal

Must Be Something in the Air on Sixth Avenue

More than one person was grasping for the same , ethereal analogy in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
On Page B5 in a story about The Limited's success with its Bath & Body Works division, Limited big cheese Leslie Wexner is quoted as saying the results are not "just fairy dust."
Then on Page B6, a story about Peter Ligouri being hired by Discovery Communications to be its COO quotes him as saying "The biggest challenge is having the magical fairy dust."
Because, after all, you don't want the unmagical fairy dust.

A Cynical Yet Pragmatic Move by Tribune and Scripps-Howard

Companies Hope Non-Subscriber Turkeys Will Pay to Gobble Up Circulars and Coupons

From the why-didn't-someone-think-of-this-sooner file comes this item from Bloomberg, reporting that Scripps and Tribune will jack up the newsstand prices for their papers tomorrow to squeeze a few more coins out of casual readers grabbing the papers for the Black Friday sales ads.
And we're not talking just another quarter or so. In some cases, papers are charging the Sunday price or even more.
“It’s a once-in-a-year sort of event for us,” said Mark Contreras, senior vice president of newspapers for E.W. Scripps, publisher of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, told Bloomberg. “The Thanksgiving paper in every place we offer it is the biggest newspaper of the year.”
Scripps and Tribune aren't alone. The Washington Post and the Kansas City Star are also boosting prices.
Contreras said the largest Commercial-Appeal of the year comes out on Thansgiving, when circulation more than doubles to 195,000. "Frankly, I don't know why you wouldn't charge more," he added.
Neither do I. But let's keep it in context. That big paper Contreras is so pleased about will largely come from preprinted ad inserts. In other words, they cost the paper nothing to print, only to distribute. So, profits from higher newsstand prices can be considerable.
But don't think for a moment that more ads mean more articles. Similar to the Detroit Lions' chances of winning tomorrow, its not going to happen.
One MediaNews executive is quoted as saying the Thanksgiving papers offer "real value" because shoppers can ostensibly see all of the best sales in one place.
Let's be clear: the real value is to the publishers, who need to do anything and everything they can to prop up revenues. It also might be the only way they can say happy Thanksgiving with a straight face.

Marcus Brauchli Puts Happy Face on Closing of Washington Post Bureaus

Convinces No One But Himself That Coverage Will Be Undiminished

Not a big surprise, given the state of affairs in the newspaper business, but still regrettable, is word from The Washington Post that it will shutter its last three national bureaus. The remaining reporters in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York will get a chance to work back at the mother ship, but their assistants are out of a job.
You don't need one hand to count the number of papers with a sizable bureau presence outside of Washington. In fact, you can stop after The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. Everyone else has pretty much closed up shop and relied on those papers and the A.P. to do the dirty work.
We get it. It's the new paradigm. Unfortunately, Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli doesn't get it, or if he does, isn't letting on. He's quoted in the NY Times saying the Post's "commitment to national news of interest to our readers is undiminished."
All well and good. Only problem: the Post will be doing most of its committing the same way most of the 1,400 remaining papers do: using the A.P. Sure, they can parachute in when something big's going down, and no doubt they will. Then again, the Post's newspaper division lost $166.3 million in the first three quarters this year. So, maybe not.
But there's nothing quite like being there, especially in New York. Now the Post will have to figure out whether to send a reporter to a story outside of D.C. by reading about it somewhere else. At least the Post still has a dozen or so foreign bureaus.
For now.

New York Times Turns In Wrong Direction to Take a Look at Effects of Recession

And the Main Subject of the A-1 Article by Michael Luo Agrees; When a Comments Section Actually Serves a Useful Purpose

The above-the-fold piece on the front of today's New York Times has a compelling headline: Job Woes Exacting a Heavy Toll on Family Life .
The copy editors did their job. But it appears everyone else involved with the story did not.
The piece by Michael Luo rests on the notion that the "greatest damage inflicted by this recession has not necessarily been financial, but emotional and psychological."
All well and good, except for the fact that Luo goes off the tracks when he focuses on a surburban Dallas man named Paul Bachmuth and his family. Luo adequately chronicles the trials and tribulations the family has experienced since he was laid off in December from a $120,000-a-year job as an energy consultant, including therapy and more than a few arguments and fights.
But the portrait is woefully incomplete, as evidenced by a photo cutline that says, in part: "Mr. Bachmuth ... at a job fair; he got a job offer last week."
Good for him. But why isn't that mentioned in the story? Is he going to take the job? Will the stress and pain that his layoff engendered now go away? Might there actually be a happy ending albeit one woefully inconvenient for the premise of the story?
We don't know, and maybe never will. The article enigmatically ends with a vignette about one of the daughters:

At night, she said, she has taken to stowing her worries away in an imaginary box.
“I take all the stress and bad things that happen over the day, and I lock them in a box,” she said.
Then, she tries to sleep.

If the Times could update the story in a cutline, it's inexplicable that it wouldn't update the story itself -- one that could have changed the story and most likely improved it. Someone else not impressed by how Luo handled the subject is none other than Paul Bachmuth, who in the online comments for the article gave some hint about how he was put through the sausage factory of newsgathering.

Michael Luo sent in an e-mail to a job networking group that I belong to. That is how he found me for this story. I had read a number of Mr. Luo’s articles on the recession and its impacts, and was very happy that someone out there was reporting on this important issue. I agreed to be the subject of this story in the hope that it might help others. However, I conveyed to Mr. Luo many times that I did NOT want the story to portray me and my family as “victims”. We are not. The last thing in the world I want is for people to “feel sorry for me.”

Given that Luo reveals how despite the fact Bachmuth's wife took a part-time job, but did little to help out around the house while idled that's unlikely. But I see his point.
It's a danger when the media tries to report on trends, or perceives a trend and tries to create one. There are no hard numbers on how widespread this problem is, and it might not be one, certainly in relation to the stresses that layoffs otherwise bring on.
No doubt, finding people to go on record to talk about something so difficult is not easy, and I have no doubt Luo labored to find the right subjects. But the Bachmuths weren't them. And the way the article ends it's almost as if Luo got up and left when a bell rang in the newsroom. Shift over. Narrative be damned.
In other words, we didn't get the whole story. When you charge at least $2 for a copy of the paper, it's not too much to ask for, especially when many people out of work can't afford that in the first place.

Time to Bargain for More of David Segal's "The Haggler" Column in New York Times

The "Action Line" Column Moves into the 21st Century

Among my destination reads on Sundays -- at least when it's in the paper -- is "The Haggler" column by David Segal in the business section of The New York Times.
Ostensibly, the column is a distant cousin of those "Action Line" and "On Your Side" columns of yore, where readers would write in seeking help when a utility company screwed them over, or the TV repairman ripped them off.
Segal performs that service, in a way, but uses the space to showcase his witty, gifted writing in the process. Sure, he takes his mission seriously, but too much so. And he merrily skewers the screw-ups who have wronged those who've written for help.
It's a fun read. Too bad, it only appears every two weeks. That's because Segal's real job is to write longform features for the Sunday business section, which are off the beaten path from the usual fare.
Times editors have given him the license to write with a little more abandon, almost as if he's writing for a magazine. Indeed, these are the kinds of pieces that would fit in nicely in a place like Fortune or the late, lamented Portfolio.
At times he'll use the first person or the "this reporter" to show he's a little further invested in the story and its outcome. It might not be how they normally do it at the Gray Lady, but it keeps you reading, no small feat when confronted with 2,500-3,000 words on a Sunday when you have football, kids and laundry to otherwise distract you.
At times, Segal stretches a little too far, as he did in an otherwise-admirable Sept. 27 piece that focused on how the recession hit close to home in Columbus, Nebraska when a wind-tower plant had layoffs.

You can see management’s unfettered hand in the vaguely Dickensian hours that many here work, and you sense an emphasis on unfettered growth in the just-build-it ethos that governs the stretch of strip malls on the road that bisects the town. It’s fast food, a Wal-Mart, a J. C. Penney, check-cashing outlets and dozens of other stores. The traffic to this generic stretch has come at the apparent expense of a fading but picturesque downtown — a Hopper-esque setting, with a railroad station, some gorgeous early 20th century buildings and a former opera house that is now a minimall.

What does vaguely Dickensian mean, exactly? Segal mentions unions are a non-entity in Nebraska because wages have been pretty good, but Dickensian implies those workers made some kind of Faustian bargain to get that money. If they work more than 40 hours on the floor, they're getting O.T. Nothing Dickensian about that.
Still in all, a great read, and it's does an ink-stained wretch's heart good to see the Times recognizes Segal's talent and lets it run rather than tamp it down because "that's the way we do things around here."
Now if we could just get a few more Haggler columns......

Let's Hope Windows 7 Works Better Than Microsoft's Copyrwriters

Bad Grammar Shouldn't Overshadow Good Product

In a few days, I should have my brand spanking new copy of Windows 7, the OS that's giving Microsoft some long-lost love in the media.
I'm excited, not just because I'm swallowing the hype hook, line and sinker, but because it means good riddance to Vista, which has been the bane of my laptop's existence.
So, it's only proper that Microsoft has given Windows 7 a nice and proper, even peppy ad campaign on multiple platforms, with people claiming credit for claiming all the gee-whiz stuff in Windows 7 was their idea -- like this spot.



The spots work, just like Windows 7.
So it was more than a bit jarring to walk past in Grand Central Terminal a Windows 7 billboard that says "I told them it should require less steps. Now it requires less steps."
Less? Less?
Did they listen to you when you were speaking? And nobody corrected you and told you it was "fewer steps?"
Eeeew.
This is not quite on the level of "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." English teachers cringed whenever they heard "like," rather than "as."
But Microsoft is a company that is nothing if not fastidious. Having worked with its PR agency in a previous life, I know words matter to the company.
So should a good editor.
They could use one in a hurry.

At Least Scalia Gets The Language Right

Acid-Tongued Righty Not "Gruntled" About "Choate"

When it comes to judicial philosophy and, well, probably just about anything else, I'm not in sync with Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, the righty power hitter on the Supreme Court bench.
But Scalia's a lover of words, as he makes abundantly clear in many of his tart, acerbic and always-considered opinions. You may not agree with what he writes, but you'll never be bored reading him.
But as the AP's Mark Sherman reports, Scalia decided a language lesson was in order from the bench. His antenna went up when an unwitting attorney said "choate," as an ostensible opposite of "inchoate." Scalia cried foul.
"There is no such adjective. I know we have used it, but there is no such adjective as 'choate.' There is 'inchoate,' but the opposite of 'inchoate' is not 'choate,'" Scalia said
Point taken. The attorney was ready to move on. Scalia was not.
"Any more than the, I don't know," Scalia said. "Exactly. Yes. It's like 'gruntled,'" he said.
The lawyer tried to continue: "But I think I am right on the law, Your Honor."
But Scalia wasn't focusing on the law. He was going to finish his English lesson. "Exactly. 'Disgruntled,'" he said, adding that some people mistakenly assume that "the opposite of 'disgruntled" is 'gruntled.'"
Such are the exchanges that cause lawyers to start drinking heavily after a morning at the Court.