Saturday, December 05, 2009

On Successive Mornings, A Pair of Articles
That Gave Me Watery Eyes Over Breakfast

Every morning begins with a leisurely stroll through the paper version of the New York Times. Yesterday, I paid special attention to this article, and this morning to this one. Though the subject of each is nominally football, the real themes are family, loyalty, dedication and sublimely inspirational people. Reading each one changed how I went about my day. I hope they might have a similar effect on you. If so, we'd naturally love to hear about it.

4 Comments:

At 8:58 PM, Blogger Kass said...

Both good stories. I liked the second one especially. It's the end of the day, so I can't say it has affected my whole day, but I do feel grateful there are people who are dedicated to doing good in the world, even if it is through a medium I mostly stay away from.

 
At 9:32 PM, Blogger John Ettorre said...

That's a nice way of putting it, that the coach is doing good through the medium of football.

 
At 4:22 PM, Anonymous Kristine said...

I wish the PD did more of those types of stories. They rarely have any feature stories of interest to me anymore. This weekend they did surprise me. The Sunday PD paper had two stories of note--one that spoke of Lebron's "foster" family in 5th grade, the Walkers, and what they did for him (based on a Terry Pluto book); and the story of the autistic boy who killed his Kent State professor mother. The latter really described the situation fully. Why don't they have more of these long feature/human-interest stories (written by freelancers sometimes) in papers anymore?

 
At 4:26 PM, Blogger John Ettorre said...

You're absolutely right, Kristine. The beauty of these kinds of stories is that they have double the potential to interest readers. You're interested if you're a fan of that team and/or sport, but even if you're not, you may well get into the subject through the human elements, completely apart from the sports angles. The sad truth is that only the very best papers are continuing to put much emphasis on this kind of coverage (because of declining space and budgets). And I'm afraid that doesn't generally include the PD.

 

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