No one quite understands how off the mark the press can be until it writes about a subject you know firsthand. So it is with a Times commercial real estate dispatch on Worcester — which has been lingering all week on the Times most-emailed story list — in which any journalistic skepticism is suspended, and the city is described as a kind of paradise:
its primary boulevards are steadily filling up with the civic amenities that attract new residents. They include a busy public transit hub, comfortable and affordable housing, new restaurants and watering holes, computer stores and coffee shops, a performing arts theater, biotech research facilities, incubators and office space for start-up companies, and renovated parks — including one alongside City Hall with an ice rink larger than the one in Rockefeller Center.
I love Worcester. I grew up there and return fairly often. It's a wonderful small city. But somehow the story doesn't mention that many of the city's public schools don't work that well, that those "primary boulevards" are also full of dingy stores whose main English-language marketing pitch to the outside world is that they accept welfare benefits cards, that there's a crime problem, and that there are patches of the city that have been brownfields for so long that nearly-full-sized trees and shrubs are colonizing the vacant lots. The whole Times article reads as if it could have been dictated by the Worcester chamber of commerce. Again, I'm happy to see my hometown getting some favorable coverage in the Times, it's just so so one-sided a story that it's strange.