News-Record.com

Contrary to the theory that newspaper circulation is down because of the Internet or the lack of time or the irrelevance of the content, I have a different theory: the decline of paperboys.

There was something about the teen-aged paperboy -- his innocence, his pluck, his salesmanship, his buyer's soft heart, I don't know -- that sold papers. Ask a circulation director and they'll tell you the same thing.

Most newspapers eliminated teenagers as paperboys years ago as delivery routes got larger and adults with cars could deliver the papers faster and more efficiently. Plus there was the sticky issue of safety: no one wanted to be responsible for a 14-year-old out walking around town at 4 a.m.

I was a paperboy when I was 14. It never occurred to me to be worried when I was out there, but I was a dumb kid. Now, I can't imagine what motorists passing me walking to the paper drop-site thought I was doing out. And I'd no more let a child of mine do it than I'd let him play on the interstate. But it was good money for a boy who couldn't get a worker's permit for another year and a half.

It may not be possible to bring them back. But maybe we should have the kids sell the paper and the adults deliver it?

Maybe the striking writers can work on some new cliches while on break from the picket lines. What will they use to reflect:

* a bored, disengaged husband ignoring his wife at the breakfast table, if he can't have his head buried in the paper?
* a plot twist or character revelation, if they can't use the device of a spinning front page with the headline in WWIII-size type saying something like this?
* a kidnapping victim who is still alive, if he can't hold the day's edition?
* a damsel caught in a rain shower but really in need of a man with an umbrella, if she can't use her paper to cover her head?
* a quiet, all-American suburban neighborhood, if they can't show a paperboy on his bike delivering papers?
* an undercover cop leaning against a building, looking non-chalant, conducting surveillance if he can't be pretending to read the paper?
* the dark underbelly of a town if they can't show newspaper pages blowing across the road?

Unlike most journalists I know, you would be hard-pressed to find much journalistic memorabilia or accoutrement in my house. That's pretty much because of my wife's good taste in home decor rather than any lack of stuff. It's a character trait that we're pack rats, and my newspaper junk has been relegated to one room away from the primarily traveled areas, which is fine because I use the word junk precisely.

But it's Christmas and it's important to help people stock their lists for Santa. Christine Tatum, once a N&R reporter and past prez of the Society of Professional Journalists, lends a hand.

I love Christine, but I'm wondering about my judgment when I read that the first thing she'd save in a house fire is her vase made of recycled paper, followed closely by her 1936 copy of Fortune. But to each her own.

I must say that retired publisher Van King has a working News & Record newspaper rack, refurbished to a high sheen, in his house that, oddly, doesn't look out of place.

This is one of the things I worry about: mock story written for a departing staff member's going away party gets into print or pixels. In this case, a satirical farewell speech from a copy editor at the Santa Barbara News-Press was published on the paper's Web site.

Eventually someone got fired over it. (Thanks to Pam at Words at Work for the tip.)

It's a widespread newsroom tradition: departing employees get a mock front page that makes fun of them and some of the stories they've written and people they've covered. We have the same tradition.

Because newsrooms tend to attract some outsized, creative and occasionally dysfunctional personalities, we've had some pretty wild, creative and occasionally inappropriate pages. Some have been inappropriate enough that I have seen the need to tell the person in charge of our copy desk -- the people who are the ultimate safety net in a newsroom -- to make sure that the wrong photo or wrong batch of copy doesn't find its way into print. They look at me as if I'm an idiot, which is the correct response. (I'm pretty confident one of the eagle-eyed pressmen would catch if it slipped through to the press.)

Would I fire someone over it? It depends what happened, but I wouldn't be inclined to go that far.

Would I stop the tradition? No way. I still have mine from the day I left the News & Observer 20+ years ago. (It features a photo of me and Pope John Paul II. You had to be there.)

For all of us old newspaper wretches, this will drive you to the liquor cabinet.

During the afternoon budget meeting, the photo chief mentions a story about George Dickel distillery trying to reduce its inventory.

Faces around the room went blank. Finally, someone asked "Who's George Dickel?"

More than half the people in the room hadn't heard of the Tennessee whisky, forcing me to pull a bottle out of my desk drawer to show them.*

The daily news about the digital revolution doesn't signal a new media world the way that story does.

For some reason it reminded me of this George Thorogood lyric:

Now, the other night I lay sleeping,
And I woke from a terrible dream.
So I called up my pal, Jack Daniels,
And his partner Jimmy Beam.

And we drank alone, yeah, with nobody else.
We drank alone, yeah, with nobody else.
Yeah, you know when I drink alone, I prefer to be by myself.

* For my friends in Human Resources, that actually didn't happen.

There's this nice little blogosphere discussion going on that makes the blogosphere so much fun. Alan Mutter of Newsosaur talks about a conversation with a journalism student who doesn't know who Mike Royko is...or was.

Mindy McAdams of Teaching Online Journalism turns the table on Alan with a "do you know who these people are" new media list of her own.

Then Meranda of Meranda Writes puts them both in their place, I think. (And I am a loyal devotee of them both.)

I'm 22. I didn't take a "journalism history" course in college. Those lessons were interspersed among my Intro to Mass Comm, Law, Ethics, Magazine Publishing, Beat Reporting, etc. courses. And the famous journalists I did and do know are probably more happenstance than concentrated effort.

But therein also lies the problem. I'll memorize it. Like it's for a test, which I guess it could be. But who knows if the names I'm given would be the right ones. It's kind of subjective.

Or is it more important that my classes in j-school taught me and emphasized tangible things. I remember and use every day the practical skills that allow me to do this job competently not necessarily the names of those journalists before me. I can understand knowing important rulings like Times v. Sullivan. I can understand needing to know when newspapers started to mass publish and the impact cable had on broadcast TV. I can even understand and appreciate reading great journalists of the past to make my own work stronger.

But in the end, if I had to choose, I choose real-world application over historical context. That's just me.

Something was nagging me as I was writing the last post but I couldn't make it out. Now I have.

The day that Hillary choked up in New Hampshire, I mentioned to a group of younger journalists the Muskie "crying" incident in New Hampshire during the 1972 presidential primary season. ("Younger" cuts a broad path in my aged world; I should be more specific and say journalists in their 20s.)

They didn't know who Muskie was. Do I think any less of them? No. Should they know the former governor of Maine, U.S. senator and Secretary of State in the Carter Administration? It would be nice, but not mandatory. For comparison, I didn't know much about Nixon's Checkers speech in 1952, and the only reason I ended up learning about it was because he became president.

History is important. Knowing that Muskie might have cried -- he said the moisure came from melted snowflakes -- adds texture to the Hillary chokes up story. Knowing that Mike Royko was an exceptional reporter is important if you use that information to learn from his writing.

Or his processes. Here's an observation from Paul O'Connor who worked for him: Mike was an excruciating writer. Meaning the columns -- when I worked for him -- came out verrrry slowly. Part of the reason for that was that he invested all of his considerable ego in each one.... Mike also liked to have the last word, or at least a complete grasp of the competitive editorial context into which he was writing. He would spend all day and into the night reading the wires and everything he could get his hands on written by his peers, to see if he could get a view into their take on stuff and thereby ensure he would not be writing a dreaded 'me too' piece. (Via Romenesko.)

Lots of people write history, almost all of them in long tomes. Not us. We want you to do it in six words, no more, no fewer.

As of this writing, we have 14 submissions, and some of them are pretty clever. Join them.

A writer wonders why we refer to the highway that is being constructed around Greensboro as the Outer Loop when it should be called Painter Boulevard.

Our electronic archives go back to Jan. 1, 1990. Not surprisingly, the first reference to Painter Boulevard is Jan. 3, 1990. The headline on the letter to the editor: "Let's get on with Painter Blvd." Since then, Painter Boulevard has been mentioned in the paper more than 600 times, although there are some duplicates in that total.

But Painter Boulevard is fading from use.

Reporter Taft Wireback wrote about it last year about this time:

Writer No. 2 also wondered what happened to the loop's original name, Painter Boulevard, after P.C. Painter , the first Greensboro city manager. "Urban Loop" or "Outer Loop" sound so prosaic, this writer suggested.

But for much of the road's course around Greensboro, people will know it as neither Painter nor loop; a lot of it will simply be Interstate 40 or I-85/40.

Does anyone call Four Seasons Town Centre anything but the mall? Is that tall building downtown the JP building or the Lincoln Financial tower? Brown Summit or Browns Summit? Phill G. McDonald Plaza or governmental plaza?

Should we call it Painter or the Loop?

Bill Walsh at Blogslot points to the first season of Lou Grant at Hulu. Lou Grant premiered in 1977 when I was on my first reporting job and it caught the magic of being a journalist. The reporters were self-absorbed idealists (as was I at the time). The photographer was aptly nicknamed "Animal." I especially enjoyed the depiction of the executive editor as a milquetoast yes man who sucked up to the publisher, which was my view of editors. At the time.

The opening montage is a classic in itself: A bird sitting on a tree branch chirps. The tree is cut down. A load of felled trees is taken to the mill. Newsprint is made. The newsroom characters are introduced. The newspaper comes off the press. A carrier tosses one in a puddle, another on a rooftop. A reader reads the paper with coffee, then tears a page out and slides it into the bottom of a bird cage. The last scene: The bird in the cage chirps.

Classic. Pretty much the way it works 30 years later.

Bill refers to a darker scene in episode 71:

Art Donovan: "Mrs. Pynchon is very interested in endangered species."
Lou Grant: "Yeah. That's why she owns a newspaper."

If the future of news is free, then why charge $20 to see its past?

That's what I was thinking when I read that it will cost a double sawbuck to visit the Newseum when it opens in Washington next month.

That could be a problem. I like history, I like museums and I love the news business. But in a city filled with history and museums -- am I going to visit one devoted to the history of news? Particularly when the Smithsonian is free? And if they aren't going to get someone like me....

The Newseum's VP says it's not aimed at me, which is probably good: "Our mission is helping the public understand how important a free press is to a functioning democracy," says Paul Sparrow.

I understand the importance of a free press. I just wish so many media organizations had not spent $435 million to do it. I know we're a self-absorbed lot, but doesn't this feel over the top?

At a time when the newspaper industry is in distress -- and newspaper companies paid big money to support the Newseum -- I question the priorities.

There's no reason that journalism shouldn't have a museum all its own. There are sure a lot of less important topics with their own museums. (Don't make fun of the Gopher Hole Museum, either.)

Understanding the past is fine, but it is the future that most of us are interested in understanding.

Update: Mark Potts smartly weighs in with more questions.

I'm just getting to the late Doug Marlette's novel Magic Time. Doug was a Greensboro native, and we met and talked many times. I'm embarrassed it has taken me so long to read this novel of newspapering, race and the South.

While I have never met an editor like this, I love the description:

When Carter appeared in his office, Callahan leaned back in his swivel chair behind an antique mahogany desk stacked with newspapers. He lowered his smudged glasses and peered at Carter with pterodactyl eyes. Callahan was like something out of The Front Page, with his ill-fitting suits, coffee-stained ties, salt-and-pepper buzz cut, and matching day-old stubble. He spoke in a steady stream of U.S. Marine Corps-honed profanity and the jaundiced aphorism of the fourth estate. "I was born in the middle of the night," he would mutter in disgust over some politician's lie, "but not last night." His brutal candor was legendary. He once described a recently elected Miss Ellis County as "so ugly she could haunt a nine-room house from across the street," unaware that she was the niece of the society editor who was proudly showing him the photo running in her section. Carter had thus far dodged Callahan's standard retort to bad copy: "He couldn't write shit with a turd in both hands."

Callahan bounced his right knee up and down like a jackhammer as Carter stood in the office, making his case. When listening to a story pitch, Callahan would always take a deep drag on his cigarette. The cigarette was like an egg timer. You had only as long as he could hold the smoke in his lungs to spit out whatever you had to say. In the event of an unnecessarily long verbal drumroll for a story idea, Callahan would shoot smoke through his nose and, alluding to the loquacious circus ringmaster who oversells his star attraction, say, "Bring on the dancing bear, son, bring on the bear."

I have heard editors talk about bringing on the bear and not being born last night, but never with such style.

That's the headline of a United Press story from the March 7, 1951, paper, that our librarian, Diane Lamb, showed me.

Circulation of English-language daily newspapers in the United States reached a record circulation of 54,877,000 copies a day in 1950, N.W. Ayer and Sons new directory of newspapers and periodicals showed today.

The 83rd annual edition of the directory recorded that it was the 11th consecutive year that American daily newspaper circulation has increased and added an estimate that more than two out of every three Americans now read a newspaper every day.

While I'm tempted to call those the good ole days, it wouldn't be accurate unless you were a newspaper owner. Rather, they were the easy days, when newspapers were the only game in town.

More interesting to me were two other stories on the page:
* A work stoppage in the woolen industry threatens to "halt urgently needed expansion of the armed forces." The Army said, "Our new troops must have clothing, blankets and other woolen items."
* "Bakers throughout bread-loving France went on a 24-hour strike today. Forewarned, most housewives bought large supplies of bread yesterday."

Beneath the newspaper circulation story is an advertisement for Karo syrup, promoting "pancakes and hot buttered Karo. Bring 1 cup Karo to a boil. Add one-quarter cup butter, stir, serve hot. Ummm!"

I wonder how many people today use that as pancake syrup.