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Media Matters
Goodbye to Old Newspaper Days
Nothing will replace the camaraderie that came with being a night-desk reporter.
Watching the Rocky Mountain News go under and the Chicago Sun-Times declare bankruptcy, I feel, like everyone else, that we’re witnessing the end of an era.
Most people lament the loss of reading culture and the attention span required to make it through a two-column story. But for me the real tragedy is the loss of the camaraderie that came with being a newspaper reporter.
I worked for four years with the Rockland Journal-News and the Bergen Record, two suburban papers that seemed to have a lock on a pair of lucrative markets right outside New York City. After all, it was Warren Buffet who said in the 1970s that there was no greater franchise in America than a daily newspaper. (That’s why he bought a big stake in the Washington Post.)
The other day I called up my old editor at the Record and asked what things were like. “Even for the papers that are surviving, it’s become unrecognizable,” he said. “There’s no more newsroom. They don’t even give you a desk. Instead, you’re called a ‘mo-jo’ — a mobile journalist. They hand you a laptop and you go cover meetings and wire in your story. Nobody comes back to the office, there’s no socializing. It’s the end of a way of life.”
I doubt if I ever would have remained a reporter for long if it wasn’t for the constant esprit of the newsroom. It was like no other job. We didn’t even start work until six o’clock in the evening. You would go to your meeting — a planning board, a town council — sit there for two hours trying not to fall asleep, rush down to interview the mayor when it was over, stop for coffee on the way back and arrive in the newsroom around 10 o’clock ready to write your story.
There was an illicit night-owl feeling to it all. We were just getting started while everybody else was going to bed. We had until 2 a.m. The crisis occurred when you realized there was a hole in your story and you had to wake the mayor up at 11:30 p.m. to ask him one last question. “You were at that meeting!” he would explode groggily over the phone. “Why didn’t you ask me then!?” You risked not getting another interview with him for a month, but trying to push an incomplete story past the copy desk was worse.
The main event, however, was the gossip. Almost everything I learned about local politics came from the scuttlebutt that flew back and forth across the desks. “You know that weekly shopper that’s running the headlines about how the mayor is stealing money from the treasury,” someone would say. “That’s the mayor’s brother that owns it. They haven’t spoken for twenty years.” Or, “You know that councilman’s wife, the one who always sits in the back of the room with her skirt hiked up? She’s been having an affair with the town attorney. I think they’re going to try to fire him at the next meeting. That’s going to be a good one!”
Then there was the idle humor.
“My town has got to be the malaprop capital of the world. The other night somebody stood up at the meeting and said, ‘Mr. Mayor, you really hit the nail on the shoe that time.’”
“Yeah, last week one guy said, ‘Nobody wants to take responsibility around here. Everybody wants to pass the bucket.’”
“They’re all immigrants. They’ve learned the language but they miss the idioms.”
“Yeah, last week I had somebody say, ‘It’s time we got down to brass roots.’”
Then everything would settle down and we would start to write. It didn’t always come easily. One septuagenarian, Bryn Mawr ‘29, knew where all the bodies in the county were buried but she could never get it out of her typewriter. She would copy her notes longhand, then type them out single-spaced, before starting to write, while the copy editors fussed and fumed. Another young reporter, a devotee of Wilhelm Reich, had to sit in his car under an orgone blanket every night for inspiration. The editor usually had to go out and drag him to his typewriter. One feature writer with the instincts of a trade rat had papers piled so high on his desk that he hung signs on his desk saying “In” and “Out” so the editors could tell when he was around.
Then there was the sly comedian who would hunch over his typewriter every night lamenting, “I know exactly what I want to say in this story. I just can’t put it into words.”
There were also office romances. At the Record there were four regional editors and every one of them had girlfriends among the pool of scrubs that constituted “the regions.” Every time one of these ingénues headed for the copy desk, all eyes would follow. The one female copy editor — a bright redhead — also had a boyfriend in the regions. They got married.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (26) | Leave a comment
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drudge ette obama| 4.7.09 @ 6:22AM
As a non-Atlanta Journal Constitution reader, unless it is free on a lunch table, most of the written journalists have squandered the gift that this country gave them.
When papers are bought merely for the coupons, they have lost their utility as a news source.
No bail out for them.
Robert Rosencrans| 4.7.09 @ 8:07AM
Newspapers around the country are still suffering from an overdose of liberalism. They still haven't learned their lesson. There is not attempt to produce balanced news or anything close to the truth.
Two examples from this morning alone. CNN headline: Most say Obama improved America's Image Abroad.
When you read the article it goes on to state that only 16% believe he accomplished anything on his trip.
Example 2: Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post writes an article about Michael Steele. In it he claims that wanting Obama to fail means you want America to fail.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In essence, the liberal news outlets are high fiving themselves to the bitter end. And it's coming. Soon.
1Freeman| 4.7.09 @ 9:37AM
When the liberal press of today was in it's infancy the entire news industry had a chance to cull the activist reporters from the herd. They declined. Now they pat themselves on the back and have self-serving awards banquets where the most activist in the gaggle are given shiny awards and told they are at the top of their field. Real reporters, interested in the news only, are fired or ignored. Those folks have moved to the web.
Today the activist judges and activist news reporters (so-called) are the scourge of our free society. I feel your sorrowful lament for the lost era of the pressroom but that died over a decade ago... three decades ago really. Thank the likes of deep throat and the liberal "win at all costs" MSM. When Cronkite announced the loss of the Vietnam war and he went unchallenged it was a wakeup call for the rest of the liberals: you can wield power against the people and get away with it. I will celebrate the death throws of the printed media with a glass of wine and some crackers. To spend more would be a waste.
GE bankrolls the NY Times. When that corporation either fails or at least abandons their anti-American agenda *then* I will break out the good stuff to celebrate.
BTW: Do you have GE accounts charging you interest? Guess where your money goes? Yep: liberals use it.
Colin | 4.7.09 @ 9:56AM
Most of the comments here, pretty much, nail the current and declining state of today's newspaper business. At my grizzled age (63) the current collapse has come to mean this:
Newspapers (with an assist from the tech side) really began their final fall when reporters made that last left turn onto the street known today as -- agenda journalism.
Fortunately, and until the liberals find a way to "shut it down, man" with some kind of Fairness Doctrine for Print -- The Net has provided us with the clippings the "agendaists" felt inclined to leave on the editing room floor
That's my analysis and I'm stickin' to it.
Have a keen day.
Colin
Truth Hurts| 4.7.09 @ 12:35PM
I wouldn't be so quick to write-off the newspaper. The fact is that management has run them terribly in recent decades.
There still may yet be demand for a well-made newspaper in many cities and towns. We'll have to see if a new generation can make it work.
Having said all this, I think that people often mistake right-wing radio's attacks against newspapers as legitimate media / political commentary. In fact, it is merely one group of competitors attempting to detract from another group. There's nothing legitimate, interesting, or true about blanket generalizations that claim newspapers simply to be "liberal" mouthpieces.
Truth Hurts| 4.7.09 @ 12:37PM
Just because Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh claim newspapers are "liberal" doesn't make it so.
Many editorial boards of newspapers are in fact liberal, but that does not mean the reporters are (qua reporters).
The generalizations above are weak and not substantiated by any objective studies I've seen. If any of you have any evidence for your claims, I'd like to see it.
Margaret| 4.7.09 @ 2:05PM
Terrific article. So true. I've also read William Tucker's Terrestrial Energy and it's fabulous -- again, very insightful.
RJ| 4.7.09 @ 2:41PM
No offense, but Tucker's column illustrates so much of the problem w/ the media; they think that it is all about THEM. The tragedy IS the loss of reading culture, and attention spans decreasing by the day and what those protend for an informed society. The tragedy is most definitely NOT the loss of camaraderie amongst those who report the news- who cares? Would we say that the tragedy isn't the loss of the American auto industry but the loss of the buddy-buddy friendships on the assembly line?
Ugh... Big Media arrogance.
Robert Rosencrans| 4.7.09 @ 2:51PM
Claiming the majority of the media isn't liberal is ridiculous. Study after study has proven it.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/143lkblo.asp
THE ARGUMENT over whether the national press is dominated by liberals is over. Since 1962, there have been 11 surveys of the media that sought the political views of hundreds of journalists. In 1971, they were 53 percent liberal, 17 percent conservative. In a 1976 survey of the Washington press corps, it was 59 percent liberal, 18 percent conservative. A 1985 poll of 3,200 reporters found them to be self-identified as 55 percent liberal, 17 percent conservative. In 1996, another survey of Washington journalists pegged the breakdown as 61 percent liberal, 9 percent conservative. Now, the new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found the national media to be 34 percent liberal and 7 percent conservative.
Over 40-plus years, the only thing that's changed in the media's politics is that many national journalists have now cleverly decided to call themselves moderates. But their actual views haven't changed, the Pew survey showed. Their political beliefs are close to those of self-identified liberals and nowhere near those of conservatives. And the proportion of liberals to conservatives in the press, either 3-to-1 or 4-to-1, has stayed the same. That liberals are dominant is now beyond dispute.
Does this affect coverage? Is there really liberal bias? The answers are, of course, yes and yes. It couldn't be any other way. Think for a moment if the numbers were reversed and conservatives had outnumbered liberals in the media for the past four decades. Would President Bush be getting kinder coverage? For sure,
1Freeman| 4.7.09 @ 3:16PM
Robert Rosencrans... thank you for the well thought out and researched response. If the reader's comment board required a log-in perhaps we would enjoy more replies like yours and less of the trolls and name calling we get now.
Facts make the difference. Thank you!
J. Lewis| 4.7.09 @ 4:24PM
Great stuff! To be sure there are many problems with the media, but I think we're really going to miss the world of newspapers.
Thom| 4.7.09 @ 4:38PM
William,
Things change over time. The printing press was a vast improvement over what preceded it and what has made the printed word obsolete is just more of the same. Not to outdo other’s comments here but the Print Media’s rapid demise is mostly self imposed also. A real Newspaper will not try to alienate its readership but modern day Liberal papers go out of their way to do this and not understand why Classified, Sports and Business sections fall off in response to the one sided News section. Doesn’t take a degree in Journalism to figure this out. Just by way of aside William, has any Newspaper offered to run a series of articles on your book, “Terrestrial Energy”? If not do you seriously wonder why? You did a serious work that goes against the paradigm of thinking in every major News room in this country. They’ll run story after story about Human caused Global Warming without a shred of scientific evidence that meets the true test of science and not a single at length article to the contrary. Why? What you miss died a long time ago and what is left is like GM trying to make $73.00 an hour labor cost and $2000.00 a vehicle pension cost profitable on a $20,000 economy car. There are few journalists or even professionals left at Newspapers today. Even less at TV/Cable news businesses. Everyboby has an agenda today……
Black Eagle| 4.7.09 @ 7:23PM
Hey, I occasionally sit under an orgone blanket, and it is inspiring! Actually, Wilhelm Reich is distorted and hated by the left wing, which has made such a hiddeous misportrayal of him, that conservatives now react to without knowing the lies. It was their smear articles against him in the communist press -- New Republic edited by Cambridge Five spy-ring member Michael Straight, in articles authored by fellow-traveller Mildred Brady -- which created the long-held false impressions that he was some kind of porno-purveyor. Reich was too conservative for the left then, and now also. He was an opponent of the phrase "free love", and considered pornography repellent and sex-negative, even while he argued for unity of sexual eroticism with love. He saw the Rohm SA homo-fascists at work in pre-war Germany, and considered homosexuality and pornography to be neuroses. Imagine if the Governor of California Ronald Reagan had been slandered early in his career, with malicious lies about his personal life, such that he was ruined and died in prison, everyone "knowing" he was "a pervert" based upon left-wing lies. But there would not be a shred of evidence to support it, no truth at all, only the malicious lies which originated from his enemies on the left. That is roughly equivalent to what happened to Reich. He was a staunch anti-Communist, perhaps because as a young man in pre-war Germany, he joined the CP and got to see it's "Red Fascism" (as he later called it) up close and personal. He qyuit them with a public denunciation in his book "Mass Psychology of Fascism" which made a penetrating analysis of the sexual psychopathology of both the Nazis and the Communists. He was attracted to the "basic decency" of mainstream America, and it was a tragedy he was imprisoned and his books burned by the left-wing "do gooder" 1950s FDA. So just because a few lefties use the orgone blanket does not make it crazy or wrong. It does boost the immune system reaction and give more energy. Some today consider his "orgone" as identical to the modern notion of "dark matter".
William Tucker | 4.8.09 @ 12:10AM
Everyone: Thanks for your comments. The truth is, though, I don't think the decline of newspapers has anything to do with their being too liberal. The Rocky Mountain News and the Detroit News, which just went to three days a week, were both quote conservative papers. The decline of newspapers can be summarized in two words: Craig's List. Thanks again for your comments.
Robert Rosencrans| 4.8.09 @ 7:10AM
To say that Craigslist is destroying newspapers would have to preface the assumption that only classified ads kept newspapers alive. I personally never looked at the ads, although I'm sure most newspapers derived a good deal of revenue from them.
The point remains that although there are a few conservative publications, the great number of newspapers remain liberal to this day, and they are dying. Very soon, within the next three years, many of the big ones will go down.
Another perspective is that liberal news organizations like the New York Times, who paid a billion for the Boston Globe, are now in a precarious position.
For years, the New York Times has supported left wing movements, and supported labor at all costs. Now they have to force the union at the Boston Globe to take a 20 million dollar hit or the paper is going down.
Is it just Craigslist, or are people finding more reliable sources of news on the internet? Unless you're brainwashed, you can't call the Washington Post news.
Just yesterday they had an article about ice sheets disappearing at a faster rate. Only problem with that is that it's a complete misfabrication.
Newspapers do not offer a source of information any longer, just a source of reference if you like left wing politics.
Look at all the news stories missed in the last few years. They were written about sparingly, but a good news community would have been all over them.
Corruption at Fannie/Freddie, corruption at the Justice Department, corruption in the mortgage markets with sub-prime loans were all noticed but were given short shrift by the news community.
What dominated the news? The drive-by media focused on only one thing, destroying George Bush.
A perfect illustration of that is that recently Obama made the pronouncement that we are not at war with Islam. He's being portrayed as a genius. When Bush did it he was portrayed as a religious nut and a hypocrite.
No, Craigslist may have contributed to a decline in advertising revenues, but Craigslist had nothing to do with a decline in objectivity.
By the way, I believe Craigslist, like objectivity, is one word.
fred| 4.8.09 @ 11:22AM
As a long time Rocky Mountain News reader and a conservative, my opinion is that the News was not a "conservative" paper. Its reporting was basically liberal. Like the Wall Street Journal, it had liberal reporting and a more conservative editorial page.
It was not, of course, as liberal as the surviving Denver Post. The Post at times seems like a mouthpiece for the press releases of local progressives. It has never seen a tax it didn't like and cannot imagine that any government program ever fails at anything.
The liberal/conservative meme for classifying newspapers misses a major problem with most of the print media. The problem is that reporters and editors appear to have lost the ability to determine whether they are being fed a line of nonsense, and in some cases seem unable to deploy even the most rudimentary scholarly apparatus for telling the difference between fact and fiction. In addition to the excellent global warming examples given above, there seems to be a template that classifies for profit activities as bad and non-profit or government activities as good. Everyone in business is selfish and deserving of critical review. No one in government has improper motives so critical review is unnecessary.
The result is that many "news" stories are simply regurgitations of the press releases of "good" organizations with no clue that the "facts" in them are simply wrong, presented out of context, or historically unimportant--a classic is the breathless claim that more people are XYZ than at any point in US history. This is not important if the population has been growing and when you standardize the number nothing has changed.
I've lost count of the number of times someone reporting on a piece of legislation simply repeats talking points from liberal groups that are obviously false to any sentient individual who has actually read the darn bill.
The lack of reliable reporting makes newspaper superfluous as they cannot be trusted. One must spend time reading the original documents anyway, so why pay for a subscription? I do miss the reporting on meetings and other events, but since I can't trust what I read, what's the point?
John Valentinetti| 4.10.09 @ 11:16AM
I want to thank Mr. Tucker for pointing me to this article. As a reader of the Record, in Bergen County, I remember his article and appreciated his point of view.
As to modern day newspapers, I find the local news enlightening. National and international new comes from AP, the Washington Post or another news service. This lack of input into the reporting leads to just reciting talking point. I know, news & opinion are separate, but since the discussion is liberal or conservative reporting, with the use of news services, I find what ever paper I pick up, I'm getting the same story, not a different angle or slant.
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