It’s been a while since I did a Journalism 101 piece, but this article at CJR Daily made me think it’s time to remedy that:
Published in the winter 2007 volume of Journalism History, “Depression, Drink and Dissipation” finds that almost half of the best people to ever push a noun against a verb in newsprint were debilitated by depression, serious anxiety, or bipolar disorder; over a third were titanic drunks, pill-poppers, or opium-addicts; nearly a third were serial philanderers, and a sizable bunch were misogynists, man-eaters, or violent bullies. In almost every case, the tendency to booze, carouse, or otherwise self-annihilate developed or seriously deepened during their days in journalism. All this is enough to make Underwood, who left a career covering politics for the Seattle Times to teach at the University of Washington, wonder whether “these behaviors and the choice of journalism and writing as a career are perhaps not unrelated.” Well, yeah.
One interesting question that remains is whether the findings, besides holding a wealth of amusing details, hold deeper significance for the news. Should we care about a reporter’s personal problems?
Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin answer with a burped, “Hell, yes.” For over a decade, the two ex-hard drinkers and legendary newsmen have been saying that print owes its readership woes to a dead corporate air in the newsroom. “Everything’s more restrained and we’ve lost a certain edge,” Hamill told the Denver Post in 1995. Meanwhile, Breslin knows what’s missing: “It’s the drinking.” They grouse that today’s reporters forgo drinking clubs and bawdy pals in favor of health clubs and quiet homes.
Their remarks call up a romantic image of crapulous newsmen throwing cigarette butts on the floor and writing with wet towels wrapped around their throbbing heads. But let’s not forget the consequences. Underwood lists nineteen literary journalists, including Agee, Ring Lardner, and Robert Benchley, who died from drinking. Seven others, among them George Orwell and Mark Twain, killed themselves smoking. William Dean Howells and A.J. Liebling were two of thirteen who ate their way to an early grave. Then there are the suicides: goodbye Gloria Emerson, Ernest Hemingway, and Hunter S. Thompson.
In my own experience, it’s not hard to find alcoholics in newsrooms. (These editors are not necessarily my immediate supervisors: Like a rainforest canopy, there can be layer upon layer of editors at a newspaper, serving nebulous and even outright mysterious roles.)
I had an editor who would put the paper together from down the street via a phone and a reserved seat at the local bar every afternoon. Another literally had a bottle of scotch in his bottom drawer. And there was the editor who would stagger into his office at 10, close the door and shut the blinds, turn the CNN up to the deafening level and then not leave until 4, when alcoholic fumes potent enough to set ablaze would follow him out.
I’m in the camp that believes it’s the personality types attracted to journalism that lead to substance abuse rather than journalism driving one to drink. Pissed-off, cynical, in love with the sound of their own voices, in love with catching others in a lie, curious to the point of creeping others out — if that’s not a journalist, it’s the creepy guy next to you at a seedy bar.
As the article says, though, this kind of thing is less and less accepted as time goes on. Gone are the days when you could smell alcohol on someone’s breath in a staff meeting while they filled multiple plastic ashtrays with stubbed-out cigarettes. Staffers now have to self-destruct in their off-hours.
Marketplace had an interesting piece late last week: As big papers are famously losing both ad revenue and circulation, the hyper-local little papers that focus on the potholes and PTA meetings are doing quite well.
The New York Times would like you to believe otherwise. But even in this age of media consolidation, the Big Apple is no one-newspaper town.
There are two tabloids. There’s Newsday. There’s even competition between the freebie papers that get handed out during the morning rush hour.
And there’s a whole host of community papers that cover neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs and the suburbs.
It’s that last bunch that’s been getting a lot of attention lately. Last fall, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp — which owns the tabloid New York Post — bought up a chain of weeklies in Queens. And another in Brooklyn. Now, rumor has it, the media mogul’s looking to nab another one. In the Bronx.
These are papers whose biggest front-page headlines wouldn’t merit a brief in the New York Times’s Metro Section. So why would anyone want to buy them?
There’s probably only five people in the High Desert who have noticed — the Hesperia Star’s publisher, the head of advertising for the Daily Press and the three of us in the office on Main Street — but even as the real estate ads shrink, the Star has gone back up from 16 pages to 20. During a time of bad news for bigger papers with larger scopes, the Hesperia Star, with its focus on, well, potholes and PTA meetings is doing quite well.
Full coverage the Las Flores fire can be found here:
I was only out at the fire a few hours, and my throat is still hurting and my eyes still burning. (Not to mention every inch of me smells like a campfire.) I can’t imagine how career firefighters are able to handle much more prolonged exposure to smoke and fire on a regular basis.
 As you might remember (those handful of you who care), last year, the Hesperia Star staff took over management of the content of the site at the same time as we added categories to make it easier for readers to find stories and allowed comments on each story.
Part of the goal was to make for a better experience for users — it was closer to the site I’d make, if I were making a site from scratch — but part of it was also to get our Web hits up, which after working at CBR, the 800-pound gorilla of the comic book industry on the Web, frankly sort of bothered me.
Well, it worked. While I don’t think I’m allowed to release exact figures, I just saw the site’s daily pageviews prior to switching over to the new system. Page hits had doubled by adding interactivity and usability to the site. So it wasn’t just what I wanted, it turns out that the readers responded to it as well. Hopefully the new site, which offers even more interactivity and usability, will have a similar response.
Speaking of the new site, it’s been patched to the next version of the program that runs everything, but the pages haven’t all been tweaked to take advantage of all the new bells and whistles. The current schedule is for the Star, the Daily Press and HighDesert.com to be fully belled and whistled by May 3.
As Marketplace pointed out yesterday, print isn’t dead, and reinvention is the name of the game. The Daily Press papers are currently kicking around some redesign ideas, from the papers’ logos through how they deliver news. Look for more on this later this year.
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