Category: Newspaper Traditions

The shrinking newspaper page

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Cost-cutters have long found ways to shrink the product to meet rising costs or boost the profit. As was said years ago, “It’s getting hard to find a nickel candy bar for a quarter anymore.” I hate to think what it costs now, much less in a vending machine.

Newspaper pages are no exception. The first jolt to tradition came back in the mid 1970s when there was a newsprint shortage. The Canadian suppliers, for whatever reason – a labor strike? – just didn’t have enough to meet demand. One solution was to narrow the width of the page.

In recent years, as the Internet has disrupted the business model of the news industry, the pace of cost-cutting has quickened.

The ones around here are now 11 inches wide, versus 15½ when I started in the business or one paper where I worked where the page was nearly 18 inches wide.

In other words, today’s broadsheet is as wide as a tabloid was back then, only longer. It’s lost two columns of news on each page – or a quarter of its surface. It’s so skinny I wince.

We never had enough room to print everything we wanted as it was.

DRIVING INTO THE SUNSET OF PUBLIC SERVICE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

When I first entered the newspaper business, profit margins of 20 percent to 30 percent were not uncommon. Some papers were even reported to take 40 percent of their earnings down to the bottom line.

Not that much of that income went to the reporters or editors, who as a group ranked at the bottom of professional categories. Below school teachers and ministers, in fact. In addition, we worked nights and weekends and holidays – no wonder the divorce rate was high. The field could be depressing, as other surveys acknowledged. Or maybe it just attracted depressed individuals.

When right-wingers rub their “liberal media” smear across us, they mock the sacrifices we’ve made in trying to serve the public. For accuracy, the mass media  are ultimately capitalist machines – or, as they used to say of newspapers when I began, they were machines for printing money. That’s anything but leftist. Can’t be more conservative than that money-grubbing side, can you?

Some of the more astute critics at the time argued that the industry wasn’t reinvesting enough in growth and development, that it was in fact “eating its seed corn” when it came to salaries and wages, especially. How could we attract talented minorities at this pay, for one thing, when there were far more lucrative alternatives such as law? How could we build new audiences and new products without them – much less support these as they grew?

In the past decade or so, the business model has essentially collapsed in the advent of the Internet. Why should anyone pay for something they can get for free? The need for detailed coverage of public affairs remains, more than ever, but there are fewer and fewer professionals on the job, and most of those who remain are approaching minimum wage. You can’t live on that, especially not if you have a family.

I keep thinking of a skilled colleague, one of the best, an editor who quit to become a bus driver. The shift had better hours and better pay, even for a college graduate.

REVIEWING THE BUMPY TRUMPY HORROR SHOW

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

During the presidential primary run, his Republican rivals had reason to complain that Donald J. Trump was garnering all of the coverage. It was, as it turns out, all about him, mostly from his point of view, that is, largely unquestioned. From a headline perspective, their problem was simply that they weren’t saying or doing anything new, meaning reporters and editors had nothing fresh to report on those candidates and their campaigns. A policy statement, let’s be candid, is news just once, when it’s released. Trump, in contrast, was providing outrageous grist for the mill – he was a truly unconventional, unpredictable, and unkempt subject. To their everlasting remorse, his opponents failed to take him on full-force, much less seriously, which would have at least landed them comparable headline presence. If they had only done their homework, they would have had many of the factual details that are finally coming to light against Trump and his ways. Gee, the recent New York Times report about Chris Christie’s forgiving Trump $25 million in overdue state taxes could have taken down two candidates at once, had Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or any of the other dwarves been on their toes.

News media coverage is not the only route to primary victories, by the way. Most of the Republicans were relying on very expensive direct-mail advertising flyers, at least from what we endured in New Hampshire. You may have read some of my household’s reactions.

In contrast, on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders was gaining ground by flying under the radar, sticking to a successful script that included little new material while hammering his points home in speech after speech. He was certainly helped by strong organization and a vibrant (dare I say organic?) grassroots social media presence.

When Nacky Scripps Loeb was publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader, she liked to quote her late husband’s adage than negative publicity was better than no coverage at all.  I know the basis of the argument, especially for an upstart, but I’ve also seen its downside: sometimes the attacks really inflict damage.

You didn’t hear Trump complaining about the billions of “free media” exposure he got on his ascent, but maybe none of his inner circle could see it would eventually come with a price.

My, has it!

We find ourselves waking in the morning with an obsession to discover the latest. It’s not just the New York Times or Washington Post, either. Team Trump has been stimulating a stunning parade of  splashy tabloid headlines, from the New York Daily News to the Huffington Post and Politico. Done well, there’s an art to these, I’ll confess with admiration. Not that my journalistic training or practice ran in that direction.

Almost every day now has delivered a new, well, Trumpage that stirs up the question, Is he really trying to lose? Is he even running on Hillary’s behalf? In the latest round, the pundits are sensing his new strategy is to circle the wagons and focus on his core supporters while hoping the Libertarian and Green parties erode enough votes from Clinton to give him an edge. As they acknowledge, it’s a very risky approach, especially for someone who may be recognizing he’s really losing.

Step back from the daily revelations and you can see Trump’s bigger story is fitting into a classic type of fiction or biography or history – a rise-and-fall epic of tragic proportions. (Remember, true tragedy is what happens when a character challenges the gods and bears the consequences.)

In American literature, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick come immediately to my mind, along with Peter Matthiessen’s less conventional Killing Mister Watson, which opens with the well-earned finale for a character who has a lot in common with Trump.

The Trumpster provides plenty to focus on as a character-driven story, especially of the psychological nature. He’s a spoiled bully full of inner conflict, anger, bombast, self-delusion, insecurity, social-climbing, hostility, and more, all abetted by the proverbial silver spoon.

There are other classic structures the story could also develop, including the idea novel, which starts with a question; the event tale, where the world is out of order and demands correcting; or the milieu narrative, which would require the protagonist to emerge a new person after traversing the strange landscape of American politics, big business, and celebrity entertainment posturing.

Each day, we’re reading and hearing more bits of the unfolding story.

Now into the post-convention stretch of the White House quest, Trump is still the primary subject of the media coverage. This time, though, as the plot line is well into the “fall” half of the equation, it’s been to Hillary Clinton’s advantage to be flying under the radar. Are we watching a death by a thousand self-inflicted wounds? Are all of his previous falsehoods, fraudulence, and flatulence finally resurrecting and running up behind him, like monsters from a horror show?

We’re still quite a few pages away from the final pages, and it’s possible Trump will somehow pivot into a new, unanticipated, denouement. Deus ex machina would be a huge letdown, to say the least, as would anything having him live happily ever after.

Not after all this.

WELL, IT REALLY WAS NEWS TO ME

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

This morning’s newspaper had a headline that sent an “Oh, gee, I haven’t seen that before” running through my head. As I mentioned the other day (Why Woodpecker Can’t Keep Up, June 14), so much of the news can be same-old, same-old variations on a theme. But this one really was new:

Motorcyclist Hits Bear.

As I also mentioned (Harley Heaven on Lake Winnipesaukee, June 16), we just had the nine-day Laconia Motorcycle Week, which attracts swarms of bikers to the Granite State, and racing along mountainous roads is one of their joys. Every year the event is accompanied by accidents and usually a few fatalities, but I don’t ever remember seeing one involving a bear. This one happened in the afternoon. Broad daylight on a perfect day.

Unlike moose, which are slow and dumb, convinced they can continue ignoring oncoming traffic, bears can be fast-moving, when necessary, and alert. Moose-car accidents are, in fact, commonplace throughout northern New England, while bear-car encounters are also a standard news item, though less frequent. I suppose I’ve seen a few moose-motorcyclist crash stories over the years, or at least should have.

This time I found myself recalling a report I’d edited and written the headline for back on my first news desk position right after college. We were Upstate New York, which has its own mountainous terrain. That time, a motorcyclist ran into a porcupine on a dark highway, and the results were fatal. As a city-boy, porcupines were still a curiosity, rather than a critter I often acknowledge in my journeys.

In this morning’s dispatch, the driver was airlifted to a hospital and reported to be in critical condition.

~*~

Another item making the rounds also seems to slip over from one of the routine categories — in this case, political survey results — into the I’ve-never-seen-that-before status. In the race for the White House, a Democrat, and a woman at that, is polling evenly with Donald Trump in the overwhelming Republican state of Utah.

~*~

This reminds me of another reaction I often have as a novelist: “This wouldn’t work in fiction.” Accompanied by “You couldn’t invent this if you tried.” Life really does take some bizarre turns if you look.

Really.

THE DESIRE FOR DOCUMENTATION … OR AT LEAST CONFIRMATION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

My career of editing newspapers often introduced a tension between trying to be the first to present important developments to our readers (that is, news) and their desire to have us run the olds – photos and lists of names from activities days or even weeks previous. My feeling was that their club and church items were usually of interest only to those who already knew about them – hardly the stuff of urgent news – and rarely added to our paid circulation. I’d met enough people who wanted others to read their publicity far more than they themselves were willing to extend the same courtesy to others. Put another way, if the “names-is-news” imperative had much merit, the telephone book would be much more thoroughly read than it is – and much fatter than it keeps getting in an Internet age.

More recently, though, in my retirement I’ve become involved in public events that could make the news spotlight – and haven’t, even when the TV cameras were turned on us. I’d love to show folks around me what we were up to. It’s confirmation we were there, actually. And that, I suspect, is what those readers wanted all along.

Curiously, that’s where social media are filling the gap in documenting everyday life. In the examples I’m thinking of here, the photos of us look great, for starters. The only problem, personally, is that I’m always somewhere in the corner, often cut in half. I guess it just goes with being in the bass section.

Well, maybe I could start taking selfies and posting them here. On second thought, though … I’ll spare you.

~*~

As a footnote, I’m also remembering one locality where everybody was willing to sign up for an event, especially as the committee chairman. Or more accurately, chairwoman. And as soon as the promotion announcement appeared in print, they all somehow vanished, leaving the two newcomers to the group with all the responsibility for actually pulling it off.

We never ran a follow-up to that effect, either.

ABOUT THE TIME WE’D THOUGHT WE’D HEARD IT ALL, SOMETHING WOULD COME UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One thing about being in the news business was how much that we covered was more or less routine. Yes, there were the variations on the given theme, but you could easily fall into a formula in covering them. Think of elections or a football game, for instance. Somebody wins, somebody loses, and you quote from both sides.

There would also be developments that simply fell outside the realm of what we’d covered, and when I started out as a journalist, community tastes were stricter than what now fills the coverage. Pedophile priests and sexually abusive parents, for instance, were never mentioned. Ditto, the private lives of politicians. And pit bull dog attacks were way off in the future.

Not so now, and it’s one of the reasons I burned out editing the low-life stories. After all, not even Hustler magazine would have touched much of the grossness that was now appearing even on the front page.

My goals in journalism were far loftier than soft porn, even in a courtroom setting.

~*~

Still, I was surprised how many times I felt I’d seen and heard all the basic stories, only to be hit by something that seemed completely new.

One of them was the arrest of one of our sportswriters on charges of pimping. Ouch! A professional with children? Somebody we knew?

And then the other day a report took that a couple of steps further.

Seems a man responding to an advertisement for a “social-type service” went to a local motel room only to be met by the woman, as expected. But there he also discovered another man and a pit bull dog, neither of them anticipated on his end.

In the ensuing events, as the story goes, the customer was beaten and robbed before escaping and being chased bleeding and naked by the pit bull into the parking lot before a phone call from the front office summoned police. (There was also something about brass knuckles that were tossed aside in the fray, but let’s stick to the basic outline.)

I keep wondering about the old “honor among thieves” code among outlaws. Aren’t there supposed to be some strict standards of behavior involved? Even among crooks, doesn’t a double-cross draws contempt, as does betrayal? In the case of prostitution, for instance, doesn’t that mean the pimp remains out of sight – or better yet, out of the room? And no dogs, unless they’re part of the, uh, proclivities of the john?

For the record, prostitution was not among the charges mentioned in this case. I raise the issue here more in the theoretical sense of illicit dealings. We could as easily substitute drug purchases or any number of other monetary exchanges. Remember, basic standards are assumed or the economic trade falls apart. Nobody would answer an escort-services listing if this was common practice.

So here we are with the new twists being the presence of the second man and the chase by the pit bull, only to find the ultimate recourse falls back on the police and criminal justice system.

As I said, it’s not your everyday news story. I’m left wondering how we would have handled such a police report in the “old days” or whether we would have published it at all. Or even if things like this even occurred back then.

FAREWELL TO THE SWITCHBOARD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At the office, we had the farewell to the switchboard operator who’d been replaced by the new phone system – someone who had been there when I arrived two decades earlier.

Oh, the weird calls we’d get, the ones she usually screened yet some still managed to slip past her.

The woman from California, “Can you tell me what state New Hampshire’s in?” and I wanted to reply, “How the hell did you get this number?”

All of the ones wanting to know my opinion, as if it mattered.

Or the drunks or the individuals convinced of this conspiracy or that. Especially late at night.

As the publisher told one, “What do you think this is, a call-in radio show?”

Listen. We’ve got work to do, rather than yap. Piles and piles of work.

~*~

Oh, my, the telephones! They become a chorus of their own in my novel, Hometown News.

Hometown News

AN ALL-STAR CAST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I was working with the newspaper syndicate, I got to meet a lot of impressive talent. (That’s how we referred to them, too, as “the talent.”)

The other day I was thinking of a few of them – Mike Peters (Mother Goose and Grimm), Jeff MacNally (Shoe), Dick Locher (Dick Tracy), Doug Marlette (Kudzu) – all of them excellent editorial page cartoonists as well – plus Joe Martin (Mr. Boffo) and Kevin Pope.

For the most part, they were a serious lot. I remember one’s reverential mention of another, “He’s the only cartoonist who makes me laugh out loud” – only to hear, months later, the comment returned without prompting. Like, admiring like, with a twist.

I remember, too, one looking at the work of another and commenting, “This is really funny” – without breaking into the slightest evidence of even a smile.

As I said, a serious lot.

What I also found was that their work was much funnier than what turned up among the others who were more boisterous and comical in person.

~*~

MacNally and Locher were both employed by the Chicago Tribune and enjoyed a warm rapport. MacNally’s studio wrapped around the elevator shaft on the 35th floor of newspaper’s iconic tower and had large windows peering out across the city and into the infinite blue of Lake Michigan as it blended into the sky. How he could ever work in such a suite was beyond me. (The top floor, just above his, was filled with electronic gear. Microwaves and the like.)

Locher’s studio was one floor down, with small diamond windows and a rather Gothic feel. I joked that it was like dwelling in a gargoyle, and he agreed.

As we sat in that space, a coworker noticed two framed certificates and remarked, “That’s all a Pulitzer is? A piece of paper?”

And without missing a beat, MacNally, who had just won his third, chortled. “Yup,” he said quietly. “That’s about it.”

REMEMBERING A PRINCE OF PUNS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Long a staple of the Friday-night Public Broadcasting lineup, Wall $treet Week’s Louis Rukeyser was noted as a master of puns. Or should that be groanster? Or even monster?

So in his presence for lunch one day, I piped up. “You know there are no good puns, only bad ones and worse. So who do you look down to for inspiration?”

He took it in good stride, knowing the sneer puns often earn, and replied calmly that when he was growing up, one of his father’s best friends was Random House cofounder Bennett Cerf – and young Louis gobbled up all of the literary publisher’s pun-filled volumes. I think he said he memorized 14 books in all. Not a bad foundation, for starters, and probably better than the jokes at the end of each month’s issue of Boys’ Life magazine.

Toward the end of his career, Rukeyser increasingly resembled the man on America’s one-dollar bills, an image he no doubt curried with a bit of tongue-in-cheek. Get a shtick in life, you might as well run with it. And how!

He was also an early example of the multimedia celebrity, something I detested in my role as a newspaper editor. I saw enough examples of television or radio personalities who tried their hand at simultaneously writing regular columns for print media, and our side of the equation was obviously the one being slighted. Let’s be frank. Anybody in the spotlight has only so much first-rate material to go around.

(That makes me recall a second-rate Boston newspaper columnist who took on TV features too, and pretty soon you couldn’t understand his content unless you’d seen the show he was amplifying. And then he was unmasked as a disgrace.)

Still, Rukeyser was candid about what we now call a “platform.” His career started as a reporter the Baltimore Sun, and he maintained a newspaper column throughout his run. “It established my credibility,” he said, back in the days when print carried clout.

The TV series, he added, gave him exposure and fame.

But the money came largely from his in-person appearances as a convention speaker. Everybody, after all, knew who he was – and that he could make the “dismal science” of economics and finance a lively, even humorous, topic.

Not every editor, I should note, bought into the argument that his fame as a public television celebrity would translate into newspaper readership. I still share their conclusion.

And then we had Andy Rooney.

THAT DISTINCTIVE LOCAL VOICE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

By now you’re no doubt aware of my belief that local newspapers need a strong local voice, the kind that’s manifested in a talented general columnist or two. The New York Herald-Tribune, for instance, at one point had both Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe in that role. Think, too, of Mike Royko in Chicago or Herb Caen in San Francisco. In Dayton, we had Marj Heyduck holding forth from the Journal Herald’s Modern Living section – but everybody had to read her daily four or five vignettes, especially when they had a humorous edge.

These are the kind of writers who speak personally from the places regular people live, rather than the council meetings and police blotter events that fill the news pages. Unfortunately, they’ve largely vanished in the cost-cutting rounds at newspapers large and small, and communities and subscribers are impoverished as a consequence.

At their best, they get out and report stories that wouldn’t otherwise appear – or at least the aspects they dig up along the way are fresh and insightful. At the Herald-Trib, for example, Breslin would go to the city desk and rifle through assignments for ones he wanted to cover from the street – that’s how he wound up in Selma, Alabama, with dispatches from the front line of the civil rights movement.

Within the newsroom, however, they were generally viewed with disdain or even contempt, even when they scooped the beat reporters, as Caen often did to his colleagues at the Chronicle. Part of the gulf originated, I suspect, in the professional wall between third-person and first-person singular writing, and the fact that reporters are supposed to be neutral observers while a good columnist is permitted to be actively present and even emotionally involved in the story. Ideally, too, reporters are to be invisible agents, unlike the star billing given to a columnist.

All of the snow we’ve been getting has me reflecting on the first newspaper I served after graduating from college – and my frustration with its resident Scribe. There were, for starters, his affectations of a thwarted wannabe novelist – the tweed jackets with elbow patches, the scarf, the half-moon eyeglasses, and, yes, the fragile ego that demanded deference if not worship. There was also an over-the-top serving of purple prose but little substance that cut to the bone. Ultimately, what he served up was inoffensive and bland, but he did have a following.

His one redeeming quality, though, was an eagerness to jump into covering two kinds of stories no one else in the newsroom really wanted to do – weather storms and the deaths of prominent local figures. And there he excelled. Looking back, I can see where a first-person voice can enhance the story – we’re all in this together, after all – even when he was weaving in rewrites of breaking news fed to him by reporters and correspondents, as I vaguely think he was. The deaths, meanwhile, lend themselves to an “we recall when” transition from one detail to the next. Moreover, as a minor celebrity himself, his presence probably got many sources to say more than they might have otherwise. Hmm, my memory is that he leaned toward the editorial “we” rather than the more direct and contemporary “I.”

Outstanding local columnists, I should add, have never been confined to the big metro papers.

A few leaps later in my career, launching Jim Gosney’s daily profiles in Yakima, Washington, demonstrated that. He gave us a parade of characters who made a difference in the community without themselves being considered the kind of movers and shakers who normally got quoted.

And then, in Manchester, New Hampshire, John Clayton began doing something similar.

Both, I should add, were top-notch reporters when it came to questioning a source and digging up facts – and both could turn a phrase in their engaging storytelling and flawless prose. (That combination is rarely a given.) What they offered was the kind of local color and connection too often missing from today’s standard and shallow coverage.

Perhaps you know of others who deserve recognition. Maybe they could even serve as models in a rebirth of the tradition.