First Editions

By Bob Nandell

Newspapering in the 1990s

 

Quint Markham is at the peak of his career when the newspaper he's poured his soul into is purchased by a heartless corporation. The losses are only beginning… but Quint isn't about to give up.

Is there life after corporate news gathering?

• Language: English
• Publisher: PBL Limited
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215531464

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE – FRUSTRATION

...t he United States is much further advanced toward a monovocal, monopolistic, monocular press than Britain. With the decline in the number and variety of voices there is a decline in the number and variety of reporting eyes, which is at least as malign.

- A.J. Liebling, THE PRESS, © 1961

Shoving his heavily stained coffee cup aside, Quinton Markham II sagged a little lower in his chair as the daily news editors’ meeting interminably ground on.

Just when in the hell are we actually going to get a newspaper out?

The day’s lead stories ran a mushy gamut from wire copy detailing President George Herbert Walker Bush’s screwing up of the economy to another whiny quasi-sociological piece about the increasing substance abuse in suburbia, offered as a reader for the features section cover.

Quint – or Quinty, as reporters who detested him referred to him – nervously tapped his pen on the table. His ever-present square lens reading glasses caused his wife, Julia, to laughingly refer to him as Squinty, at home. Of course, a few newsroom staffers called him Squinty too, but only behind his back. Most simply viewed him as a quiet, fairly likeable tyrant.

Why the hell do people name features sections boring things like Tempo, or Today’s Living, or Style? It might sound nice in the city, but who gave a crap up around Fosberg, or Freeland, or any of the little farm towns upstate?

The wire editor’s litany of international politics and mayhem tailed off as Quint interrupted. Look, the national economy figures are one thing, but if we’re going to tag it so our readers will bother to read it between beer commercials on television, you ought to put the packing plant story from the business section on page one.

But we’d have to substitute some pretty boring insurance copy, the business section editor argued.

Look, people, Quint snapped, "the folks will understand the big economy story if we lead off with why MetCo Foods is pulling their plant out of Fosberg. That’s a hundred and ten jobs. Local jobs. A thousand jobs lost in New Jersey don’t mean a thing to the readers right here."

In his sense of what was happening with television’s inroads in the news business, Quint knew that stale wire stories about foreign events were only loose packing around advertising pages in the Ledger-American main section. Only the front page itself held live news. The section’s last two pages carried the lofty ruminations of the editorial page editor, along with guest columns, syndicated columns and cartoons, as well as a few letters to the editor, usually giving the paper hell about something the reader hadn’t liked in a previous edition.

Most of the day’s real reporting was in the Ledger local section. That was where readers found out who had been arrested, what the weather forecast was, what building had burned down, and who had died. They also could find out the latest carryings on at the state legislature and at city council meetings.

Quint knew very well they got their international news on evening TV network newscasts anyway.

Do we have pictures from shift change at the plant? he continued. Good. Let’s lead with the plant closing, the local story. And I want some local workers’ mug shots to go with their quotes.

Quint fondly remembered days of yore when the paper’s news editor, perched at a well-worn desk in the middle of the newsroom, would simply scribble out what the next front page would look like. The editor-in-chief would walk over sometime during midafternoon, peer at it, suggest a few changes, and head to an appointment or to the country club golf course.

Now a dozen people sat around a meeting room table, trashing most of an hour, to accomplish the same thing. Quint had little patience for it. Committees weren’t supposed to run newspapers! Wasn’t he supposed to be editor-in-chief and make some decisions?

Quint had been news editor when the previous Ledger-American editor-in-chief, who had held the position for thirty years as an old-school newsroom tyrant who nobody dared question, had dropped dead in a back hallway of the newspaper building. That man had never conducted a news meeting. His decisions about what did or did not go on page one were ultimate. For a reporter to be called, fear-filled, into his office was jokingly referred to as having an audience with the Pope.

Quint had once worked for a managing editor who made the mistake of trying to be a friend with everybody on the staff. That didn’t work well either, because certain miscreants eagerly took advantage of the situation. Chaos had reigned supreme.

Quint remembered how the Ledger-American publisher, T. J. Connelly, had simply walked up to his messy newsroom desk one afternoon several weeks after the old editor’s death and said, You are in charge as of today. You are now editor-in-chief.

That was three years ago. There had been no national talent search. There had been no grooming. Only a hastily written staff memo from T. J. had announced the change. No further embellishments had been needed. Such a promotion was a total surprise to Quint, who was mentally prepared to slog out the rest of his career editing day-shift news copy.

The whole thing astonished Julia, who had figured their lives were finally settling into a sustainable pattern. She had, however, sensed Quint’s increasing boredom with both his job and his marriage.

What neither of them realized in the lofty moment of his promotion was that Quint’s work schedule would no longer be tidy forty-hour weeks. Phone calls came day and night from readers, staff members, and politicians. When big stories broke, so did the Markham family schedule. It all went with the territory, being on the ladder’s top rung.

But the greatest irony was that he, Quinton Markham II, editor-in-chief of the Ledger-American, was the culprit who had come up with the idea of the daily news meetings he now so detested. No wonder what had once been a smooth-running newsroom, with everyone simply doing their assigned jobs, had turned into a mess. Little fiefdoms had cropped up in various sections. The Queen, in the features section, could add twenty minutes to a meeting with her dithering. The sports editor seldom spoke at all; he knew what his job was and did it very well. His section held the paper’s highest readership.

A sudden rustle of news budget pages and the scrape of chair legs on the conference room’s black and white tile floor suggested the meeting had blissfully ended. Scant information had been gained, a few egos had been salved, a few inter-staff rumors were squelched, and heavily stained coffee cups stood empty. Another newsroom cycle had begun.

To a newbie journalist, it would have looked like something out of old movies. Most days the newsroom was filled with layers of drama, excitement, and tedium, capped with a wild and caustic blend of human personalities. To have so much talent combined with a large variety of tempers, all working in the same large room, was at times quite electric. Sometimes it was filled with controversy. Sometimes, on the inevitable slow news day, it was quiet and dull.

Toss in a few desk folks who snuck a martini or two at the corner bar on their supper hours, and late evenings were sometimes hilarious. But it was a far cry from days of old when a veteran night police reporter kept a fifth of Old Crow whiskey in his bottom desk drawer. Newsroom lore had it that by the end of each week the bottle was empty. The joke was that the night police reporter himself never drank the stuff. No one ever confessed.

Another hectic four hours after the meeting’s end, first edition copies of the Ledger-American would thunder off a row of ancient green-painted Goss Headliner press units two floors below the top-floor newsroom. The whole building would hum with their rumbling, and the smell of soybean oil-based ink would permeate even to the newsroom floor.

Inkers, as the press room gang were called, in turn referred to the newsroom gang on the building’s top floor as crows. Due to an increasing number of female reporters, the newsroom was jokingly called the crow’s nest by workers in advertising and circulation department offices on the floor below.

Often members from all the groups could be found having a beer in a run-down nearby corner tavern that served as an alternative office. Newsroom wives would sometimes call that establishment before calling into the newsroom, in order to find their husbands in a family emergency.

Quint walked down the long hallway to his office. The walls were covered with numerous awards the Ledger-American had garnered over the years from outfits like the Inland Press Association, the National Press Photographers Association, and numerous state press associations.

He thought about the first time he had ever walked into the seventy-year-old building for his interview to be a business reporter. The place still looked like a throw-back to the glory years of newspapering.

Two huge front doors were still polished brass. When one entered the first-floor reception area, they were greeted by a Depression Era mural high on its back wall, depicting steel mills, steam trains, and propeller-driven airplanes. A long-outdated map of the world was the centerpiece of it all. It was a marvelous reminder of newspaper glories. School kids touring the building would stand in awe, staring at it.

When Quint started at the paper, it had been like finding a home. This was no rinky-dink, one-press outfit. This place was big. The newsroom was big, and newsroom egos were big in those days too. The Ledger-American was a paper to try to get to rather than a newspaper to get away from. Of course, a salary increase of twenty-five dollars per week had been nothing to sneeze at either, particularly when a young reporter was trying to start a family.

As Quint settled into his office chair a sense of satisfaction fell over him, in spite of the dreadful daily news meeting. His first year as editor-in-chief had been tumultuous. The usual backbiting over who should have or could have been named editor-in-chief instead of Quint had been startling. A few groused that a lowly State College boy shouldn’t have gotten the spot. Others rejoiced that he had been promoted, because so many other newspapers seemed to be importing editors from far away states, people who knew nothing about the community they were coming to. Perhaps hiring outsiders was an attempt to elevate their status among publication rankings.

Quint was a different animal altogether. Now, during his third year at the helm, more than a few staffers realized Quint was much more easygoing.

CHAPTER TWO – TRAGEDY

A city with one newspaper ... is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

– A.J. Liebling

A particular joy to Quint was the fact that he had never actually had to fire anyone. Certain staffers’ peccadilloes were quietly overlooked. Even obstinate reporters realized that if they consistently came up with beat stories that had some meat to them, and showed up for work on time, they had few problems and Quint would go to bat for them if an irate subject of one of their stories came howling for their hides.

He had quickly learned the difference between being a hard-driving editor and an outright tyrant. This difference seemed most appreciated out on the copy desks. His predecessor had scared the daylights out of people by marching into the newsroom and bellowing at them. Quint preferred a calmer approach. He had deeply disliked being bellowed at himself.

Quint