The Real Paper - Journalists

Journalists

By the early- to mid-1970s, The Real Paper served as a springboard for a number of journalists, including music critic Jon Landau and film critic David Ansen, who left to write for Newsweek. Theater critic Arthur Friedman, who moved on to the Boston Herald, died February 18, 2002. Time columnist and TV commentator Joe Klein reported on Cambridge politics during the turbulent 1970s. Mark D. Devlin, who was first published in The Real Paper by editor Mark Zanger, later wrote the critically acclaimed memoir, Stubborn Child (Atheneum, 1985).

In September, 1978, Gerald Peary moved from New York City to Cambridge to become a first-string film critic and staff member for The Real Paper, continuing to review for The Real Paper until it folded in June, 198l. Stephen Schiff covered films for The Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix before moving on to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and then establishing a career as a screenwriter (Lolita, The Deep End of the Ocean, True Crime). Other film critics contributing to The Real Paper included Stuart Byron, Kathy Huffhines (later with the Detroit Free Press before she was killed in a parked car by a falling tree limb), Patrick McGilligan (who later wrote biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Nicholson and others), David Rosenbaum, Bhob Stewart (later film critic for Heavy Metal magazine), David Thomson and Michael Wilmington (later film critic for the Chicago Tribune). This team of critics provided a total coverage, reviewing everything from major openings in Boston to the local Orson Welles Cinema (located one block away) to film showings in churches, coffeehouses, museums and college auditoriums.

Like Ansen, food historian and dance critic Laura Shapiro also moved on to Newsweek after writing Real Paper pieces such as "Books and People: The Cambridge Ladies" (October 17, 1973), as noted in a 2004 interview by Alison Arnett:

Shapiro is a child of the '50s. She grew up in Needham, the daughter of a good cook and caterer. Her father, Harry, who lives in Boston, played French horn for the Boston Symphony and at 90 is the manager of the Tanglewood student orchestra, Shapiro says. After graduating from Radcliffe, Shapiro planned to get a degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley. Biding her time, she took a summer job at the former Cambridge Phoenix (later The Real Paper) and soon decided she was having too much fun to go back to school. Shapiro was hired by Newsweek in 1984 as the dance critic and later began writing about food. Her first book, Perfection Salad, chronicles the beginnings of the food industry.