Remembering a Profession of Nobility from a Vantage Point of Experience

This is the editor in 1988, seeing the humor in it all.

There are days when I feel like a Pony Express rider galloping past the men stringing telegraph wires on the Western plains, even as a train passes on the way to the west coast on the new rail connection.

I still write for newspapers and magazines, 57 years after I began in 1964 and the profession continues to bring me great pleasure on an almost daily basis. The stories I write range from the totally inconsequential (best snow sledding hills, pickleball, cat people vs. dog people), to the informative (board of directors diversity, the business of the economy), to the important (rape, domestic violence, human trafficking). 

With all of that, I'm trying to finish my second novel. This one's titled NEWS! and it goes back to the early days of my newspaper experience, though it is mostly made up. It is, however, based on events I took part in or saw.

In the late 1960s, newspapers were not just relevant, people actually depended on them, trusted them, respected those gathering and reporting the news. People didn't spit on us or call us "enemies of the people." We weren't then and we aren't now. We are enemies of the enemies of the state.

In 1969, when the novel begins, technology hadn't changed much since Gutenburg perfected the printing press in about 1450 and since the invention of movable type (1040) and the Line-o-Type machines in 1892. The composing room was heavy metal, mostly lead. 

Reporting was reporting, which is one of the points I'm trying hard to make in the book. Reporting will be reporting when the paper representations of the news are brown, crumbly history. Increasingly, of course, they are becoming a series of 0s and 1s, computer images for the consumer of news. "Content" for websites. Not quite so reliable on the whole as newspapers used to be because most are not created and run by journalists, but by marketing people and lawyers.

Still, there are and will continue to be reliable "newspapers" even when the term is a quaint reference to something long gone. Journalists are not newspapers and never have been. They are the core of journalism, and the paper is simply the delivery system, one that has been changing for all the years I've been involved.

Journalism has been a noble profession, one I've been proud to be part of, even though I'm not and never have been an especially good reporter. I've done some good work, but mostly I've just done some work, fast and in considerable volume, plying my trade among people who are often my heroes.

I am fortunate to have spent all these years loving what I do and now, at nearly 75, being able to take a look back at what it meant and continues to mean. A lucky guy, I am.