Pam Belluck at The New York Times led Science Times this week with a moving story about a new mother who strapped her 10-month-old baby to her chest and jumped out of an eighth-floor window. She had become obsessed with the idea that she had caused brain damage in the boy, and she rejected assurances from doctors who said he was fine, Belluck writes.
In a 13-page letter the mother, Cindy Wachenheim, left behind, she wrote:
I love him so much, but it’s obviously a terrible kind of love…It’s a love where I can’t bear knowing he is going to suffer physically and mentally/emotionally for much of his life.
I became so low thinking that if I had unknowingly caused brain damage to my beautiful, precious baby, I didn’t want to live.
It’s a moving story, and Belluck’s message is that postpartum depression, or even postpartum psychosis, can occur months after a baby is born. Read to the kicker; I won’t spoil it here, except to say that I had to fight back tears.
The Times inserted two notes into the copy, one saying that this was the second of two articles, and another that said the series was called Mother’s Mind. After being so moved by Belluck’s piece, I was eager to look up part 1. But where was it? When did it run? Neither note told readers where to go.
It wasn’t hard to Google. But newspapers should not be sending readers to Google. The Times might have printed a shortened URL that readers could type into their computers. Or it could have said “the first part appeared yesterday on page such-and-such.” But it did neither.
What’s worse, the two stories don’t link to each other online, either. Nor did the print versions alert readers to related videos available on the Times website.
The Times and Belluck did a wonderful job on this two-part series, and on the videos. Why, I wonder, did it fail to tell anyone what it had done? Now that both stories have appeared, they and the associated videos should all have a single index page at nytimes.com.
Good work should be read, not hidden. The behavior of the Times is hard to understand, except, as I’ve pointed out, it has happened before.
-Paul Raeburn
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