Michael Paulson's remarks at Mike Berger award ceremony 2008

May 20, 2008
Transcript of Mr. Paulson's remarks.

In the summer of 2004, the Globe’s projects editor came up to me and said he wanted me to help out with a multipart series on immigration.

A group of reporters were being dispatched to find out how immigrants were affecting various aspects of life in Boston, and my task was to take a look at immigrants and faith.

For a variety of reasons too mundane to get into here, the project collapsed, as projects sometimes do.

But that failed project, as also sometimes happens, led me to Ma Siss’s Place, the subject of the story you are honoring today.

I had been wandering around Dorchester, a large, diverse, sometimes troubled neighborhood of Boston, looking at start-up churches, many of them in storefronts, when somebody suggested I check out the old garage on Quincy Street

This was just a mile or two from my desk at the Globe, but slightly off the main road, so I had never really noticed the yard piled high with used appliances and couches and racks of clothing, or the hand-lettered sign, up against a chain-link fence, that said “Please Come Pray Eat Worship”

But it turned out that inside, every Saturday, a group of neighborhood women was gathering to pray.

Their inspiration was a large, relatively taciturn woman whose real name is Idene Wilkerson, but who is known to everyone by a nickname, Ma Siss. She was hobbled by age and various infirmities. She had come from Alabama, worked as a maid in the affluent suburbs of Boston, and raised so many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and foster children that I never could establish a hard count.

Her life was filled with tragedy. All four of her children had done time for drug crimes. Brinnie died in his 30s, and Willie Jr. is now incarcerated at a federal penitentiary; Sonnie is a recovering alcoholic and Dora battles a heroin addiction. Nevertheless, Ma Siss is a deeply prayerful woman, and grateful too, and she had long dreamed of a church in her neighborhood.

Ma Siss and her friends were nearly 70, and African American, but their prayer leader turned out, somewhat improbably, to be closer to your age, 24, white, and from Virginia. Aaron Graham is the son of a Southern Baptist missionary; he had grown up partly in Liberia and Kuwait, and he had come to Boston as soon as he graduated college to live out his faith as best he could in a region often viewed as inhospitable to evangelicalism.

The worship services were unusual. The garage is so close to the commuter rail tracks that it shakes when the trains roll overhead. There was this artificial turf covering the floor, bed sheets covering the walls, people cooking and sleeping and taking phone calls during the worship, abandoned overstuffed sofas and chairs for pews, and a cat named Church wandering around to get the mice.

My editor and I quickly realized I had stumbled into the very beginning of a very intriguing church, and thought that if I stuck around long enough, I might have a rare window into the birth of a church. So I spent three years, off and on, following the small group of people who gathered in this garage each week, and attempted to capture the drama of ordinary life in an evolving institution -- failures and successes, arrivals and departures, shootings, arrests, even a flood. We followed Ma Siss into the hospital, and Dora into court and into prison, and Missy into the grave.

Professor Thomas Edsall, Dan Balz, Michael Paulson (left to right)Photo/Weijia Liu

The result was the four-part series that we published over Christmas week. It was a lot to read – about 18,000 words, which is a huge commitment of space in this day and age – and a lot to see – five videos, and about 70 photos between the print and web. Clearly that was too much for some people, and for others, the subject matter was unworthy; at 8:12 a.m. on Christmas Day a reader e-mailed me and said “The tissues please. Real slow news days. Who you piss off to get this ‘assignment’?"

But there was also, judging from the reaction, a large audience for this story, people who stuck with it through every word and some who wanted even more.

A couple of things stood out for me in the feedback.

First, some people are clearly still open to having an emotional experience with a daily newspaper. One reader wrote about how she woke up early on the second day of the series, Christmas Eve, to read the paper, and found herself crying over her cup of coffee.

Secondly, many religious people, particularly evangelicals, think we dis them with some regularity. A professor at Boston University was one of several who wrote to tell me that she believes the Globe often, and I quote “repeats one-sided caricatures of southerners, of evangelicals, and of poor people,’’ and those critics were pleased to see us attempt a much fuller and more nuanced portrait in this series.

Thirdly, our readers, even the most religious ones, clearly were willing to tolerate a detailed discussion of challenges and failures at a church because it came in a context that they recognized as true.

This kind of journalism is scary. This story was by far the biggest project I had ever taken on, and when I began, I had no idea what I might find. When I sat down to write, I confronted piles and piles of notes and tape recordings .

If I have any wisdom for you, it is, don’t be afraid to take chances. As Mike Berger’s career teaches us, there are an incredible number of stories out there if we just take the time to look for them, and in the humblest of places we can find people and events that tell us about the world in which we live so much more powerfully than much of the stuff that makes up the content of our papers each day.

I had a chance to read not only Mike Berger’s Pulitzer-prize winning story, but also a portion of one of his books and the spectacular obituary than ran of him when he died in 1959. Your web site says this award pays tribute to his coverage of ordinary people, but you only have to read a few of his pieces to realize that to him, and to his readers, those ordinary people were quite extraordinary.

I don’t have to tell you that journalism is changing rapidly and unpredictably. Mike Berger could never have envisioned the multimedia features that became a part of telling the Ma Siss story, and I’m sure there are developments yet to come that we cannot envision here today.

But even as the platforms change, the fundamentals remain the same, and that’s why it is so significant that you are continuing to honor journalism that attempts to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, to burrow into the hidden places of our cities and share with our audiences a better sense of the world in which they live.

We at the Globe invested a huge amount into this story in part because we thought it might provide us with an unusual way of exploring evangelicalism in our backyard, and poverty, and faith. But mostly we invested in this story because we thought it was compelling, and interesting, and important, and rare, and deep, and true.

Today, it is both humbling and heartening to have that work recognized by you all, and I am honored. Thank you.