A Viking editorial assistant named Rebecca Singleton was assigned to work for Onassis when Onassis started at the company and was faced with a series of unusual priorities, including acting as a barrier between Onassis and curiosity seekers who just wanted to see the former First Lady. At one point, a man arrived at the office and told Singleton he was strapped with dynamite, at which point Singleton, who had worked as a psychiatric nurse, calmly patted him down and put him back on the elevator. She threw out letters sent to Onassis addressing the Kennedy assassination and fielded phone calls inquiring about the latest rumors, including one about Frank Sinatra supposedly shopping his autobiography to various publishers. "Did she really sign Frank Sinatra's autobiography for $1 million?" one caller asked her. "Categorically not true but we're all trying," Singleton told them. "Is she going to marry Frank Sinatra?" was the next question. "Categorically untrue and not trying," Singleton replied.
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.
