Dan Barry managed to find people in the middle.

The final installment in Dan Barry's five-part, 14,000 word series about a diner in a small Ohio city ran in today's paper, and public editor Margaret Sullivan used today's column to commend Mr. Barry on a job well done.

Last year, Times executive editor Jill Abramson encouraged all staff members to go find real Americans and tell their stories, according to Ms. Sullivan. And boy, did Mr. Barry ever!

The good people of Elyria, Ohio, gather over coffee at Donna's Diner to talk about their struggles to make ends meet. They arrange classic car shows against all odds. They have hopes and dreams and hard times. They are Americans.

“Dan took this almost as a personal assignment,” Chuck Strum, a deputy national editor, told Ms. Sullivan.

“The spirit of the people, their great pride—I was just enchanted,” Mr. Barry said.

But just in case the city-slicker Times readers are having trouble understanding, Mr. Barry helpfully provides a literary context.

"Like characters out of a Thornton Wilder play—or maybe a short story by Sherwood Anderson, who once lived here—the denizens of Middle Avenue play out their roles under the watchful eye of that looming Loomis camera," Mr. Barry wrote in the final installment.

So, like Our Town, but the characters aren't dead? We understand. I mean, who didn't go to Oberlin?

While we may take issue with the pandering tone of the series, the boss is happy. "Ms. Abramson is justifiably pleased with the result," Ms. Sullivan wrote.

“Elections turn on the balance between the hopes and struggles of the American people," Ms. Abramson told Ms. Sullivan. "Dan Barry’s vivid reporting on Elyria, Ohio, brilliantly explores this balance at precisely the moment that so much political coverage focuses on candidates rather than the character of the country."

And Ms. Sullivan agrees. She thinks you should read it.

"It’s well worth spending the time to read all five parts of this remarkable series and see the multimedia effort, too," wrote Ms. Sullivan.

Since when is the role of the public editor to promote the newspaper and back-pat reporters for doing their jobs? On the flip side, it could be a great blurb in those Times commercials.

"The dateline is Elyria, Ohio, a city of 55,000 about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. You know this town, even if you have never been here," reads the accompanying photo caption. After reading pages and pages of his florid prose, Mr. Barry has a good point.

But, we wondered, how do the good people of Elyria feel about being turned into Times fodder?

"It's the talk of the town, we are just on cloud nine. Nothing like this has ever happened to us before," Donna Dove of Donna's Diner said when we reached her this morning. "It's like when you get a new car and you just keep looking at it because you can't believe it's really yours."

Although there are some new faces since the series began on Sunday, Ms. Dove said she hasn't seen any dramatic uptick in customers now that she is "world wide." But some readers have been so moved by Mr. Barry's words that they have decided to contribute. A woman in Sarasota, Fla. sent a Ms. Dove a check.

"Pete sips coffee and reads The Chronicle-Telegram through the damaged glasses he hopes to replace someday," Mr. Barry wrote. But now, thanks to the contribution of a sympathetic Times reader in Tennessee, Pete Aldrich will  no longer have to see the world through his "thick-lensed eyeglasses [that] are missing one arm."

Although most of the reaction has been positive, there has been some negative attention--specifically, in the comment section.

"People warned me that the reaction will be about 5 percent negative, but I just focus on the 95 percent that's positive," Ms. Dove said. "You can't dwell on the commenters in Thailand or wherever who think they know Elyria."

One upside?

"The Breakfast Club likes it. It gives them something to talk about," Donna's daughter Kristy told us, about the older regulars profiled so prominently in the story.

In the yet-to-be-named column, Barry will be "taking his voice and his notebook beyond the Hudson to 47 other states," according to a press release. Alaska and Hawaii need not apply.

Full release is after the jump.

Date: Nov 14, 2006
Subject: From Suzanne Daley and David Firestone: A New Column for Dan Barry

To the Staff:

In his memoir, Dan Barry describes his fear, when he first walked past the personalized landfills in the Times' newsroom in 1995, that he might not make it past his six-month probationary period. Somehow he squeaked by, and for the next 11 years, he distinguished himself and his newspaper on some of the most important assignments that Metro and National had to offer, from the wreckage of Flight 800 to the squalor of Room 9, from the salt wash of Staten Island to the fog of Ground Zero and the dark waters of Katrina. Since 2003, he has the been the steward of the "About New York" column, taking readers along a remarkable journey through the sounds and the smells, the sages and cranks, the pain and hidden beauty of the five boroughs. He has done so in the tradition of the paper's finest columnists, with an unmistakable voice of wry grace and rueful passion.

Now it is time to extend his abilities to a new frontier. Dan is about to inaugurate a new weekly column for the National Desk, taking his voice and his notebook beyond the Hudson to 47 other states. The column, still unnamed, will in essence be a national version of "About New York," and those who read of his journeys through the floodlands earlier this year know the power of that combination. Dan will burrow under news stories and unearth tales in wheat-field counties, cul-de-sacs and inner cities, and we hope he will soon become intimately familiar with the nation's air traffic system.

This is a new venture for Dan and for us, and in many ways it will be defined as it progresses. But we know of no one better to provide that definition, illuminating far corners of the country as he has done so well for our hometown. The column will begin in the new year.

Please join us in giving Dan your best wishes and story ideas.

Suzanne Daley
David Firestone

P.S. Some readers are going to say I'm picking on Barry, who I criticized last week. O.K.—I'll move on.

Well, I still think Blaine is brave, and people respond to that. But I apologize; I should have been more nuanced.