As many Northwestern students know, journalism comes in many shapes and sizes. “Standards” and “relevance” are about as concrete as they were back in the days of Hearst himself! Interestingly enough, it was in those days of “yellow journalism” that the New York Times decided that they were just too cool for anything and everything that wasn’t “fit to print” — a direct reference to the sensationalist contortions of truth common to most reporting.

Nowadays, as many students of media history will tell you, this slogan just makes the Times sound like a bunch of butt holes. Last week, however, the Times challenged that reputation with an article about… butt holes.

Photo originally printed alongisde NY Times article "No Snickerng -- That Road Sign Means Something Else

The article, entitled “No Snickering — That Road Sign Means Something Else,” reveals the hardships of living in one of Great Britain’s many hilariously-named villages, roads and townships. Author Sarah Lyall explains:

Mr. Bailey, who grew up on Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire, and Mr. Hurst got the idea for the books when they read about a couple who bought a house on Butt Hole Road, in South Yorkshire.

The name most likely has to do with the spot’s historic function as a source of water, a water butt being a container for collecting water. But it proved to be prohibitively hilarious.

“If they ordered a pizza, the pizza company wouldn’t deliver it, because they thought it was a made-up name,” Mr. Hurst said. “People would stand in front of the sign, pull down their trousers and take pictures of each other’s naked buttocks.”

The couple moved away.

Yes, what she said indeed. Lyall goes on to document the people of Penistone, Crapstone and Spanker Lane, to name a few. If I were still in eighth grade, chances are this article would be printed, highlighted and taped on my wall.

But be careful not to enjoy it too much! The Times reminds you not to snicker and to enjoy the article responsibly. While one can’t help but be surprised to see this in the Times, it seems a safe bet to say that the paper’s target audience would at least get a chuckle out of the article. After all, even the staff of the New York Times can let down their gates and have a little fun, once in a while.

Full article is available here.

Dear Thomas L. Friedman:

Let’s stage a coup.

I propose that my generation — those in their teens and twenties — overthrow your generation and take control of the future of our country.

You seem to understand that your generation is screwing ours. Your generation keeps starting wars, spending money and inventing problems that my generation must one day confront. America’s burgeoning public debt is straining America’s influence and increasing its dependence on foreign economies. Our social welfare system is entirely unprepared to handle the financial pressure that your generation’s retirement will impose.

The planet is facing ecological and humanitarian crises that will become only more precarious the longer we wait, and both of our generations are waiting. Neither a vote nor a letter to Congress will solve these problems. We need a coup.

But why you? After all, you are a fifty-something journalist and charter member of the generation that has stacked global problems like blocks in a Jenga tower. However, you have the sense and the credibility to ally our two generations in a movement to preserve our nation’s strengths for posterity.

Last year, you labeled my peers and me Generation Q: the Quiet Generation. “I am impressed because they are so much more optimistic and idealistic than they should be,” you wrote. “I am baffled because they are so much less radical and politically engaged than they need to be.” A coup is both radical and engaging, decisive and necessary.

Soon after your article was published, my generation became swept up in a romance with Barack Obama. He generated interest in politics among formerly apathetic young voters and mobilized an unprecedented number of young volunteers. Journalists called him the youth candidate, claiming that he had dragged our generation out from the depths of disengagement and apathy. But what are his plans to confront the chief issues that this country will face in two to three decades?

We have become so hopeful about “President Change” that we have ignored his refusal to stand up for the interests of our generation. Where his platform addresses the future of Social Security, it’s labeled “Seniors and Social Security.” He does not outline how his spending proposals will affect the next generation, nor does he seek to equip our economy and society for long-term ecological challenges. Though his environmental plan is more aggressive than that of any national figure not named Gore, it presents distinctly short-term solutions. It does not seriously confront generational concerns for sustainability like re-urbanization and public transit.

On education, too, the incoming administration is cognizant of the difficulties facing college students but unwilling to humbly confront the issue of college affordability. The trend of increasing costs of higher education requires the federal government to undertake a fundamentally new approach to higher education that increases the depth and breadth of opportunity for the next three waves of college students.

But I do not blame Obama for our collective refusal to address the issues that will weigh heavily on my generation’s minds and wallets. It is not his fault that he charmed the pants off of us. It is not his fault that we didn’t ask tougher questions, that we didn’t force the presidential candidates to address the pressing concerns of the next generation.

But it’s not too late — Obama can be the president that prioritizes preparation as well as response. Here’s the plan.

First, we will release our platform and begin to launch a policy offensive. We will organize an action-tank (the lovechild of a PAC and a think-tank) in order to lobby local governments and Congress. It will organize Qs (members of Generation Q) to run for public office on a farsighted platform. It will also enlist students in lobbying activities on behalf of the issues that will directly affect them once they come of age. If we hope to wrestle with these precarious issues before they become insurmountable, we will need to engage in politics and policy-making.

We will need to devise concrete, innovative policy ideas for the chief issues of our time, and we will need to sell these ideas to the people. Our conversations must begin to focus on the lasting effects of policy. We have been politically prude for too long. It is time for us to lead.

Second, you need to organize level-headed members of your generation to support us in our quest. If we start running for public office with Platform Q on our own, we might only mobilize five to 10 percent of the population. You are the Baby Boomers’ conscience. You recognize the importance of preparing this country for the next generation. Your message reaches beyond ideology and party, beyond the issues of the moment. Your generation trusts you, and we need their faith in order to launch this offensive.

We are going to stage a preservative coup. We are not looking to displace a generation of leaders. We are looking to join with them in confronting the long-term problems that we, all generations, cannot afford to ignore. Let the planning begin.

Very truly yours,

Ben Armstrong

Last year, Eat the Press did some fantastic, over-the-top coverage of when one NYT story about marriage and killer whales was #1 on the most-emailed list for several weeks. Which led to this quote from Jack Shafer of Slate:

The Shamu story establishes once and for all that men are the new women. You can now use the New York Times to write the most dehumanizing and insulting shit about them and everybody will laugh in recognition.

I applaud this new cultural switch. Please excuse me while I go shopping for handbags.

I love that even at The New York Times, an incredibly self-important newspaper, it’s romance, sex and doggies* that readers really respond to.

*Not necessarily at the same time.

Former New York Times Bagdhad correspondent Dexter Filkins described how he found out a Sunni sheikh wanted to kidnap him.

“I went to interview a Sunni sheikh one day and brought my favorite translator,” he said. “I wanted to talk about the insurgency or something, but [the sheikh] and [my translator] started to have this long, heated conversation in Arabic.”

Filkins was eventually able to interview the sheikh and then asked his translator what the long conversation was about.

“And he said, ‘well, he wanted to kidnap you, and [the sheikh said]…if we kidnap that guy, you get that money, I get half the money,’” Filkins said.

Fortuantely, Filkins said, the translator’s father led a tribe that would “kick the [sheik’s] tribe’s whatever.”

Now a Nieman fellow at Harvard, Filkins discussed his experiences in Iraq during a question and answer session at the McCormick Tribune Center Monday night. He talked about the the difficulties a language barrier presents, media coverage of Iraq and opinions on the current situation. He won the George Polk Award for war reporting in 2004 and was a Pulitizer Prize finalist for international reporting in 2002 for his work in Afghanistan for The New York Times.

While many questions brought up current political dilemmas and opinions, Filkins focused what he called “paradox of Iraq.” Previously having been The New York Times Afghanistan correspondent, Filkins said he “was sort of waiting for the cheering crowds.”

“I remember that day there were people just standing there and it was as if we had pried the doors off a mental institution,” he said. “There were people weeping, some people were cheering, people were yelling, they were talking to themselves.”

Now, he said, he thinks American presence stabilizes things in Iraq more than it destabilizes them, but it is a real dilemma.

“We can’t stay, because they hate us, but we can’t leave because if we leave the place it will disintegrate,” he said.

One audience member wanted to know what his definition of success in Iraq would mean, noting that no country has ever won in an insurgency situation.

“I think if you asked General Petraeus, at this point, in 2007, he’d say stability,” Filkins said. “Just get people to stop killing each other.”

Filkins did acknowledge how hard it was to say for certain what the future of Iraq is.

“I don’t like to predict the future,” he said. “It’s hard enough to report what happened yesterday.”

The NY Times has created a database where you can search for any word in any of Bush’s State of the Union addresses. The interactive feature will show you, visually, where in the speech he mentions each word, and then you can click on the word to see the sentence it was in. Oh, and it will it visually compare the number of times the word was used with other common words.

Here it is: