A newsman, Ted.

Still thinking about the loss of certain sights and sounds and smells that has come with our advance into the push button world of post-industrial America.

Among the places where the losses may be felt keenest are newsrooms.

Ask any journalists who started their careers in the days when everybody smoked and every story was banged out on a typewriter and who now tiptoe through a "workplace" that is smoke-free and glows blue to whisper timidly to a copyeditor about the mangled mess that copyeditor has made out of their story, in which sort of place they'd rather hang their snapbrim hats.

I've heard it argued---over beers.  A lot of beers.  Maybe too many beers.---that the decline in journalism is due to the cleaning up and computerized quieting down of newsrooms.  Overnight, my sozzled sources have said, newspapers became safe havens for neurotic ex-English majors without the gumption to become real writers or the grades to go to law school and the world of journalism went to hell in a handbasket.

Once upon a time there were giants in the world, men and women who couldn't think without a cigarette dangling from the corners of their mouths, who pounded out their stories on IBM Selectrics, and shouted back and forth to each other to be heard over the racket, using language you wouldn't expect to hear outside the hold of a tramp steamer during a typhoon.

Reporters drank their lunches in those days, sometimes right at their desks.

How many Pulitzers were won by stories written by hungover reporters tearing their already splitting heads apart with hacking smoker's coughs as they pounded away at their typewriters with uncertain fingers trembling with the DTs?

Nowdays, reporters go to the gym over lunch and eat salads and make prissy sour faces and wave their hands in the air when any one within a five mile radius lights up for a smoke.

My sources are bitter people.

I love newspaper people.  I admire them no end.  I'm not talking about the celebrity journalists down in Washington.  Those people stopped being journalists a long time ago.  They carry press passes and notebooks and go through the motions of being reporters.  They list their places of employment as newspapers, but they really work for themselves and they are in the business of self-aggrandizement.  Their occupation is being a celebrity and their job is to please an audience made up of other celebrity journalists.  But they are a minority.  An annoyingly highly visible and influential minority.  But a minority.

The vast majority of newspaper reporters aren't interested in appearing on television and they don't want "access,"  except for the kind of access you get with the fire chief at the scene of a three-alarm fire.

I've been in newsrooms that were so raucous and profane, despite the absence of cigarette smoke and typewriters, that it wouldn't have been surprising to see Cary Grant rush in chasing after Roz Russell, urging her to forget Ralph Bellamy and hurry down to the prison to cover the execution.

And I've been in newsrooms that were quieter and more sedate, as civil and as dull, in fact, as the accounting department at a major insurance company during an audit.

Both places were home to some very fine newsmen and newswomen.

I am very sorry to be living through the decline and fall of the newspaper business, for their sake, as well as for my own as a life-long avid reader of newspapers.

Nancy Nall, one of the finer of those fine newspaper people I've known and loved---like a sister, wiseguy!---wrote a post last week eulogizing another sort of newspaper person going the way of the town crier and the broadsheet, the small town newspaper editor.

Jim Barbieri, the long time editor of the Bluffton Banner in Bluffton, Indiana.

It's hard to say just what kind of journalist Barbieri was.  What you can say about him, what Nance does say about him, is that he was...well...unique.

Nance's, and the blonde's, former colleague, Bob Caylor, who got his start working for Barbieri, also has an appreciation of a defiantly American character.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

Quite a guy. My aunt and uncle published The Copper News, a weekly covering the Bisbee/Prescott/Bagdad region of Arizona, but they didn't come close to that sort of intimacy with the community. (For one thing, they each had day jobs.)

I remember trips to the printer in Phoenix to pick up the paper; we'd bring it back home to the house, lay plastic over the dining room table, and start attaching mailing labels to each copy.

The paper died when they could no longer physically publish it, and even the Arizona Newspaper Association (or whatever it's called) couldn't help me when I asked what they knew of it. I wish I'd been around them more and talked about its history. Small-town papers are a breed apart.

[Nance]

Thanks, Lance. Here's an e-mail I received recently from another ex-reporter. I'll fudge the details to preserve her privacy, but I think she gets it just about right:

Last night, a large contingent of State House journalists gathered for one of our most irregular reunion dinners. Anyone who did time in the (paper's) State House bureau gets invited, whether it was one session (such as me) or the record of, IIRC, 15. The AP reporter is covering his 42nd session, so no one comes close.

At any rate, one old friend said, "Remember the day you screamed into the phone, 'Grow some balls, Mr. (Editor)'" to our editor at the time. (Also at the reunion.) I didn't, but I didn't doubt I said it. I also don't doubt that it's been about 14 years since any one has spoken that way to any one in management. But it was very common at the time. We yelled, we screamed, but it was all about what was or wasn't on the page, in the story. It was never personal.

So here's my theory: As editors broke their own employees down in the 90s, insisting on decorum and respect in the newsroom, a more corporate environment, they broke them down outside the newsroom. And then, just as the press corps was about as namby-pamby as it could get, Bush got elected. And newspapers failed to do their job and became increasingly irrelevant to people's lives.

Reporters need to go back to screaming at their bosses.

[Rasselas]

Plenty of smokers and sots are craven, toadying lickspittles to their bosses or to others in authority. Like presidents and other people with offices in big buildings.

I am weary of the fetishization of the drunk, yellow-fingered journalist. In no other profession or trade is self-indulgence thought a mark of integrity, honorability or courage. Alcoholics and smokers are addicts, and addicts may be picturesque, but are generally pitiable and unreliable, and can be dangerous.

I can think of a contemporary journalist who drinks, and drinks, and drinks, and drinks, and smokes, and drinks, and drinks, and drinks, and makes an obnoxious point of both, as though his indulgences made him something other than contemptible, and flatters himself that defying rules about breathing poisonous smoke onto innocent bystanders requires courage, rather than obnoxious selfishness. Perhaps there are or ought to be different rules for people who can grind out a few thousand words making up some portmanteau word for the latest excuse for killing foreigners, but should aspiring journalists imitate Christopher Hitchens?

[The Editors]

Dear Mr Rasselas,

It is not the policy of the editors of the Mannionville Daily Bugle to comment on our reporters' relationship with their sources. Therefore we can neither confirm nor deny that Christopher Hitchens is one of Mr Mannion's bitter, sozzled sources for this post. Mr Mannion has asked us to make clear that his own opinion of newspaper people is not expressed until the 10th graf of the post, which begins, "I love newspaper people." Mr Mannion states further that he means newspaper people in the present, including gym-going, salad eating, anti-smokers who do not curse, swear, blaspheme, gargle whiskey, or wear snapbrim hats while on the job.

[Jeremy]

I'm partly with The Editors, having sat through the total tedium of Factotum recently.

On the other hand, IBM Selectrics???? Wusses! When I were a lad we used to pound out our stories on real typewriters, ones that responded to a good pounding.

[velvet goldmine]

Damn you, Lance! I'm nostalgic enough about the biz this week because I'm leaving soon and my likely replacement is an intern who keeps asking me J-school questions like, "Does [boozy editor] frown on one-source stories?" and "How many words should the school board story be?"

All reasonable questions, but somehow beside the point, at least for small-town papers, as Nancy captured so well. (Barbieri managed a daily, but I still found a lot of parallels to my own weekly).

I printed out her appreciation for my editor last week, thinking he'd likely get a kick out of it too. I can't tell you whether he liked it though; he's in the middle of a bender.

One of the things about weekly papers, which are sort of the redheaded stepchildren of the industry, is that the newsroom atmosphere remains eerily locked in the past. There just isn't money for the latest sanitized technology. This, of course, is a subject we bitch about endlessly, but it certainly has its comforts. I work in a fairly seedy storefront office, but that means we're all free to let our eccentricities -- as well as the inevitable f-bombs -- fly.

I do have a digital camera, true, but it's a hand me down once dropped on the street by previously mentioned editor. Every time I change the batteries, I have to apply a fresh strip of duct tape to keep the compartment shut. This does not look good at press conferences.

While the pay stinks and every reporter is aware that even the most deathless prose will nonetheless be dead by the next issue, there is something about having the sportswriter come in to talk about his epic fishing trip, and then getting a call from the school official who was just busted for a crack bender/fake kidnapping story, that keeps things interesting. It's all about the gossip.

As Nance said in her piece, I could go on and on -- and in her case, that's always a good thing. I will say that, speaking of old school journalism, this is the one story I wish I could have been around to cover:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Molasses_Disaster

[Rasselas]

Sorry. I like to play Toshiro Mifune to nostalgia's Tatsuya Nakadai when I can.

(The reference is to the duel at the end of Kurosawa's Sanjuro, for those who didn't recognize the second name.)

[The Editors]

Dear Mr Rasselas,

The editors wish it to be known that it is company policy to stand in awe of any reader who can work a reference to Toshiro Mifune into a comment.

[Rasselas]

No comment can contain Mifune. It is Mifune who contains all comments.

[Anne Laurie]

Lance, I can't wait to hear your opinions on THE TRUTH, wherein journalism is invented in Ankh-Morpork, more or less accidentally and not at all with the sort of results that would be expected in a logical universe (thus replicating our own "real world" nicely). I'm only sad that Heath Ledger is getting too old to play William de Worde, with Michael Caine as his father, lord of a noble family whose official motto is "le mote juste" and whose working motto is "A lie can run around the world before the truth can get its boots on." Pratchett spent part of his career as a working journalist, of course, and like all fine writers ruthlessly re-works his actual experience to great effect.