More narcissism at the Erie Times-News

The following appeared on Sept. 22 in the gossip column KevinCuneo pens sporadically for the Erie Times-News .

“Congratulations to the columnist who normally writes in this position. Ed Mead, who has penned more than 13,000 Ed Mathews columns since 1952, was honored Friday by the Erie Ad Club with the George Mead Distinguished Person Award. Ed, former chairman of the board of the Times Publishing Company, worked for many years as assistant to his Uncle George at the newspaper. He's one of Erie's most respected leaders.”

I knew Ed Mead back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s when I worked at the Erie Morning News, first as a reporter under Managing Editor Ben Jones, then as city editor under his successor, Larry Pintea, from both of whom I learned a great deal.

Since Ed and I don’t travel in the same circles, I haven’t seen him for decades, but I have always thought of him as a nice guy, an amiable, likeable gent who smiled and laughed a lot. In those days, he would drift in and out of the newsroom without seeming to have any urgent task at hand, picking reporters' and editors' brains.

Nowadays I read his column fairly regularly, mainly to see whether there’s been any improvement over the years in his writing style, which I would characterize as lower middle school (there hasn’t), and occasionally send him brief e-mails gently correcting his grammar or syntax (among other things, he, and apparently his proofreaders, if any, can’t seem to get who/whom usage right), or setting the record straight on content. Most of it seems to be drawn from articles in the Times or other newspapers, overlain with his simplistic ruminations.

It’s no secret to longtime Erieites that Ed has risen to the top of the Times Publishing Co. by birthright, not merit. Though he has street savvy, he’s not smart by any standard. He’s held many positions at the Times on the way up, but it’s unlikely he would have been able to find fulltime employment at any one of them anywhere else, and certainly not as a “columnist.” Though he has held the job title of editor at times at the Times, it’s solely through inheritance, not qualifications or skill.

Nonetheless, Ed would trot blithely off to prestigious meetings or conventions of the American Society of Newspaper Editors or the Pennsylvania Society of Newspaper Editors to schmooz with professionals whose equal he wasn’t, while the Times’s real editors who could have extracted some actual benefit from the experience to pass on to their staffs, or contributed to the distant proceedings in meaningful ways, were left behind in Erie.

If, by “one of Erie’s most respected leaders,” Cuneo means Ed leads by virtue of his inherited position at the top of the local media food chain, predator rather than prey, he’s right. The irony may have been lost on the advertising executives at the Erie Ad Club who presented Ed with an award named after his uncle George, but it surely cannot escape more perceptive observers that the affair unerringly paralleled the environment of occupational incest that has pervaded the Times Publishing Co. since its inception.