The State of the Newspaper Industry

A wonderful rant/remembrance of days past in the newspaper business. From Fred on Everything:

Passing the Torch
Onset of Boredom

The news racket is dead, mummified, and ready for a mausoleum. The joy has gone. Reporters once were once a misbegotten tribe of ashen-souled cynics, honest drunks chain-smoking their way to the grave, foul-mouthed, profane, boisterously male, believing in nothing but the certainty of corruption and the squalor that is human nature. In short, they were both philosophers and splendid company. You couldn�t chew the fat with a better crowd. They knew the world as no one else did. I mean the real world, big-city bus stations at three a.m. where things crawled forth that would unnerve the inhabitants of a rotting log, and city governments no better. They knew Linda�s Surprise Bar in Saigon and Lucy�s Tiger Den in Bangkok. Many had been in the military and survived the ritualized absurdity of GI life. Delicates and milquetoasts they weren�t.

They were the world�s true aristocrats. All the Heidelberg philosophers rolled into one grand taco, and exponentiated, would have known less of life than a cub on his second year on the police desk. Less that was worth knowing, anyway.

Maybe the news trade didn�t build character, but it built characters. Marquis, Mauldin, Royko, Charlie Reese, Smith Hempstone, Paul Vogel, names ancient and less so, mostly unknown in the wider world. Over drinks, usually lots of drinks, they told wild stores in the press bars of Taipei and Joburg, stories both impossible and sometimes true.

There was Six-Pack Muldoon, a chopper pilot working in Southeast Asia. Always flew with an open six-pack in the cockpit. Asked why, he said, �In thirty years of flying, I�ve only crashed twice. Both times I was sober. I�m not going to risk it again.�

That world is gone. The news biz has been sanitized, made polite and tedious, like a family pool hall with orange felt and no betting. The morgue has become �the library.� Newsrooms are �non-smoking environments.� As women came in, the boisterousness and dirty stories went out. The gals could do the job perfectly well, but the atmosphere changed. A true news weasel didn�t feel at home. You could no longer say, �So there we were on Bugis Street, and Murphy picks up this hooker with three thumbs, yeah, really�.�

And he is just getting warmed up. A wonderful and sad read. We lost something big when we lost this world...