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.
Eventually the excitement would wear off. You’d grow weary of
being up until 3 a.m. every morning, wondering if you’d make it
home before the sun rose. I once read a story I’d written two
months before and couldn’t remember a single thing about it. It
was being like a fireman, jumping up off and running to some
emergency every time the bell rang. You’d watch the old- timers
pecking away with one finger because they’d never learned to
touch-type and realize it was time to move on. Most of my fellow
reporters ended up at the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, and Newsweek. I still see their names all
the time.
Yet there was a romance to those all-night, lobster-shift
adventures that’s never been replaced — the thrill of writing
tomorrow’s headlines while the world slept.
One memorable occasion summed it all up for me. I was just
finishing up my last police calls at 2 a.m. when a laconic
policeman’s voice came on at the other end of the line.
“Any accidents or arrests,” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Anything else worth reporting.”
“Well…there’s one thing here that might interest you.”
“What is it?” It was like pulling teeth.
“There’s a report here that at 1 a.m. this morning, as the
district attorney was riding home after staying very late at his
office, someone on an isolated road in the western end of the
county fired a bullet into his car. The matter is under
investigation.”
I slammed down the phone. The only person left in the office was
a curmudgeonly old copy editor who wore sleeve garters, smoked a
cigar and hadn’t cracked a smile in the two years I’d known him.
“Hold the front page,” I shouted to him. “Somebody just tried to
kill the D.A.”
The copy editor’s face lit up with rapture. He dropped his cigar,
jumped out of his chair, pumped his fist in the air and shouted,
“Yippeeee!”
I miss those days.
