Enough of David Simon, Give Me David Broder

Ring talks about going undercover as a prisoner and as a copper miner here (second item):

http://www.umt.edu/journalism/news_pages/archives/December/Dec-Jan00/archive.dec.htm

His point is that long investigations take money and not many papers are willing to devote those resources to such work.

Now I was very young then, 16 when I started working on newspapers in 1976. But I remember it as a time when newspapers gave a shit and editors tended to be crusty, truth-telling people instead of the slick, superficial, managementspeak-spewing douchebags who lead so many newsrooms today. It wasn't nirvana, but it was much, much better.

 

Webs have narrowed and pages have been cut back for most papers over the past decade. I would say papers were better 10 years ago than they were 30 years ago, but not better now than 10 years ago (unless you count the Web site as part of the "paper."

 

Maybe there were more papers willing to do those stories then, but not many, just as there weren't many Ray Rings then capable of producing the goods and aren't many now.

 

Sorry, Dave, there's no empirical way for either of us to prove we're right. But my feeling is that then newspapers were on offense and today they're on defense. And they're much duller today. Back then I could buy an armload of newspapers from various cities and see real differences. Today they all copy each other's gimmicks and many of them even look the same in terms of design. Most of them put me to sleep. They're generic.

 

I'd just like to say this is a great discussion, and it will probably become even more compelling. I hope the trolls stay away and keep it from becoming another locked SportsJournalists.com thread. Good stuff, all. Keep it coming.

 

Frank, I'd argue it was always so.
In "City Editor," written in 1934, the legendary Stanley Walker pines for times gone by:
"The job of city editor is a little less piratical and adventurous than in the old days. The machinery is faster. The staffs are larger, the organization more orderly. Crusading has died down, partly because readers suspect the motives of a paper which beats its breast, as they suspect a yammering bogus evangelist. Competition between newspapers...is not outwardly the blazing vendetta that it used to be. An exclusive story...remains exclusive only a little while, and soon means little either in circulation or prestige...."

By book's end, Walker, not unlike us today, is imagining what a real newspaper might be:
"Is there any sense in the idea that a respectable, high-class, sophisticated newspaper of tabloid size, morning or evening, could find a place in New York? Since the war (Kindred Note: That would be The War to End All Wars, number I), little groups of newspaper men, and ex-newspapermen, have discussed this dream, but nobody ever does anything about it....Some wealthy man, tired of losing money in Wall Street, in keeping up yachts or racing stables, may attempt this venture some day. He can lose lots of money and have a great deal of fun proving his point."

All I'm sure of, Frank, is that in my youth at the Daily Pantagraph, Bloomington, Illinois, a hundred years ago, I heard old-timers bitching about how their bosses didn't know shit from Shinola. (Shinola!?! Proof that it was 100 yrs ago!)

 

How many newspapers were there in Bloomington then, Dave. if there was more than one, then times have pretty much changed permanently and for the worse.
I think Frank has the right of it when he talks about playing offense or playing defense.That said, I think the newspaper story-arc on The Wire has been pretty average. Bunch of guys yelling about ad lineage.

 

One newspaper, Fens....though papers were dying left and right, even in the '60s....just as schools were dying and communities wept over consolidation robbing them of their hearts....

 

I think there's an awful lot of difference between family-owned newspapers dying on the vine, and huge newspapers dying from media consolidation, new technologies, and "stockholder" conscious editors who know that a 12 percent profit margin isn't enough.
T'wasn't always thus, Dave, I don't think.

 

What's the difference between "stockholder-conscious editors" and "patriarch-conscious" editors answering to robber barons who threaten to shut down if the paper doesn't make as much money as the town's widget factory? The narrative arc of "Deadline USA," made in 1951, rose and fell on a family's decision, not a corporation's. Seems to me we're mad at the giants among us, the Wal-Marts, the Gannetts, and rightly so, but to say it's different is to ignore the truth that it's always been just about money, only now there are more zeroes at the end and we can't point to an oil portrait and say, "There, HE is the one who shut us down." The villains are faceless these days.

 

Shit, Dave. Back to your original point:

You don't think the people working in newsrooms in the 1970s and early 1980s were a product of their times? Hell, Ray Ring certainly is -- a product of the Woodstock generation, of challenging authority (rightly or wrongly, sincerely or because it was fashionable), of questioning conventional wisdom and conventional mores. Ring was hardly unique then, he is different now only because, judging by his current work, he did not shed those values like some discarded bellbottoms.

Now there was a lot of bad work done, too, young reporters and editors expecting to find another Watergate around every bend -- and perhaps the motives were not always pure, self-aggrandizement rather than the betterment of mankind. But we pushed ourselves then and so did our newspapers. There was the sense that everything was possible, that if you found The Big One your newspaper would do it right.

I have Stanley Walker's book, too. But you cannot separate the journalists of the 1970s and early 1980s from the times that molded them. Whether you liked the late 1960s or you didn't, it was undeniably a unique era and it spawned a unique era in American journalism.

 

That's why I like Ring so much -- do a mashup of us, Frank, you, me, Ring, we're all the same guy, the same generation, same ideals, unchanged yet....I'd just rather not put in with the gloom and doom'ers who think the world has gone to hell in a handbasket because we didn't make achieve every dream.....one or two dreams made real, with others still pending, is good enough for me.....and that seems to be enough for Ring, too, and all of us "best and brightest" who still believe in the work....