The End Of Journalism As I Knew It

It is now about a month since I removed several bags' worth of newspaper clippings from a closet in my home. I had intended to go through the bags and file the articles in a more coherent system. But when you work for a five-day business newspaper you are expected to write a story a day, every day. It quickly became clear there was no way I could go through eight years of newspapers in anything less than a year. So I started culling. I decided to save the columns I once wrote for the newspaper. But as I went through the newspapers I started to more clearly remember things I hadn't thought about in over 25 years. When my favorite boss  sold the insurance trade magazine to a person who moved it from Manhattan to Westchester, I started working for the business newspaper. My beat continued to be insurance. Every day I had to write something , including briefs, the more the better. Insurance took up only one page of the newspaper, which was focused mainly on trade and transportatio...

It may seem as though the Internet has always been with us , but it hasn't. I know this from long experience. The last newspaper job I had as a reporter was at a five-day business newspaper that was started in 1827 by, among others, Samuel F. B. Morse to provide maritime news. The newspaper had its own schooners to sail out and intercept vessels to get stories ahead of the competition. When I joined it the schooners were long gone and the paper was owned by Knight-Ridder, although the company kept my employer apart from the more mainstream newspapers. In 1995 Knight-Ridder sold the paper to The Economist Group . Like Knight-Ridder the new owner didn't really know what to do with us. Knight-Ridder would later disappear after being sold to the McClatchy Group in 2006. Under the Economist Group the paper's focus was broadened beyond transportation (on land and at sea) and insurance (my beat) to more stories on trade and finance.   When I worked there the Internet - or the ...

Behold the Rolodex, one of the most important tools I used when I was a print reporter. As far as technology is concerned, it is as low-tech as you can get - cards that can be attached to a drum attached to legs allowing it to sit on a reporter's desk. Contacts are put on the provided blank cards. Some of the cards I used had business cards attached. On others I wrote the names, titles, organizations and phone numbers of people I might need to contact for future stories. The Rolodex was so important the name became a thing, like Kleenex, Xerox and Band-aid. But like print journalism, the Rolodex is a fading thing of the past. What modern reporter uses paper cards? Now everything is digital - your phone likely contains more contacts than I ever kept in a Rolodex. Or as one article I read put it,  The Rolodex was commonly found in offices and businesses from the 1950s to the 1980s. You can still find Rolodexes available for sale online, but most individuals and organizations have tr...

New York is full of private, exclusive clubs . One of the perks of being a reporter is you get to eat in them if they are hosting a press conference or other such function. It is an important way the clubs earn money aside from member fees. So I have eaten at the  Harvard Club  on West 44 Street in midtown Manhattan, although I am not an alum of that Massachusetts institution of higher learning, and I have eaten at the Union League Club  on Park Avenue and East 37th Street, where the only Black people I saw were the white-gloved waiters. The University Club of New York as seen in  A monograph of the work of McKim, Mead & White, 1879-1915  (public domain picture) I don't remember the food being particularly spectacular at these places, but eating wasn't the reason I was there. These private, exclusive clubs offer members a place to sleep if they are in the city -  the  Yale Club  is c onveniently close by Grand Central Terminal where the New H...

Ten minutes after you're gone scavengers raid your old desk. Who takes the stapler? Who takes the tape? Who splits with the Post-its and who grabs the letter opener?  So begins the poem "Ten Minutes" by my friend Anthony Buccino from his book of poems, "Canned". I have been through this many times over the years, on both sides. At the wire service where I worked for 12 years as a copy editor I took the stapler from the now-vacant desk of a departed colleague because every time I'd look for a stapler at the supply closet there were none. I still have the stapler. At this same wire service the boss - another in a line of jerks who were mainly white men who had trouble dealing with my "attitude," whatever that was at the time - was looking for a way to get rid of me and I provided it by accidentally putting the wrong time on an embargoed story that ran 24 hours too early.  First, I was busted down to copy reader, meaning I could edit but not publish...

I have worked for a lot of jerks in my time in journalism, most of them men, most of those white and most older than me.  There was my first job out of college with the sadist who used to bring his leather-boy friends to the office. When he allowed me to take the day after Thanksgiving off and then rescinded that after I had made family plans, he said I could take the day off but don't come back. I didn't. There was the editor of a weekly community paper who kept the police scanner on all the time, loud. When I turned it down he came out screaming. When I came back from getting a story from the police blotter about an elderly woman mugged in her building's elevator I wrote it, he read it and then called the woman as I sat across from him. Through a combination of fake sympathy, gile and pressure he got her to give him details, including of how she felt going through that frightening experience. I learned two things that day: Speaking to a person is better than getting a rep...