By the time I saw “The Front Page,” the show about hard-bitten police reporters in Chicago, the story may have been a bit of an anachronism.
The play and movie painted a picture of reporters who came from the street and worked on the street. They weren’t cops or criminals, but they got their living from the work of both. Cops, criminals and reporters all lived on the street. They were “of the street.”
Set in the second decade of the 20th century in Chicago, “The Front Page” took place in the rough-and-tumble press office in Chicago police headquarters. The characters are clearly “of the street.” Hildy Johnson is in his last day as a reporter. A convicted murderer has escaped and run into the press room. Hildy hears his story and figures he’s innocent. The plot unfolded from there. Hildy was following an old adage that journalists were to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I saw the 1974 movie with Jack Lemmon as Hildy and Walter Matthau as Walter Burns, his editor.
About the same time that I saw “The Front Page,” I also saw a study that showed people thought newspapers were one of only two major American institutions that had improved. (I forgot the other, but it may have been airlines.) Forty years later, newspapers struggle to keep readers. TV news struggles to keep viewers. Radio (except NPR) has all but abandoned news. So, in 40 years what happened to newspapers’ strong reputation?
Let me suggest that maybe newspapers, among others, moved too far from the street.
Of course, that’s not the only reason. The news cycle has been shattered, and technology has fragmented audiences.
The old 12-hour news cycle of newspapers publishing a morning and an afternoon edition collapsed as afternoon papers began closing. That morphed into a 24-hour news cycle, and with a single cycle, what time you presented the news didn’t matter much.
Technology was there to make it possible to write and post the news ever faster.
Of course, technology also fragmented the audience so that news is being absorbed from lots of sources and by only small batches of people seeing each source. On the Select Board in New Sharon, I see this fragmentation from a unique vantage. The town has a website, but only a few folks click on it. The town has a Facebook page, but only a few folks click on it. The town posts on a web-based “newspaper,” but only a few folks click on it. And two newspapers sometimes cover us.
Let’s go back to the streets. My news career began at The Kansas City Times, the morning edition then of The Kansas City Star. The Times hired me as a bureau reporter. No way the afternoon Star would hire me because I lacked a college degree.
Never mind that in 1917 the Star hired a kid named Ernest Hemingway, who hadn’t attended college.
Though he was from a fairly ritzy Chicago suburb, Hemingway was very much on the street in Kansas City. His beat included General Hospital, where he checked on victims of accidents and crime and found newsworthy patients. He covered Union Station, where reporters met trains carrying famous locals and non-locals and he covered the 15th Street police station mostly to pick up news of petty crimes and offbeat calls to the police. All were within a short walk of The Star building.
What perhaps marked Hemingway during his time in Kansas City was not, as we were taught at The Star, the paper’s writing style, but just being on the street. Life happens on the street. Hemingway twigged to that right away. Made him a pretty good writer.
Hemingway never needed to go to college. Nowadays, many journalists, maybe too many, come from ivy-covered walls of academia. I would never say that reporters should not go to college. But I will say time and again that they need to remain “of the street.” I might even say every reporter should recycle through the “cops beat” for a few months every five years or so.
I see a number of instances of mainstream news people “rising above” the street. For example, the ABC News reporter Sam Donaldson grew up on a farm. That should have given him street creds, and he was scrappy as a bantam rooster. He made a bundle of money — one estimate has it at $40 million — during a career in journalism.
In 1994, he dumped on a congressional junket paid for by the American Insurance Association. Fair enough. But a few months earlier, Donaldson had accepted a $30,000 speaking fee from an insurance group that included AIA. Also, “Inside Edition” reported Donaldson had accepted $97,000 in federal mohair subsidies for his ranch. How does a mohair ranch square with comforting the afflicted? I guess everyone needs a sweater.
Donaldson is entitled to earn all he can. He is also entitled to play all the angles. But he does undercut his street credibility when he takes money from someone whom he then bashes for giving away money. Easy to see how some folks would transmit their disdain for such actions onto other journalists.
To this day, when someone asks about my time in newspapering, I reply with something like, “Mostly, I was an editor. I was only on the street for three years.” Translation: I was a reporter for three years.
Bob Neal regrets that so few modern journalists seem to have forgotten the streets up from which they came. Street time is good for the soul. Of reporter and newspaper alike.
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