Digging Through A Closet

On a cold and very windy February day I needed something to do. I decided to tackle my home office's closet, where we keep supplies and other things. In the course of doing so I discovered files upon files of old newspaper clippings from my years in journalism.

From the time I graduated Boston University until I switched to copy editing to stay employed - ironic, considering copy editors are now being replaced by artificial intelligence - I was a print reporter for a number of small business publications, and one five-day business newspaper - all now long out of business.

Found in my closet with my clippings.

So I'm talking about decades of clips. I dumped most of them in two large garbage bags intending to throw them out. But my husband thinks they can be useful in remembering what journalism was like back in the day.

And I do mean back. At J-school we used electric typewriters. At  home I used a manual typewriter. Businesses used computers so big they were put in a dedicated room. There were no computer workstations, much less laptops. I know this because my summer job in Boston was keypunching data cards that were fed into those monster computers.

Now you have computers on your portable phone - another thing we didn't have back then. Reporters routinely post their headlines on Twitter, er X, or other social media sites. Print newspapers are either closing or are going web-only. Some still publish a real newspaper, like the New York Times, but unless you are in Manhattan a copy can be hard to find. Online content is behind a paywall. 

Have reporters changed? Are there still those who jump in with tough questions at the first opportunity at a press conference the way I did? I don't know. I've been away from reporters for over a decade.

My last job was as copy chief for a web publication covering cryptocurrency. I was hired to improve the writing to be published on the website. I was appalled by a lot of what I read - stories rewriting the press release rather than advancing the story, using jargon that, when questioned, they could not put into plain English, not getting to the lede of a story until the sixth paragraph. I got into a lot of fights with these reporters and their bosses. Sometimes I was forced to back down.

There were lazy reporters back in the day, too, of course. I saw them. 

This blog is part memoir, part journalism critique. I will remember people I covered on the job, people I worked with and for, and some of the articles of which I am most proud. This blog is another form of the journalism I've been working at all my professional life, when others from my BU class dropped out, went into public relations, or started waiting tables. 

Being a blogger I don't have to strictly stick to who, what, when, where and why. As Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, the only unbiased journalist is a dead journalist.

This is my journey to a place and time called print journalism.