Patty Baena's hair competes with cheap falafel; Derek Jeter wins by faltering
Today's tabloids, June 15, 2011.
9:15 am Jun. 15, 2011
Each day, the New York tabloids vie to sell readers at the newsstands on outrageous headlines, dramatic photography, and, occasionally, great reporting. Who is today's winner?
The New York Post: The temperature in New York is a spring-like 65 degrees right now, the sky an only slightly hazy blue, with some cumulus scudding across the Western horizon and, nearer, high cirrus and middle-height altostratus clouds painted across the haze. You could almost believe it was some weekday before Memorial Day, before the first bawdy picture of congressman Anthony Weiner went viral after an errant Twitter direct-message was broadcast across the Internet.
Today's Post is a reminder, though, that those days were not days of innocence. At the top of the page, Mildred "Patty" Baena, former housekeeper to former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is posing in silhouette on a blue field, looking a little like a war between two wigs that is being waged on top of her head.
"Maria and me," reads the yellow, black-outlined, underlined and drop-shadowed text. (What, no embossing?) On the lower left there's a picture of the Governator and wife Maria Shriver in black-tie and gown, and flowing between the two images is a dek that reads "Arnie's baby mama tells."
It's not labeled "exclusive," and we suspect the Post has not assigned more stakeouts of Baena, who has fled her Brentwood home and is at an undisclosed location with her son, the 13-year-old child she conceived in an extramarital affair with Schwarzenegger. And yes, in fact, it's all retread of a giant piece in Hello!, in which Baena tells the reporter Shriver knew about the lovechild around Thanksgiving of last year and confronted Baena about it. Baena tells the paper Shriver consoled her, and that she apologized to Shriver. Rather magnanimously, Baena tells the magazine that Schwarzenegger loves Shriver and that she hopes the two work out their marriage.
Schwarzenegger and Shriver have hired family-law attorneys but haven't yet filed for divorce. Maybe they won't! I doubt it will have much to do with whether they have Baena's blessing.
Though the Schwarzenegger love-child baby-mama story takes up the most real estate on the page, as always, it's the straightforward type treatment, here on the lower-right, in black and white, that is meant to convey the page's top news story. "C-FOOD," reads the headline, awkwardly: The "C" takes up the entire vertical space of the box; the hyphen and the rest of the main hed are laddered up over the dek and lede text. "Eateries fined for hiding low grades" reads the underlined dek; "They've been served" are the first words in the article.
It's another step in the Post's Shame on You crusade against restaurants that got bad grades in the last sweep of city inspections and are trying to hide it from the public. $1,000 fines are being given out. Here's the thing with this storyline: It's best when the paper can identify actual restaurants that are being fined. But that's lots of restaurants. So what's next is to find the ones where the fact of a low inspection grade, and the shadiness of the owners in hiding it, are surprises. Don't we want to see an wayward Pret-a-Manger in Midtown, a fancy restaurant on the Upper East Side, and a true horror-show of a burger joint in the Financial District called out on the front?
Somehow the uptown falafel joint that has put up a "grade pending" sign (we don't know what grade they actually got) is neither surprising nor interesting; a patron asked why she was buying food there when the grade was being concealed responded, wisely, that the falafel is three dollars. What more needs to be said?
There's a small tribute to the fact that Derek Jeter will be inactive until the end of the month. After a strain in his right calf flared up in Monday's game against Cleveland, the Yankees captain was, after much deliberation, put on the disabled list. With just six hits remaining till he gets his 3,000th, this opens up speculation that Jeter might make pass the mark during the next subway series in early July. That will really be front-page news, right? Inserts, and posters to tack onto the wall-carpet of your cubicle?
Daily News: The News, possibly figuring that 1) Arnold Schwarzenegger's not a local story, 2) it's not quite the thing to dominate one's front page with a recycled report from Hello! magazine and 3) anything on the "players" side of major-league baseball generally appeals to their sportsy readership, gives Jeter lots more tender love and care on its front today. The shortstop-icon is in profile in a photo that takes up most of the page, looking downward and dejected.
"OUT!" reads the main hed at the bottom, in knockout type against the photo background. Above are bullet points (see, there are lots of things to get to here!). "Jeter goes on DL just 6 hits shy of 3,000" and "Big one could come at Citi Field."
But the News has more to sell you, most of it kind of boring. Across the bottom, a nicely executed red strip with knockout-white type, somewhat unaccountably small in stature, reads "BAM A SHINING STAR IN PUERTO RICO," documenting among other things his handshake with Marc Anthony and his eating of a medianoche sandwich (which sound to us like a Cubano on sweet bread). Obama's picture is cropped along the right-hand side so that just the white star on the blue field of the Puerto Rican flag is visible behind him, so the treatment altogether kind of feels, well, Puerto Rican. The purpose of Obama's visit is not to get votes in Puerto Rico: they can't vote in the general election. But as with his trip to Ireland earlier this year, visiting the Homeland reverberates greatly and organically among voters here. What's called the "Hispanic vote" is obviously a little more complicated; if Obama visited Cuba he'd likely lose the very few Cuban-American votes in Florida he might have gotten in the first place.
As well as Obama did with "hispanics" I'd love to have known more about how he does with the nearly five million Puerto Ricans who live in the Upper 48. Maybe that's next.
In a nod to what is perhaps the biggest news coming out of Albany in the near future, a red skybox at the top of the page advertises the fact that "GAY MARRIAGE 1 VOTE AWAY IN ALBANY." But in the tabloid context, in that spot on the page, it just seems a little odd. Aren't there more Caribbean vacations to give away?
Observations: Neither paper seems quite willing to commit today. The Schwarzenchild and C-Food stories on the front of the Post seem stalemated in a tug of war for control of the front, and Jeter just looks like he's cheering on the sidelines. Nothing here is calling out as loud as you want it to. The News has also decided to pack lots onto the front page, but the emphases are clearer: today's front is Jeter, and he is OUT. OK, I don't think it's big enough news for this treatment, but if you can't be with the one you love, you've got to love the one you're with, right? It's close, but in a 1-0 way, not a 10-9 way.
Winner: Daily News.
