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Dear Lord, when will the suffering end?
By adamg on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 9:45am
Sure, City Weekly is gone and the Globe newsroom is getting sliced in a million different ways and the whole paper could go poof next week, but none of that matters: Sarah Schweitzer is back on the Lifestyles of the Rich beat!
Today, she reports that the recession is even hitting people who shop on Newbury Street!
Tamer tastes can be glimpsed up and down Newbury Street. At Ralph Lauren, men are shying away from orange-patterned dress shirts and favoring blue gingham ones, opting for charcoal pinstripe over glen plaid suits.
Oh, Sarah, we've missed you so. But dammit, I'm not giving up my orange-patterned dress shirt no matter what sort of looks people give me. It just too much a part of who I am.
But, yes, even a hard-hearted blogger in his underwear like me had to shed a tear on reading of the sheer generosity in the Back Bay these days: Why, one "wealthy Bostonian, who asked that he not be named, so as not to appear to be flaunting," said he gave up his yellow Ferrari because his neighbors were all losing their jobs. The black Maserati he traded it in for is just so much more understated.
The Outraged Liberal writes that if the Globe goes under, Schweitzer could probably get a job churning out a new reality show: Survivor: Newbury Street:
... The Running of the Scarves at Burberry. Getting a table at Stephanie's. Looking for close-outs at Louis. ...
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Comments
Your disdain for Schweitzer
Your disdain for Schweitzer and her beat is as bleeping bizarre as it is petty. Her articles are a good deal more interesting than the coverage of school committee meetings and other hyperlocal snooze fests that some imagine is the kind of material that will make readers snap up the Globe like it's 1989.
School committees?
Well, yes, as a parent of a school kid, I'm more interested in school stuff than other people, perhaps. But I did enough School Committee stories of my own back in the day to recognize most people don't care. Still, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most people in the Boston area do NOT shop on Newbury Street and that there are plenty of interesting things going on that could better fill a slot on the front of the Metro section.
I would've found this story
I would've found this story more interesting, had I been able to accept it at face value.
As easily as it could be fascinating little ethnographic peek into the lives of people who few of us understand-- it could just as easily be PR for those people, vapid filler in the vein of celebrity 'news,' an inappropriate generalization from a few anecdotes to a group, or Newbury St. retailer PR announcing the season's fashions to lure well-heeled back to stores.
I shouldn't have to wonder that. I think one underlying problem is that the Globe does both good reporting and crap. The reader can't always tell when the Globe is in crap-mode. One result of this is that the Globe has a credibility problem.
Reading this post reminded
Reading this post reminded me of own double standard: When it comes to the N.Y. Times, I'm willing to swallow its wallowing in the lifestyles of the rich and/or famous in return for its national and international coverage. I'm less kind to the Globe when it does the same thing.
Instead of covering the immediate belt-tightening on Newbury Street, how about taking a longer term look at how, not too long ago, it had a much more diverse array of merchants before they were crowded out by the same chi-chi places that now must hawk the lower end designer stuff. Oh, never mind...
NYT has a big market
There are plenty of people in NY who care about this sort of stuff - for celebrity reasons and for keeping up appearances.
Boston has a different culture than NY and most certainly different from LA when it comes to what the rich are doing and buying. Put bluntly, there are a few rich people around here who care about that kind of thing, but they tend to be global and not local in their consumption of that sort of culture. Then there are the gossip consumers who aren't rich but like to keep up, but they too have a global market for their appetites.
Then there are the rest of us. We don't care.
That doesn't leave many Boston area readers to consume this drivel, now does it? Even in NYC, if you get a tiny fraction of the population buying in to this stuff, that is still a truly huge number of people. Boston area? Not so much.
Huzzah for Boston
Indifference to the wealthy is a virtue.
Meanwhile, across town on Bore-issey Blvd
Schweitzer's colleagues are frantically going through old
issues of the Herald, in search of winning WINGO! cards.
This makes me all the more
This makes me all the more confused about the Globes killing the city weekly.
I feel that as a newspaper reader who doesnt collect Social Security and who lives in the city, I am the kind of person that the globe SHOULD be wanting to keep.
Instead, they seem willing to lose their city readers in favor of pushing stories about shopping on Newbury street? Why did city weekly, and other Boston oriented stories, get cut? I read the Globe less and less, yet whenever I do I notice that carburbs like Needham and Wellesley seem to be getting more coverage, with their own online section.
And their argument that covering the BU Med killer and other tabloid events like that are sufficient city coverage is shit, since we all know its from the same perspective as their coverage of the mayors race: carburbanites views of the city.