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An Opinionated Columnist Finds His Own Venue By Marietta Pritchard Ed Shanahan is back - not that he ever really went away, except for a few years' stints at newspapers in Quincy and Connecticut. The editor of the Gazette from 1971 to 1986 has owned and operated Bookends, a serious, well-stocked used bookstore in Florence for the past 10 years. Now this opinionated former columnist has started up a venue of his own to sound off for the benefit of those of us who don't stop by his store often enough. A few weeks ago, I found him in full-dress outrage and thoughtful commentary at his new Web site, called "Downstreet," located at www.downstreet.net. There, with all the freedom that the new medium brings (freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns the press, as the old saying has it), he was fulminating against state Rep. Bill Nagle and against the shortsighted pedestrian improvements bankrolled by Smith College, criticizing a planned expansion of Florence's Lilly Library, while writing elegaically about the late book auctioneer Richard Oinonen, among other timely and timeless subjects. In the grand old days of newspapering, the provocative and sometimes infuriating columnist was a powerful fixture, a way of attracting and keeping readers who seemed to enjoy having their feathers ruffled. H.L. Mecken, A.J. Liebling and others made themselves indispensable to the newspaper-reading public. Recently a friend sent me a copy of the selected works of Charles McCabe, who wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle five days a week for 22 years until his death in 1983. The 350-page book represents only a small fraction of McCabe's entertaining and stinging oeuvre. Here's the first sentence of a column, titled simply "Dope": "If there is any essential difference between your cup of coffee, my shot of whisky, and the other chap's sleeping pills, snort of cocaine or deck of heroin, I simply fail to see it." Large national papers still have their gadflies, some mainly displaying egos, but some also following that old journalist's creed of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. But these days, newspapers are extending their reach into the new media, even as they shrink in their older format. For example, as the Gazette expands its Web site, it has cut back on the physical size of the paper along with its freelance budget. The Boston Globe has been in an extended legal battle with its freelancers and the National Writers Union over a contract that requires writers to relinquish all future rights to articles submitted to that paper. The writing may be on the wall - or online? - for those of us who write from outside the newsroom. Creating a Web site for yourself, Ed Shanahan's move suggests, is a way of keeping in touch with a community that may want to hear an alternative and homegrown, rather than a syndicated opinion. "Downstreet" is a twin project, an effort, says Shanahan, to cover "this community and beyond," as well as the local book scene. The handsome and user-friendly design was created by Stephen Found, another Florence business person, proprietor of Found Design. There are links to new and used book sites, to other independent book dealers, book reviews, local libraries, and an irreverent link labeled "lighten up." Shanahan has found getting the Web site up and running more work than he'd expected, but he's clearly enjoying the chance to get back to connecting journalism with public service, as he puts it, "an old-fashioned and hardly popular view these days when the two most reviled professions are elected politics and the media." He expects to update and replace his items every 10 days or so, but makes it plain that "this is not a daily newspaper." Most important for him is to have an outlet for his "sense of outrage." The Web site, he says, "enables me purge myself of these opinions I'm afflicted with." Others are invited to do the same. One contrary opinion has already come back from Mark Kille, director of the Lilly Library, who appreciates Shanahan's earlier piece, but disagrees with the analysis. What the original article describes as a "marriage" between the library and the Florence Association, Kille describes as a "shotgun wedding." Watch for more fur flying "downstreet."
This
article in a slightly different version was published previously by
the Daily Hamphsire Gazette for which Marietta Pritchard writes a monthly
column.
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