My Front Page

A decade-plus in newspapers provided a lifetime of lessons

Putting out a newspaper requires equal parts of ingenuity, improvisation and expediency. Photo courtesy of Chad Sibilia.

They say journalism is a mission, one in which financial rewards are secondary to the work of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” as the fictional bartender Mr. Dooley once described the Fourth Estate.

Unlike Saul on the road to Damascus, I was not called to be a journalist. Rather, I stumbled on it as a last resort, or at least a second-to-last resort. Midway through an academic career that could be politely called promiscuous (three different majors and a lot of surfing), I had an epiphany — once I graduated, I needed a job. Duh, as Mr. Simpson would say.

Even I, an unambitious 21-year-old with slight levels of ADD, knew that an English degree and healthy remuneration were inversely correlated, so I eventually declared journalism as a major. Like many in my generation, I was a witness to Watergate and influenced by the great journalism committed by those swashbucklers at the Washington Post: Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham. But what ultimately drove me into the arms of newspapers was not the mission, but a very quotidian reason — money. I needed a paycheck.

Big mistake, financially speaking. I started my first job in 1975 at a small, suburban daily in the San Francisco Bay Area, an opportunity that literally landed in my lap. I’d done a summer internship at the paper two years before and out of the blue one day got a call from an editor.

“Aren’t you getting out of school sometime soon?” he asked.

“Well, yeah, I am. Next month.”

“Do you want to come to work for us?”

“Sure.”

“OK, see you in three weeks.”

It wasn’t until I’d been on the job for about a week that the thought popped into my head: Hey, how much are they paying me, anyway? I walked into the Managing Editor’s office and asked the question. He was an inscrutable fellow, but his expression clearly reflected a thought along the lines of, “This dumbass doesn’t even know how much he’s making and still took the job?”

“Six hundred and fifty dollars,” he said.

“A week?” I asked.

“A month.”

Thus, I joined the ranks of what John Kennedy once referred to as “the last of the educated poor.” I endured for 13 years — reporter, copy editor, feature writer, music critic, business editor, city editor — before I had a second career epiphany. For the sake of my checking account, my family and my sanity, I needed to abandon the mission of journalism and begin the work of making a living.

So, I did. I had the good fortune of working for three great companies during the span of my career. It was transformational, financially and intellectually. But despite all I learned in the business world — the value of competition and the free market, the art of persuasion, the power of networks, and much more — the lessons I had learned from those years in the newsroom never left me. Some are unique to the newsroom — such as the fact that a disorderly desk is often the sign of an orderly mind — but others are more fungible. Here are some of the more memorable lessons I learned.

Don’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy Of the Good. Newspapers never stop. They’re produced on a daily basis, 365 days a year. There’s no negotiating that point. The content can be good, bad or indifferent, but there is always the need for content. Indeed, that was what we were paid for; we all wanted to do stories that would topple a congressman, win a prize or maybe lead to a book, but essentially we were paid to produce content. Every day.

A reporter for our local paper, the State Port Pilot, wrote a charming piece about a rare snowstorm we had last week. “In my previous life as a sports reporter/editor in New York,” wrote Bob Liepa, “(snowstorms) came with the stress of assignments being blown to bits, postponing games and practices. The white stuff outside caused me to scramble and come up with a new game plan to fill white space in the newspaper.” Time and tides and newspapers wait for no man, to paraphrase Chaucer.

When I was an assistant city editor, I’d been waiting for days on a particular story from one of our general assignment reporters (GA was one rung above a beat reporter because it provided a wider scope of reporting). After deadline one night, I walked over to her desk and reminded her. She was clearly agitated and looked at me as if I were an IRS agent announcing an audit.

“You know, I took this job because I care about writing,” she said. “I wanted to make Waterford crystal and here I am on an assembly line turning out Toyotas.”

I looked at her for a moment then said, “OK, let me know when the car’s finished.”

Newspapers can often be very good, but they’re never perfect. They’re done in a hurry (the first draft of history, as they say). They get things wrong, which is why there’s a corrections page and follow-up stories. If every edition was held to the standard of a piece of Waterford crystal, newspapers would never publish. Some things — like open heart surgery or a launch sequence — require perfection. But most of life, like newspapers, can’t be perfect every day. So, get on with it.

Don’t Just Tell Me, Show Me. My biggest flaw as a reporter was impatience. I couldn’t wait to start writing and would sometimes shortcut the reporting. The outcome always suffered, especially when a copy editor would start asking questions that I couldn’t answer. A good copy editor will spot a hole in a story faster than Trump will insult Adam Schiff.

This taught me the importance of facts and data — be prepared to defend your story — which came in handy later. My corporate career was largely focused on selling ideas. The street word for it is “spin,” which is a perjorative whose first synonym is bullshit. But actual persuasion, which I was paid to do, rests on facts and data, which are hard and fast. “Spinning” without facts brings out the copy editor in everybody and never has a good result.

In my corporate communications career, I was good at creating “platforms” — broad, adaptable messaging architecture that advanced the company’s license to operate. A good platform could be expressed in simple, powerful, memorable language; one of them was the basis of an effective ad campaign compressed into 30-second TV spots that had a measurable impact on public opinion toward the company.

But underneath the simple message in the TV ad was a deep bedrock of facts and data — the reporting. Fiction has the freedom of imagination to drive it; facts are irrelevant. Nonfiction, and journalism in particular, simply can’t exist without facts. By extension, neither can democracy. The quality of our democracy is directly tied to its foundation in facts and data, despite Ronald Reagan’s famous observation that in Washington D.C., facts are negotiable. One of the few things in a newsroom that wasn’t negotiable, besides the publishing deadline, were facts.

Figure It Out. Good reporting is always a struggle. Lots of reporting is mere stenography — covering a city council meeting or a congressional hearing are both fundamental jobs of a newspaper, but the reporting is relatively straightforward. The best reporting often is borne out of personal and professional enterprise — The Washington Post’s Watergate coverage being one of the best, if dated, examples.

But enterprise reporting always carries its own set of challenges. The information isn’t always easily available. Sources sometimes don’t want to talk to you, or if they do, won’t go on the record (thus the easy way out, “sources say”). The necessary background for a story is so dense it’s hard to get to the point (thus the “nut graf,” a passage nine or 10 paragraphs into a story that tells the reader what it’s really about).

A good reporter knows how to devise a way around or through these kinds of challenges; it just requires a little bit of imagination and energy. That lesson sometimes helped me navigate the maze of corporate culture and many of the challenges in my personal life. When in doubt, I reminded myself, figure it out.

Be Original. Journalese, a newspaper term for the language of journalism, is an old cliché in the newsroom, a place where clichés abound. There’s an entire lexicon of “save/get” language in newsrooms, so called because of words, phrases, or paragraphs that could be loaded onto the “save/get” tab of a keyboard and be reproduced at the stroke of a key in the interest of time and expediency. The “save/get” key could more appropriately be labeled “lazy.”

For example, in newspapers, relief is always adorned by a “palpable sense of,” indictments are always “searing,” something surprising is often “eye popping,” veterans are always “grizzled,” lawns are “manicured” and streets are either “mean” or “leafy.” Speculation (especially if it’s on the front page) is “fevered,” dictators are usually “brutal,” and restaurants that are hard to get into and have white tablecloths are always “swanky.” Some words in newspapers survive no matter how archaic they are, and often are words that no one uses in everyday language. Try using these words in an everyday conversation: imbroglio, brouhaha, tycoon, donnybrook, or decry. Bet you can’t.

The best journalism, the work of a Maggie Haberman or Robert Costa or Bari Weiss, are cliché-free zones. They reflect fresh thinking and fresh writing, never falling back on the “save/gets” that can compromise both. Hemingway once allegedly said that working for newspapers is a great training ground for aspiring writers as long as you don’t stay too long and get ground down by the clichés. As a young speechwriter, I worked with a CEO who always admonished me, “No platitudes.” The best news platforms are those that value originality — whether in writing or thinking — as much as scoops and timeliness. For my money, the best example today of originality in the sea of clichés is The Free Press. Check it out.

There were many more lessons I learned in the newsroom (like never talk to the person working the slot on a copy desk right before deadline, or choose your arguments with the publisher very, very carefully), but these are some of the most enduring. As it so often does, time has taken off the many rough edges of my newspaper memories, leaving me with a clarity and fondness about the best of my experience.

Sometimes it takes a key to unlock these kinds of deep memories. For me, it was a random Facebook post that included the photo that accompanies this post. It shows a photographer who worked for my first newspaper, the irascible Bob Sibilia, moving some equipment from the darkroom into fancy new digs a few miles away. It seemed to encapsulate the essence of newspapering — get it done quickly, but effectively; figure it out; and try and have some fun doing it. The shot is the epitome of sausage-making — it may not look good in the process, but the end result is something that can surprisingly, even elegantly at times, create order out of chaos.

-30-