Ink-stained wretches can still dream

Not long ago I started corresponding with an old friend, a fellow survivor of the newsroom wars. I hadn't seen him in 20 years, and he had an idea that caused the printer's ink in my veins to flow a little bit faster.

This idea was, why doesn't he buy an old struggling newspaper, call all the old reporters who haven't drunk themselves goofy yet, get them all together in one newsroom, and show the world what real journalism is all about.

Stop me if you've heard that one. It's a nice dream, and one that every honest old-style newsman has dreamed at least once per career.

A definition is in order first. When I mention old-style newsman, I'm talking about the person who started by writing obits with the smaller papers before moving on to better news beats and bigger newspapers.

The folks who were pledged into the fraternity (sworn in by putting your left hand on the AP Stylebook and raising your right hand).

Those who worked the phones and went on site to gather news, then typed their stories on manual typewriters or the old Harris system terminals.

Those folks.

Ink-stained wretches on a fast train to nowhere.

My first real mentor, Charlie Hand, had that dream. A newspaper in our area was up for sale, and he was in the running to buy it. He had some investors on line. He was in negotiation with the owner of the paper, and it could be had for little bit of nothing. The only thing it had of value was the nameplate and its state adjudication, which allowed it to run those lucrative legal ads. He had his news staff picked out, and despite my relative youth (late 20s then) and inexperience), I was to be a part of it.

As with most deals constructed with dreams and funny money, everything fell through. We went back to our regular news beats, but the dream remained. If you're an ink-stained wretch it never goes away.

A few years later I hooked on with a fledgling paper in Bullhead City, Arizona. It was probably the closest I've come to seeing this dream come to life. The news crew was in place -- the four of us (Verne Peyser, Greg Bucci, David Molina and myself) had more than 100 years of newsroom experience between us. Verne had a relatively free hand in setting editorial policy because, quite frankly, I think he intimidated the snot out of our publisher.

The editorial staff spent time together off the job (in fact David and I were roommates), and we had many great discussions of the good old days of journalism. And yeah, as the bottle made its penultimate round we probably aired a version of that same dream.

For a while Rick Lanning joined us as a feature writer. Another seasoned wordsmith who crisscrossed the country in search of good stories and a good forum to publish them. During his stay he bunked with David and me, and the three of us spent our evenings in the living room and various Bullhead City taverns swapping more tales. Just by osmosis, you're going to learn a lot about writing in general and journalism in particular after hanging around those two.

I was the youngest of the bunch (by at least a decade), and the most computer literate. I saw the potential of high tech in delivering the news, but my news attitude was straight out of the hot-type days. You can count me among the last of that great generation.

David, a top-notch slot man (what you young pups now call a copy editor) passed his love of the language on to me, Greg urged me to dig deeper for the story within the story, and Verne cracked the whip over our backs. In that crucible I turned out my most amazing work ever.

The catch to this whole thing was, we didn't own the joint. Some big company did.

Result: A great newspaper. We won some prestigious awards. Kept our city officials honest, always a rough task. Forced our competition to practice the same brand of journalism. A good time was had by all. But we never reached our true potential because, again, we didn't own the joint. Later I worked with other papers and was able to infuse what I learned under Charlie and Verne into those operations, meaning I got away with a lot.

Now, the news business is in trouble. Back then, the big issue was that constant push-pull between the editorial and advertising departments, but things have changed for the worse since then. Most newspapers are run by large media companies and the product is standardized into some McNews mix. Print journalism has given way to the online version, meaning the McNews gets to you in real time. People don't read as much as they used to, so copy is formatted into bullet points so it can be scanned instead of read. Good graphics and flash presentations carry more weight than good writing. These are the trends, set in stone, and there's little anyone can do to reverse them now.

And the reportage? Don't get me started. Perhaps it's consumer-driven, but celebrity "news" is the hot story these days. Few reporters have the temerity -- or the wherewithal -- to suggest the emporer has no clothes. Many major stories are overreported, but even more major stories get no coverage at all. Meanwhile the readers are treated as the proverbial mushroom -- kept in the dark and fed a bunch of ... well, you know.

Even the Web news scene isn't looking so hot these days. One of the better-known news entities on the Internet is the Huffington Post, and it wasn't exactly a paragon of good journalism. That company preferred to aggregate (known as "steal" in our language) their news, and they're not known for paying their "reporters" for original copy. Recently America Online bought the Post, and Ariana Huffington installed to oversee AOL's news department. Web content is driven by keywords to keep the search engines happy, and Web writers are paid pennies per word. For some reason writing is now equated with typing, as if no brainwork is involved, and the work is paid accordingly. And readers buy that stuff.

Writers like Verne, Charlie, Greg, David, Rick, and me? Forget it. Those of us who are still alive and active are anachronisms now. The only way any of us could get into a newsroom now is by stealth attack; no media company would be insane enough to hire us.

But an ink-stained wretch can always dream.