Bringing the news home on Devon Ave.
Let’s go for a walk on Devon Ave.
It’s our global connection, global souk, global dinning room,
global gathering place.
So what do the signs tell us?
That there are Jews and Israelis and Russians and Georgians and Palestinians and Assyrians and Pakistanis and Indians and within all of these groups even small groups.
This is a small part of the story that the latest issue of the Chicago Jewish News tells. Their story is about the fate of the Jewish community on a street that once was the community’s hub. It is a wonderfully detailed and thoughtful two-page spread that raises doubts and questions. But most of all, it connects.
It is alive with people, alive with something that matters and so alive it will bring its readers in.
Let’s keep walking. We stop and go up a few steps to the offices of the relatively new Indian newspaper, Hi India.
So we pick up a story and this is the question it raises:
What did David Coleman Headley tell the Indian Consulate in Chicago when he applied for a visa to visit India?
He is one of two Chicago men who have been charged by U.S. officials with involvement in alleged terrorist conspiracies.
In a story from IANS (Indo-Asian News Service), Hi India tells us that Headley was described as making several efforts to cover up his background in his visa application. Rather than giving the name of his Pakistani father, he allegedly provided an English-sounding name. And instead of giving his birth name, Daood Gilani, “he seemed to have misrepresented his birth name in his first visa application made in June 2006 and left it unspecified in the second one in July 2007.”
By relying on a story from an Indian news service, Hi India did what any good news publication does. It found a local angle, and an angle likely to cause more interest and more follow-ups. And it brought the foreign news which it could not write about down to a more local, more specific target.
And that’s a model that works well for the ethnic news media.
It works on Devon Ave. for sure
