Category: Newspaper Traditions

END OF THE LINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Maybe the last of the high-visibility newspaper chiefs was Dave Burgin, an abrasive, volatile, but brilliant editor who began his legendary career at the New York Herald Tribune in 1963 and then went on to head a dozen-and-a-half major metropolitan daily newspapers, most of them already in their death throes, ranging from the Washington Star to the Orlando Sentinel (his one big success story) to the Dallas Times Herald to the San Francisco Examiner (where he was fired – twice) to the Oakland Tribune. Of course, it’s hard to leave a lasting impact if you don’t stay long in any community.

Still, one boss I had always returned in amazement after a visit with Burgin. Said he was the only person in the entire business with a real vision for a future or the changing needs of younger readers, along with the reasons they were avoiding newspapers en masse. He, too, saw the value of the weird comic strip “Zippy” for his Bay Area readership and was willing to run it page-wide on Page A2. Not that it would fly quite the same in Dallas.

One of his lasting bits of wisdom was the question, “What do I have in the paper today that will bring a reader back tomorrow?” I’ve looked at a lot of newspaper copy with that question over the years and felt we were missing the answer.

Actually, it’s a good question for a lot of businesses. I think it’s even a matter of getting down to the basics.

FREE OF THE ENTOURAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Most newspaper writing and editing is done is large, open newsrooms rather than small, private offices. It’s amazing to think anyone can actually concentrate and work amid the surrounding mayhem, especially when the scanner is blaring police and fire dispatches and the television’s on overhead. (Well, I took to streaming opera and music by living composers to blot out that hysteria.)

Still, a few management-level editors had offices, and we’d get visitors who’d head there or to the conference room for private meetings. Usually, the men would be in navy blue suits, along with a woman or two in high heels. That is, they’d arrive and depart as a team. Since New England Cable News also had a presence in our newsroom, I’d sometimes get a phone call from my younger daughter, the political activist. “Do you know who’s standing behind you?” No, I hadn’t looked. I was too busy working. And she’d call out the candidate’s name.

Not that they were all politicians. Sometimes they were business executives or lobbyists of one stripe or another. Even the writers and artists seemed to travel in packs. And often a face would look familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Let me add that many of them look quite different in person than they do on video.

Late one afternoon, though, I looked up from my terminal and noticed a dignified solitary personage striding into the room. He was taller than I’d suspected but the face was one I soon identified. David Broder, a Washington Post columnist my college professor had called the best political reporter in the country decades earlier, an evaluation that remained dead right.

I didn’t interrupt with a greeting as he walked past. Respected his space and thinking. But I was far more impressed than I’d been by any of the celebrities who had posed behind me.

PAINFUL NEUTRALITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

At the least, the pursuit of objectivity has meant that news reporters and editors cannot engage in political activities. Even community-wide charity drives become suspect. I learned early on I couldn’t wear political buttons or put a bumper sticker on the car, much less participate in a protest line. The ethics policy at the Kansas City Star was famed for telling its personnel that the only organization where they could vote was their church. (And, presumably, public elections, although some journalists have argued even that would taint their professionalism.) To be honest, even though we Quakers never take a vote in our business sessions, I felt some relief to know that my church was taking public stands in my stead.

It’s not that we don’t have values or don’t believe that reforms are needed. Rather, it’s an awareness that to report all sides fairly, we need to have some distance from participating in the battle itself. We have to be able to report shortcomings even in the places where we feel most sympathetic.

Still, I’d like those who accuse journalists of bias to try living under such strictures themselves. Maybe they’d even see a bigger picture.

WINDY CITY PERSPECTIVE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

In 1922, the Chicago Tribune conducted an international architectural competition for the design of its new headquarters. The World’s Greatest Newspaper, as it proclaimed itself, could have erected a landmark modernistic tower envisioned by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer or an impractical giant lectern styled by Adolf Loos but instead went with a neo-Gothic bullet by Howells and Hood.

By the mid-‘80s, when I was employed by the paper’s syndication service, the grimy gray building was surrounded by many much newer buildings that resembled the glassy proposal the publisher had rejected. Maybe that says everything, in the end.

By then, though, the newsroom had definitely changed. Gone were the typewriters, long replaced by computer terminals and keyboards. Tours were guided through glass-shrouded catwalks overhead, where they could look down on journalists at work. I remember being fascinated to recognize there were four semi-circular copy-desks below me, each one ringed by copy-editors and a single “slotman” at the center, just as it had been when I started. I’d heard, too, that none of those seats were ever vacant long; this was a paper edited ‘round the clock for its many editions. But then I noticed that the editors on one of the rims were doing nothing except writing and editing photo captions. Nothing else for the entire shift. I’m sorry, but I’m used to far more variety when I’m editing. How did they ever stay awake?

Since we were really there to see two of our cartoonists, we headed for a set of elevators serving floors six through 32. And we were headed to the top, Jeff MacNelly’s suite, which sat just under the floor of microwave gear.

With his panoramic windows between flying buttresses looking out over Lake Michigan (you couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began that day), I wondered how he ever got any work done on his editorial cartoons or his Shoe comic strip.

One floor down, which Dick Locher commanded, was quite different. With its tiny diamond-shaped windows, the suite wrapped around the elevator and service shafts felt more like sitting inside a gargoyle.

At that point, one of my colleagues noticed a framed Pulitzer Prize on the wall. “That’s all it is? A piece of paper?”

Locher, who drew the Dick Tracy strip in addition to his editorial cartoons, had won two.

On the couch, MacNelly, who’d just won his third Pulitzer, grinned. “Yup, that’s about it. A piece of paper.”

OBJECTIVITY, FOR STARTERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Journalism students used to be told of a reporter writing a weather story in a newsroom. Even though he can look out the window to see that it’s raining, he turns to the guy at the next desk, asks him to look out the window, and then quotes him in the report. It’s probably apocryphal, but it does reflect the kind of training no-nonsense reporters had in turning to sources, rather than their personal observations.

That’s why you see so many direct quotations in a news dispatch.

What you learn along the way is that what you see may not be the full story, much less the real account.

For all I know, it could have been glass falling from an explosion or sawdust, as they do in theater productions.

At least this way, there’s someone to blame if it’s wrong.

THE HUMAN IMPRINT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

In the old days, a newspaper or magazine often had a personal imprint. The publication took on the publisher’s or top editor’s vision, and a certain tone and range of interests followed. We can look at the legendary names – McCormack, Hearst, Pulitzer, Scotty Reston’s New York Times, Ben Bradlee’s Washington Post, the Bingham family’s Louisville Courier-Journal, Tom Winship’s Boston Globe, even Bill Loeb’s Union Leader – and then realize it’s not something you see in the corporate journalism of today, especially where top editors are out the door in a year. Can you name anyone at the helm today?

As for the big-name stars of network and cable news/entertainment, well, let’s just say they’re pale imposters. There’s something to be said for knowing the ropes of a community and its people. Of having roots and depth – and the responsibility of recognition when they’re out in public.

THE SHRINKING PAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

l look down on the newspaper page and think how narrow it’s become – about half of the width of the pages I designed at the beginning of my career. The broadsheets of today are about the width of tabloids back when.

It’s all cost-saving measures, of course. Like the shrinking candy bar. Yes, I remember when the joke circulated, “It’s hard to find a nickel candy bar for a quarter these days.” Ditto, for the cola.

So we keep hearing the economists warning about inflation. Not a word, you notice, about the corresponding deflation of the product itself.

BIAS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Pejorative labels do nothing to advance public discourse. Rather, they’re intended to stifle it. Even worse, they inhibit clear thinking or positive outcomes.

Consider the charge of “liberal media.” Or even “the media,” especially when used in the singular rather than the plural. In reality, American newspapers, magazines, and commercial broadcast stations have long been corporately owned, with the focus on some very profitable bottom lines. Corporations, as the epitome of capitalism, rarely fit neatly into the liberal end of the political spectrum. And so “corporate media” would be far more accurate than the “liberal media” mirage. A closer look would also find most of the editorial pages are of a conservative slant – and nearly all of the political and economic columnists syndicated in the past quarter century have been openly conservative. I’d like to hear of any liberals. In addition, in my experience, the media are highly competitive – there’s no collusion or conspiracy regarding what we’ll cover or ignore, Fox News excepted. For that matter, the media extend into the entertainment media as well – Hollywood, Nashville, Madison Avenue, and Broadway, among others.

Professional reporters and editors, meanwhile, learn to keep their own political and social views out of the way: the goal is to listen carefully and respectfully to all relevant sides of the issue and to present that as clearly as possible, especially in determining what’s new in the event being covered.

I’ve come to the conclusion that those who accuse news organizations and personnel of bias actually have no interest in objective reporting – what they want is bias, of their own right-wing persuasion or even more blatant propaganda. Ideology, rather than fact. The truth be damned, in their hearts.

Perhaps nothing should be more telling than Spiro Agnew’s rabid attacks on a free press, especially when we consider he had every reason to keep reporters off the track of his own criminal actions – and those of his boss, Richard Nixon, all the more. All the while, we covered his attacks on us verbatim and uncontested – had we been anything like he accused us of being, his words never would have seen the light of day, or blasted by critical comment as he spoke them.

If anything, I think of all the years when I willingly suppressed my own convictions – and the price that’s imposed. At last, finally out of the trade, I can truly speak and write freely.

LOCAL, LOCAL

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Ever since Watergate, daily newspapers have devoted more and more of their resources and attention to what they consider local news. Editors and publishers look at surveys where readers say the want local, and decide that’s what we’ll give them – at least until the news business tailspin.

Never mind that the readers’ definition of local news might be quite different from what happens at city hall or even the school board. Or that what happens in one town holds absolutely no interest to the readers living in 99 other localities.

In fact, most of the time, there’s nothing more boring than local news.

When Thomas Jobson led the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey, he relied on a different definition – not “local news,” but “news of local interest.” And so a Mike Royko column out of Chicago just might run on the front page. Circulation at Jobson’s paper soared, while at least one of its neighboring rivals withered.

I’ve taken the lesson well.

ONE PHONE CALL TOO MANY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Journalists learn the importance of covering all the bases they can before the deadline cutoff. You learn the risks of running a single-source story. Even when you’ve talked on record to several people, you’re urged to make one more phone call. Just to make sure.

Sometimes, that’s when the reporter tells an editor, “There’s no story.”

“What do you mean?”

It was simply a rumor. It didn’t happen at all. The problem was fixed long ago. The guy we were going to praise has a serious drinking problem. The person who called in the tip is a crook or simply dishonest. You get the picture.

As for what had seemed to be a hot story, there was just one phone call too many.