Last Updated: November 09, 1999
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A look back
Longtime newspaperman’s notes on leaving the trade
About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even
old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam
Maurice. It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start
missing everybody.
— J.D. Salinger,
“The Catcher in the Rye”
Ireported for work at the old Houston Post building 46 years ago, a
20-year-old part-time obit writer wearing a just-off-the-rack blue suit
that was cheap even for 1953. I would quickly become adept at pounding
out obits on deadline while swatting the vivacious mosquitoes that swarmed
each night through the open windows on the newsroom’s Dowling Street side.
I wanted to be a novelist.
My goal was to learn to write the way Sam Clemens and Ernest Hemingway
did — at a newspaper. Unknown to my bosses at the Post, I planned to spend
a few years mastering the trade, then leave and write my novel. It would
be an angry novel that would rip the lid off the entire U.S. Army, from
which I had only recently been (honorably) discharged. It had not occurred
to me that several fine novelists had capably pre-empted the topic.
Later, I did write a novel, but it was about newspapers. Angrily and
without humor, it ripped the lid off the news business. My daughter stumbled
across the manuscript a few years ago. “You write a lot better now, Dad,”
she said. I burned the manuscript last summer. I pictured my granddaughter
some day reading “The Bitter News” — that was its title — thinking, “Papa
was very shallow.”
A statistically significant number of people in that newsroom wanted
to write novels. We thought of ourselves as the bitterly enslaved, pounding
out obits, weather stories, fillers and police news to measure while in
transit to some other, better place. Management looked easy, tired, self-satisfied,
not unlike deadweight. We never bothered to notice that the gentle, dignified
managing editor Arthur Laro had put life into the paper and given us a
sense of mission without ever raising his voice. Grouchily, we set ever-higher
goals for him.
Police reporters and feature writers were part of this literary flowering.
Today’s newsrooms seem to care mostly about journalism, which seems to
me discouraging. I need to remind myself that things are better now, or
become a figure of pathetic and disabling nostalgia.
Did we do journalism better? No, just differently.
So what have I learned? I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Picking
a comic strip is not a science. It‘s a mistake to start a daily bridge
column or a daily depiction of the flag or a daily prayer whimsically,
without realizing they’re forever. Have a full life that is apart from
journalism. Love your family. Learn to be a human being. Be part of the
community. Loving your community is not a journalistic conflict of interest.
Do what’s necessary, like standing up for the downtrodden. Don’t grandstand
about it. Remember the people who’ve cared about you and helped you. Avoid
pieces labeled “What I’ve Learned.”
We pick easy targets for our journalism. “There is no concept more generally
cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor,” A.J. Liebling
wrote in 1947. He was speaking then of the emergence of the Welfare Queen
as a target of determined journalism and outraged public opinion. As Liebling
suggested, ferreting out government waste, fraud and abuse became our most
generally cherished mission. We taught readers how to hate their own government,
the best, the most free in the world, and now we are flabbergasted when
many do.
The security that vested interests feel can best be measured by their
proximity to a newsroom. The real journalistic failure of the great savings
and loan scandal of the ’80s was that the scandal was rarely caught locally.
Only when the damage was done did the story become local.
We care more now about people, and that’s a plus. We write sympathetic
stories about the poor, but we can do this so clumsily that the poor, in
their innocence, are offended by our earnest offers of help and understanding.
Conservative readers are equally offended, and see these efforts as “sob
stories” executed in service of ultra-liberal editorial agendas. Readers
do not understand that dubious content is as often formed by copy starvation
as by odious principle.
News stings more when it is close. This accounts for the anguished look
that flashes across an editor’s face when he hears his prize-winning editorial
cartoonist is about to do a local cartoon.
We seek out waste, fraud and abuse in government, but we have less interest
in their private sector manifestations, particularly when close to home.
Yet stupidity isn’t limited to government bureaucrats; they’re just easier
targets. Big business, big money, big think tanks and lobbyists set much
of the nation’s commercial, social and political agenda. We should suspect
all aggregations of power equally.
“Everyone will give you a thousand reasons to not run a story. But we’re
sometimes the only ones who will stand up for the ideal of publication,”
Joe Fenley, managing editor of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, once told
me when he saw me falter. I have never forgotten that. Still, there are
times when it takes guts to say no to a story that contains lots of capital-J
Journalism, but whose reasoning is subtly flawed in ways you sense but
can barely articulate. Many sins are committed in the name of Journalism.
The most frequent failure of conventional journalism I’ve seen is the
failure to get the other side of the story. Every editor ought to be “covered”
once in a while, just to see how what you said came out, and how hard it
is to shake a reporter from a preconceived thesis.
Too many reporters seek “reaction,” rather than ask the more seminal
“What happened?” We are willing to spend two months developing an investigative
piece, then give its target 10 minutes on deadline to explain.
Creating a phony balance is not the same as balance and fairness. It’s
possible to do a story on kids being shot down in schools without finding
some nut case who thinks they should be, and calling that balance.
With plenty of time to correct our flaws, we have habitually failed
to report ideas as news. When a new idea turns up in our communities, we
too often scoff or are so late the idea has been institutionalized in the
real lives of our readers. We need to establish beats for ideas, where
they would be handled respectfully and in the clear.
We wait, instead, and report ideas as established controversies, or
so tardily that people wonder if we’re awake. Ideas need to be reported
at least once without a smirk on our editorial faces. Young readers, particularly,
receive particularly shabby treatment. They notice.
We ought to eliminate journalism contests. The Pulitzer Board would
do us all a favor by committing institutional seppuku and putting itself
out of business. Our best journalism ought to be grounded in chores that
are relentlessly and morally inescapable. Some of us get perilously fond
of what we hate.
The reading public is way ahead of us on this. They think contests give
us bad motivations, that we’re self-serving, self-interested and addicted
to whatever little glories we can scratch up for ourselves. That’s not
entirely right, but it’s enough right to think about.
When I think back to that 1953 Post newsroom, I think about what layers
of small advantage newspapers have abandoned voluntarily. We used to run
fillers, which gave an air of the unexpected to the paper. We used to run
vital statistics, which made people think we cared about getting their
names in the paper during the great moments of their lives.
We used to run daily chuckles, which we disdained, and serialized novels,
which we thought we could do better. And gobs of poetry, which we disdained
even more, although it made our readers think we understood grace and beauty
and patriotism. I was a prime mover against these pathetically slender
grace notes. On the copy desk, we cited the inevitable:
I’d rather flunk
my Wasserman test
than listen to a poem
by Edgar A. Guest
We were losing touch. Readers adored Guest’s sweet, encouraging verses.
We filled the Post’s columns with whatever interested us, then ranked these
stories in the order of their ostensible importance. We called this “news
judgment.”
Modern newsrooms struggle now with heartbreaking sincerity to get in
touch with readers. We poll our readers. We cast them bewildered — they
thought we were the experts — into focus groups. We explore credibility
restoration, but we fall short of knowing their minds. We have yet to find
so small a thing as the moral equivalent of a daily chuckle.
You would be correct if you asked me why I had not followed more of
my own advice. I had, after all, 46 years to be true to myself. There is
a funny sort of bond among editors: we never get the job quite right.
We are at our worst when we forget, and scoff at our youthful innocence
and the young and think that we were silly and naive once to care so much,
so bravely and so heedlessly.
Rosenfeld, editor-in-chief of Cox Newspapers, will retire in April
2000. Here he is in 1960, 1975 and today.
