Unlike Cardboard Nelson Poynter, likenesses of other journalism pioneers can be easily located. That doesn’t mean they’re being treated any better.
Josephus Daniels’ bust sits in the lobby of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. There’s also a statue of him across the street at Nash Square. Daniels wasn’t just a newspaper man, Rob Christensen, a political reporter and columnist for the N&O, said in a phone call with Poynter. He was also an active Democrat, the secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson, an ambassador to Mexico under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a royal elbow-rubber, and a white supremacist.
Daniels isn’t such a hot topic these days. Neither is his bust.
“I think for a lot of reporters now, it’s so musty and old,” Christensen said, “I don’t think they pay much attention.”
There’s one statue on Liberty Island that gets the most attention, and it’s not the one that depicts Joseph Pulitzer, who rallied the country with columns in 1885 asking people to give money and help finish the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
“To our knowledge, the statue has never been subjected to any indignities initiated by visitors,” George Tselos wrote in an e-mail to Poynter. The supervisory archivist for the Statue of Liberty said Pulitzer’s statue, and the others there, offer visitors important historical information. But they’re probably not a destination by themselves.
“As proud as we are of them,” acting public affairs officer John Harlan Warren in an e-mail to Poynter, “they are, literally, overshadowed by a certain statue in plain site where they stand.”
A statue depicting a paperboy guards the St. Joseph News-Press in St. Joseph, Mo. When the paper acquired the statue, which was built in honor of a paperboy who died in an accident, they were told it was one-of-a-kind, said Steve Booher, multimedia news editor at the News-Press.
“Since then, I think they’ve discovered four or five other ones,” he said.
-
- Photo by Steve Booher
The newsboy’s mouth, open in a perpetual “extra, extra,” is sometimes decorated with a cigarette, and from time to time people put their own news over the statue’s front page.
“People put signs over the paper, like, ‘city hall sucks,’ ” Booher says.
The statue has also been mistaken as real and approached for conversation by at least one person, Booher said. “It must be pretty life-like.”
In Poynter’s courtyard, faculty and visitors who missed their opportunity to take a snap with Cardboard Nelson Poynter can at least take comfort beside the founder’s bronze sculpture, paper open, in the courtyard, right?
-
- Photo by Mallary Tenore
Wrong.
“Over the years many have mistakenly thought the sculpture was of Nelson Poynter,” Jessica Blais, Poynter’s director of marketing, writes in an e-mail. “But it is not.”
Compared with the fates of Cardboard Nelson Poynter and his sturdier contemporaries around the country, perhaps that’s for the best.
Comments