Pete Hamill on Town Square Journalism

A passage from Pete Hamill’s News is a Verb, courtesy of Zach Seward:

In the cities and towns of Mexico, the main plaza is usually called the
zocalo. It is a marvelous social institution. Along the sides of most such
public squares are the city hall, the central police station, and the
church. There is a often a band shell in the center, surrounded by a park,
with benches under the trees and shoeshine boys and newsdealers.

Most buildings have arcades fronting the square, and beneath the arcades there
are cafes with tables. In the evening, men and women of all classes arrive
from all districts of the town. Boys and girls walk in groups, flirting,
whispering. At the cafe tables, there is much talkAt one table, the
subject might be football. At another, the cost of living. At a third, the
perils of love. Every sort of imagination is exchanged: news of politics,
corruption, the cost of living. Each night, there are thousands of small
encounters, collisions, illuminations. More important, there is a sense of
belonging in the rude democracy of the zocalo. The daily visitors belong
to that town. They are its citizens. They come to know its great men and
strong women, its frauds and informers, its liars and its truth tellers,
its solid citizens and its criminals. In the zocalo, they come to
understand how the town works and who has real power. They understand
clearly what factors — weather, devaluations, the larger economy — will
affect their ability to put food on their tables. They go to the zocalo to
learn.

The institution of the central plaza has never existed in the same way
north of the Rio Grande. There is no unifying, centralizing place in New
York or Chicago or Los Angeles. Our scale is too large, the cities too
immense. Even our small-town equivalents — the town square or Main Street
– have been abandoned for the glossier attractions of shopping malls. But
I like to think of newspapers as psychological zocalos. A newspaper is a
specific product; but it is also a common destination for citizens from
all walks of life, a thing that is also a shared location. Those citizens
might spend only a short time in the printed zocalo, but they can feel a
small amount of comfort in the big, anonymous, alienating city in knowing
that such a brief experience is common to hundreds of thousands of others.

The newspaper as plaza must be open to all those who want to learn more
about the place in which they live and the world in which that place
exists. If it is too narrow, too insistently rooted in the parish, it
becomes by definition parochial. If its concerns are too ethereal, too
remote from the lives of ordinary citizens, it will become a closed space,
a kind of private club, a force for exclusion instead of inclusion. A
newspaper must be open. It must communicate a sense of welcome. There is
room in the zocalo for people who are interested only in sports or
politics, crime or education. Some might want to know about changing
fashions, the latest plays, movies, or music, the best restaurants. Some
might want a laugh; they can turn to the comic strips. Some might want to
hear the latest gossip.

“What is your audience?” is the question often asked of newspaper
executives.

The answer should be a variation of: “Everyone in the zocalo.”

About these ads