It was a tired old column that Boston Globe editors killed in 1991. “Starts & Stops” had run for a couple of years weekly in the Metro/Region section, starting out as a lively repository for transportation tidbits — the kind of news that didn’t merit a longer story but needed to make its way to the reading and increasingly frustrated commuting public.
But the transportation beat changed hands a few times, and the column became a burying ground for press releases that weren’t good enough to be fodder for the news columns.
I took over the beat in 1993, and for three years my editors and I talked about reviving Starts & Stops. I knew, as I became more familiar with the many-faceted transportation scene, that there were lots of worthy items — especially the increasing number of significant detours associated with the Big Dig — that needed a space of their own in the newspaper.
But we just talked about it.
One day in 1995 I even put together a prototype but it was set aside. Then, in April 1996, City Editor Teresa Hanafin, my boss, said, in effect, “Let’s do it next week. It’ll run on Monday.” The column I cobbled together, and those that have run weekly since, have brought a response that is nothing short of stunning. For a few good reasons, some of which we did not foresee, it has been a huge hit with readers, providing a connection that newpapers used to have but years ago had lost and have been desperately trying to reestablish. The column has provided a service; it has involved readers in improving their daily commute; it has satisfied a need readers have to complete a circle of communication that had become uncomfortably one-sided, and it allowed a humanization of a medium that by its nature and power has alienated many people.
It has drawn positive comments the likes of which reporters and editors rarely hear these days. “Hi there, S&S. I’ve been a reader ever since you began, and I look forward to your weekly column!” writes one E-mailer.
“Thanks for your weekly insights and help,” writes Greg from Somerville.
“Thanks for a very useful column,” writes Barry from Maynard.
“Your column is one of my ’can’t miss’ assignments on Monday’s,” writes Jim.
“You probably have the best column in the whole paper,” writes Gerry. (Don’t tell Mike Barnicle, OK?)
That first column had four parts: a lead-in mini-column on a current user-oriented transportation topic; a place for a direct response to inquiries (which we hoped for, of course, but as yet had none of, and eventually named “We get letters ... ”); a short “dot-dot-dot” section of developments and factual one-liners (“Pit stops”), and, finally, a section on detours and other changes that commuters needed to know about (“You can’t get there ... ”).
We have been receiving about 100 E-mail inquiries a month directed to Starts & Stops. We also get dozens more letters or cards a month in the regular mail. I could write the entire column just based on the comments and questions that come from within The Globe building.
The Starts & Stops column concept has been so successful that we have tried to clone it. We now have put the consumer reporters’ material in a Starts — like format on Sundays, and the religion writer’s Saturday offerings as well. They are attractive and readable, and both columns are drawing mail from readers.
Without soft-pedaling foreign news or anything else that has been a traditional part of the paper, we are giving people more of what it is they respond to. And respond they do to a user-oriented transportation column whose content is largely dictated by their own questions and comments.
We’ve helped get a clearer “Lanes Merge” sign on Route 128 at Route 9, and we’ve spurred the Massachusetts Highway Department into smoothing out the heaving pavement at the mouth of the Dewey Square Tunnel.
Two important features of the column are that it is personal — we use first names and hometowns — and the tone is light. State officials don’t always like the fact that we poke fun at their inevitable excuses and endless promises, or that we skewer their habitual transpo-jargon. But readers up against the system in their grinding commutes — faced with “Seek Alternate Route” signs when there are no viable alternate routes — seem to love it. And there is too little place for humor in a medium devoted largely to bringing people accounts of what is wrong with the world they live in.
Starts & Stops is a success because people like to contribute and because we respond to what they have to say. It deals not with politics, which they often feel doesn’t affect them, but with road signs, which do.