Pride of Georgia

No, we're not talking Ty Cobb here.

Thanks to longtime Washington writer Cynthia Grenier for pointing out that Gori, Georgia, under bombardment this week by the Russian military, is the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. For those who don't remember Papa Joe, he was the brutal Communist dictator of the Soviet Union from approximately 1924 until his mysterious death in 1953. Sad to say, he was much beloved by many "fellow travelers" in the United States and other Western nations, many of whom were unrepentant in their support of him until their own deaths.

The New York Times even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for coverage out of Moscow sugarcoating Stalin's excesses, although both the Pulitzer people and the newspaper have finally distanced themselves from that one in the last five years. Never too late, I say.

Stalin was responsible for the deaths of anywhere between 10 million and 30 million of his own people, depending on which historian you choose to believe. I prefer to go with

20 million which is the number Robert Conquest, to my mind the most distinguished Stalin biographer, has arrived at.

It's clear that in the post-Communist Putin era Stalin's illustrious place in history has been forgotten. How quickly they forget.

Good lovin'

Here's one out of the blue: Felix Cavaliere, the voice and genius behind The (Young) Rascals, is back at age 65. He has a new album out with Steve Cropper, the 66-year-old Memphis guitarist who co-wrote "In The Midnight Hour" and other gems -- and, perhaps more importantly, played sweet guitar on all of them, too. "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay" anyone?

The CD is called "Nudge It Up A Notch," and if you're a person who still plays a vinyl record every now and then, the cover alone is worth the price. But this is killer stuff -- and it revives the long-defunct Stax label. Like "Lonely Too Long" and "People Just Got To Be Free"? Cue up "If It Wasn't for Loving You" or "Impossible," and you're time-traveling back to AM radio circa 1966-67.

In honor of the late great Isaac Hayes, grab Felix's and Steve's new CD -- and a copy of "Hot Buttered Soul" if they have one.

 

The Front Page

Whenever I get a little sour on the newspaper industry, I watch one of my favorite films, "His Girl Friday," directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Not only is it the greatest newspaper movie ever made, it is absolutely one of the funniest films period, thanks to the screenplay by Charles Lederer which leans heavily on the original play, "The Front Page" by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. For anyone who has worked in a newsroom, a really competitive newsroom, it's a dream come true.

Which, in fact, is what I have been doing for more than three decades now. Working in a competitive newsroom. Both as a reporter and an editor, I've done my best to feed that competition, too. For many of those years, I've gotten up virtually every morning and looked at "my" front page to compare it with my competitor's. Early in my career the bad guy was the Northern Virginia Daily in Strasburg, Virginia; until a few months ago it was The Washington Post. How did "we" do versus "them"?

Every morning when I was a news editor at The Washington Times I looked at my paper and logged on the Internet to look at the front-page images of The Post and the New York Times just to see what each of us thought the most important stories of the day were and how much weight we gave them. Our best days were the ones when we didn't have any page one stories in common with our competitors.

Primarily the competition was over breaking news stories, but having a news feature or analysis topic first on page one was nearly as satisfying. For the number two paper in town it was also good business strategy.

These days, though, I find myself looking at -- and comparing -- websites. How does any website I'm associated with stack up against its competitors? And the competition isn't just newspapers anymore. How much weight does the Drudge Report give a story versus how The Huffington Post plays it, as opposed to the New York Times and Human Events? Now newspapers, aware they're no longer the only "news" source in town, are scrambling to keep as big a piece of that market as they can.

For me the habit of a lifetime has changed as well. I'm not sure the change has sunk in quite yet, especially since a daily print newspaper is still part of my reading diet. But these days the competitive side of me checks the Internet first.