When Paterno was in his first year as head coach at Penn State, his wife, Sue, decided that the student body wasn't caring enough about an upcoming game against Syracuse University. "It was way too quiet," she said. "No one was showing any spirit at all." So she and assistant coach George Welsh's wife, Sandra, sneaked over to the Nittany Lion statue and put a tiny bit of orange washable paint on it. But then the next morning, it was reported on the news that the statue had been painted orange and police were well aware who the perpetrators were, with time in jail on the table. "He was really mad," Sue said of Paterno. "He has always had the strongest sense of right and wrong.... If they had sent me to jail, I don't even think Joe would have fought it." Eventually, they found out that after seeing the small amount of orange paint on the statue, Syracuse students had painted the entire thing orange with oil paint and ended up serving jail time.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
