I am at lunch with the new managing editor as I prepare to return to the newspaper after a second book leave. The first book, Homicide, had done well and been made into a television show.
I cowrote a script for the drama, won a screenwriting award, and was offered a television gig for more money than The Sun could ever pay. Instead, I returned to the newsroom and, employing everything I’d learned about crime, violence, and nonfiction narrative from the book project, managed to become a better reporter.
After two years, I’d gone back on leave to report a second book, a year in the life of a city drug corner. I now had an even better sense of the city, of the drug war and its frauds, and I was saving string to write a four-part series on what ailed the city police department.
It was complicated: The B.P.D. was caught in a crossfire of bad practices, bad policies, and simple circumstance. But complicated was what could make the series strong and fresh; complicated was the good part. I try to explain, but the M.E. wants to ask instead about newsroom morale.
“What are people saying?”
“About what?”
“About me.”
“About you? I guess they’re waiting to see where you go with it. The new hires certainly believe in you and John. You hired them. The veterans are waiting to see.” I take a breath, venture further: “You and John came in and said a lot of things publicly about the paper being weak, and naturally that’s taken to heart by the people who were here, working hard. There is some deadwood, I know. But there are people doing fine work, and I guess they’re worried that this isn’t acknowledged.”
“Who is saying this?”
I tell him that he’s asked me for a general sense of what was being said in his newsroom and I had provided such.
“Who is saying these things?” he asks again. “You can tell me, and I won’t reveal the source.”
“Bill,” I reply, “I’m not a snitch.”
We finish the meal in near silence. On the walk back to the newspaper, he asks me again, and I tell him that it is unfair of him to ask me to betray the confidence of coworkers.
“It’s not personal,” I add.
He cites Mario Puzo’s Godfather, the passage where Tom tells Michael that it’s business, it’s not personal. “Everything,” he assures me, “is personal.”
And for the most part, he will be proved right.
No, it won’t be personal when The Sun closes its evening edition and combines staffs, making it a one-newspaper town. And it isn’t going to be personal when Times Mirror puts together a couple more buyouts to reduce the number of reporters and editors on the paper that remained.
To most, the staffing reductions of the 1990s will seem inevitable, almost sensible given the loss of The Evening Sun. But in retrospect, this would be the moment when we finally gave up the pretense of being even a great regional entity, of transforming The Sun into a newspaper with enough resources and authority to truly address modern complexities.
At the very edge of being rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Internet -- at the precise moment when their very product would be threatened by technology -- newspapers will not be intent on increasing and deepening their coverage of their cities, their nation, the world. They will be instead in the hands of out-of-town moneymen offering unfeeling and unequivocal fealty to stockholders and the share price. And when the Chicago Tribune Company buys Times Mirror and more buyouts follow, the tipping point will be reached. Instead of a news report so essential to the high-end readers that they might -- even amid the turmoil of the Internet -- still charge for their product online and off, American newspapers will soon be offering a shell of themselves in a market unwilling to pay for such and then, in desperation, giving the product away for free. The window will close; newspapers will not be getting better, stronger, more comprehensive. Not ever again.
In Baltimore, the response will be to drop beats, to abandon the pretense of actually covering the city in detail, to regard institutional memory and the need to look at the city’s problems systemically as, well, quaint. The newsroom culture will instead emphasize impact.
No longer would the journalism be rooted in the organic work of reporters sent into the streets to learn new things and then pull smart, balanced stories through the keyhole. Impact means prizes. Now you pick a target and, to the exclusion of all complexity, you hammer on that target, story after story. Most especially, you write additional accounts highlighting the “impact” that The Sun’s coverage has achieved -- covering your own coverage -- the better to show that the newspaper has effected change.
If the newspaper cares about something in December, it cares nothing about it in January; the prize cycle follows the calendar year. If you can source something to The Sun’s reporting -- to documents obtained by The Sun or The Sun has learned -- it reads better than to simply cite the facts, even if they are from the public record. If a politician fails to respond to your reporting by scheduling a hearing or issuing a position paper, you bang on him until he does so.
And worse still, in the newsroom where I grew up -- a semi-intellectual environment where everyone once seemed to be arguing about everything all the time without actually impairing their careers -- dissent will become problematic.
This is the personal part.
Because the new way of doing business apparently leaves no place in the newsroom for fundamental disagreements about content, about reportage, about the substance of what we are doing or not doing. Arguments over quotidian matters such as the slant of Mideast coverage, or an ethical debate over attribution, or the use and overuse of a stylistic device will soon bring transfers and demotions until, finally, an exodus begins. And it will not be the deadwood; those taking the buyouts or simply leaving outright will be the ones with options: Struck, Alvarez, Robinson, Zorzi, Thompson, Wooton, Lippman, among far too many others -- the departures will be the veteran voices of a good newsroom. When they come for Littwin -- our best columnist -- it will involve their anger at a Guild bulletin written during contract negotiations.
“Bill,” he tells the managing editor, “it’s not personal.”
And in response: “Have you ever read The Godfather?”
The divide between new hires who embrace the prize culture and the old guard, many of whom find it a little shameful, will be exacerbated. And old against new is senseless. For the paper to get better, it needs to retain the talent it has and add more. They won’t be chasing the weaker reporters; they’ll be alienating the core of the institution, leaching as much talent as they hire.
So I write a memo to the top editor, arguing this privately, urging him to reconsider this self-defeating mythology in which no one here knew a thing about newspapering until the new regime. Old and new together can build this paper into something greater than the sum of its parts; new set against old cannot.
No response, not a word, except the editor manages to spike my next story without explanation or comment. I go to see him.
“I was disappointed in that story,” he says.
“How so?”
“It was trying too hard not to be a newspaper article.”
“John, I happen to know the feature editor you brought in here to encourage narrative writing -- she read the story in the kill basket and then came in here and told you she couldn’t see why you spiked it. She told you that was the kind of story you brought her here to do.”
He says nothing to that, so I press him: “That’s some of my best work, John. If you spiked it because you were mad at my memo, we can talk about that. But if you spiked it and you’re telling me that kind of journalism has no place at The Sun, then I guess I have no place at The Sun.”
“That,” he says, “may be the case.”
I get up to go, feeling as if I’d cut my right arm off with a butter knife. Before I leave, though, I do one last thing: I speak up for some people in the newsroom, honest players who had watched as standards had changed and who are too scared to complain openly. You’ve hired a lot of good new people, I tell the editor, and I’ve happily worked with many of them.
But there’s a fellow here who is cooking it. He’s trying too hard to write impact stories and he’s making it up and John, we’ve retracted a couple stories already. “You might win a Pulitzer with a guy like that. You might also have to give it back.”
“Who?” he asks.
I give him the name.
“Well,” he says, “one bad hire out of twenty-five is a pretty good record, don’t you think?”
I allow that it is. Then I go to see Rebecca, who is editing one of my last stories. It’s about a couple of homicide detectives -- smart, competent players -- who are working a last week before taking retirement.
Her cursor rolls down the screen and she highlights a quote from one: “My friends are all gone now and the place doesn’t seem the same to me. It’s just time.”
She moves on to some of my own verbiage: “. . . it isn’t the casework they plan on remembering; it’s the time spent doing that work -- the camaraderie, the banter, the strange things that a cop sees every time he goes out on the street . . .”
Rebecca Corbett gets it. She starts to cry and I am secretly delighted. It’s always good when you get your own editor.
“You wrote a goodbye,” she says. “Didn’t you?”
I tell her that I am, in my mind, a newspaperman still. I just don’t work for a newspaper anymore. I tell her that I will go to television on a lark, learn a new skill set, but I’ll eventually get back to what it is I’m supposed to be doing.
Four years later, I am in an editing suite in New York, working on an HBO miniseries. And I get a call from an old friend, a veteran of a newspaper that once lacked for impact but gave good weight to getting it right.
“He did it again.”
“Who?”
He gives me the name. And immediately I know.
This time, the newspaper had been required to apologize privately to the governor. A story -- part of a series of articles tailored for a prize campaign -- claimed that the governor visited with black ministers in Baltimore, solely in response to the power of The Sun’s coverage.
Except it hadn’t happened. Not any of it. The meeting was about something else entirely. The ministers -- one of whom was quoted at length about the righteous things he told the governor about The Sun’s Pulitzer-worthy issue -- had uttered nothing of the sort.
I am a free agent at that point, clear of any newsroom politics or careerist worries. Fuck it, I call the publisher and leave a message. But it’s the editor who returns the call.
“An honest mistake,” he explains.
“John, there’s nothing honest about it. This bullshit about having impact and winning prizes? It leads to shit like this. The guy’s making up meetings that never happened. There are quotes that no one ever said.”
“It was a misunderstanding.”
“It’s the third time you’ve retracted one of this guy’s stories. Not corrections -- I’m talking about the very premise of the story having to be retracted.”
“What were the other two?”
It took me a long moment to regroup.
“John,” I said finally, “if I was the editor of a major metropolitan daily and I had to retract three stories by the same reporter, I would remember it until the day I fucking died.”
I’m not prescient. At that moment, I can’t yet fathom all the still-to-come Tribune Company cost cutting at The Sun, the Kafkaesque reductions in staffing, the slow-motion demolition of the Washington bureau, the shuttering of the foreign bureaus.
And I am still as clueless as the captains of the newspaper industry when it comes to the Internet, still mistaking the Web as advertising for the product when, in fact, it is the product. I don’t yet envision the steep declines in circulation, the indifference of young readers to newsprint, the departure of display advertising to department-store consolidation and classified space to Craigslist.
Admittedly, I can’t even grasp all of the true and subtle costs of impact journalism and prize hunger. I don’t yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city -- eliminating such fundamental responsibilities as a poverty beat, a labor beat, a courthouse beat in a city where rust-belt unemployment and crime devour whole neighborhoods -- and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee.
I have no way of knowing that for all of its claims to renewed greatness, The Sun will glean three Pulitzers in twelve years, as compared to, uh, three Pulitzers awarded to The Sun and its yet-to-be-shut-down evening edition during the twelve years prior -- a scorecard that matters only to a handful of résumés and means nothing to the thousands of readers soon asked to decide whether they need a newspaper that covers less of their world.
I can’t yet see that what ails The Baltimore Sun afflicts all newspapers, that few, if any, of the gray ladies are going to be better at what they do, that most will soon be staring at a lingering slide into mediocrity.
I only know, as I hang up the editing-suite phone, that I’ve lost my religion, that too much of what I genuinely loved is gone. I turn to David Mills, my coproducer on the HBO project. He’d worked with me on the college paper, then at The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Post. But we wrote that first television script together, and when I returned to the metro desk, he went to Hollywood, never looking back.
“Brother,” I say, “we got out just in time.”
True enough. But the other day, I saw a column of black smoke due east of I-95 just above Eastern Avenue -- dark and thick enough that I drove there. It was a roadside car fire, no injuries. Nothing worth a call to the desk. Good thing, too, because Spry is long dead, and Ettlin retired last year. Who I was gonna call it in to, I have no clue.
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