It Has Hair On It

The Times (not unironically) profiles some of the great Queens weekly newspapers — and if anyone at Silvercup is paying attention, it’s a great idea for a television series — pitch it as Lou Grant meets Taxi:

[Times Newsweekly publisher and editor Maureen E. Walthers] has had her share of run-ins with the news media world of Manhattan, dating back to the single day she spent in a journalism course at Columbia University. Ms. Walthers hadn’t gone to college; she came to The Ridgewood Times as a divorced mother in her 40s. But she was already an experienced reporter when she sat down for the class, which began with a searching question: What is the most important principle in journalism? The students said “integrity,” “justice,” “truth.” Ms. Walthers was the last to answer. She said, “advertising.”

“They were all looking at me as if I was some sort of crass individual,” she said. She went back to Ridgewood and bought the paper 20 years ago.

“I have a very simple philosophy,” she said. “The stringbean farmer wants to read about the stringbean crop.”

Last Tuesday, a day remained until deadline and things looked grim.

The managing editor, Bill Mitchell, was thinking of running a story about a police forum attended by no one except a reporter from The Times Newsweekly. (“You’re not going to get anything in terms of residents storming the Bastille. The story here is there’s nobody here,” he reasoned.) The sinkhole was still a contender, but it was already three-day-old news. “It has hair on it,” Ms. Walthers said.

Mr. Mitchell left the office hoping for something to break on Wednesday. An exploding manhole cover? A graffiti bust? If worse came to worst, there were photographs from the previous weekend’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in Sunnyside.