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The Bulletin Celebrates Its 5th Anniversary
By Kevin D. Williamson, For The Bulletin
Five years into The Bulletin’s experiment in independent, sensible, family-oriented journalism—how do things stand with the press? Some things about the newspaper business, it seems, never will change: Last week brought news of FBI raids on the circulation offices of New York City’s largest newspapers as part of an investigation into mob control of the union that represents their deliverymen. Some things do change: The New York Sun, one of The Bulletin’s inspirations, is no more. The new owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are out of luck and headed to a bankruptcy auction of their papers. Journal Register Co., which owns most of Philadelphia’s suburban newspapers, has exited bankruptcy with its better properties reduced to shadows of themselves; the best indication of its plans for the future is its recently announced hiring of Daniel Sarko away from Philly.com to oversee its online operations. The Bulletin, too, now leans more heavily on its Web version, having gone from a daily printing to a weekly printing.
The Bulletin was built less on a business plan than on two images: Publisher Tom Rice’s memory of his father leaving the old Bulletin on the floor for the kids to read after he was done with it, and my observation that the sort of people advertisers might want to sell cars and cell phones and vacations to—the people who ought to have been Philadelphia Inquirer readers – were more often to be seen browsing through the New York Times at Milkboy Coffee, Last Drop, or the Narberth train station. We hoped to have a bit of both: The idea was to build something that had both the cultural sophistication of the Times or the Wall Street Journal and the family-friendly, neighborhood-level journalism of the old Bulletin. And to do it without the backing of any billionaire business moguls: wits and grit and all that. (Turns out that it’s more a test of grit than wit).
One of the great pleasures of a newspaper like The Bulletin is that it can be unpredictable. (Is there anything more predictable than the Inquirer’s editorial page? Other than the New York Times’s editorial page?) It can bring outsider voices to the conversation, like that of Patrick Barron, whose economic analysis is not the sort of thing you’ll see in other newspapers. Daniel Pipes is a Philadelphia local, and also one of the world’s authorities on the intersection of Islam and politics, but if it weren’t for The Bulletin, you’d be hard pressed to find him in the Philadelphia press. Reprinting Thomas Mann on the 1923 hyperinflation in Germany as a commentary on the stimulus? (“Inflation is a tragedy that makes a whole people cynical, hard-hearted and indifferent. Having been robbed, the Germans became a nation of robbers.”) That’s why you have The Bulletin – you may think the stimulus is the best thing since beer in cans, but that commentary is thought-provoking. Which is what you want in a newspaper, after all.
The Bulletin has never been intended to be a political enterprise (you want to change public policy, it’s far more efficient to donate to candidates and pressure groups), but it has never stinted on opinion. There’s a good reason for that: Much of the “objectivity” in newspaper journalism is utterly phony, a cover for presenting tendentious propositions as settled fact, which is dishonest and, almost as important, boring as hell. But an independent paper is free to publish a truly open range of opinion and commentary. There are times when I read The Bulletin and think to myself, this writer is crazy – but interesting. I don’t agree with everything Pat Barron writes (nor he with me; Pat regularly writes letters to the editor of my current employer, National Review, diplomatically noting the shortcomings in my economic thinking), but I am grateful that he has an outlet for his heterodox analysis. Mr. Rice publishes a lot of thinking that does not accord with his own, because he understands, I think, that a newspaper is a kind of conversation.
And conversation is what makes city life bearable. Living in New York City, I sometimes have need to quiet my affection for Philadelphia – there was some sort of baseball tournament, wasn’t there? – but I still think it’s the most underrated city on the East Coast, and a great place to be a newspaper editor or a newspaper reader. Philadelphia’s strange combination of the very high and the very low – from Charles Dutoit to Anthony Forte—is inherently dramatic, and it suffers neither from the complacency of Washington nor the narcissism of New York. It is, as John Lukacs called it, a city of patricians and philistines. It needs somebody to tell its story, and that’s what The Bulletin is here to do.
Kevin D. Williamson was the editor of The Bulletin from its launch in 2004 until 2006. He is an editor at National Review and a columnist for The New Criterion.
The Bulletin was built less on a business plan than on two images: Publisher Tom Rice’s memory of his father leaving the old Bulletin on the floor for the kids to read after he was done with it, and my observation that the sort of people advertisers might want to sell cars and cell phones and vacations to—the people who ought to have been Philadelphia Inquirer readers – were more often to be seen browsing through the New York Times at Milkboy Coffee, Last Drop, or the Narberth train station. We hoped to have a bit of both: The idea was to build something that had both the cultural sophistication of the Times or the Wall Street Journal and the family-friendly, neighborhood-level journalism of the old Bulletin. And to do it without the backing of any billionaire business moguls: wits and grit and all that. (Turns out that it’s more a test of grit than wit).
One of the great pleasures of a newspaper like The Bulletin is that it can be unpredictable. (Is there anything more predictable than the Inquirer’s editorial page? Other than the New York Times’s editorial page?) It can bring outsider voices to the conversation, like that of Patrick Barron, whose economic analysis is not the sort of thing you’ll see in other newspapers. Daniel Pipes is a Philadelphia local, and also one of the world’s authorities on the intersection of Islam and politics, but if it weren’t for The Bulletin, you’d be hard pressed to find him in the Philadelphia press. Reprinting Thomas Mann on the 1923 hyperinflation in Germany as a commentary on the stimulus? (“Inflation is a tragedy that makes a whole people cynical, hard-hearted and indifferent. Having been robbed, the Germans became a nation of robbers.”) That’s why you have The Bulletin – you may think the stimulus is the best thing since beer in cans, but that commentary is thought-provoking. Which is what you want in a newspaper, after all.
The Bulletin has never been intended to be a political enterprise (you want to change public policy, it’s far more efficient to donate to candidates and pressure groups), but it has never stinted on opinion. There’s a good reason for that: Much of the “objectivity” in newspaper journalism is utterly phony, a cover for presenting tendentious propositions as settled fact, which is dishonest and, almost as important, boring as hell. But an independent paper is free to publish a truly open range of opinion and commentary. There are times when I read The Bulletin and think to myself, this writer is crazy – but interesting. I don’t agree with everything Pat Barron writes (nor he with me; Pat regularly writes letters to the editor of my current employer, National Review, diplomatically noting the shortcomings in my economic thinking), but I am grateful that he has an outlet for his heterodox analysis. Mr. Rice publishes a lot of thinking that does not accord with his own, because he understands, I think, that a newspaper is a kind of conversation.
And conversation is what makes city life bearable. Living in New York City, I sometimes have need to quiet my affection for Philadelphia – there was some sort of baseball tournament, wasn’t there? – but I still think it’s the most underrated city on the East Coast, and a great place to be a newspaper editor or a newspaper reader. Philadelphia’s strange combination of the very high and the very low – from Charles Dutoit to Anthony Forte—is inherently dramatic, and it suffers neither from the complacency of Washington nor the narcissism of New York. It is, as John Lukacs called it, a city of patricians and philistines. It needs somebody to tell its story, and that’s what The Bulletin is here to do.
Kevin D. Williamson was the editor of The Bulletin from its launch in 2004 until 2006. He is an editor at National Review and a columnist for The New Criterion.
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