'Get to a newspaper'
Two old pros wax about journalism's future
Pete Hamill called into Fred Dicker's Albany-area radio talk show this morning to promote his new novel "North River." Thought all you Gangreeks out there might enjoy what two of the biggest names in Big Apple journalism had to say about blogs, the value of good editing and the future of "the industry."
Dicker: “Pete, let me ask you about contemporary journalism today. I’ve never before in my career (and I’ve been at it – well, I’d hate to admit it – 35 years or so) run into so many young reporters who are pessimistic about the future of print journalism. Widespread sense that newspapers are dying, backed up by the circulation figures. How do you think it’s going?”
Hamill: “It doesn’t look good. But I always remember, Fred, when I went to work on June 1, 1960, at Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post. At the end of the week, one of the old-timers came over. He said, ‘Are you going to start working here?’ I said, ‘I hope so.’ I was on a tryout. He says, ‘This thing won’t even be here in October.’ Here it is 2007. And it’s still there. I’m rooting for all the papers to survive, particularly in New York, because it gave me my live. I want them to survive so that young people might have as much fun as I had, when I was young. Working in papers in those days, there was always some guy who would get drunk and throw a typewriter out a window and walk down the block and go and work for at the Journal American. There were options. The more options the better, not simply for the people who make newspapers, but for the readers. You don’t want every paper to sound like every other paper. And you don’t want a one-newspaper town.”
Dicker: "Which is what most towns have."
Hamill: "Which is what most towns have. The second paper is usually The Times national edition or USA Today or the Wall Street Journal. The more the merrier, obviously. You want a variety of opinions. You want different ways of seeing, stories with different viewpoints on various issues. So, I hope they survive. I think the problem now is, if they dumb them down, the reader will say, ‘this is not much more than I can get on TV. Why do I have to pay money, more money, actually, than ever before? What do I need that for?’"
Dicker: “Or I can read its Web site and not have to buy it or I can look at these blogs. You can take a look at these newspapers blogs. The bloggers seem to me, Pete, to be basically opinionated stenographers, writing basically for shut-ins. I can’t imagine who would spend their time reading these things except a very rarified, small group of people.”
Hamill: “I don’t read them because life is too short. But I advise the young journalist, don’t waste your talent on blogs. Get to a newspaper, no matter how small, where there’s an editor who will look at you copy and say this will be better if you do this. Go somewhere where you learn the craft. Most blogs are therapy. But they’re not journalism. People who write them, except for the professional propaganda blogs, are there for therapy. They’re there so people can feel better about having thrown a rock through a window. But they’re not useful for information most of the time. They’re certainly not good for young writers to fall into the bad habits of an unedited blog. They might professionalize over the next few years, but, so far, that hasn’t happened. And I’m too old to even worry about it.”