Looking Through The Past

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 transportation. But my boss - a rare woman - was afraid she'd lose her job if she didn't fill the page. So she leaned on me and other reporters to write or rewrite anything and would get upset if a story was chosen for the front page because that would mean more space to fill.

(Vecteezy.com)

I would get the odd front page story, usually because of a major disaster such as Hurricane Andrew or a sporting event such as risk management for the football Super Bowl. But most of the articles were the boring type of daily journalism that does not age well. You write a story and the minute you are done it goes out of your head. It's day to day, not something you'd use in hopes of a Pulitzer Prize.

The more I culled the more I saw most of what I wrote was about products, hearings or insurance-related legislation. There was a lot of fuss and bother at that time about action by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency - who knows from the OCC anymore? - to allow some federally chartered banks to start selling insurance. This put some members of Congress plus state insurance regulators into a tizzy. That seems rather quaint now. After the 2008 financial crisis banks became more heavily regulated. But in recent years what's old is new again and more banks are into more areas of finance, including dicey loans.

After going to Bermuda for one insurance conference, the island nation was added to my beat. So I wrote about the consternation of the insurance industry - which based operating companies in Bermuda because of its friendly laws - at the prospect of the country opting for separation from Great Britain in 1995 (the referendum lost). 

I even got to write about my old "friend" Rudolph Giuliani, by then mayor of New York City, who filed a class-action lawsuit in New York State court against the insurance industry to keep it from raising the price of auto insurance. (The case was thrown out.)

I found the 1996 newspaper issue when the publisher installed by the new owner announced the century-plus-old broadsheet would now have color. "We have a new design, a new computer-driven production system and a new way to organize the news and comment we present," he wrote.

But as far as my beat was concerned, it was history repeating itself. The publisher hired an older white man, who thought himself God's gift to journalism. to run the insurance page. We did not get along. I was switched from writing the occasional "insider" column to a weekly one rewriting product announcements. That column was allowed to go very long to take up a lot of space on a page the man had as much trouble filling as the person he replaced. No one liked him, even the man who hired him. 

As I continued delving into the newspapers I realized that by 1998 I was rarely writing. I was transitioning to becoming a copy editor and creating pages for the "computer-driven production system." The newspapers I was looking at had checkmarks showing the stories I had edited. That made it easier to dump more newspapers into recycling.

Newspapers are becoming obsolete now thanks to the Internet but back then I quickly realized that if I wanted to stay gainfully employed I had to make a lateral move. I was a copy editor for the rest of my working life.

I stayed at the newspaper into 1999 before taking a copy job at an electronic news service once known as "the Ticker." It was the end of my career in print newspapers.