I'll Mature When I'm Dead (16 page)

T
he American newspaper industry is in serious trouble.

How serious? Consider: In 1971, when I was hired for my first newspaper job, there were 62 million newspaper subscribers in the United States; today, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, there are twelve, an estimated five of whom are dead and therefore unlikely to renew.

What the heck happened?

I can hear you wiseacres answering: “You already told us what happened. They hired
you
.”

Fair enough. Some of the blame is definitely mine. Over the years I’ve received at
least
62 million letters from irate people declaring their intention to cancel their subscriptions because of something I wrote. Among the groups I have deeply offended are:

This is a very incomplete list of the readers I managed to irritate. I once wrote a column that offended an entire
state
. Granted, it was North Dakota,
²⁸
which has a smaller population than the average New York City public restroom. But still, those unhappy North Dakotans were newspaper readers, and therefore customers. And anybody who knows anything about business knows you should not offend your customers.

Of course that’s part of the problem: The American newspaper industry isn’t run by people who know anything about business. It’s run mostly by English majors, or people who majored in some other academic sector of the gigantic bullshit festival known as “the liberal arts.” We spent our college careers discussing and writing papers about large important books such as
Crime and Punishment
that often we were unable to physically read more than about 30 percent of because we were busy being college students. Our chief marketable skill, coming out of college, is the ability to write authoritatively about things we don’t necessarily understand.

The newspaper business is a perfect fit for us, because it doesn’t require the firm grasp on factual reality demanded by businesses such as, for example, plumbing. When a plumber installs a bathroom, he has to understand and obey the laws of plumbing physics, and he has to have all of the plumbing parts he needs, or the bathroom is not going to work, and he is not going to get paid. Whereas we journalists, using our English-major skills, are able to routinely assemble authoritative-sounding stories even though we have only a few tiny shreds of second- or third-hand information and only the vaguest understanding of what actually happened. We produce stories that, if they were bathrooms, would have water spurting from the electrical outlets and bolts of electricity shooting out of the toilet.

I produced many such stories myself, starting out as a cub reporter in West Chester, Pa., for a daily local newspaper called, descriptively, the
Daily Local News
. I wrote stories about a wide range of topics I was unqualified to discuss with any degree of authority, including municipal government, crime, fires, traffic accidents, the courts, the public schools, politics, medicine, zoning, religion, sewage treatment, and local residents who had grown unusually large zucchini. I always tried to be accurate, but I suspect I made mistakes of varying sizes in every story I wrote, including about the zucchini, which I probably identified as some other vegetable, or possibly a raccoon.

“Wait a minute,” you’re saying. “Don’t newspapers have editors?”

Yes, but the editors are also English majors. What is worse, they are English majors who have ceased engaging directly in journalism. They spend virtually all of their time in conference-room story-planning meetings with other editors, and thus have completely lost touch with reality. Committees of newspaper editors are legendary for coming up with story ideas that would require reporters to perform feats of journalism that are clearly impossible, such as interview both Prince Charles
and
Jimmy Hoffa. Having dreamed up a story concept, the editors order some wretched reporter to execute it; when the reporter turns in the story, the editors are invariably disappointed that it doesn’t measure up to the shining polished brilliance of the original idea as conceived in the conference room.

Editor meetings are also the source of almost all newspaper “trend” stories, which over the years have consumed billions of acres of forestland without adding a single fact to the storehouse of human knowledge. These stories typically originate when an editor happens to notice something that strikes him or her as significant. For example, the editor might see a person wearing a Howdy Doody T-shirt, and then, a few hours later, see
another
person (or possibly even the same person; it doesn’t matter) wearing a Howdy Doody T-shirt. The next day, at one of the story-planning meetings, the editor might mention this, and another editor might report having
also
recently seen a person (also possibly the same person) in a Howdy Doody T-shirt.

The editors, having reached critical mass—
Three
Howdy Doody T-shirts!—decide that they have discovered a trend. They stride out into the newsroom, where reporters, seeing them coming, scatter like gazelles on an African plain when the lions show up. Some reporters will dive under their desks to avoid being assigned a trend story.

Inevitably the editors track down some unfortunate reporter and order him to produce a thirty-inch “fun” story about the Howdy Doody nostalgia trend that is sweeping the nation. And make no mistake: The reporter
will
produce that story. He has to. The editors have already scheduled a publication date and commissioned a fun graphic-design element; they would be
very
unhappy with the reporter if he threw a monkey wrench into the production line of journalism by reporting that there actually was no such trend. So using his journalism skills, he will scrape together a story containing the Minimum Acceptable Trend Story Factoid Content, consisting of:

The three regular people can be anybody, including if necessary friends or relatives of the reporter. The authority is usually a college professor. There is no topic that you cannot find a college professor willing to produce an instant, authoritative quote about.

So the reporter grinds out thirty inches on the Howdy Doody craze and turns it in. The story gets a big display—bigger than most stories involving actual news—because (a) the editors thought of it; (b) it was on the schedule; (c) they had a graphic-design element for it; and (d) it’s fun! Editors for other newspapers or TV news may see the story and order
their
reporters to investigate, thereby setting off a chain reaction of Howdy-Doody-craze stories all over the country. It’s even possible that there might actually BE a nationwide Howdy Doody craze. Or, it could be that just one lone individual happened to be wearing a Howdy Doody T-shirt. Nobody in the newspaper business will ever know for sure, and nobody will care, because as soon as the story is printed it’s time to move on to the next story concept, which originated when an editor decided, based on two people he talked to at a party, that there is a trend toward converting to Buddhism.

I’m not saying that newspapers publish only stories about imaginary developments. They also publish box scores; horoscopes; Garfield; stock tables; movie listings; classified ads; deeply ponderous editorials in which an anonymous committee of editors in, say, Cleveland reveal what they think about, say, North Korea; Sudoku; letters from insane people; typographical errors; and the word jumble. Sometimes, when reporters are able to elude editorial supervision, they even publish actual news.

This has been the basic newspaper recipe for many decades, and until fairly recently it was hugely successful. Newspapers were raking in money, and they spent it freely. It was a golden age for us English majors. I was on the staff of the
Miami Herald
’s Sunday magazine,
Tropic
, and among the items I put on expense reports, and got reimbursed for, were:

We journalists were fearless spenders of our newspapers’ travel budgets in those days. In 1987,
The New York Times Magazine
discovered, about ten years late, that Miami had a drug and crime problem, and ran a big honking spectacularly clueless cover story called
Can Miami Save Itself?
In response,
Tropic
sent an investigative team consisting of me and photographer Chuck Fadely to New York City to conduct an intensive two-day probe to see if we could uncover any problems up there.
²⁹
As part of our investigation we decided to have a look at the Islip, Long Island, garbage barge, which was this disgusting barge with a huge reeking pile of garbage on it that had become a big story because New York couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. At the time it was probably one of the two or three most famous barges in the world; it had become, in its own way, a celebrity, comparable to Lindsay Lohan.

By running up a ridiculous taxi bill, Chuck and I were able to locate the garbage barge somewhere off the coast of Brooklyn; however, Chuck couldn’t get a really good picture of it. So we decided to rent a helicopter
.
Yes. We took a taxi to New Jersey and rented a chopper so we could fly over the harbor and
take a picture of garbage
. I don’t remember exactly what it cost, but it was thousands of dollars, and the
Miami Herald
paid for it without batting an eye.

Another example: One time the editors of
Tropic
, Gene Weingarten and Tom Shroder, decided to do a cover story in which they offered a $200 prize for the reader who came up with the best idea for a new fad. The winner was a guy whose fad idea was eating money; he said that if he won, he would eat the prize, in cash. Which he did. In other words, the Sunday magazine of a major newspaper aided and abetted a person who
ate legal U.S.
currency
. (Gene recalls: “I think we also donated two hundred dollars to charity. As if that made it any better.”)

And it wasn’t just the
Miami Herald
that was tossing money around
.
Many big newspapers had large travel budgets and far-flung bureaus staffed by reporters on generous expense accounts. The papers could afford it; they were making big profits. We journalists assumed that this was a result of the unquenchable public thirst for the vital journalism we were cranking out.

And then,
pffft
, it all went away. Today newspapers everywhere, if they’re not shutting down completely, are laying people off and cutting expenses to the bone. Newspapers that used to send reporters all over the world now won’t authorize any trip that would involve leaving the parking lot.