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)

BYLINE, Post-Partum

             So Amazon has published my little thriller, BYLINE. My East Coast writing buddy Susan has posted a five-star review, the friends have expressed support and congratulations, and a few copies have been sold.

            After reading and re-reading manuscript, proofs and revised proofs, I am a little tired of my own opus, especially when I find typos and things I could have done better. It’s not as if I thought I was writing about eternal verities or anything, but I thought I’d be more thrilled to have my shout-out living its own life.

            Twice this week I’ve talked with a reporter from our local newspaper, which will be running an interview about the book this week. She is young and pretty, but she has written for the paper 26 years, she said. Both of us have always loved to write and have tried pretty much every way of putting words together.

            She wanted to know how I jumped back and forth between playing the piano and trying to write news stories, poetry and fiction. I had to think about it, because certainly it seems that I flit from one thing to another, halfway between doing paying work and indulging myself.

            In newswriting and music program notes, I thought, you tell about something. In fiction, of course, you try to show rather than tell. In poetry, you play with the musicality of language, and in music you deal with the musicality itself. “But what do they have in common?” she asked, knowing, of course, the answer.

            Sue and I correspond almost daily about our current writing projects, but it was lovely to sit at the table and chat with someone else who thinks wordsmithing is worth while.

            The reporter and I reached a comfortable silence. We looked out the window at Montara Mountain. “It’s great living near the ocean,” she said, “but I have to confess that I’m really a mountain kind of girl.”

Queen Anne's Sign

In the days when newspapers were known as the Fourth Estate, copy editors sat around a U-shaped desk, cutting, clarifying and checking whatever the reporters and news services put out.

We were known as the Masters of Little Known and Useless Facts...such as the fact that the word restaurateur has no “n” and people from Ghana are Ghanaians, not Ghanans.

I have accumulated any number of new little known and useless facts since I started doing crossword puzzles (the definitions of “olla” and “etui” among them), and during a game of Bananagrams last week I learned that there are names for the Solfège notes between Do, Re, Mi, Sol, La and Ti. Imagine!

But the most interesting useless fact I’ve come across recently concerns Queen Anne’s Sign or the Sign of Hertoghe. It is the thinning or loss of the outer third of the eyebrows, a sign of hypothyroidism often disguised by women with a clever stroke of the eyebrow pencil. Wikipedia demonstrates Queen Anne’s Sign with a 1612 portrait of Anne of Denmark.

The Fourth Estate, the press, by the way, came after the First Estate (clergy), the Second Estate  (nobility), and the Third Estate, commoners. The term implied an importance and dignity which not everyone would accord newspapers since journalism became media.

Newspaper Mystery

I am in the throes of writing a mystery novel set at a large metropolitan newspaper in the 1950s. Being in the throes means that I have about twenty files on the computer as well as a large binder filled with notes, maps, and scribbles on envelopes and napkins.

The work brings up all sorts of memories of my first job, working for what I am calling the Knoxville Times: Sounds, feelings, even the names of people I haven't thought of in years.

And since we are far removed in time and space from those days, I might as well confess: I am the one who misspelled either "Seize" or "Siege" in a banner headline on the front page. It was some years after I started at the paper and I was on the rim of the copy desk, where we edited copy and wrote headlines.

The headline was passed to the copy chief, who sat in the middle of the U-shaped desk. He put the half-sheet of paper in the pneumatic tube which went to the composing room, where it was set in print, locked into a lead page, cast into a cardboard mat, recast as a cylinder in lead, put on the presses and printed.

The news editor swore very loudly when he saw the paper. The presses were stopped. The page was remade, the earlier copies of the newspaper scrapped, and all this was on overtime at regular union wages. And then the hunt began for who was at fault. Meanwhile, the man who sat next to me on the copy desk had found the original paper with the headline and had buried it in his desk drawer.

Heads would have rolled, of course, except that nobody seemed to know anything about who was really responsible for the misspelled headline. There were five or six of us on the copy desk; the news editor and the managing editor had seen the proofs and had not noticed the mistake.

I confess: Not only did I write that headline, but just now I had to look up the spelling of "Seize" because "I before E except after C" is still stuck in my head.

Stop the Presses!

We actually stopped the presses three times when I was working at the News-Sentinel: Once when Pope Pius died, once when President Kennedy was assassinated, and once when a banner headline contained a spelling error. This would have been a firing offense except that the headline written by a young copy editor had been read and passed by both the copy chief and the news editor (the original typed headline mysteriously disappeared.)

It was a matter of "I" before "E". The headline contained the words "Seize" and "Siege" ("I" before "E", and I still look both those words up in the dictionary before I write them.)

Stopping the presses in those days was expensive. The front page (it was usually the front page and the final edition which went for street sales) had to be recomposed, lead type and zinc photoplates changed or adjusted, then made once again into a cardboard mat into which metal curved to fit the presses would be poured to form a plate. Copies of the newspaper which were being replaced were discarded and printing began again, often with all the union printers on overtime.

I actually shouted "Stop the presses" myself at the Spokane Spokesman-Review when I was the only person left in the editorial room one Saturday afternoon and the first copy of the Sunday Women's Section hit my desk...with an engagement announcement for the publisher's daughter in which her name contained a typo.

The pressroom chief and I decided to blur the typo with a red-hot iron rod instead of trying to remake the page. Nothing was ever said about the tiny smear which appeared in the newspaper.

This morning's San Francisco Chronicle is the first edition to be jobbed out for printing instead of being printed at the Chronicle's own presses. The paper is five columns wide, about a half-inch narrower, with puzzles and comics now so small it is difficult to read some of the type. There are no wrinkles in the paper and the color pictures are perfectly registered.

Two hundred pressmen at the Chronicle have lost their jobs. "Well, where are they printing it?" Nicodemus asked. "Fremont?"

He thought he was kidding. The San Francisco Chronicle is now printed in Fremont.

(Engraving, Johannes Gutenberg, 1398-1468, inventor of the mechanical printing press.)

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle had a small story saying that at least 125 employees would be offered a buyout before the end of the year, and that if the reduction goal is not met, layoffs would be likely. The publisher was quoted as saying the Chronicle was "not the first newspaper to be affected by the downturn in advertising."

This morning's Chronicle had 24 advertising pamphlets or booklets--I don't know what to call them--in addition to advertising within the thin sections of news, some of it full-page. The Bay Area section of the paper, for instance, had six pages, three and a half of which were devoted to paid obituaries.

Founded in 1865, the Chronicle is northern California's largest newspaper, the only daily broadsheet newspaper in San Francisco. In 2005, the Chronicle experienced a 17 per cent drop in circulation, down to 400,000. In 2006, circulation again fell, to 363,805, and a fourth of the newsroom employees were laid off.

The population of the eight counties of the Bay Area is about seven million. Are they all getting their news from television and the Internet, have they lost the ability to read, or is it that they just don't much care what's going on in the world? Is it possible that readership could be related to content, and that the very lopsided relationship between editorial content and advertising could be affecting the declining numbers of people reading newspapers?

(The photo is a copy of Rembrandt's version of the Writing on the Wall from the National Gallery in London. The image is in the public domain.)

Small World

I was on the island of Crete, between the Greek mainland and the north coast of Africa, about a month ago. Sitting at a restaurant near the Morosini Fountain, I struck up a conversation with the couple sitting at the next table. They were from the East Coast city where I went to college and had gone to the same college the same years I was there. "Maybe you remember me," I said. "I wrote a column for the News-Sentinel." Amazingly, they did remember the column. It's so strange to think that when you put words on paper, (it was paper in those days) the words sometimes take on a life of their own.

Who Am I, Anyway?

I won a poetry contest in second grade, but that was a long time ago.

I was a journalism major in college and I wrote for a metropolitan daily newspaper in the days before the Internet (please see ancient photograph with typewriter.) Newspaper writing and editing demand a kind of terseness, a word-Zen, almost. This kind of writing made me want to write expansive, meditative things and also poetry, a secret vice in which I indulge almost daily.