Monday, November 23, 2009

Report of my death

One of my quirks is to google names of some people I know, including myself. When I checked the e-mail this afternoon, I gulped when I read this:

Larry Lorenz Death Notice Larry Lorenz's Obituary by the Grand ...
Online death notice for Larry Lorenz. Read Larry Lorenz's life story, offer tributes/condolences, send flowers or create a Larry Lorenz online memorial.

And after I gulped, I pulled this little ditty out from deep in my files:


The New Suit

I have come from the store with a navy blue suit,
a red four-in-hand and a starched white shirt,
and black shoes so polished that they will catch
the sparkle of a ballroom chandelier
and the twinkle of candlelight in a dark restaurant.
And I shall wear them all for events of passage,
christenings and weddings and funerals—
perhaps even my own, on that morning
when grinning death appears from my closet,
as formal as a well-practiced butler,
and invites me to slip on the coat.


When I read the obit, I realized the stiff was an imposter. It isn't time for the coat quite yet.

Whew!

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Now, arguably, this is, like, I mean, you know....

Pollsters at Marist College have found that we Americans are most annoyed by the use of “whatever” in conversations. Forty-seven percent of us. Another 25 percent are annoyed by “you know.”

Whatever.

I mean, my list of annoying words and phrases is long, and the older and more curmudgeonly I grow, the longer the list grows.

I mean, beginning a sentence with "I mean" annoys me no end. Especially when it is paired with “you (ya) know.”

And I, like, nearly go mad when I, like, hear the staccato repetition of "like" all day. As when students on campus say (in their lingo,"go"), like, "I mean, you know, I was like, you know. I mean...." When I get them in class and they say that in discussion, I stop them dead with “No. I do not know what you mean.” Or, “it’s not ‘like ethics’; it’s “ethics.” They look at me blankly for a second, then patiently translate what they are saying into language an old fuddy-duddy professor can understand.

Arguably, "arguably" isn't a word that's needed, but I get the impression that many writers (and some speakers) today aren't willing to make a flat statement and face argument, so they hedge with "arguably" ad nauseum.

In fact, I've wondered whether the Sulzbergers couldn't save millions on ink each year if they eliminated "arguably" and "famously" from the pages of the Times. Just this week, I read there that "Antone's Home Of The Blues was, famously, at 29th and Guadaloupe...." and that Lance Armstrong is "arguably the world's most famous endurance athlete...."

I should say, iconic New York Times which this week referred to "Maine's most iconic industry" and wrote that Irving Penn transformed cigarette butts "to iconic status." With that one, another couple of million, at least, goes down a drain on Eighth Ave. each year.

Now, television reporters like to interject "now" at the beginning of sentences--sometimes two or three in the same story. And by the time I have gotten past the "nows," I can't remember what the story was about.

I would add to my list, Brit-isms like "early on," "towards," and "amongst," and one weatherman's "one hour's time" and "in the overnight hours."

Now, some day--at the end of the day--my wife is going to find me dead on the couch in front of the tv set, a newspaper clutched in my cold, dead hand, and, my face like, I mean, you know, arguably contorted into a reasonable facsimile of Munch's famously iconic "The Scream."

Thank you for reading my rant. And, please, dear reader, do not say “No problem.”

Monday, August 17, 2009

Happy Birthday, Abby

Toward the middle of August of 1973, Kathy packed a bag for the hospital and put it by the window of our bedroom.

Her due date had been sometime in late July or early August—the exact date escapes me—but it had passed, and we were concerned. One day we went to the hospital for tests. I stood next to the doctor as he clipped an X-ray to the light panel and studied it.

“Congratulations,” he said at last, “you’re going to be a father.”

My eyes watered then just as they are doing now, as I relive the moment .

Everything was fine. The infant, our first, apparently was just enjoying the warmth and solitude of the womb until she (as it turned out) was good and ready to join us.

It was after that that Kathy packed. And every night, before getting ready for bed, I asked how she was feeling and whether that might be the night. Every night, her answer was the same: “No. Not tonight.”

On the 16th, I asked again.

“Tonight?”

“No.”

And so we went to bed. Minutes later, she shook me.

“Let’s go.”

I could have beaten a fireman in getting my clothes back on. And in getting her to the hospital.

And then we waited. Hours and hours, into the early morning.

Finally, when the child was good and ready, Kathy was wheeled into the delivery room. I put on all the protective gear so that I could be by her side. Within minutes, out came the baby. So fast and so covered with goo that I feared she would slip out of the doctor’s hands and onto the floor. But he had a firm grip, and within seconds he had her breathing and bawling. A nurse took her, cleaned her, wrapped her in a blanket, and took her to Kathy.

The baby was all pink and wrinkled with eyes shut tight.

“May I touch her?” I asked.

“Go ahead,” the doctor said. “She’s yours.”

That was 36 years ago today. Half of my lifetime ago. She has a husband and two lovely little sons. But in memory, I hold her for the first time. She is still mine.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Seeking DiMaggio's Autograph

Picture a 14-year old boy standing at the door to the visitors’ locker room at the Kansas City Blues stadium in 1951. The Blues are a AAA farm team of the New York Yankees, and the Yankees are playing the Blues in the annual exhibition game the two teams play.

It’s about the fourth or fifth inning. Yankee manager Casey Stengel, having given the yokels a look at the stars of the team, has pulled them to give the second-stringers a few innings on the field. The boy’s father has told his son that it’s a good time to go try to get players’ autographs, and the boy has gone down to the locker room with his new autograph book in hand.

He especially wants DiMaggio’s autograph. The other stars, he’s not sure of. But he knows about DiMaggio. The great Joe DiMaggio.

It’s drizzling in Kansas City, but the boy doesn’t care. He’s willing to be soaked, if that’s what he has to do to get DiMaggio’s autograph.

The door opens and some men come out and hurry past the boy to one of the taxis in the line along the curb. The taxi drives off. A short man in a suit had held the door for them, and the boy asks the man if they were players. The man tells him they were. The door opens again, and more players head for taxis. They all ignore the book in the boy’s outstretched hand.

And then the short man opens he door again and DiMaggio appears in the doorway. The boy knows the face. He edges forward.

“Mr. DiMaggio, may I have your autograph?” he asks.

“Out of my way, kid,” DiMaggio says. He brushes the boy aside and hurries to a taxi.

Other players follow. They ignore the boy, too.

The disappointed boy turns to the man holding the door.

“Do you have anything to do with the team?” he asks.

“Yes,” the man says.

“Would sign my book?”

“Sure, kid.” He takes it and the pen the boy offers, signs the book and returns it.

“Thanks,” the boy says, and walks back up the ramp to the stands.

Only then does the boy look at the book. There’s the signature on the first page: “Phil Rizzuto.” And for the nearly 60 years since, he has treasured that autograph, and in all those years he has never met a finer man.

But DiMaggio? When he was grown, and anyone mentioned the great Joe DiMaggio, and he could use such words, the response he practically spat out was always the same.

“Joe DiMaggio? Fuck Joe DiMaggio.”

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Stop the Presses...but not just yet

A talk before Le Petit Salon, New Orleans

If you have seen the movie The Paper, you will remember that much of it revolves around the story of the arrest of two young black men for a murder and the efforts by a columnist named Michael McDougal (Randy Quaid) and the metro editor, Henry Hackett (Michael Keaton), to get the story right. When the two young men are arrested early in the day, the "wood," the giant-sized headline for the next day’s story, reads “Gotcha!” But with more reporting, it becomes obvious that the two were wrongfully accused. Henry wants the story rewritten and a new headline on the front page.

Henry and McDougal are in the press room. The presses have already started to roll. To stop them, put the new page in place, and start them again would be an expensive operation, and especially because the paper is in dire financial straits. Henry dithers about whether to remake the front page with the new headline and replate the press.

Finally, he says, I'm stopping it.

Michael McDougal: What?

Henry: We stop and replate. Go upstairs and write up what you've got. Tell Lou to send down "They Didn't Do It".

McDougal: Hey Henry, are you going to say it? You gotta say it.

Henry: Use the same art they used for "Gotcha!".

McDougal: Come on, how often do you get the chance? You can't just do it and not say it, come on!

Henry: I -- Stop the presses!

That’s a phrase that’s been used a lot lately; more and more people have used it to headline their views on what is happening in the newspaper industry.

Normally, though, “stop the presses” is an expression that is used only in the movies. You certainly don’t hear it in pressrooms. Especially these days, when newspapers are pinching all the pennies they can out of every dime.

A fellow recently wrote to the listserv many of us former United Press International newsmen subscribe to to say that he had agreed to talk about the future of American newspapers. "What should I say about their future?" he asked us. I wrote, "Be silent."

I won’t follow my own advice to him here. But I want to start with a look backward.
What we are seeing would seem to bed a new phenomenon. Newspapers, even large metropolitan dailies, stopping their presses, and others whose reported financial woes threaten the longevity of even more newspapers. But the situation has been years in the making.

The first newspapers in America were political or business newspapers, both rather expensive and, for the most part, catering to small groups. In the 1830s, however, came a popular newspaper. Publishers like Horace Greeley, who published the New York Tribune and, especially, James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald led the way. To them, everything in the city was news, from Wall Street to society balls to courts to City Hall--everything about the city, and the nation and the world, for that matter, that would interest their readers.

They were sensational. Ministers staged a boycott of the Herald. But the newspapers' editorial pages showed that their publishers and editors  understood that the success of representative democracy depended on an informed public. They were also filled with advertisements aimed at that broad public. Department stores grew on newspaper advertising—and the metropolitan newspapers grew on department store advertising.

As the population grew, as business and industry expanded, the formula those publishers developed insured that newspaper publication became ever more profitable. Media buying was not the sophisticated operation it is today, in which businesses buy advertising not only on the basis of cost per thousand readers or viewers, but can target specific age groups and sexes who read a particular newspaper or magazine or watch a particular program. And circulation was not carefully audited -- all newspapers inflated it to increase the price they could charge for ads. So businesses spread their advertising among two or three or more newspapers.

In 1861, six English language newspapers were being published in the city, three in French, and one in German. New Orleans was then the sixth largest city in the United States with a population of 168,000—and it supported all of them.

After the Civil War, individuals like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst grew wealthy catering to both readers and advertisers. Both owned more than one newspaper. Hearst held on to the San Francisco Examiner when he moved to New York and bought the Journal and Pulitzer kept the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis. Hearst spread out across the country and developed a chain of newspapers.

In most instances, they and other chain owners bought a newspaper to establish themselves in a city--in some, they bought two or more newspapers and combined them. And they battled each other for circulation. The University of Chicago sociologist Robert Park, writing in 1925, in the midst of newspaper wars in that city, opined that the newspaper has not just a history…but a natural history, and, he wrote, the struggle for existence has been the struggle for circulation. He said of the successful publishers, they “discovered the kind of paper that men and women would read and had the courage to publish it.”

Another scholar, the Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, wrote in The Uprooted, his lovely book on the late 19th century immigrants, that the mass journals were built by catering to immigrants. He described Hearst and Pulitzer as “perspicacious men alive to the potentialities of this new public…. They emphasized the sensational at the expense of pure news; they devoted space to the doings of the local associations and of local personages; the serial story was at home in their pages; and they stood ready to advise their readers in the most intimate manner. Finally, they catered consistently to the nationalistic emotions of the organized immigrant movements. All this a mass circulation enabled them to do cheaply and lavishly. It was no wonder that even some in the first generation were inclined to lay down their pennies for these papers, simple in language, big with headlines and fat with pictures.”

The latter part of the 19th century of course was a time of cut-throat competition in American business generally. The era of Hearst and Pulitzer was also the era of Rockefeller and Carnegie—laissez faire to the utmost. And by the turn of the century, as a result of natural selection in the news business, as in oil and steel, Americans began to see fewer different newspapers in newsboys’ hands.

Changes in the economic situation of newspapers after World War I were especially dramatic. The post-war period was one of great newspaper consolidation--weak newspapers being swallowed up by stronger ones or disappearing entirely.
The historian of American journalism Frank Luther Mott points out in his American Journalism that newspaper consolidations had occurred in the past, but not to the same degree.

Why?

First, more newspapers were in existence than any city could afford to support. Some could not serve their communities with either news or advertising. Advertisers seeking to reach the largest possible audience placed their ads--and money--with larger newspapers, weakening still further the economic base of newspapers with smaller circulations.

Business expenses were growing. Labor costs were higher, along with costs for paper, ink, type metal and machinery. Costs of transmitting the news were going up. Many newspapers could not earn enough to pay the increases and folded. Others joined with competitors because it was more economical for them to operate a joint plant twice a day then two separate plants only once a day.

In addition, the major news wire service, the Associated Press, had a rule against selling to competing newspapers. About the only way a publisher could get the service would be by buying a weaker paper that already was an AP member. That’s how Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch came to be; he bought one at a sheriff’s sale in order to have a newspaper, the other for its AP membership.

Our work and living habits changed, also. Workers – especially factory workers -- once went to their jobs early in the morning and got off early in the afternoon. They may have picked up an evening newspaper for the trolley ride home, and the family read it in the evening. That schedule changed in the latter half of the 20th century as we made a transition from a factory system to a service economy. Evening newspapers in metropolitan areas lost circulation and died out or switched to morning publication or merged with morning newspapers. That happened in cities where I have lived—Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Kansas City and Milwaukee. Here in New Orleans, where the States-Item was a strong evening newspaper, it was merged with the Times-Picayune into what came to be known as the Tipsy—an appropriate name for New Orleans—and then one day the States-Item name disappeared from the flag.

The period between the wars saw further losses of newspapers, largely the result of the development of radio and television. Especially after the second world war, people began to turn to television for their daily news. Newspapers responded by brightening their pages and simplifying their layouts. The style of newspaper writing became more direct, with shorter, active sentences, more like the language people use in conversation.

Content also changed. Radio and television could present the “who,” “what,” “where,” and “when” as soon as events occurred, or shortly thereafter. But they could not easily provide the “why” and the “how” of news. So newspapers began to move toward interpretive reporting, explaining the meaning of events.

The public’s use of newspapers changed, too. Rather than turning to the newspaper only for news, they used it also for weather information, stock market reports, advice columns, advertising--and television listings.

The effects of television on the other media are just as great. The big Hollywood movie studios lost money heavily. Some closed down. But thoughtful producers came to realize that they were no longer in the movie business, but in the entertainment business. They began making movies specifically for television. And they converted their lots into production studios for television programs.

Television hurt book publishing, too. Readers stopped using the local library and stopped buying trade books, at least partially. They spent their leisure time in front of their television sets rather than with a good book.

Magazines, which competed with television for national advertising, began to lose money. Many of the general interest magazines we grew up with dropped from sight, including Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s,” Coronet, and Look. Others reduced their size. At the same time, specialized magazines like Time and Newsweek, The New Yorker, Ladies Home Journal and the like survived and prospered. It is not strange at all that the most successful specialty publication of its time, the one with the greatest circulation, was TV Guide--and even it is in financial trouble. Now, we have even more-specialized magazines, tailored to our narrower interests.

So the world of media we once knew has been a long time changing, and in recent years, the changes have accelerated. As in the past, today’s media are influenced by economic, social and political forces. And by developments–and challenges--in technology; the internet, of course, as did radio and tv, seems to be having great effects on all of the media.

The general trend toward huge businesses and industries brought about by competition and rising costs has carried over into journalism. The newspaper mergers coupled with the growth of chains that began in the early 20th century continued to the end of the century.

Remember the movie Citizen Kane? Kane’s California estate was called Xanadu, after that “stately pleasure dome” of Kubla Kahn. The new media moguls--as they had begun to be styled—of the late 20th century found newspapers to be profitable beyond their wildest dreams. Al Neuharth, who extended the Gannett chain and founded USA Today was reaping earnings of 20 and 30 percent (so far this year Gannett has suffered a 60 percent drop in revenue and is down 18 percent in revenue).

In this new century, however, those who would also feed on honey dew and drink the milk of a Paradise of newspaper profits, would be sorely disappointed. They over-extended themselves. Sam Zell who bought the Chicago Tribune not long ago, is perhaps the latest and, certainly, most egregious example. In buying the Tribune, he also acquired the Los Angeles Times, New York’s Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant and half a dozen smaller newspapers; WGN radio; 21 television stations, including WGNO and WNOL in New Orleans; WGN Cable; a partial stake in WB Network; and Tribune Entertainment, a television production and syndication company; a host of other media-related companies; and the Chicago Cubs; and Wrigley Field. That was a tremendous load of debt to take on, and Zell mistakenly thought, as he has now admitted, that profits would cover the purchase.

Then came the financial crunch. The Tribune is in bankruptcy; so is its rival, the Sun-Times; groups like Gannett and Lee Enterprises, which bought the Pulitzer family’s Post-Dispatch -- are on the verge of bankruptcy; Rocky Mountain News is dead; Seattle Post-Intelligencer has gone to internet publication, as has the Newhouses' Ann Arbor News; Detroit newspapers are in print only three days a week. I haven't space to recite the whole sad "Te Deum" of the dead and dying.

Survivors—the walking wounded-- are cutting staff. Among the casualties were 300 at the Los Angeles Times…205 at the Miami Herald…156 at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution…150 at the Kansas City Star. Among the Pulitzer Prize winners this year was a reporter in Arizona who had been laid off a few months ago.

The survivors are also cutting other costs. They have gone to thinner newsprint, print fewer pages, combined sections of special features, and worst of all, decreased quality reporting. An acquaintance of mine noted recently that there are fewer serious competitors for Pulitzer Prizes lately. So we subscribers ask why we are paying the same subscription price or higher for less and less content.

One group we do not know much about is the parent of the Times-Picayune, Advance Publications. It is privately held—and held very privately—by Samuel I Newhouse Jr. and Donald Newhouse. They own dailies in about 20 cities around the country, more than 40 weekly newspapers, and two dozen magazines published by their Conde Nast unit, including the The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.

Advance now has mandatory 10-day furloughs without pay and a pension freeze; there’s a hiring freeze at the Times-Picayune, perhaps at others. All you have to do to see the new newspaper realities is pick up that newspaper every morning— thinner paper, down-sized and fewer pages, with one page of comics where there had been two, truncated sections for books, business, travel and others. Many of those money savers came in the wake of Katrina, but without Katrina, we would still be seeing them. I don’t think we will have to do any serious worrying about the Times-Picayune, though, until Nell Nolan’s feature disappears.

And it could.

Let me tell you in mournful numbers. In 1910, the nation had 2,202 daily newspapers. In 2007, it has just slightly more than 1,422—a loss of about 8 newspapers every year. Circulation of newspapers rose from 28-million to just under 50 million—up 78 percent; but that increase did not keep pace with the population gain of 227 percent—92-and a quarter million in 1910 to an estimated 301 and a half-million in 2007.

What those numbers add up to is dreary outlook for American democracy.

Robert Park wrote, back in 1925: “If public opinion is to continue to govern in the future as it has in the past, if we propose to maintain a democracy as Jefferson conceived it, the newspaper must continue to tell us about ourselves. We somehow learn to know our community and its affairs in the same intimate way in which we knew them in the country villages. The newspaper must continue to be the printed diary of the home community…. Local News is the very stuff that democracy is made of.”

Thomas Jefferson put it even more simply: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

How can newspapers save themselves?

Some say they cannot. They are doomed. We will get our news from the over-simplifiers and sensationalists of Fox news, MSNBC, CNN or from minuscule number of professional journalists who publish on the internet. Cynics say we will have to rely on amateurs – who now publish material they have picked up from professional publications or rumor mongers.

Most observers say that newspapers can survive, but they must show that Jefferson and Park were right—that they are essential to our democracy. Forget about Britney and focus on keeping the reading public informed about government and other aspects of life that really affect our lives.

Some hold that newspapers could become non-profit organizations that we would support with tax-deductible dollars. Or they could become philanthropies, supporting small professional organizations that would gather news and information. Or they could get underwriting for developing new models of newsgathering in the online environment—and there is, already, a good deal of experimentation with online publishing of news gathered by groups of displaced newspaper people.

Others say government is the answer. Distasteful as that may seem, government has stepped in before—in 1970, Congress enacted the Newspaper Preservation Act (in its first appearance on the Hill it was called the Failing Newspaper Act, and it failed). The measure allowed separate, competing newspapers in a city, where one was suffering heavy circulation losses, to form joint operating agreements—to combine their circulation and advertising departments, though keeping their news operations separate. In effect, it exempted those newspapers from antitrust laws. So there is precedent.

Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland has introduced a bill to a allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies. Under his arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements. Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, where the New York Times-owned Boston Globe is in danger of being shut down, is going to hold hearings a week from today to consider the economic problems facing the newspaper industry—and, presumably, what government might do to help ameliorate the situation.

Two journalism professors have argued that so essential is the newspaper press to the functioning of a democratic government that the government has an obligation to step in to save it. The suggest an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers. “The newspapers would have to publish at least five times per week … with less than 50 percent advertising. In effect, this means the government would pay for a a free daily newspaper subscription for each of us…and we would get to pick the newspaper. They say their plan would “ buy time for our old media newsrooms--and for us citizens--to develop a plan to establish journalism in the digital era." And, they say, "We could see this evolving into a system to provide tax credits for online subscriptions as well.”

They argue, convincingly, I think, that “We have to open the door to enlightened public policies and subsidies. We need our members of Congress and our leading scholars to approach this matter with the same urgency with which they would approach the threat of terrorism, pandemic, financial collapse or climate change.”

As I look back on that history I recited for you, I keep imagining that out there, somewhere, are individuals like Greeley and Bennett, Pulitzer and Hearst--those, to paraphrase Handlin, characterized as perspicacious and alive to the potentialities of this new public of the 21st century.

But if nothing at all is done, and newspapers are allowed to die or shrivel into mere compendiums of digital social notes and unsupported opinion, then I fear, as do others, that this wonderful experiment in democracy that we have enjoyed for the last 220 years could collapse and, with that, the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Bill G. Ferguson

A fine journalist and great guy died Tuesday. The UPI.com obituary carried the basic facts: born, Winchester, Ind., March 1, 1926; died Cartersville, Ga., May 12, 2009; married, four sons; U.S. Army Air Corps in WWII; a 40-year career with United Press and United Press International: Southern Division sports editor, night editor, Georgia state editor and legislative correspondent; supervisory editor on national brodcast news desk, vice president and executive broadcast editor; UPI managing editor-national.

To flesh out those bare bones, ex-Unipressers who knew Billy have shared their reminiscences on the downhold listserv.

This is mine:

Bill Ferguson was the overnight editor on the national broadcast news desk (UPR) when I joined UPI 47 years ago this month, and I became one of his writers after a novitiate of about a month on the hectic dayside.

What came through as soon I had introduced myself to him was that he was a friendly, genuinely nice guy. He was always a bit disheveled – who on the overnight wasn’t? – and had a sort of “down home” manner and a staccato laugh that made his head bounce slightly up and down. He was an easy-going editor to work for. But there was no question that he was in charge, and when the teletype bells signaled a bulletin, down home became all business.

Billy was also a superb writer. He could turn out clean spare copy that was a model of of that "chatting with an old friend" style that we all wanted to achieve. We writers were to read the last “world news roundup” or “world in brief” to check for errors, to see how the desk had edited our copy and how the veterans did the job of rewriting newspaper copy for broadcast. There was no question which stories Billy had written, and reading them was not only was instructive but a pleasure.

Two other mainstays on the onite were Larry McCoy, who normally had the second desk, and Harry Stewart, a veteran going well back to the UP era. During breaks, they played a game they called “hall hockey.” The field was the highly polished corridor that ran alongside the newsroom, and the puck was the metal disk from the end of a roll of teletype paper. The play involved a great deal of shin kicking and shoving as one tried to get the disk to one end of the corridor while the other defended.
I thought Billy especially tolerant in putting up with that. But I learned that the nuttiness was part of UPI, and part of Billy’s work—and charm—was passing on the culture.

For his part, he told stories. I heard those Ed Rogers stories that have been repeated here. He also talked about putting Merriman Smith’s copy into readable condition, even writing for him, when Smitty was under the influence of a few juleps while covering President Eisenhower’s golfing trips to Augusta. My favorite was of a newly hired female, a recent college graduate, who showed up for her first day of work in the Atlanta bureau an hour or more before the appointed time. The restrooms were on alternating floors in the building, and the bureau was on the floor with the women’s. But there was a sink at the end of the room, and since no women worked in the bureau, on the overnight, at least, the men sometimes made use of it. So it was that a staffer was standing at the sink when the young woman opened the door across from it. “May I help you?” he said. She took one look at that member of the press and was never seen again. I can hear Billy’s laugh today.

With a wife and four sons and a UPI paycheck, Billy had a second job. And that, along with his overnight duties and his familial responsibilities, kept him tired much of the time. He would sometimes catch catnaps sitting at the desk, and if he came in early or had someone cover for him, he would go to the storeroom, stretch out on boxes of teletype paper or surplus copies of Hugh Baillie’s High Tension and take a longer snooze. I almost lost my new job when Dean Miller, then UPR manager, one night came in late and asked another relatively new staffer, Bill Roberts, where Billy was. I’m not sure what Roberts told him, but Miller found Billy in the storeroom. Later, Miller came up to me and said “Don’t ever lie to me again.” I don’t know, but I assume that Billy somehow cleared up the misunderstanding.

When we got to know each other better, once every couple of weeks, he and I would play golf right after work at the Glen View course. I had been a good caddy but was a lousy golfer. He was a serious about the game and pretty good at it. He seemed to race down the fairways, probably because he was taking fewer strokes than I. The teacher side of him did not show up on the golf course; I had a terrible slice, and I could not get his help in straightening it out. When I left for graduate school, I bequeathed my clubs to his boys and have not been on a course since.

In the summer of 1968, I was between graduate school and my first teaching job. Billy was the UPR manager by then, and he hired me as summer relief. I worked days, mostly, and some nights. Good guy that he was, he did not put me on the overnight. But I’m glad beyond measure that someone assigned me to that shift when he was running it.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Adult Content

Amid the laughter
of children at play next door,
I take out the trash.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Driver's Ed Revisited

I am a better driver today: a certified graduate of the AARP course for over-50. It is guaranteed to shave a few dollars off of the insurance, and that’s why I took it. Or, I should say, I took it because my wife badgered me for months to take it to cut a dollar or two off of the insurance.

I should add that mine was a four-hour refresher course. I took the full eight-hour course, over two days, four or five years ago.

My wife, though, was so busy harping on my taking the courses that she has not taken either one herself. But she will, I’m sure. Why should I have all the fun?

My classmates, I noted, as I looked around the room while the instructor was telling us how cars have changed over the years, included the old fella’ who nearly got me when he turned into the parking lot and another one, a guy I’m sure I’ve seen on the expressway traveling a safe 35 miles an hour. At another table was the little old lady from down the street who drives a giant Mercury and whose view of the road ahead is limited to what she can see between the dashboard and the top of the steering wheel.

The instructor, a volunteer, told us all about “them new things” on cars--things like turn signals and alarms that warn us if we are about to back into another car. Then he told us how we have changed. For one thing, we are older. That means we may not see as well in bright sunlight, on shady days or at night, so we ought to have our eyes checked and get glasses if we need them. We may not hear as well as we used to, so we ought to have our hearing checked. If noise distracts us, we should tell the person sitting next to us in the car not to talk until we reach our destination. I almost raised my hand to ask if he had tried that with his spouse and, if so, if that was why he had the scar on his cheek, but I did not want to jeopardize my chances of graduating.

The instructor read to us a lot from the instruction book. I thought about suggesting that he was ready to graduate to PowerPoint presentation, but by that time we had moved on to an exercise involving the class. He had each person on the front row read a unit title and the section titles that followed. So at least eight people got to participate by reading aloud to him. I was sitting on the back row, and that’s how I learned that my hearing is not what it used to be.

It took us two hours to get though a film and the first unit. Then he went around the room to collect the tuition--$12 for AARP members, $14 for non-members. “What if I’m a member but don’t have my card?” Someone asked. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll take your word for it.” “What if I’m a member but don’t have my card?” someone else asked. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll take your word for it.” The third time I heard the question, I figured my hearing was improving.

Then we took a five- or ten-minute break. When we were back in session, the instructor went through the succeeding units, one by one, reading the titles and pointing out some of the more important instructions in the text. Things like, “if you’re taking medication, you probably shouldn’t drink alcohol before you get behind the wheel,” and “hold the steering wheel with both hands at the 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock positions or the 7 and 4 positions, because if you have your hand on the top of the steering that air bag will break your arm when it comes out when you crash.”

We got through all that in about 20 minutes, then he passed out forms we were to fill out with name, driver’s license number, date of the course, and other important data, “but don’t start filling them forms out yet because we are all going to fill them out together,” which we did--"Print your name in the box where it says 'Name.' Has everybody done that? Now, fill in your driver's license number. Has everybody done that?"

When everybody had done them things, he dismissed us, saying that he hoped we were all “smarter” than we got there.

I know I was. I raced for the parking lot so I could get out of there before all those old people started backing into each other. And I drove the speed limit all the way home with my hands at 9 and 3; I didn’t want that air bag breaking my arm when I crashed.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Haiku on haiku

of poet Billy Collins’
“Midwinter-evening”


Mid-winter evening,
alone at a sushi bar-
just me and this eel.
--Billy Collins

Poet pens paper,
Scrawls seventeen syllables,
crafts fishy haiku.

Poet's morning chore--
take one shoe to be repaired
just me and this heel.

Down-at-heel poet
munches on cheap eel sushi--
electric soul food.

Poet can't decide--
Billy club or Tom Collins.
Either knocks him out.

Gray-haired professor
packs up yellowed lecture notes--
red wine limns sunset.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Hugh Gaine: Enlightenment Printer

In press:

Hugh Gaine (1726-1807) was printer-editor of the widely-circulated conservative newspaper The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury from 1752 through 1783 and one of the most important and prodigious book publishers in the late colonial era and the earliest years of America’s independence. In both roles, he served to further the American enlightenment by putting his printing press at the service of its authors. He also changed sides in the first year of the Revolution, from the Americans to the British, and thereby earned the opprobrium of many of his contemporaries and the reputation in history of being a turncoat.

Gaine was born in Portglenone, a village about thirty-four miles northwest of Belfast, and at the age of fourteen he began a five year apprenticeship at the Belfast printing house of Samuel Wilson and James Magee. On becoming a journeyman in 1744, he emigrated to New York, where he found work in the shop of James Parker.

In 1752, Gaine opened his own printing shop and on August 3 of that year he issued the first number of The New-York Mercury. According to the New York historian James Grant Wilson, The Mercury “became by far the best newspaper in the colonies.” Like other publishers of the day, Gaine was a printer-editor; he had no staff of reporters and he rarely wrote for the newspaper himself; to fill the newspaper’s columns, he reprinted items from other colonial newspapers and, especially in the early years, those from England. Readers found stories of fires, crimes and natural disasters, proclamations of the governors, reports of parliamentary debates, declarations of the king and minor court gossip. For businessmen, he printed commodity prices and a list of the latest ship arrivals and departures. He printed columns of advertising that supported the newspaper, including notices for the goods of his own shop: stationery items, medicines, and books he printed himself and those he imported from England.

A staple of Gaine’s Mercury, as for other newspapers of the day, was the familiar essay. He reprinted many that had appeared in other newspapers, both English and colonial, and printed original essays offered to him by local writers on all manner of subjects, especially scientific topics, religion, philosophy and relations between the sexes. Perhaps because of favorable reaction to those, in mind-August of 1754 he attempted to establish a literary magazine, The Plebean, but it died within the year.

Gaine originally resisted involvement in political battles, but inevitably in the charged atmosphere of the day, politics was forced upon him. In The Mercury’s first year, the colony’s Presbyterian faction attacked him for supporting the Episcopalian faction in a dispute over the financing and administration of King’s College (later Columbia University). Subsequently, however, he sold space on the front page of The Mercury to the Presbyterians to carry out a year-long propaganda assault on the Episcopalians; he was “a fickle fellow, and easily intimidated,” one of the Presbyterian writers observed. At the same time, however, he opened the pages of the newspaper to counter arguments from the Episcopalians.

In the long propaganda war on Britain that began with opposition to the Stamp Act, Gaine and The Mercury followed an erratic course. He printed essays condemning the Stamp Act, and after the act became effective on November 12, 1765, he defied it by printing his newspaper throughout the month on unstamped paper with the heading “No Stamped Paper to be Had.”
Following enactment of the Townshend Acts in 1766, he printed the eloquent series “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” by John Dickinson, and he supported the nonimportation agreement to boycott British goods. But when duties on all goods but tea were repealed, he opposed continuation of the boycott.
In 1768, he was named public printer of the province of New York. He changed the name of the newspaper to The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury and began publishing political essays with a more conciliatory tone toward Britain. As Whig responses to Britain’s efforts to tax America grew more violent, he ignored riots in New York and Boston or printed Tory versions of the incidents.
With passage of the British East India Company Act in 1773, Gaine gave perfunctory support to the resistance movement, but he reacted to the violence of “tea parties” in New York and Boston by printing essays abjuring violence and advocating an accommodation with the mother country. When the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, he carried essays that continued to argue for accommodation, but after the battles of Lexington and Concord, he filled his columns with essays that supported Whig positions.
In 1776, he was a fence-sitter on the question of independence until Congress passed the Declaration of Independence. He printed copies of the document for distribution in New York printed essays on behalf of the independence movement in The Mercury. When the British were preparing for their invasion of New York, he fled to Newark with his family and printed the newspaper there for two months before returning home. In the meantime, Ambrose Searle, secretary to Admiral Lord Richard Howe, had taken over Gaine’s shop and had been printing a pro-British Mercury, and he retained editorial control until sailing with Howe’s fleet in 1777. Gaine’s change of sides and his whole-hearted conversion to the British cause won him the hatred of Americans and he was denigrated viciously in print; even Philip Freneau satirized him in his “Hugh Gaine’s Life.” James Grant Wilson expressed succinctly the enduring view of him: “When with the Whigs, Hugh Gaine was a Whig; when with the Royalists, he was loyal; when the contest was doubtful, equally doubtful were the politics of Hugh Gaine.”
At the end of the war, Gaine ceased printing the Mercury and devoted himself to job printing and to publishing books. In 1802, he teamed with the bookseller Matthew Carey of Philadelphia in founding the American Booksellers Association and was elected its first president.

Journalism and Jesuit Mission

This piece was published in Conversations, No. 35 (Spring 2009), the bi-annual magazine of the National Seminar on Jesuit Higher Education.


Close your eyes for a moment.

Recall the faces of those hundreds of people, most of them black, whom you saw on your television screen suffering in humid August heat outside New Orleans’ Morial Convention Center in the week after Hurricane Katrina.

They had been unable to leave the city, and in the days after the storm, after the levees had burst and the deluge had flooded their homes, they had walked to the Convention Center seeking what they vainly believed would be shelter and transportation out of their devastated city.

Hear in memory the words of an uncharacteristically subdued Wolf Blitzer on CNN: “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals. . . . So many of these people. Almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.”

Questions, indeed.

Sadly enough, the first was, “Who are these people?” We who live in New Orleans knew there was poverty in the city; we had seen the dilapidated projects, the unemployed standing on the street corners; we had read the statistics. But the sight of all of those individuals in that place and all of those those crammed into the Superdome just a mile and a half up Poydras St. shocked us.

As I watched the story unfold from my air-conditioned refuge hundreds of miles away, it struck me that journalists had failed them and us by not bringing them to our attention long before. And as an educator of journalists in Jesuit universities for 36 years, at Marquette and Loyola New Orleans, I questioned what responsibility all of us who teach journalism in Jesuit institutions might share.

One is tempted to respond that our role is to teach the nuts and bolts of news reporting and writing, how to cover news when it occurs. But this is not 1920, when the philosopher and journalist Walter Lippmann sniffed dismissively in Public Opinion that schools of journalism were trade schools, “intended to prepare men and women for a career.” We have more profound responsibility.

In his 2000 address at Santa Clara University, Father General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach told us that the role of faculty members at Jesuit colleges and universities “is tirelessly to seek the truth and to form each student into a whole person of solidarity who will take responsibility for the real world.” He made no distinction between disciplines; he was directing his words at us journalism professors as well as at our colleagues in theology, philosophy and literature.

What truth do we seek as we study our field and lead our students in seeking?

Prof. David Host of Marquette’s College of Journalism came up with an excellent answer 40 years earlier, in 1960, in an essay marking the fiftieth anniversary of the college. Host stated that he and his colleagues there pursued truth in two ways: “truth about journalism as a work to be done and truth about the news media as social instruments through which the work is done.”

The same could be said of today’s journalism instruction in Jesuit institutions, as evidenced by our curricula. We all teach students the basic principles of the work and the essential techniques of gathering news and preparing it for publication; it is the grasp of those underlying principles of the work that will enable our graduates to adapt readily to changes in the field. At the same time, as did the Marquette faculty of the last century, we attempt to bring our students to a knowledge and understanding of the role of mass media as social instruments: how they have developed over time, how they are changing, how they affect the public, and journalists’ ethical responsibilities to their readers and viewers. And if we are doing our work as we should, we are bringing our students to know not only how media operate today but to view them critically and consider how they ought to operate.

We have all firmly rooted our programs in the liberal arts in order that our students have that broader knowledge and understanding of the world that is crucial to their development as human beings. For us, as for the Marquette faculty of Host’s day, it is inconceivable that journalists should not be “educated precisely in those persisting questions of the nature and end of man and of the most pressing of his common worldly circumstances with which humanistic studies are traditionally concerned.”

Fr. Kolvenbach also said at Santa Clara that university knowledge, while valuable for its own sake, is also “knowledge that must ask itself, ‘For whom? For what?’” The answer, as we are frequently reminded on our campuses, is “the service of faith and the promotion of justice.”

The year before Fr. Kolvenbach was on that campus, a Santa Clara audience had heard Joseph Daoust, S.J., president of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, take up the same theme. He pointed out that the 34th General Congregation of the Jesuit Order had specified that promotion of justice could be accomplished by direct service to the poor, social activism, or “developing awareness of the demands of justice and the social responsibility to achieve it.” Neither soup kitchens nor political mobilization campaigns, while laudable activities for our students, are central to the academic enterprise, he argued. But “developing social consciousness and conscience, or conscientization as the Latin Americans call it, is of the essence of Jesuit education. A university which does not, in its main educational activities, concern itself with this mission is not . . . in the Jesuit or Catholic tradition.”

It is here that we face our greatest challenges. How do we help shape our students to develop social consciousness and conscience for their work in the mass media—to be men and women for masses of others? How do we “form each student into a whole person of solidarity who will take responsibility for the real world” as journalists—especially, in a media environment in which the trivial is too often promoted to an audience that is increasingly indifferent, if not hostile, to serious public affairs? How can we better educate our students for the positions they ultimately will have as editors, general managers, and publishers (recalling Joseph Leibling’s book dedication, “"to the foundation of a school for publishers, failing which, no school of journalism can have meaning)? How do we adequately prepare each one to revolutionize the mass media on behalf of social justice?

We need to ask such questions in our periodic curriculum reviews, when we write our syllabuses each semester and as we craft each lecture. And I would suggest that we journalism faculty members in the Jesuit colleges and universities, perhaps under the auspices of the AJCU Communication group, collectively begin a serious and pointed conversation focused on them.