Copy editors don't get no respeck

The 1978 Newspaper Strike Daily News knockoff

   Recently I had occasion to flash back to the Great Newspaper Strike of 1978. I always thought it lasted 78 days, but memory is funny, a google entry pegged it at 84. Whatever. My supervisor at the News at the time, Chuck Slater, got a job as the sports editor of the "interim" Daily Press and brought me along. It was a way smaller staff, if I remember correctly the entire sports department was five or six people, but it might have been less.
   But the thing I remember most about that time was riding in the elevator one day with a couple of colleagues. The Daily Press was in an office building, unlike the Daily News, which had its own Art Deco building on East 42nd Street. There were a couple of secretaries or receptionists in the elevator and one of them asked one of my colleagues if we worked for that newspaper. He said yes, and one of the secretaries said something to the effect of Oh, that must be so exciting.
   At the time she was right. But she might also have said Oh, that must be so depressing, and she also would have been right. Because people who work for newspapers don't work normal hours, which might be called office hours, and if you do that for a certain number of years, like a lifetime, that can be pretty damn depressing. People who work for corporations, of course there are variations, but if you average them out, they come into the office at 9 in the morning and leave the building at 5 p.m. So the elevators are crowded, the subways are mobbed, the lunch lines are long. I often think of the rare time when I was in my twenties and got a weekend off and went to a movie on a Saturday night. The people on line were cursing the lengthy wait to get into the movie. Me, I was loving it, doing something normal on a weekend instead of leaving the office at 11 p.m. and wondering what am I going to do now, then going home and watching old movies on TV until I fell asleep.
   I flashed back to 1978 because the newspaper where I work part time moved last week. It's a pretty old newspaper, and once had its own building in town with its own presses. Then it moved into a four-story building a couple of blocks away that it shared with an engineering firm, the newspaper on the fourth floor and the engineers on the second and third floors, until the engineering firm went out of business and the second and third floors were vacant. But it was still basically a newspaper building. No corporate nine to five types coming and going. Some departments of the newspaper left at five like normal people but they had relatively normal jobs, selling advertising, secretarial positions, things like that, and because the main office was right by the elevator and the newsroom was around a corner and down a hall, their five o'clock departure wasn't very noticeable.
   Last week, the newspaper moved again, into a modern three-story office building, modern at least for the town, which hasn't seen any significant new office construction in about a decade. The main tenant in the building is a mortgage company, which is one of the more prominent members of the town's Chamber of Commerce. Before the move there was a tour of the new office, which I didn't go on, but my colleagues were raving about the breakroom, which they said had three or four of those single serve Keurig coffee things and vending machines and tables, they said it was really cool.
   The actual move was less traumatic than anticipated, and the staff's lone IT guy not only didn't have a nervous breakdown but is probably weighing offers from Marvel to star in its next movie.
   We've been in the new offices for a week now.
   My first day there is when I flashed back to the "interim" paper of 1978 because this was very much a corporate building. The newspaper is on the third floor, along with the mortgage company. On the first floor there's a cardiology practice, which explains why the fifteen to twenty handicapped parking spaces outside the building were all full when I showed up at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday for my first shift in the new building; and a probate court (the building is right next to the Superior Court building); I don't know which tenants are on the second floor, except one of them is a lawyer with an LLC after his name.
   When I arrived, the large parking lot was almost full, meaning I had to park out in what I used to affectionately refer to as god's country. On the other hand, walking is good for you so I shouldn't complain.
   Then five o'clock came around. I was busy editing copy and laying out pages, so I didn't notice the exodus, which, I should add, included a large portion of the newspaper's staff. But when I looked out the window, there were only a few cars left in the parking lot, so far off you could hardly see them.
   And that fantastic, luxurious breakroom? I paid it a quick visit and there were indeed a lot of coffee pots, it would be a great place to have AA meetings on weekends, except I don't think they use Keurigs at AA. And then the word came down from our nice neighbor the mortgage company: No one from the newspaper was to enter the breakroom after 4:30 p.m. This was very bad news for my copy editing neighbor to the right, who is a diabetic with a two can of Diet Coke and a pack or two of chips from the vending machine a night habit. The news meeting ran late a day or two ago and he glanced at his watch and said he hoped the meeting would end by 4:30. It ended at 4:45.
   The next harsh reminder that copy editors don't live normal lives came at sundown. At the former building, staffers parked in a large municipal garage about a block from the paper. The town's infrastructure never quite caught up to its municipal garage capacity, so that while there weren't many cars in the garage when people left work at 11 p.m., they didn't have to go to the fourth or fifth floor to find their car.
   At the new building, come 5 o'clock the parking lot empties out except for the handful of reporters and editors whose cars are in the farther reaches of the lot. And as the sun goes down, the lights that are spread in rows throughout the lot don't come on. It's pretty eerie looking out at the empty lot with the shadows of a couple of cars way off in the distance, or a single car parked in a far corner of the lot. And on a moonless night, the parking lot is pitch dark. Sure, it costs money to turn on the lights, but did anyone consider this when hammering out the terms of the lease? Just like the availability of the break room, another reminder that copy editors and reporters are second class citizens, although reporters at least get out of the office once in a while.
   The other night, after a few days in the new office, the colleague to my left began getting a headache near the end of the shift. His eyes were bothering him, too. So he asked Mr. Google "What is the proper distance from a computer screen for your eyes?" The answer came back 18 to 20 inches. The new desks are very narrow, whereas our former desks were pretty wide, with drawers even, never mind that an occasional mouse liked to forage in those drawers for the occasional stray piece of Halloween candy, but I digress. So he got out his Stanley tape measure -- the office is located in New Britain, after all, birthplace of Stanley Tools and still home to Stanley Black & Decker -- and counted nine inches from his nose to the screen. Then he wheeled his chair back so that his nose was approximately 18 inches from the screen, only to discover that he couldn't reach his mouse. So, like Humphrey Bogart in "The African Queen," when he emerges with numerous leeches on his body and Katharine Hepburn has to burn them off with a cigarette, then after the Queen gets stalled again, right back into the river he goes, so went my colleague's nose back to nine or ten inches from his monitor.
   I was lucky in that I got laid off in 2008 before the Bergen Record moved from the spacious "Record building" to new, smaller headquarters in a corporate building in another town, which they had to do because the presses that took up the whole first floor of the Record building were no longer used and the staff which once filled the fourth floor was decimated.
   I wouldn't call it post traumatic stress because there's nothing particularly traumatic about such a move, but flashbacks are flashbacks, and I'm very much not liking this move because it's served as a glaring reminder of how far from a normal career my career as a newspaper copy editor has been. On the other hand, I'm still a couple of balloons short of throwing a pity party.

Post traumatic headline disorder

Entrance to the Mine Shaft (source of photo: Lenny Waller)

   A recent headline on Politico triggered in me an episode of post traumatic headline disorder, setting off a flashback to a Page One headline that appeared in the New York Daily News in the early 1980s. I  was still working in the sports department of the Daily News so it must have been prior to 1983, that's what, 33 years ago. By the way, why is it that reporters often say "prior to" instead of "before," but that's a nag for a different race.
   Jim Willse had recently been hired as the new editor of the Daily News. He wasn't in the position long before the News ran one of its trademark exclusives: A gay nightclub called the Mine Shaft was rented from a landlord who had some connection to the city and was getting a big tax break. Great story. The blaring Page One headline, however, was "How the city got shafted."
   Whoa, I thought. "Shafted" is a euphemism for f***ed. I had always considered that to be a no-no. I mean, to me, saying "How the city got shafted" was no different than saying "How the city got f***ed." What would the housewife in Queens, considered to be a typical Daily News reader, react to that?
   This took place in November or December. At the Christmas party that year I approached Willse, whom I'd never met, and asked him about the headline.
   "That was a good headline," he said. Who knows, he might have written it. His point being that shaft, as in the club's name, and shaft, as in what happened to the city, was a clever pun. No arguing with that, so I let the issue go.
   That headline opened the floodgates, even in the sports department. A few days later, my colleague Freddy Cranwell, for an article about how the New Jersey Nets basketball team got blown out in a road game for the umpteenth time, wrote a very large back page head that said "Road Apples."
   Now, I grew up in the city and had no idea what a road apple was, so I asked him, "What's a road apple?"
   "You don't know what a road apple is?" Fred, who lived in New Jersey, asked incredulously.
   "No I don't," I said.
   "They're what a horse leaves behind on the road," he said.
   In other words, horse shit. He was writing a headline that said the New Jersey Nets were horse shit.
   Fred was the night sports editor that night, so there was nothing I could do about it, doubly so since the city had just been f***ed.
   Which brings me, 33 years later, to a headline on Politico.
   "Critics ream Trump immigration address," the headline said.
   Whoa, I thought. Just to be sure, I looked up "ream" on the Internet, and here is the definition from the Urban Dictionary:

v. to be reamed
usage: To get fucked painfully. Can be replaced in most instances of f**k.

Jon f***ed Shelly -> Jon reamed Shelly
I got f***ed over on this assignment -> I got reamed on this assignment

 
   Now, some people, including I'm sure Jim Willse, who went on to a prize winning career as the editor of the Newark Star-Ledger, would find Trump's immigration speech getting "reamed" to be perfectly acceptable. Maybe Arianna Huffington would find it OK as well, although to the best of my recollection this is the first time I saw it used in a headline on any news site.
   Further, one might argue, the purpose of euphemisms is to make acceptable in language or usage acts or things which would otherwise be perceived as unacceptable.
   And then it occurred to me that as dinosaurs such as myself fade from the copy editing scene, a much younger generation is cranking out the news both in print and on the Internet. Which raises the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that someone who only heard "reamed" in a usage whereby it was substituted for "harshly criticized," as in "I got reamed for trying to sneak that headline through," that copy editor might not even know he had just written the equivalent of "Critics painfully f**k Trump immigration speech," and thought that they were only being harshly critical of it.
   That's what I'd like to think, in which case I could attribute my reaction to a case of Post Traumatic Headline Disorder, even though the initial headline was in the Daily News and not the New York or Washington Post. Daily News Traumatic Headline Disorder doesn't carry much weight as a malady, although it would be hard to argue with WaPo Traumatic Headline Disorder.

A slow news day in the neighborhood

   In the world today, an epic battle that already is being compared to Stalingrad and Bastogne was in its fortysomethingth day on the border between Syria and Turkey, U.S. military troops were being quarantined after helping out in Ebola-stricken countries, Pentagon workers were being warned they might be targeted for lone-wolf terror attacks, and the Fed was ending quantitative easing.
   So what did I see as I passed the newspaper stand in the supermarket this morning?
   A blaring headline in the New York Post that said "Fiddler on the roof" about a fellow jerking off in his window who was photographed by a popoffrazzi. And a blaring headline in the New York Daily News about a guy somewhere who some court said could marry his niece. Naturally, the headline was "Speak now or forever hold your niece."
   Here's a headline for you: "Vinnie Musetto turns in grave." (Poor Vinnie, who died last year, was the Post copy editor who wrote "Headless body in topless bar.")
   "Pervy peeper plays his pickle." I wonder if Rupert Murdoch wrote that one himself. Now, WTF is quantitative easing? Or is it qualitative easing? Whatever.

'Headless' headline writer axed

The headless newspaper delivery person of Sleepy Hackensack

   It was big news recently when the fellow who wrote "Headless Body in Topless Bar" was let go after 40 years with the New York Post. Actually, he'd been writing movie reviews on a freelance basis for the Post, so he was probably either bought out or laid off a couple of years ago, and some bean counter likely said, "Why do we need to pay for freelance movie reviews anymore?"
  The firing of Vinnie Musetto went viral, with NPR saying many people consider that the greatest tabloid headline ever written. Not me. First, note how NPR qualified it with "tabloid," as if the New York Times or Washington Post never would let a headline like that grace its pages, which they wouldn't. It's probably taught in journalism school as the ne plus ultra of tabloid headlines.
   If I had the final say, I'd have let the headline through, I may be critical but I'm not a fool.
   I suppose, though, it was a watershed event in tabloid journalism and if it has inspired legions of journalism students to think creatively, so be it.
   There's another headline, though, that I think of as far better as pure headlines go, and it doesn't make fun of gruesome murders or strip clubs.
   It was written by my former colleague Ed Reiter, and won a New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists award, for which it hung for several years on a bulletin board near the copy desk. It's probably still hanging there, although the newsroom has long since been deserted and the staff moved to less valuable real estate.
   The headline was above a gardening story, that's right, a gardening story, about an invasion of slimy pests that were giving people grief. The more I looked at that headline from my seat on the copy desk, or as I passed the bulletin board on my way to the cafeteria, the more it grew on me.
   The headline was "Slugfest in the Garden." To me, looking at that headline on the bulletin board was like looking at a work of art in a museum. It was a double double entendre deal, with slugs being the slippery slimy creatures and the left and right hooks and body blows and haymakers and garden conjuring imagery of both that place the slippery slimies were invading and Madison Square Garden, once the mecca of the so-called "sport of kings."
   So here's to you, Ed Reiter, award winning headline writer and world famous numismatologist (he's also an expert on coin collecting).

- - -

  

Miles to go before I get pulled over



You are now entering ... Aaron's blog





   I've been fired, I've quit, I've been downsized, restructured, laid off, yelled at, cursed, thanked, congratulated, transferred sideways so many times you'd think I was on a merry go round. In 46 years in the newspaper business since I landed a part time job as a copyboy at the New York Post when I was 17 years old and a freshman at the City College of New York, I've sharpened pencils, made coffee, distributed galley proofs, read upside down, written headlines, corrected grammar, saved countless reporters from getting their pants sued off, gotten one newspaper's pants sued off (they should have fought but it was cheaper to settle), hell, it's like preventing terrorism, only the ones that slip through the security measures get noticed. I've Hemingwayed a thousand run-on sentences, called hundreds of reporters in the middle of the night to tell them there's a hole in their story big enough to bounce a beachball through. Did I mention I've made up a verb or two along the way and mangled the English language in a thousand different headlines? There's one thing I've never done until this week ... retired.

   Make that semi-retired. That's the way I see it. Bad financial judgment over the years led me to put in for early Social Security at the age of 63 and for every buck I earn above a certain amount I have to pay a penalty, so I decided to cut back on my hours. I was sure the publisher of the newspaper I work for would take it hard, since I did everything I could the last two and a half years to make myself indispensible, but when I asked to cut back on my hours his eyes lit up. The paper isn't going to replace me, will no longer be saddled with the cost of my health insurance, and my colleagues will have to pick up the slack, so why shouldn't he be happy.

   He's happy. I'm happy. If a day or two of overtime gets thrown into the mix my colleagues will be happy. What's wrong with this picture? I'll tell you what's wrong. If I don't do something to head it off at the pass, my friend Victor is going to send me a comment saying "Congratulations on your retirement." And I'm going to have to correct him and say "Semi-retirement."

   The fact is, it's time to devote more time to my second career as the second coming of Studs Turkel. And to collect my thoughts on the fine art of writing headlines and finish that semi instructional, semi autobiographical book I always wanted to write under the title of this blog. Uh oh. I think I hear the dinner bell tolling. It's tolling for me. I toll you so.

   Toity.

  

  

 

Editors shmeditors Part 3

This is Buddy Martin, the
first of many editors who
would have fired me if
he could.

  

   It all seems kind of a blur as I approach the age of 64 but some things pop out of the fog.

   Like the time the New York Post moved from its plant on West Street in lower Manhattan to the Journal American Building on the East Side of Manhattan. I had a little difficulty finding the new building, so after disembarking from the Number 6 train at the City Hall station, I hailed a cab and asked the driver if he knew where the Journal American Building was. The Post bought the building because the Journal American went out of business in 1966 (thank you, Wikipedia)  and the building had a better printing press than the Post building on West Street.

   "You mean the American Building," the cabbie said. God bless the quintessential New York cabbie, those, too, have gone the way of the World Journal Herald Telegraph Mirror Tribune Sun.

   It was the American building before it was combined with the Journal.

   I loved that building. I could drive down from the upper West Side, park below the East Side Drive for free in an area that must have been the scene of a dozen crimes in "Law and Order," bodies pulled from the river, burned out cars with bodies in the trunk flush up against a pillar holding up the East Side Drive, today it probably costs $24.95 for the first half hour to park there with a short walk south to the South Street Seaport or east to Chinatown. After I got out of work, say, at three or four in the morning I could walk down to the Fulton Fish Market which was thriving at that hour and buy a five pound box of fillets.

   I left that building a few years later to go to the Daily News, which had its own iconic building with an Art Deco lobby. In the middle of the lobby was a giant globe. One of my fellow copy editors in the sports department of the Daily News, Eddie Coyle, was a recovering alcoholic and currently addicted marathon runner who loved to tell the story of the time he came in to work inebriated, climbed on top of the globe in the middle of the lobby and began singing "I'm sitting on top of the world."

   Not long after I went to the Daily News the company launched an advertising campaign that went "Imagine how much fun it must be to work at the Daily News." Not as much fun, I imagine, as those copy editors putting out the Orange County Register from desks on the beach, as depicted on the covers of a thousand editions of Editor and Publisher, but it was fun for a while. That didn't last long, however.

   Newspapers across the country were thriving except in big cities. There was a death watch going on as the circulation of the Daily News declined and the circulation of the Post under Rupert Murdoch crept upward but the paper still bled cash and people were waiting, speculating, to see which paper would succumb first, while Newsday on Long Island was basking in the demise of the Long Island Press and hovering like a vulture to snap up the market share of the Daily News or the Post, whichever went under first.

   Neither of them did go under, and they even both survived the 78-day newspaper strike of 1978, which occurred in my first year at the Daily News.

   A few years later the Daily News, hoping to hasten, I surmise, the seemingly always  imminent demise of the Post, launched an afternoon edition called Daily News Tonight.

   That led to my second and last encounter with Bill Brink, the editor who interviewed me when I was hired.

   The Daily News Tonight was a disaster -- a high-quality disaster, mind you -- from the day it was launched. They hired a bunch of people and poured money into it, but the circulation wasn't there.

   At some point they hired a new sports editor named Buddy Martin -- I was still in the sports department at the time, and I'm not even sure who he replaced, although it must have been Dick Young -- I just found Young's obituary online, and it said he was sports editor of the Daily News until 1982 when he went to the Post, so that would have been when Buddy Martin was brought in from outside as the sports editor.

   When the Daily News Tonight was launched the News hired a deputy sports editor named John Clendenon. This Clendenon fellow was, well, he must have had some redeeming qualities.

   The Daily News Tonight lasted only a few months if I remember correct. When rumors were flying about its impending demise, with the attendant layoffs, Bill Brink made a tour of the newsroom, giving pep talks from department to department.

   After his pep talk in the sports department, he asked if there were any questions.

   I raised my hand.

   Yes?

   "Why is it that we're no longer allowed to use Chisox or Bosox in headlines?" I asked.

   "I didn't know you couldn't," Brink said.

   "Because those are cliches, and we don't use cliche headlines," chimed in Clendenon, who had outlawed their use. Such cliche headlines, in 120 point type, were practically the trademark of the Daily News back page. CHISOX TOP YANKS, YANKS BELT BOSOX, etc., etc.
   Just as an aside, one of my all-time favorite headlines was written by a crusty elderly sports copy editor named Lester Rose early in my tenure at the Daily News. It went: MILWAUKEE WISCS YANKS. Try writing a headline like that today!

   Ironically, Clendenon was right that Chisox and Bosox were cliches, he was only wrong to outlaw their use.

   The next day, or maybe a day or two after that, Clendenon was fired.

   He wasn't fired because I asked that question, or so I was assured, that was simply the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

   Unbeknownst to me, when the News was looking for a sports editor to replace Dick Young, it was Clendenon who saw the listing, I imagine in Editor and Publisher, and told his buddy Buddy. In other words, Buddy owed his buddy bigtime, and when Buddy's buddy got canned, ostensibly because I laid that straw on that proverbial camel's back, I was about to discover that Buddy was no buddy of mine.

   It might have been the day after Clendenon was dismissed, it might have been a day and several hours, but I got called into Buddy's office, and he would have fired me were I not protected by the Newspaper Guild. God bless the Newspaper Guild. When he realized he couldn't fire me, he told me I could resign or be transferred to another department. I opted for the latter, and although the circumstances might be described as having been under duress, it was the best career move I ever made, at least in my newspaper career.

   I wound up on the features copy desk, thanks to my job protection under the union contract, and Buddy Martin himself wound up fired a few months later.

  

(to be continued)

  

And another one...and another one...

An Africanized honey bee thinks about who to kill next.

(See earlier post: Another One Bites the Dust)

  

  Over the next few centuries I imagine a couple of books will be written about Rupert Murdoch, but I doubt that either of them will mention a clipping that was posted on the bulletin board of the sports department of the New York Post in 1977. The clipping was from the San Antonio Express -- I don't imagine it was the original article but probably was a photocopy -- the Express was the first newspaper in America that Murdoch bought, and Murdoch had recently purchased the Post -- the headline from the San Antonio newspaper blared something to the effect, and I forget the exact wording, about killer bees making their way to America from South America.

   Everybody laughed, this is our new boss? I will say it took ten years or so, but since then Africanized honey bees have claimed their fair share of fatalities north of the border. Thwap! Whew, that was close. I don't know if that sucker was africanized or not, but I didn't want to find out.

   Killer bees aside, I witnessed another what now is probably considered at best a minuscule moment of Murdoch history when one morning in 1978 the "wood" was wheeled through the sports department on its way to the newsroom; "wood" was the term used for front page headlines that were too big to make on a linotype machine so they were engraved in wood, don't ask me, I don't know how the process worked, but this particular wood, in maybe 300 point type, the kind used for Pearl Harbor Bombed or Twin Towers Collapse, announced "Baby Born Without Mother." Wow. This new boss of ours is totally bonkers. Didn't we used to be a newspaper. I'm not quoting exactly, these were just some of the thoughts that were drifting through the sports department. What had happened was that someone had given Murdoch an advance copy of a book about cloning. This was 1978, mind you, maybe even 1977, Dolly the Sheep wasn't even a rung in the ladder of her father's DNA.

   Ironically, while it still hasn't happened and it doesn't justify Murdoch's mangling of journalistic ethics, cloning has come a long way since then.

   Now, back to all the editors and managing editors and executive editors I've worked for over the years. After Paul Sann retired from the New York Post, I have no idea who took his place, since I was blissfully ensconced on the night desk of the sports department and had practically nothing to do with the dayside doings at the Post. I looked it up on the Internet and apparently it was some guy named McKenzie. I'll leave it at that.

   Initially after Murdoch bought the post there was an exodus of talent, including Chuck Slater, I'm not quite sure what his title was but he was probably the night sports editor at the Post since he was my supervisor. After he left, I was awarded the privilege of filling in in the "slot" which was one of the most stressful jobs I've ever tackled; I won't at this point go into the reasons for this. I don't know the exact sequence or the dates, but Ike Gellis retired as the longtime sports editor and was replaced by a Murdoch stooge named Jerry Lisker, actually I kind of liked the guy, and Greg Gallo, the son of the legendary Daily News sports cartoonist Bill Gallo, was brought over from Murdoch's Star to be the assistant sports editor.

   About a year after the initial exodus, when I was training new sports copy editors to back me up in the "slot" and then seeing them promoted ahead of me, I began to wonder what was going on. Then one day Greg Gallo said to me that he wasn't supposed to tell me this, but at a news meeting one morning, Murdoch blew his stack because the sports department missed deadline, and somebody said to him that it was my fault. End of career. That day I called Chuck Slater and asked him if there were any openings at the Daily News. I don't know whether it was a week or two weeks later, but I left the Post and went to work on the sports copy desk at the Daily News.

   This time, however, I did have to go through the application and interview process.

   The person I interviewed with was Bill Brink. I looked him up online the other day and found his obituary from a few years ago and it noted that he was in the Army Air Corps in Italy during World War II. I was like damn, I wish I'd known that, but at the time I wasn't nearly as interested in the history of World War II as I since have become.

   The one thing I remember from the interview is that I told Brink that I loved writing headlines, and that I always admired the headline in the Daily News that said "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

   "I wrote that," he said.

   Damn, I thought, I really wasn't trying to butter the guy up, I had no idea. Anyway, I got the job.

(to be continued)

Another one bites the dust

   I arrived at work yesterday to find my managing editor outside having a cigarette. As I opened the door to enter the building's relatively small lobby -- somewhat proportionally re the size of the paper to the grand Art Deco lobby of the New York Daily News where I used to work -- he asked me if I'd heard the news, as if I even know how to open my company email from my home computer, heck, I've only been there two and a half years.

   No, I said. What news? I assumed immediately that the Turk -- as Norm Miller, a sportswriter at the Daily News many moons ago used to refer to the ax that fell on professional football squads at certain points in the pre-season; I imagine today the Turk would proverbially chop off Norm's proverbial head if he used that expression in a story since one doesn't want to give the impression anymore that Turkish people go around chopping off people's heads, that's not very politically correct, now, is it? Maybe the Taliban is visiting NFL training rooms these days. At any rate, just about the only news in the newsroom these days, other than another delay in going live with the new bells-and-whistles rich web site, is that somebody has been fired.

   "Jack's no longer here," the managing editor said. Jack K-----, the person to whom he referred, was the executive editor, which makes three executive editors who've come and gone since I was hired that seemingly short time ago. Well, not exactly come and gone, two came and three went, since the first one was within weeks of retiring when I was hired.

   There was a great deal of speculation in the newsroom yesterday but nothing concrete. I suppose if the publisher were listening, he would have picked up what Homeland Security calls a great deal of chatter. He did call a couple of my colleagues into his office to ask them what the mood of the newsroom was. He didn't call me in, but I'd have readily given him my opinion, which was that the executive editor was a nice guy, everybody liked him, but that he never quite got the chance to assert his authority. He tried a little too hard to be perceived as a "good guy" and to plug some of the newsroom's many holes; for instance he took cell phone pictures of the Christmas tree lighting ceremony across the street last year when no photographer was available, never mind that they were blurry and really lousy quality; he rewrote press releases and edited stories, but didn't edit them nearly as well as a copy editor might have edited them, if all the copy editors weren't so overworked and stressed out. And he loved to write weather stories.

   All of this got me to thinking about all the managing and executive editors -- mind you, I never quite understood the difference between the two, although I suppose in some table of organization there is one -- I've seen visited by the so-called Turk in the 46 or so years since I first sharpened two or three dozen No. 2 pencils a night, made coffee in an urn with flies on the bottom and was sent to buy cigarettes for Pete Hamill (two packs of Camels).

   There have been a lot, but none ever came close to the standard set by my first managing (executive?) editor, Paul Sann, whom I never had a conversation with -- he didn't interview me because I started at age 17 as a part-time copyboy on the midnight to 8 a.m. shift -- and I certainly wasn't recruited, but Paul Sann circled a headline on a galley proof and sent it to the sports editor, Ike Gellis, with the note "good headline," or maybe it was just "good head," or maybe even simply "good," and it was like somebody slapped a ball and chain to my ankle and wrapped the ball a few times around the base of the copy desk. Not that that was a bad thing, there were times in my alleged career that I loved being a copy editor, but the fact is that copy editors are the Rodney Dangerfields of the newspaper industry.

   In one of my earliest blog posts -- so early that it was in a roll your own iteration of the blog sprouting from one of my web sites and isn't included in this blog, so here's a link -- Aaron's early attempt at blogging -- I gave more of a description of the circumstances surrounding that circled headline, and I spoke of the friction between Sann and the Post's new owner, circa 1978, Rupert Murdoch, and I had a couple of the facts wrong, which I can thank Sann's son Howard for correcting. I didn't know it then, but I've worked under some good and some poor excuses for managing and executive editors but Sann set a standard that's been approached but never equaled.

(more)

 

(Wow, am I so old that I can remember when "more" was at the bottom of a page of copy? Excuse me while I catapult myself into the 21st century...)

 

(to be continued)

Toity

My entry into the newspaper business came with a question on a copy editing test at my college paper, The Campus, some 43 years ago.

The question: What is bfulc?

My answer: Those were the glasses Ben Franklin invented.

My exit from the newspaper business came with an email from the editor of a midsize newspaper: "Thank you very much for your interest in our page design/copy editing position. We had a flood of 80 applicants including many who were highly qualified and it was a very difficult choice, but we have filled the position."

That's it for me. Ten four, out the door. I used to tell kids if they could write a good headline, they could always get a job in this business. That advice is now as useless as this blog, although some copy editors might still learn something from my occasional entries.

My former newspaper, the Bergen Record, would like to consider me retired, but I'm not. I'm just beginning my second career, reinventing myself as it were, as an oral historian. It's an uphill climb, but I need the exercise.

When I started in the newspaper business, as a cub reporter at my college paper, there was a tradition when seniors graduated, or even if they didn't graduate but finally moved on to a real newspaper after six or seven years dodging classes in the school paper office, a little hole in the wall, capacity about eight with a couple of desks and a few typewriters and paper all over the place, look at this, a run-on sentence, tsk, tsk, I must be getting copyheimer's disease, but anyway, they got to write what was known as a "Thirty" column. I wrote one in my fifth year when I finally negotiated my way into a degree, trading all my "incompletes" for F's and emerging with a 2.1 grade point average, a smidgin above the requirement to graduate. I forget what I said in my Thirty column.

By the time I graduated I was already working full-time, at the New York Post, where I started as a copyboy in the summer of my freshman year.

In real businesses -- newspapers, after all, were never real businesses, still aren't, although they've come to think they are -- people get a gold watch after 25 years. In newspapers, whatever the number of years, they got something much more personal. The cartoonist would do a big drawing and everybody would sign it. When I was at the Daily News there was one fellow who up and went to Hollywood because an old friend of his was now a famous screenwriter and was going to help him get started. The staff held a party for him and the artist, I think it was my alltime favorite newspaper artist, Jerry Schlamp, did a big caricature of him lying in a king-size bed with a horse's head sticking out from under the sheets, two empty bottles of booze with three x's rising from the top of each, and a nurse wearing nothing but panties with a red cross on them and a bra and saying "Now about that screen test ..." I got to sign that along with everybody else, although I suppose if he were to look at that today, he wouldn't know who the heck I was.

That's what I aspired to in the newspaper business, but it never came to pass. I left the Post in the exodus that followed Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the paper, and went to the New York Daily News. Ten years later I left the Daily News in a mass downsizing and wound up at the Bergen Record. I left the Record twenty years later in a "restructuring," please step into my office, you're not being offered a job, goodbye, a few days later some of my copy desk colleagues took me and another laid off copy editor to a diner and that was it, no cartoon. They did get me some kind of Hallmark card and signed it, but that's not the same.

"Thirty," in the Pleistocene Era of Journalism, is what reporters would put at the end of their story so that the people working the linotype machines would know that it was finished.

Oh, and bfulc stood for bold face, upper lower case.

Disparate housewives

It's apple picking season and I heard on the radio yesterday that Jim Willse -- the reporter pronounced his name without the noisy "e" at the end, so it came out Jim Wills, although she corrected the pronunciation later in the day -- is retiring. Which reminded me of a story.

It was during the Holidays, as usual I forget which year but I was still in the sports department of the Daily News which makes it early 1980s, and Willse was the new managing editor, or editor, at the News.

When I joined the News, the mantra throughout the newsroom went something like: Your typical reader is a housewife in Queens. Maybe I was a little too slow to change, and maybe the housewife in Queens eventually became a desperate housewife, but with the arrival of Willse, that mantra went out the window.

In typical Daily News fashion, the paper broke an important New York story with an exclusive about how a city official owned a piece of property for which he managed to gain tax-exempt status. Only problem was the tenant on that property was a bar called the Mine Shaft, and you can guess the type of clientele it entertained. So far so good, breaking stories like this is what the News was famous for.

But then, there was the big page one headline, in two or three or six hundred point type, screaming "How the city got shafted."

I don't know about the housewife in Queens, but I was offended by the use of such a euphemism. It was absolutely the same as saying "How the city got f----d." But if the headline said that, the New York Post headline the next day might be: "Readers to Daily News: Drop dead." So "shafted" it was.

My reaction was, "What do the editors think, the housewife in Queens is stupid?"

Today a headline like that wouldn't raise eyebrows. But it rattled my thoughts about headline writing. Was I now supposed to write crap like that?

A few days after this, the News had its Christmas party. Like I said, this was in the 1980s, before newspapers began using the euphemism "Holiday party" instead of Christmas party. And if you think the state of the newspaper economy sucks today, things were so bad then that the paper started charging its own employees -- $10, I think it was -- to attend the Christmas party!

So there I was at the Christmas party, and who should I see off in the distance but this new editor guy Willse, surrounded by the usual gaggle of sycophants who suck up to any new big shot at any large paper. I worked my way through the crowd, which was kind of sparse to begin with, and introduced myself to Willse. Then I asked him if he didn't see anything wrong with using a headline like "How the city got shafted"?

"Not at all," he said, or words to that effect. "It's a pretty good pun."

Don't you think?

No I don't.

I'd heard all I needed to hear. This man was clueless. Although, now that I think of it these many years later, his previous job was in San Francisco, so maybe, rather than attempting to move the News' headlines in a provocative new direction, he was simply motivated by his experiences in a different cultural milieu. Maybe he wasn't a fraud after all.

It didn't take long for the new order to take root. Copy editors who'd been trying to sneak suggestive headlines past the slot for years saw the floodgates thrown open. I was still in the sports department at the time, so how risque could you get? Then one night the New Jersey Nets lost their umpteenth game in a row away from home, and the night sports editor -- nobody had to sneak anything past him, since he wrote it himself -- penned a big back page headline that went: "ROAD APPLES."

Now, me being a city boy, I had to ask someone what a road apple was, and when I got the answer, I was appalled. I said to the person who wrote it, "You can't write that."

His response: Why not? If the city can get shafted, the Nets can lay road apples just like horses do. Or words to that effect.

And that, for me, is the connection between one road apple and another.