Extra, Extra: Read All About It!

I discovered that the Knoxville News-Sentinel, the newspaper that formed the model for the fictional Knoxville Times of my novel, Byline, had an alumni page on Facebook. Although I didn’t recognize any of the member names, I asked to join the closed group and was accepted. I posted an image of my American Newspaper Guild card on the site.

Scrolling through the posts, I found dozens of pictures of co-workers from the mid 1950s and early 1960s, pictures of newspaper people whose descriptions and traits I had borrowed for my book. Here was the sweet-natured cartoonist. There was the scary news editor. Here was the smiling face of the morgue—now called the library—manager.

So many of my colleagues stayed on after I left, first for Spokane, Washington, then to Greece, New York, San Francisco.

It was a sobering discovery to learn that almost all of them have died. The one live person I knew was a red-haired photographer who was only a couple of years older than I, and he proved to be the website’s administrator. I remembered his strolling out of the teletype room, waving a piece of paper and saying, irreverently, “Pope’s pooped” when Pius XII expired.

This fellow drove me, in 1963, to get an interview with someone involved in a Congressional inquiry. She was visiting relatives at Christmas, and I faked my way into her house by carrying wrapped gifts, as if I were a family friend. The story was picked up by the wire services, Newsweek and Time magazine, with my name. It was my Brenda Starr moment...such a big deal at the time, and such a forgettable deal 50 years later. The photographer didn’t even remember me.

On the alumni website, I saw pictures of the old copy desk, the newsroom, the composing room, the pressmen with their newspaper hats. I saw pictures of the presses being moved with heavy equipment when they became obsolete. I saw the typewriters go and the computers come in, saw copy boys become writers and editors, marry, have children, retire. Saw the assimilation of the rival newspaper, the move to a new campus, the launching of an on-line edition.

The old News-Sentinel had four editions every day, back in the day. When a big story broke—the death of the Pope and Kennedy’s assassination both happened when I was on the copy desk—an Extra would be put out. The newsboys on the street really would shout “Extra, extra, read all about it,” just like in the movies. The paper’s circulation was huge, among the top one hundred nationally.

I can only assume that the newspaper, like all newspapers, has downsized. One alumnus, responding to a photo of the old pressmen in their newspaper hats, remarked that the broadsheet newspapers are now too narrow to make those hats...but then there are no ink-spattered pressmen either.

When I wrote my novel, I drew a map of the old newsroom and made a list of all the editorial employees, pretty surprised that I remembered those things when I can’t remember what I had for dinner yesterday. I am glad I wrote my novel, trying to describe how it was in the glory days of newspapers. But I found all the information on the alumni page disquieting. I was left with mixed emotions, as if I had experienced some odd sort of time travel, more than fifty years of the road not taken.

(The novel Byline is available on Amazon.com)

No News Is Bad News

We've been heading in this direction for some time. At 8:00 this morning, the newspaper delivery person tossed a two-pound package in the general direction of the house. I took the parcel out of its two plastic bags and prepared to sort out the readable parts of the San Francisco Chronicle, only to find that there were none. The entire package was advertising sheets and circulars.

As the scene grows darker for print media, the Chronicle has resorted to more and more advertising gimmicks: An advertisement page with the newspaper's logo at the top which obscures a third of the real front page. Various ad pages which protrude from the papers ever-slimmer news sections. Inserts made of stiff paper so that the reader cannot turn the page. And of course column after column of screaming commercial messages, more of them when there is a holiday coming up. (In this case, the Super Bowl--that's football for those of you who do not follow sports-- is next Sunday, and much of the advertising has to do with television sets or what is now being called Home Entertainment Systems.)

There was a time when the Knoxville News-Sentinel had a strict policy that no more than one third of the newspaper could contain advertising. But that was when more people wrote for and read newspapers. It's sad.

Checking Your Sources

I was on the copy desk of the Knoxville, Tennessee, News-Sentinel when the teletype machines began to spurt out the news of President Kennedy’s assassination. It was after the final edition deadline, and only two of us were on duty at the copy desk, editing news service stories for the next day, cutting, marking capitalization and paragraphs and writing headlines.

This was a long time ago, but I distinctly remember our quandary as to which news service to trust as we scrambled to get the story of the president’s assassination into print, shorthanded and dazed from the almost unbelievable news.

The first Associated Press transmission and the story from United Press International had very different information concerning the number of shots which had been fired, the grassy knoll, descriptions from witnesses. The phones were going like mad, and under pressure to get out an Extra and remake the newspaper’s front page, we had to choose which story to run. We went with the Associated Press because there was no way to check the sources and the AP story seemed more conservative, more believable.

We live in a time of unparalleled access to news, and yet it seems ever more difficult to find out what is going on. Almost every time I try to research something through the Internet, I run into conflicting information. In order to stay current, I read the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times and the Athens News; I watch the local news and BBC America on television. There is not as much overlap as you might think.

Which is not to say I shouldn’t have checked my sources on the Brautigan Library information. Writing a blog is a little like putting a message in bottle. I don’t really know who will read it. Besides this lack of feedback, I find that I’m a bit glib when using the computer to write. (I always write poetry in longhand.)

Dr. John Barber, who has left a longish comment on my blog of March 30, "The Library Lives", reminded me that even if I am putting a note in a bottle, I need to verify my sources.

A story by Kevin O’Kelly in The Boston Globe on Sept. 27, 2004, said “If Brautigan (Library) founder Todd Lockwood’s plans work out, the (contents of the Brautigan library) will move to the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library next year.”

In 2005, The Fletcher Free Library, where the Brautigan library was housed, wrote in its newsletter that the Brautigan collection was going home to San Francisco. Lockwood had, according to the Fletcher newsletter, “negotiated with the San Francisco Public Library to arrange a permanent home for the Brautigan Library at the Presidio Branch of the SFPL, the exact location where Brautigan placed his fictional 24-hour-a-day library”.

To my credit, I did e-mail the Presidio Library to see if the collection had made it, but when I got no response, I didn’t keep after it. The Brautigan Library, as Dr. Barber says in his comment, never made it from Vermont to San Francisco, and, mea culpa, I never followed up to see if the Fletcher Free Library newsletter or the Boston Globe had noted that fact.