M55 Lindgren gets feet wet; NMN shows it’s all wet
Current issue of National Masters News (January 2006) is out. And it has some really strange stuff — a heavy-on-fluff column by USATF Chairman George Mathews in which his opening paragraph goes into numbing detail on the number of hours he spent in meetings at the Jacksonville convention (poor, baby!) and a column by Mike Tymn about a Scottish guy living in New York in the 19th century who claimed to “long jump” 30-40 feet through spiritual levitation (and the relevance to masters track is?)
But what levitated me was way back in the paper.
NMN printed the results of the Hawaii Senior Olympics from mid-November.
The winner of the M55 3000-meter run was one “Gerry Lundgren.”
Well, maybe someone by that name lives and runs in Hawaii, but I’m betting it’s our mysterious Mr. Lindgren of 1960s record-setting and 1980s ditch-the-wife-and-kids fame. NMN sez he ran 11:45 for the 3K, which is about 200 short of two miles.
That means he’s baaaacccccck. Very interesting! But when a factoid like that smacks NMN upside the face, it proceeds to ignore it. (Where is Tymn to track down fellow Hawaiian Lindgren when we need him?)
But maybe the strangest thing in NMN is the utter and absolute sameness of its coverage of the Athletes of the Year. For as long as I’ve read NMN (and that goes back 10 years), the January issue has been laid out according to a breathakingly dull formula: A two-line main headline with subheads devoted to masters track and masters LDR, with a few photos thrown in for giggles.
By now, I imagine, NMN has heard of the Internet.
In other words, nothing in its Page One report is news. It was all disclosed weeks ago — either on this site or USATF’s. NMN hasn’t figured out what magazines like Newsweek and Time divined decades ago. You don’t print the news; you explain it. You don’t tell readers what they already know. You tell them what they want and need to know.
Under this theory, NMN should have interviewed Nadine O’Connor and Emil Pawlik — and shared their secrets of success and visions of seasons past and future.
Instead of printing filler list after filler list of past Athletes of the Year and Performances of the Year, why not ask W45 Neni Lewis how she manages to throw so far — with all implements? Or get M80 Mel Larsen to describe the training that led him to break the 80-meter hurdles world record in San Sebastian.
Even daily newspapers know better than to pretend they are first-providers of news. Dailies assume you’ve seen the news; they focus instead on what you don’t know about the news.
NMN’s Web site, meanwhile, goes underexploited as a source of news. It’s undervisited too, I imagine. Who bothers with a static site?
But NMN Publisher Suzy Hess is quoted in the Jacksonville meeting highlights as saying: “that the NMN will continue to be a hard copy publication and will not become a webste (sic) subscription.”
OK fine.
We’ll continue reading, and scratching our heads.
