The Printer’s Devil

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The other day I bumped into the father of a former newspaper intern.

The intern had been a keeper. She was smart, had the beginnings of the killer instinct that makes great reporters, and even though she was a high school student, was already a passable writer.

She represented the future of newspapering in America and she went to a nearby large university with a decent journalism school (if there are any ones these days).

We chatted about the high cost of college and I asked about the intern.

“She switched her major from journalism to geography,” he said.

Knowing her strong interest in newspapering, I expressed surprise.

“She did some figuring,” he told me. “She thought why should she run up $50,000 in student loans for a $30,000 a year job when she could get a job for $80,000?”

Hers isn’t an isolated example.

I’ve checked. Most of the big journalism schools will graduate 70 to 80 students a year. Most want to get into public relations, “communications” or even entirely different careers. Guess how many want to work for newspapers?

In a given year, if you get five who decide to work for a newspaper, it’s a big year.

And if there’s any journalism schools — and they tend to be even more sensitive to the way things are than CorpsNews — most of them them have shucked journalism from their titles and now refer to themselves as “communications” schools.

Where have all the reporters gone?

When a journalism graduate can make more money flipping hamburgers, greeting customers at ChinaMart or shoving stuff into boxes at distribution centers, you tell me.

Those who do try to be reporters take a vow of poverty — and unlike Dominicans doing their thing for God, they don’t get any gratitude from CorpsNews.

Nearly all small-daily reporters with kids qualify for food stamps. Their health insurance is so shoddy — if they have any at all — their kids will qualify for Medicaid.

Even those at a larger paper will be at the bottom of that city’s pay scale.

I’ve had editors tell me that when they post job vacancies, they’ll get no applications, or if they do, they’re homeless winos who apply for everything.

The day an editor could push out an under-performing reporter and get three or four qualified applications for the job are long gone.

It’s a matter of survival for your paper — and your job as an editor — to keep your reporters happy and at you paper as long as possible.

Long ago, one old reporter told me it took a writer about one million words for a writer to really start producing decent copy. I notice that L. Ron Hubbard, the legendary sci-fi writer and founder of Scientology, said it took two million words.

And reporting is art of the brain. They have to talk to people (and ask questions that people may not want to answer), do some significant research (and that doesn’t necessarily mean Googling it or looking at Wikipedia on the Internet), make complicated decisions on how to organize their stories and knock out reams of coherent copy, all in 30 minutes or less.

Yet stupid but busy newspaper publishers blithely boast about their “revolving door” of reporters, using their talents until they “reach their potential” at larger papers. In the bizarro world of CorpsNews, they’re proud of it.

As reporters leave or don’t sign up in the first place, the quality of the writing in newspapers gets worse.

Worse? Hell, it’s crap.

If you’ve read one of my posts on newspaper readers, you’ll know my answer to why people read newspapers.

Nationally, newspapers are dying. But it’s not because of the Internet, TV, the economy, “people are busy” or (fill in the blank).

Newspapers are dying of stupidity.

They have one thing to offer — writing. These days, what they’re offering is crappy writing.

It’s been my observation whenever the readers are given a constant barrage of crap — local crap or “hyperlocal” crap, it’s still crap — they are becoming less likely to shell out $100 to $150 a year, as the circulation figures show.

Publishers in CorpsNews Bizzaroland are alarmed as people abandon newspapers.

But they won’t deal with the real cause. Instead they try gimmick after gimmick, be it “hyperlocal” news, “news you can use,” or Newspaper Next on The Internet.

The name of the game is cutting costs and the first cut is the newsroom.

According to what I’ve heard, the highest paid reporters in the U.S. work for the National Enquirer.

Guess which newspaper has the highest circulation in the U.S.?

Ironically, at a time when most “mainstream, responsible” newspapers are falling over themselves to follow the latest follies of the Pop Princess du Jour and other celebrity and entertainment chit chat, I’ve noticed the Enquirer has been writing pointed stories about goings-on in the Bush Administration, a topic that CorpsNews has been noticeably missing.

Why does Hollywood give gazillions to Tom Cruise and not the producer of Tom Cruise’s movies?

Why does pro sports teams shovel cash at their stars and overlook all their stars’ pecadillos — short of killing the coach (or a bunch of dogs)?

What kind of professional baseball would you get if you paid the “revenue producers” such as the ticket takers, soda pop sellers and the cotton candy and beer hawkers more than the players on the field — and you made the players stay after the game to pick up all the trash in the grandstands?

What kind of players would you get?

And most importantly, who would pay to watch them play?