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It’s On My List

The other day a friend posted an article from the Wall Street Journal on Facebook. If you had asked the founders and early adopters of either the Wall Street Journal or Facebook if they thought that eventually people would be mixing them up, as in, “I read an interesting article in, I don’t know, the Wall Street Journal, or on Facebook or somewhere…” they’d have laughed in your face, or asked just what in the Sam Hill you were drinking. Things change. What might have been even funnier would be going back in time to ask either Charles Dow—yup, the “Dow Jones” Dow—or Mark Zuckerberg if he figured his new media experiment would be particularly popular with commercial fishermen. Yes, the person who posted the article was in the fishing business. Fishermen read the Wall Street Journal. The lobsterman up the road from me reads the Wall Street Journal. Also, Mark Zuckerberg dresses like a sternman. I wonder if he knows that.

The journalistic effort in question, a piece called “America is Drowning in Lists” by Laura Meckler and Heidi Vogt, gently tackled the subject of, well, you know, slips of paper where you write down a lot of things. The whole article was just a list of steps useful or desirable when writing an article about lists, the stated thesis being that making a list will make a difference. The authors meant to test that thesis. They referenced, with all proper academic citation, another author who had evidently produced a whole book arguing how “everybody on the planet” should be making to-do lists because they work.

Yeah, maybe–but the Wall Street Journal? (Now, with extra foam! It’s not just for the stock market anymore!) To be fair, it always has been a perfectly good newspaper. I know that. Please don’t write to me and call me a complete hick.

In any case, reading it (the WSJ article, not the whole book about to-do lists) was a way to avoid work for about two and a half minutes, and it got me thinking quite seriously about what newspaper columnists do when it’s what you might call “a slow news day.”

Generating a regular column for a newspaper was a weird enough job before the Internet made a big hash of industry experts and bloggers and fishermen and the Dow Jones and some nerd in a sweatshirt who made good. The fact that most people think this effort a mere hobby, and not a job at all, as in “My 5-year-old could do that,” is another subject, and if you want to go there, we ought to first begin with a beverage. I’m not saying they aren’t sometimes correct, by the way, including this month. But it feels like work as often as not. I’ve held on to article topics that I’d wanted to do for a long time, and waited until just the right moment, because the subject was so important that I needed to do all the right research first and patiently wait until it could be published in just the right magazine. “Nellie and the Hand Grenade” comes to mind, in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors a few years back. But what does one do when there really isn’t any news, and the deadline is Tuesday? You send in something entitled, “Ten sure-fire ways to rid your bathtub of silverfish.”

Editors of some of the major fluff magazines love that stuff. The thinking is that nobody has the attention span for dense paragraphs about silverfish, or anything else, these days and they’d really rather just get tips on how to clean house and buy electronics and make lobster mac-and-cheese because nobody has any skills anymore either. Oh, that’s another thing, tips: they’re called “life hacks” now. Nobody writes about “tips.” “Hacks” are what we used to call “Hints from Heloise,” back when we thought “hacking” bore some suggestion of online theft or fraud or sabotage.

It would be one thing, on a slow news day, to submit a lighthearted and friendly column working over, for example, a happy list of reasons to own a boat (1. Everybody likes being the captain) or reasons not to own a boat (1. The maintenance) or reasons to summer on an island (1. You do not have to pick up the dry cleaning) or not to summer on an island (1. The maintenance) or reasons to learn to play the Sousaphone (1. Not a lot of middle-aged women do it, so everybody will think you’re a bad-ass) or not to play the Sousaphone (1. It is the size of a small pickup truck and sounds like a walrus until you get good at it, which only three or four people are, and they all live in Germany and Finland. Not so much maintenance, though; not compared with an oboe or a bassoon.) It is quite another to submit a column making lists of ways to learn about making lists. I wonder what the Wall Street Journal pays?

There are lists that matter, and are worth the paper they are printed on: a pilot’s checklist, akin to a trucker’s circle check only more so, required by law and unlikely to be made into a joke. What-all you meant to buy next time you go to Rockland. The things you are studying and must memorize, be they the cranial nerves or the capital cities or the color-coded bands on a resistor. The Beaufort scale. Not, “Ten ways to tell if your hairdresser is ripping you off.” Not, “Nine reasons to vacation in Saskatchewan this year.” Not, “Eight delicious recipes for carnivorous whelk.” That’s not journalism.

This isn’t either.

Of course, the better scriveners can do the list genre justice. Here we are, midway through Maine’s season of recreational mariners, among boat shows and brightwork, yacht snobs underfoot at Hamilton’s, vessel transoms claiming home ports like “Bridgton” and “Bismarck,” retired podiatrists running around in Greek Fisherman’s caps, and cut-throat parking struggles at every harbor in Maine save maybe a couple so nearly Canadian that the manners get better—so, I’ll leave you with the imparted wisdom of Senior Newspaper Columnist Emeritus and Licensed Armchair Sociologist Dave Barry, who offers, in list form:

“How to Sail a Sailboat:

1. Figure out which way you want to go.

2. Whichever way it is, do not aim the sailboat in that direction.

3. Aim the sailboat in some other direction.

4. Trust me, this is the way sailboaters do it.

5. They are heavy drinkers.”

That one looks sort of useful.

Eva Murray is the Recycling and Solid Waste Coordinator for Matinicus Island. Eva’s last lobster license was dated 1990, the year her son was born, and cost $53.00, which at the time she thought was an awful lot of money.