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James Ledbetter and Katharine Mieszkowski

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Turning Off, Plugging Out

By Katharine Mieszkowski
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 11, 1999, at 1:43 PM ET

Hi Jim:

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My heartfelt condolences at the passing of one of your beloved two fat ladies, not to mention your poker losses.

One other notable feature of the Times' obit: Nemy takes pains to point out the negative results of the Times' own taste test of the recipe book Cooking With the Two Fat Ladies. A writer found that no less than all six of the six recipes she tested didn't work. " 'It is their rapid rise here, of course, that makes this careless effort at a cookbook so regrettable,' " the obit quotes the 1998 Times piece.

Excuse the expression: This is a fine example of the Times' having its cake and eating it too. Even in death, there's opportunity to tut-tut about the ill effects of celebrity run amok, namely unleashing bad recipes on the masses, while simultaneously celebrating that celebrity in the form of a prominent obituary complete with a photo of both ladies with their motorcycle and sidecar.

Still, you can't find that much fault in an appreciation of a life that ends with this quote from the surviving fat lady about her deceased partner in cuisine: "She didn't see the point of flowers. She'd rather have caviar."

As a coda to our conversation yesterday about the perils of technology run amok, see today's "Work & Family" column in the Wall Street Journal, in which "A Technology Junkie Learns To Live Life a Little Less Plugged in." We hear the tale of a project manager for US West, who's spent his career finding ways for businesses to use technology but in the process found himself a slave to the machine.

In the emergency room for chest pains, this tech junkie panics about his lost cell phone, not the about state of his health. The piece is about how one man learned to "find the 'off' button" without quitting his job. Here's a hero for the digital age--a guy who saw the light, and while he still reads e-mail and listens to voicemail on the weekend and on vacation, he sometimes doesn't even respond to it. Can you imagine? To be fair, the profile subject says of himself, "I'm not a success story yet, but I recognize the issues."

As for your ruminations on the effects of competitive jealousy on news judgment, I'd have to agree that there's something out of whack if a story like the Paducah, Kentucky, bomb factory goes so wildly under-reported in other papers, just because the Post broke it. Readers don't really care who broke a story, only other journalists do.

But I ask the business question: Can you see any way that papers might change how they operate to better balance such behind-the-scenes professional competition with serving readers? After all, no one wins awards for putting out me-too stories.