Lifestyle mag touches a nerve in Barrington

[Note: I regret my earlier slapdash description of RI Monthly, which didn't do it justice, and which, as someone affiliated with the magazine points out, is similar to how some might draw a simplistic description of other publications, including the one for which I write.]

The ProJo reports today on the unusually sharp reaction to a Rhode Island Monthly story about teen drinking in Barrington, including an explicit threat to the author of the piece, Massachusetts-based contributor Gretchen Voss.

The article, with a cover headline “Fatal Attraction: How kids, cars and drinking are tearing Barrington apart,” has sparked hundreds of reactions on the Internet, many from a new Facebook group called Boycott Rhode Island Monthly and many more on the Web site of the magazine itself, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Providence Journal.

Editor Sarah Francis said she wrote Police Chief John LaCross last week after one writer on the Facebook site suggested that the author of the story, freelance writer Gretchen Voss, should be sexually mutilated and then forced to watch her family being slowly killed. The individual suggested how to keep a body from being discovered, adding in a second post: “Remember, if there is no body there is crime.”

Missing from Gene Emery's article is any irony about how a story rather typical of its genre -- in a magazine which mixes serious reporting and lifestyle features from which readers usually seek tips on a plastic surgeon or a trendy restaurant -- has inspired unusually tough tactics from the denizens of an affluent suburban enclave.

At least on the surface, the situation is vaguely reminsicent of how Adrian Nicole LeBlanc encountered a harsh case of blame-the-messenger when she wrote, for the now-defunct New England Monthly, about a wave of teen suicide cases in her native Leominster, Massachusetts.