Fine, sure, Friday, meme-ish, it’s Texts from Mitt Romney.

Stephen Edwin King turns 65 today. I read his story “The Boogeyman” when I was in 5th grade and to this day I am uneasy around closet doors that are open just a crack in the middle of the night. So screw that guy. Today also marks the centennial of the birth Charles Martin Jones, better known as Chuck, who was responsible for much happier feelings in all of us.

The annual tour of Freshkills! The Brooklyn Book Festival! Dale Peck’s book party fiesta! The bizarre I’ll Be Your Mirror extravaganza! Also at the IFC Film Center, How to Survive a Plague is playing.

One Town, Two Newspapers: Will the Real Digital Innovators Please Stand Up?

by Brett Sokol

Another day, another newspaper bankruptcy. This time it was the Journal Register national chain, home to eighteen small dailies including the New Haven Register, and now operating under the seemingly sexier-sounding name of Digital First Media. That rechristening had been trumpeted as more than mere window-dressing — Digital First Media’s senior executives publicly embraced the Internet as the future of journalism, boasting of not only their “digital DNA,” but also their determination to “stop listening to newspaper people” and their stuck-in-the-past, ink-stained thinking. Don’t panic over vanishing print ad revenue, Digital First chief executive John Paton insisted last September: If you stack them high enough, “Digital dimes can replace Print dollars.” For an industry desperately casting about for survival strategies, the Journal Register’s Chapter 11 filing early this month, only a year later, appeared to signal particularly dark days ahead.

Yet as media pundits weighed in on this bankruptcy, regardless of their stance towards Paton — doggedly brave innovator committed to a paperless future or yet another smooth-talking corporate huckster — virtually all the day-after reckonings shared one key trait: None of them bothered to actually look at the products at the center of this financial drama.

So what of these Journal Register newspaper websites — the journalistic guinea pigs for all this relentless experimentation? Why not take a moment to visit the site for the chain’s flagship, the New Haven Register? Surf away!

Back so soon? Is that a bottle of Tylenol in your hand?

It’s hard to imagine a worse-designed, more downright ugly newspaper website than what the Digital First Media brain trust has come up with for the New Haven Register. From the clown-car layout (how many separate boxes of headache-inducing text can we cram onto one page?) to the crude font, the Register seems less like the digital future than a creaky GeoCities holdover from the Web’s earliest days. This is what so many of Digital First’s boosters been cheerleading for? This is what millions and millions of dollars have been poured into?

Clicking through to read the Register’s articles doesn’t improve matters. The local reporting — or what’s left of it — has been dumbed down to an extent that makes USA Today read like The New Yorker. Actually, that’s being unfair to USA Today — while brief, their political stories are at least coherent. Anyone trying to get a handle on New Haven’s city hall via the Register will be faced largely with mind-numbing, he-said she-said stenography, free of any explanatory context or background. An occasional story with some life in it might still creep onto the Register’s pages (Randall Beach’s columns remain one of only a few signs of a pulse), but good luck stumbling across them in the jumbled morass of the newspaper’s website.

What makes this state of affairs all the more bizarre is that an inspiring digital future does exist in New Haven. Over at the online-only New Haven Independent, editor Paul Bass has instituted most of the old-school conventions which the Register has tossed aside. Their nonprofit structure isn’t yet entirely self-supporting. And the Independent isn’t going to win any beauty pageant awards for its own web design, though it’s hardly the visual trainwreck summoned up by the Register. But Bass isn’t trying to reinvent the journalistic wheel.

For starters, daily reporting isn’t “crowd-sourced.” Bass assigns it primarily to either himself or three other full-time paid staffers — all of whom regularly close their laptops and hit the pavement, interviewing sources face-to-face, covering events first-hand and writing real stories full of nuance and analysis. Not all of these reporters share Bass’ decades of experience in digging around New Haven’s nooks and crannies, but the emphasis is on doing just that — learning the ins and outs of the city and making sense of it all, not producing a sea of inane videos, glib tweets and half-baked blog posts.

Readers in New Haven have been responding — and not merely in the heated (but moderated) comments sections, which often feature elected city officials enthusiastically wading into the fray, a telling indicator of which media outlet is driving local debates. By contrast, the Register’s own much-touted “community engagement” consists of comments sections that read like Klan rallies.

The Independent not only beats the Register when it comes to informed coverage of day-in, day-out civic affairs, it even bests its competition on delivering breaking news — supposedly the Digital First Media forté.

That point was driven home forcefully during last September’s city-wide primary elections, which saw the first hotly contested race for New Haven mayor in decades. After nine terms in office — yes, nine — the incumbent Democrat was seriously challenged by a vocal community activist gathering support from disaffected liberals and conservative fiscal critics alike.

Adding to the intrigue, the city’s unions (primarily representing employees at Yale University) took a page from the Tea Party’s electoral playbook and ended their traditional backing of the local Democratic Party’s chosen candidates for city council. Instead, angered by the mayor’s previous budget cuts, the unions entered their own members as candidates throughout New Haven’s wards, aiming to unseat both veteran grass-roots figures and party hacks.

Come election day, there was more than enough drama to draw local eyeballs (as well as strategy-plotting progressives across the country) to the Register’s website. Yet by 11 p.m. that evening, as the local TV stations prepared to air victory speeches — and the union hopefuls swept the field, effectively taking control of New Haven’s city hall — the sum total of the Register website’s election night coverage was a single five-sentence article and a suggestion to “check back for more.” If you hunted around a bit, you could also find a 55-second video of the mayor serving up a few dry soundbites. That was it.

Two hours earlier, the New Haven Independent had already run detailed ward-by-ward vote tallies — all on top of a fascinating analysis and plenty of photos. That was on the heels of an article earlier in the afternoon capturing colorful election day scenes.

The jarring contrast begs the question: If the so-called pioneers at Digital First Media can’t even accomplish the bare minimum of journalism, why bother to keep the lights on?

It gets worse.

Digital First Media’s latest chain-wide initiative is Project Thunderdome. According to Digital First Media editor-in-chief Jim Brady, 45 people are being hired for a Manhattan-based bureau which will parachute its staffers into breaking stories all over the country. But don’t call them national correspondents — the company’s job listing prefers to tout them as “SWAT Team” members. (One can only assume dubbing them “word ninjas” wasn’t deemed hip enough.)

“No. 1 is the centralization of the non-local stuff,” Brady told Net News Check. “I’ll take Paul Ryan getting named as Romney’s VP choice as an example. Every one of our papers and websites ran with the story, but we don’t have any papers in Wisconsin and we don’t have any particular expertise in Paul Ryan.” Cue Project Thunderdome’s SWAT Team! “The goal there is to say, OK New Haven Register, we’ve now freed up some bodies by taking a lot of this national and international work off your back. Now go figure out what we can have those three people do in New Haven.”

Apparently, no one clued Brady in to the fact that the Register is already running plenty of Associated Press national and international stories. And it’s hard to imagine that New Haven’s readers are crying out for a Ryan story carrying a Thunderdome byline in lieu of one from the AP wire. So when it comes to running national stories in Digital First’s small-market dailies, why not continue picking up stories off the various wire services? Why duplicate — at considerable added expense to a, lest we forget, bankrupt newspaper chain — what’s already being done?

But Brady wasn’t finished yet. “I think we could all agree that the fate of the New Haven Register doesn’t rest on its coverage of Afghanistan,” he said, “but on its coverage of Yale and New Haven and its surroundings.” On that note, here’s a revolutionary idea: Instead of hiring 45 new SWAT Team members to jet around the country and wade into media scrums alongside CNN camera crews, why not base those 45 staffers at the company’s own local papers whose newsrooms are practically starved for warm bodies? Why not have them dig into their communities and report local stories? After all, by Brady’s own admission, in today’s Internet era, local reporting is the only reason left for the Register — or any of the Journal Register’s newspapers — to exist.

If Brady is still in the dark over how to best deploy those local reporters and “figure out what we can have those three people do in New Haven,” he could always check out the Independent. They’re not only doing exactly what the Register really should be doing on a daily basis, they’re accomplishing it on a total annual budget of roughly $300,000 — a sum that should compare favorably to the annual rent on Project Thunderdome’s lower Manhattan offices.

To be fair, sending reporters into their own backyards is hardly as stirring as dreaming up Mad Max-themed projects that send them jetting around the nation whenever a bomb — metaphorical or otherwise — goes off.

A truly local approach that eschews empty buzzwords won’t get you invited to address the Aspen Institute. It won’t draw that much attention from prominent philanthropic foundations looking to fund the New New Thing. It won’t get you saluted as an intrepid “digital apostle” by the breed of consultants who last insisted you put all your content online for free — since accumulating eyeballs and riding the cultural zeitgeist is far more crucial than a viable business model. And it certainly won’t earn you any high-fives from your current hedge-fund owners. But looking at the Register’s website is a reminder that meaningful journalism — whether digital or scratched into a cave wall with a sharp rock — never really factored into their planning at all.

Brett Sokol’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, New York, Slate, and Miami Beach’s Ocean Drive magazine, where he is the arts editor. When in New Haven he favors a corner booth at Louis’ Lunch.

★★★★★ Engaging to the eye, and gently bracing to the body. The high sky was a canvas for contrails and cirrus and streaks that might have been either one. One twin stroke, definitely left by jet engines, widened and narrowed in regular rhythm, as if the winds at altitude had twisted it into a double helix. The pockets of the jacket held papers unseen since springtime — REGISTER NOW FOR SUMMER 2012 — and a few nails pulled from the wall of the last apartment. Water puddled still at the landing of the subway stairs. The air was cool enough to sting, just a little, on its way to the lungs.

Thursday, September 20

At Carolina -2.5 NY Giants

Cam Newton versus
Giants’ torched secondary?
I smell barbeque! PICK: PANTHERS

Sunday, September 23

At Chicago -7.5 St. Louis

Jay Cutler is not
one of those quarterbacks that
you want on your team. PICK: RAMS

At Dallas -8 Tampa Bay

Most of Mitt Romney’s
47% are
Dallas Cowboy fans. PICK: COWBOYS

San Francisco -6.5 At Minnesota

There’s something about
Coach Jim Harbaugh that is just
very off-putting. PICK: 49ERS

Detroit -3.5 At Tennessee

If the Titans win,
it will definitely be
because of scab refs. PICK: LIONS

At Washington-3 Cincinnati

RG3 should be
named the new Secretary
of Pure Awesomeness. PICK: WASHINGTON

NY Jets -2.5 At Miami

Darrelle Revis is
so good you never get to
see him on TV. PICK: DOLPHINS

At New Orleans -9 Kansas City

The Saints are better
in Verizon commercials
than Reality. PICK: SAINTS

Buffalo-3 At Cleveland

Picking the Browns to
win every game sounds like a
really lame book deal. PICK: BROWNS

At Indianapolis -3 Jacksonville

Maurice Jones-Drew
will be double-teamed all game.
Jags will get shut out. PICK: COLTS

Philadelphia -3.5 At Arizona

Cast-off quarterback
Kevin Kolb gets revenge like
a cheesesteak gone wrong. PICK: CARDINALS

At San Diego -3 Atlanta

This would make a good
Super Bowl with maybe The
Pixies at Halftime. PICK: FALCONS

Houston -2 At Denver

When Peyton Manning
loses he looks exactly like
that Droopy Dog. PICK: TEXANS

Pittsburgh -4 At Oakland

What’s a great place to
lose one’s virginity? The
Oakland Coliseum. PICK: STEELERS

At Baltimore -3 New England

Ray Lewis, hello.
Please do not hurt my boyfriend
Tom Brady — Thanks, Jim. PICK: PATS

Monday, September 24

Green Bay -3 At Seattle

Seahawks win at home
because of ‘The Twelfth Man’ and
‘The Patchouli Stink.’ PICK: SEAHAWKS

Haiku Picks went 6–9–1 last Week. For the season that’s 15–16–1.

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

“In the long run, NAFTA worked and now Americans can enjoy this delicious treat.”

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Niagara

It wasn’t God
with us that October.

It was something bigger than we can put into solemn books
and pray to

although I saw you praying as you stood over the falls,

your eyes shut for a while. I was praying too
which I do when I’ve lost sight

of anything human.
I’ll admit it here:

I was embarrassed

because the scene didn’t take my breath away like I had wanted it to.
Majestic, yes, and

sure, I could imagine falling
because I always imagine falling

but there was something about the way
the lavender of the sweater you bought me

split open

the mist and the gray
that had me thinking

things don’t have to be sweeping to be beautiful,

they don’t have to kill me
to make me love them.

Lynn Melnick’s first book of poems, If I Should Say I Have Hope, is forthcoming from YesYes Books.

Pssst, buddy, you lookin’ for more poems? Keep this under your hat, but we’ve got a bunch right here, in The Poetry Section’s archives. Quality stuff, too, trust us. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Would you like to feel better about the dietary choices you’ve made over the last month or so? Then watch this video, in which two men compete to see who can consume more foie gras-injected beignets in the course of a minute. It will totally put you at ease with your own recent decisions. It may also make you vomit.

Dear Pamela Geller, If Someone Rips Down Or Otherwise Defaces The Disgusting Racist Advertisements You Have Won The Legal Right To Display In New York Subway Stations, I Will Not Know Anything About How That Might Have Happened

We’ve never met. My name’s Dave. I don’t know much about you personally, but from what I have read about you, and from watching you talk on TV about the proposal two years ago to build a mosque five blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood, your public persona is one that makes me ashamed to be American and Jewish and a human being alive in the 21st century who has the letters “a” and “r” in his name. Because those two letters are also in your name.

You and the organization you lead, the American Freedom Defense Organization, recently won a law suit forcing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to accept and display advertising posters you made and submitted to hung on the walls inside New York City subway stations. The posters read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

Congratulations on your legal victory. Ten of your posters are scheduled to go up next week.

It’s hardly worth going into why I find the posters disturbing. You know why I do. You know they are disgusting and offensive. That’s why you used the word “savage” in an argument about politics and religion, why you juxtaposed it with “civilized man.” I don’t think you’re stupid. (You were the associate publisher of the New York Observer from 1989 to 1994. Again, we’ve never met. But I wouldn’t think that’s a job for a stupid person.)

So you’ve chosen to espouse hatred and incite rage in the subway stations of the city. The city where we both live. The city where I ride the subways with my kid, who is seven. The MTA originally balked, for easily understandable reasons, but the MTA operates under a lease with the city, which has to allow everybody equal access to its public advertising space. And since the courts decided that your message in its wording was protected under First Amendment Rights, here we are. Auspicious timing, too, with all the craziness in Arab countries over the Innocence of Muslims movie and the new cartoons in the French magazine. Your contribution to the kind of paranoia and hysteria that so often leads to violence is appreciated.

What should someone like myself do? I don’t usually advocate vandalism or the destruction of other peoples’ property. (Not even Bon Jovi’s.) But in this instance, I think that it might be the right move. What’s the fine for getting caught ripping an advertisement off the wall of a subway station? Fifty bucks? A hundred? Is it different if you can’t get the whole poster down, so you just have to take your housekey and scrape until the words “savage” and “civilized” and “Israel” and “Jihad” are no longer legible? Maybe the two Stars of David that adorn the poster should go, too. Because they wouldn’t look nice there next to all the scraped-up, torn-up paper. They don’t look so nice there next to all the hatred as it is.

Mind you, I’m not saying that I will enact this sort of vigilante justice myself. I try to break as few laws as I can. Sometimes I have pot in my pockets. All I’m saying is that it would be a shame if something like that were to happen to any or every single one of the ten posters you plan to put up. The city’s a dangerous place for bigoted posters.

You know what? On second thought, it would not be a shame. It would be better for everyone. The heading of this letter is misleading. If someone rips down or otherwise defaces your posters, Pam Geller, I may well know how it happened. Because if I see any of these posters, I’m going to do it. I promise.