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A former newspaper colleague of mine said she was on her way to an interview for a public relations job. She said she was trying to work through one problem: that once she took such a job, she wouldn't be a reporter any more. "I'd be going over to the dark side."
Now, I believe good reporters, of which she is definitely one, are trained skeptics, not accepting what they hear without checking and evaluating it. But they are human, and like most humans have a harder time examining those things closest to their hearts. The title "reporter," is like "poet" or "artist" or "carpenter," titles one hesitates to give oneself because of the honor and tradition that comes with them. And it's hard, real hard, to put such honors in one's past.
Consider this, young padawan. You have been loyal all your adult life to the profession. But has the profession been loyal to you? Just a few months ago the paper for which you performed prodigious and ultra-competent service dumped you. Before that, did any of the papers you've worked for pay you enough to live on? Or were those papers subsidized, in effect, by your spouse or parents? Were you allowed to take sick or vacation time without having to fight for it? Were you not "asked" to work convoluted schedules so you would work dawn to midnight without being able to claim overtime? Were both management AND your editor humane? Just one and not the other? Or both but only halfway, with major blind spots?
"Real world" jobs aren't oases of love and tenderness. You'll still have deadlines (which in spite of the perception of non-reporters, are no big deal), you'll still see destructive editing of your work by those who are several grades behind you in writing, and perhaps you'll put in extra hours. But if you get offered a job, and it has a decent salary, a reasonable commute, and your prospective boss isn't teetering on insanity, take it. Regret is portable, so you can miss the old days in your spare time.
Nothing disarms a complainer quicker than agreeing with him. Misplaced defensiveness, the more common response, just proves the complainer's point that you really aren't paying attention to the customer. You have to be sincere though; we can tell when it's just a ploy just to shut somebody up.
I sent a version of my post of July 26 to the local editor of the Bucks County Courier Times. He responded:
"Thanks for the observations. It proves that readers notice these kinds of goofs. I will take the issue up with each individual reporter and their supervising editors. Hard to understand such sloppiness when we require 2 reads by assigning editors for every story, then as a failsafe we require our night copy editing desk to read every story a third time. Hope you see improvements soon. Best wishes, Carl"
His note was followed by another editor's asking what I meant by the misuse of "alleged." I referred her to items on the Columbia Journalism Review site and the Poynter Institute. Yesterday's paper had a crime story in which every statement was properly attributed but without the use of "alleged."
So I hereby take back what I said about papers not having the will to make a better product. They still might not have the means, but people like Carl are doing what they can.
Martin Sullivan tells me he too is a blogger, for www.tax.com. So I'm going to put in a plug for him. He's very good at objective, yet critical, analysis of what Washington is doing to the economy any given week. Here's his bio on his site: Marty Sullivan is an economist who has written more than 400 articles for Tax Notes, Tax Notes International, and State Tax Notes. Formerly, he was an economist at the U.S. Treasury Department, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, and a major accounting firm. He got his B.A. at Harvard University and his Ph.D. at Northwestern University.
He's also my little brother.
It's a shame a major shoulder injury -- from a chariot crash -- caused Steve Reeves to hang up his sandals in his 30's. I would have liked to know how he would have trained in his 60's. It would give me some validation to hear him say "Whoops. This dumbbell's too heavy."
I think dumbbells are the best workout tools, but the zone of the gym with the dumbbell rack and benches gets too crowded most weeknights. However, with my new "schedule" I can beat the crowds, so I decided to go to a mostly-dumbbell workout. I was making good progress for about a week, adding weight and reps each time. But when I got into the 50-70-pound range I noticed it actually hurt my shoulders quite a bit to lug them into position. Bummer because just a few years ago I manipulated much heavier dumbbells with no such discomfort. So I went back to those sissy machines.
Aging is a double challenge for this exercise addict. First, I've had to accept that no matter what I do, I'm not going to be as strong as I once was. Second, having accepted that, I've had to just work around that fact and keep marching on.
That's all for now. I'll be back now and then with interim reports on my own lifelong experiment.
Reading a local newspaper can be dangerous territory for an old reporter/copy editor. It's probably not because reporters and editors don't know how to write and edit. It's more likely that as newspapers push more and more of the production duties onto the editorial staff, editors have less and less time to do what used to be their primary function. Little things that used to squeak by occasionally as a matter of imperfection have now become big, messy things. Take this passage from a story in our local paper, the Bucks County Courier Times, about a local sewer board:
"The board has yet to determine how much customers will pay for sewer flow per gallon. Suggested prices run from about $7 to $15 per gallon, but those costs won't be finalized until the authority's budget discussions begin."
If the reporter or editor thought about it for a few seconds, and did some arithmetic, that would translate to $11 to $75 dollars a flush, depending on the age of the toilet. A single shower would wipe out most people's food money for a week or two. Obviously the figures are missing decimal points or a per each X number of gallons. But the second half of that sentence is more subtle in its bewilderment:
".... those costs won't be finalized until the authority's budget discussions begin."
So they're going to begin by setting the rates, before they know how much revenue they need. Anyone who has followed any public budget process knows that such things zig-zag between a draft budget and a tentative rate, and the rate is finalized when the budget is, well, final.
I'd offer to do what's called a "markup" of their whole paper. But this and many more examples convince me they don't have will or the time for quality control. For another thing, they can't afford me.
I enjoy historical movies, but sometimes half the fun -- okay, maybe more than half -- is picking out anachronisms, unsupported legend and just plain errors. The misnamed "Juarez" is about Maximilian von Hapsburg and his three years as emperor of Mexico, placed on the made-up throne after a rigged referendum. He was shot in 1867 after the French army, which had brought him to Mexico in the first place, abandoned him in the face of threats of intervention from the United States.
I had doubts about the featuring of the song "La Paloma," but Spanish composer Sebastián Yradier died in 1865, so it's entirely plausible it was Charlotte's favorite tune.
The makers of "Juarez" took special care with accuracy and authenticity, and for 1939 they did a pretty good job. What doesn't wash is some of the characterizations and dialogue. For instance, John Garfield plays Porfirio Diaz as a fine soldier and leader, which he was. The Battle of Puebla on Cinco de Mayo in 1862 is one of his gifts to history and to gringo party animals. But the sweetie-pie tone Garfield takes chafes in the face of Diaz' eventual 40-year dictatorship.
There's at least one clear anachronism, if only a few months worth. Toward the beginning of the movie Napoleon III of France, played by Claude Rains (in a rare, for him, bit of overacting), receives word of the defeat of the Confederate Army at Gettysburg, its relevance being France would have to back off its ambitions in Mexico if the North won the Civil War. Later in the scene he mocks democracy. "Rule of the mob, by the mob, for the mob," an obvious allusion to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. But that speech wasn't delivered until Nov. 19, 1863, four and a half months after the battle. Even though news was carried in ships, the craft of the time whittled transatlantic communication down to around two weeks. So Napoleon couldn't possibly have known Lincoln's tripartite description of democracy..
The scenes with Paul Muni as a barely alive Juarez seem just too long. Perhaps he was demanding he be allowed to show off the great makeup job.
Briane Aherne is magnificent as Maximilian, and has all the best lines.
Cosmo: Talking pictures! That means I'm out of a job. At last I can start suffering and write that symphony.
Simpson: You're not out of a job, we're putting you in as head of the new music department.
Cosmo: Well, thanks, R.F.! At last I can stop suffering and write that symphony.
-- Singing in the Rain
That's the way things happen after a layoff. For a while I get all grandiose about it, saying this is my big chance to write that book, finally (finally) get in shape, go fishing and actually catch fish, read all the books that have been waiting, play the piano ...... Then the truth sets in. The state of unemployment is a purgatory where the energy of the worker goes to wait some undetermined length of time before being admitted to employment (I can't call work heaven; analogies go just so far). Hyperactivity turns into a slo-mo montage of household puttering, running errands, and trolling the Internet for jobs and eventually, nothing in particular.
So I started a blog.
