Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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When You Find Yourself in Someone Else’s Memoir

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University of Iowa School of Journalism office int he 1920s.

I started reading the memoir Ghost of the Hardy Boys because I loved the Hardy Boys mystery books as a kid and because I knew a little of the story of how they came to be. Leslie McFarlane (1902-1977) didn’t write all of the 60 books in the series published under the name of Franklin W. Dixon, but he wrote the first third of them. McFarlane was responsible for the 22 books between The Tower Treasure in 1927 and The Phantom Freighter in 1947. 

I read all 22, roughly between 1960 and 1963. I loved them. They even inspired me to write, or start to write, my own mystery. The handwritten manuscript, forever lost, was about 25 pages of a group of kids finding a secret passage from a grandfather down into a cave. I was 10 years old. Yeah, I could see the books had some old-fashioned words, like roadster and coupe for types of automobiles. But I didn’t care, even though I looked up the words in the dictionary. (If you’re interested, a coupe was a two-door car, the name borrowed from a type of horse-drawn carriage. A roadster is what we would call a convertible today.)

McFarlane published his memoir in 1975; this edition was republished this year in a format that resembles the Hardy Boys books themselves. And he tells the story of writing the book series in a highly readable and often funny way. He never thought of these books as “great literature,” but, like the Stratmeyer Syndicate’s other series, The Bobbsey Twinsand Nancy Drew, they constituted childhood reading for tens of millions of youngsters. Like me. 

McFarlane’s memoir isn’t only about The Hardy Boys. He’s telling his own story, how he became a newspaperman in northern Ontario in the early 1920s and how he eventually landed in Massachusetts, at the Springfield Republican. And it was this description of (relatively) small-town journalism in 1920s that took me by surprise.

With very small changes, he could have been telling the story of small-town journalism in the 1970s. I know, because I was there for a year, my first job out of college. From 1973 to 1974, I worked as a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise. I found myself in McFarlane’s memoir so easily that I had to ask why. I mean, half a century separated his experience at the Republican and my experience at the Enterprise. How could they be so similar?

I think there are at least three reasons.

First, new computer technology only just started to seep into journalism in 1973, and then it was only in the backshop, where typesetters would retype the stories on computers for printing “cold type” and then pasting the stories onto pages. Reporters and editors still typed on typewriters, and layout designers still did their work by hand. No computer sat on any reporter’s or editor’s desk, simply because they didn’t exist.

Second, just like McFarlane’s experience, our primary sources of news were reporter-written or from the Associated Press or similar wire service. The newsroom had a television set, but we only watched it when there was some huge national story that was breaking. We weren’t competing against local TV stations. And social media was three decades into the future.

The stereotype of the reporter in the movies wasn’t far off from the reality.

Third, the people McFarlane worked with and for – his fellow reporters and editors – were eerily similar to the people I worked with. Like McFarlane’s experience, the older reporters and the middle and senior editors had not gone to journalism school (or even college) but either happened into journalism or somehow grown up in the business. And they were individual characters. They yelled a lot. They didn’t mind telling us how dumb we were – in front of our colleagues. Their heads held all kinds of esoteric knowledge and “background” information. And most of them were native Texans, which carried a whole additional set of eccentricities. 

I don’t think I had a boring day at work the entire time I was there. Not to mention the fact that the Watergate scandal was unfolding, and I even wrote the huge front-page headline “Agnew Resigns.” 

But to read Ghost of the Hardy Boys, a memoir by a favorite childhood writer, and to find myself and my own experiences, was a startling thing. I don’t think these newsrooms exist anymore. Everything is professionalized; reporters have degrees from journalism schools or similar backgrounds, not to mention advanced degrees in many cases. Despite the proliferation of individual bias into news stories today, journalism seems far less personal than it was 50 years ago.

Something’s missing in journalism today. But I’m glad to have been reminded by the writer of the Hardy Boys stories that he and I shared something important in common.

Related: My review of Ghost of the Hardy Boys.

When Journalism Began to Change

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When I read Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger, I was struck with how much his experience at the newspaper tracked with my own experience in corporate communications. The worldwide web and what followed was upending his world at the newspaper at the same time it had begun to change mine – and for the same reasons. We began to deal with it earlier, while The Guardian and other newspapers were affected more quickly, but we were grappling with many of the same issues and at roughly the same time (1995-2015).

I left corporate communications for a time – almost four years. I felt worked to death, spun off, and finally laid off, and I was done. I set up my own consulting firm, and I was focused on two areas of communications – writing speeches and community relations. In late 2003, a friend dared me to apply for the top communications job at St. Louis Public Schools, which I did, thinking I’d never hear anything. I was wrong. They called, I interviewed along with nine others (we were all told to report at the same time and sat in the same room until we were interviewed). I got the job and started work the next morning.

The school district was in crisis. A reform board had been elected, an outside management firm was hired, the district was found to be bankrupt, and underway were layoffs, school closings, and staff restructurings. The old communications department had been 13 people. The new one was me and one-half of another person, and we shared a secretary with another group. 

I’ve never had a job like that one. On my first day of work, I was filling out papers in HR when I was told the news media were waiting for a statement. The teachers were having a sick-out to protest changes in sick-leave policy. I did five media interviews that day, three of them on camera. One of the reporters laughed when she saw me. “We heard they’d hired you. Welcome to St. Louis Public Schools.”

For the next eight months, there wasn’t a single day when I didn’t give a media interview. I was followed home at night by reporters. I was tracked down at a car dealership on a Saturday when I was having my car serviced. Sometimes it was national media calling and doing interviews by phone. I lived, breathed, and dreamed journalists and journalism. And sometimes the news happened right next to me, like when a school board member drenched my boss with a pitcher of water or people in the aisle next to where I was sitting were arrested at a school board meeting. A good meeting, my boss told me, was one where fewer than three people were arrested.

It was a crazy and rough-and-tumble experience, but I was dealing with journalism as I’d always known it, as I was trained in it, and as I had experienced it in corporate communications. A bit more intense, to be sure, but I recognized people who saw their jobs as getting the news and telling the story. 

By the time I returned to corporate communications in 2004, something had fundamentally changed, and especially with national media. I was working in a narrowly defined area, communications for so-called “legacy” assets. A spinoff from seven years before had declared bankruptcy, and the company had regained responsibility for all of the issues that had been spun off with the bankrupt company. I was hired because I had the background for it.

Generally, the reporters I dealt with specialized in business or environmental issues, or they were local media in various locations. I was in familiar territory, and the journalists were familiar. But with the company’s main line of business, the journalists were anything but familiar, and the people involved in media relations were going crazy.

Simply put, reporters were casting news stories in a broader context of opinion. It wasn’t all thinly disguised editorials masquerading as news stories, but it was close. And it wasn’t all reporters, but it was a few key ones. I’d sit in staff meetings, listening to the problems. And it wasn’t simply a case of “PR people always dislike reporters and vice versa” kind of problems. I read the stories, and I could easily see that the problem was serious. The media relations people had tried everything – from uninviting the reporters to events to traveling to meet with the reporters’ bosses. Nothing had worked. 

At one staff meeting, after yet another example of what should have been a balanced story had been turned into a disaster, I offered a suggestion. “We have a web site. You’re going to have to critique the story and publish the critique on the web site, showing exactly what’s happening.”

By the looks I received, they must have thought I’d landed from Mars. You didn’t do that with reporters. It would make it worse. They would hate you and get even. That was not a solution, and no one had ever done that before. “You don’t get into a spitting war with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

“Embarrassment at doing a shoddy job is the only thing I know you can do that might work,” I said. “Seriously, what’s the downside?”

My advice was not accepted. The problems continued. For years. Until the day a worse-than-usual outrageous story was published, inventing “news” out of whole cloth. It was all bogus. It was so bad that a major journalism school called out two reporters for what they had done. But only people following journalism had seen it.

By that time, one of my responsibilities included the company’s blog. We often published links to stories about the company. Without asking permission, I published the link to the journalism school’s statement, without comment, and lots of people saw it, including people inside the company. The offending reporters were pulled by their editors from covering the company for six months. 

Today, we have a phrase for the problem, and it is a serious problem. Many people will tell you that our national media no longer report the news, but instead maintain, promote, and defend the narrative (a post-modern concept if there ever was one), whatever the narrative happens to be. And it’s exacerbated by social media. 

How all of this might have started is unknown. A lot of things fused together – post-modernism, fundamental changes in university academics, the growing political divide in the United States, and more. The narrative is not an active conspiracy of publishers, editors, and reporters colluding to report the news in a certain way. It would likely be easier to deal with if it was a conspiracy. Instead, it’s group think, group think shared by many of the nation’s elites, and it’s killing journalism. And the rest of us

Related:

How Email Started a Revolution

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

Top photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Lower photograph by Absolut Vision via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Rise of News Deserts

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In 1970, Congress passed legislation to create the Newspaper Preservation Act. The act exempted “joint operating agreements” (JOAs) from antitrust law, and in effect allowed two competing newspapers to share the same business operations – printing presses, buildings, advertising operations, distribution methods – as long as the news operations remained separate and competitive. It was touted as a way to preserve competition between newspapers, especially in cities with two (or more) newspapers. The legislation had been introduced after the Supreme Court found a joint operating agreement in Tucson, Arizona, to be a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. 

The intention was (seemingly) laudable – preserve newspaper competition. What followed was very different from the stated intention. Other forces were at work. The economic foundation of traditional journalism was changing rather profoundly, and this was in the days before the internet. Joint operating agreements proliferated across the United States; the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat operated under one. But St. Louis couldn’t support two newspapers, and eventually the Globe-Democrat, after being sold, shut down in 1986. 

One newspaper in a JOA closing operations became almost normal. Looking back, people who’ve studied what happened have raised the question of who benefitted from the JOAs and the closing of newspapers. The answer is no surprise; it was the big newspaper chains. 

Independent newspapers have become an increasingly rare enterprise. In practice, what happens is that news takes on a sameness, with the same national stories replicated across the landscape, and local news diminished. The internet didn’t cause the development, but it certainly advanced it. I can remember the shock of seeing the Shreveport, Louisiana Times sounding exactly like what you’d find in St. Louis, Detroit, or anywhere else – the same wire service stories, the same columnists, the same editorial slant. Here is St. Louis, even book reviews and movie reviews are purchased from syndicates. 

The upshot is that local news, and issues of local importance, get short shrift. The term “news desert” has come to be applied to the death of weekly and community newspapers, but it has equal application to the subject of local news as well. (Few realize this, but the pages and the headlines for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, now owned by Lee Enterprises, are assembled in another city.) I suppose we should feel grateful that it’s still in the United States; it could be China. Lee, headquartered in Davenport, Iowa, publishes some 75 newspapers and touts its commitment to local news. 

When journalists talk about news deserts, they are usually referring to the widespread decline of weekly newspapers in the United States. In the past 15 years, some 20 percent of weekly and community newspapers have disappeared, according to The New York Times. Thousands of communities across the country have no local newspaper. No coverage of local council meetings or school boards. No coverage of local crime. No coverage of local politicians or elections. Where newspapers have managed to survive, they resemble shadows of their former selves. 

This is true even of many newspapers in cities like New Orleans, St. Louis, and elsewhere. Not that long ago, the St. Louis region had two major newspapers, a chain of suburban journals, and a host of community newspapers. Now it’s one newspaper, owned by a chain and usually dominated by national news. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat closed; the Suburban Journals were bought by the Post-Dispatch, their function officially “incorporated” but in practice eliminated.

We still have local television news, but TV news can’t do what newspapers do, and that’s to report in depth and detail. TV news focuses on what grabs attention – like crime, car wrecks, and the weather. And for TV news to cover something as mundane as a zoning change isn’t going to happen, no matter how important that change might be to a group of residents.

News deserts are of two kinds – the disappearance of newspapers in countless communities, and the disappearance of local news in what newspapers have survived. I can still find local news in the t. Louis Post-Dispatch, but more often than not I find a lot more stories from elsewhere, produced by the Associated Press and / or syndicated from the Washington Post.

This “death of the local” is more than a loss of familiar news and community- mindedness. The evidence is beginning to mount that the end of local news is contributing significantly to political polarization in the United States. We’ll look at that next week.

Related: A Conversation about Journalism.

Top photograph by Cason Asher via Unsplash. Used with permission.