Steve Smith of the Spokesman Review in Spokane has written the best elegy I’ve found so far to my dying calling. Some of the blog comments that follow are clueless and boneheaded. But Smith’s essay is important and beautifully done. Among his passages:
Newspapermen worked hard and played hard. The bartender at the dive
across the street knew how many beers each reporter could consume
between editions. And after the last edition went to press, the bar
lights would be turned up just enough to let the newspapermen read
those papers pulled fresh from the press.
The newspaperman was
respected in the community. There was a mystique, a glamor that really
didn’t exist but which the newspaperman happily cultivated. In the
movies, the editors were Cary Grant. Or Clark Gable. Or Jack Webb. Or
Humphrey Bogart, the greatest of all.
The young newspaperman
wanted to be Bogie, standing in the press room, screaming into the
phone, "That’s the sound of the press, baby." The young newspaperman
aspired to challenge authority, defend the defenseless and right
wrongs. If he was a Don Quixote with a pen, his windmills were
politicians, bureaucrats, crooks and thugs. He thought of his job as a
calling and truth was his holy grail.
Today’s cubicle proles, plugged into the Matrix, must wonder if this life ever existed. It did. I am just old enough to have lived the last of it, when the best compliment a journalist of either gender could receive was, "You’re a good newspaperman." No wonder being a "mojo" typing school lunch menus (with video!) just doesn’t hold any appeal.
I’m disappointed you think so highly of Smith’s silly essay. He’s recalling a “golden age” that never existed.
When I entered newspapering 25 years ago, getting loaded on the job or throwing objects at a coworker’s head would have gotten you canned — just like today.
Check that — today management might let you stick around if you do a stint in rehab.
OK, we could smoke in the newsroom. I used to think I couldn’t possibly write on deadline unless I had one burning in my ashtray.
I’m distressed by what’s happening to American newspapers. This bogus “elegy” only pisses me off a bit more.
Just a comment on the comment above. The essay doesn’t say anything about throwing objects at a coworker’s head. A cub reporter did not constitute a “co-worker” from the perspective of a Managing Editor. Still doesn’t, despite the truly despicable corporate jargon (“Associate”) used by some companies today in the hope of flattering the flunkies into accepting low pay and poor benefits without grumbling.
It also doesn’t say anything about getting loaded on the job. It mentions finishing off a good meal “with a stiff drink” on expense account, and reporters visiting a bar to drink beer “between editions”.
Not having been there myself, I can’t comment on verisimilitude, but it doesn’t sound like too great a stretch, though the essay at times does at times verge on the “hard-boiled” approach of old novels. However, the essay author does explicitly point out that his newspaperman happily cultivated an image whose glamour and mystique “didn’t really exist”.
This isn’t to suggest that there is anything to wax nostalgic about where fits of physical abuse committed by a temperamental boss are concerned. If the Age of Lawsuits has put the fear of god into some of these “characters” then all the better.
But absence makes the heart grow fonder, and an evocation of atmosphere which contrasts with a comparatively sterile, regimented environment might, despite including the grittier or seamier elements, appeal to those who have genuinely lost something but forgotten just how rotten and obnoxious the more objectionable parts actually were in person.