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DON’T STOP THE PRESSES
Smithsonian magazine recently ran a
wonderful archive photo of the city room at
the old afternoon newspaper the New York
Joumal-American, circa 1950. It's a great shot
that beautifully captures the taut energy of
newspapers at the time. Rewrite men pound
ing at their typewriters, sleeves rolled up
and cigarettes dangling from their mouths.
Copyboys rushing furiously around the room.
The city editor working the phones. All of
them working cheek-to-jowl to find the lede,
break the story, get one more edition on the
street before the city's workforce heads for
the trains. It's a glorious memento of the days
when the daily newspaper was king.
I found the photo on Smithsonian's website
and linked it to my Facebook page. And that,
Alanis, is irony.
Granted, what I do hardly qualifies as
"news," "reporting" or "writing," but I'm
proud to be even peripherally connected to
print journalism, and it's a real heartbreaker
to watch the old bastions of newsprint fell like
dominoes in the face of diminishing ad rev
enue and the rise of the Internet. Not only is
old-school journalism done with a laptop and
a smartphone now, but the very model of what
constitutes a news source has changed. Now
all you need to be a reporter is a blog, and all
you need to be a photographer is Photoshop.
News outlets used to send their people out to
pound the pavement; now anyone can email in
a story or an image and get a free T-shirt. This
is an inevitable development, I suppose—
news travels fester than papers can cover and
everyone has web access, so it only makes
sense—but it's still a damn shame.
The crumbling edifice of print journalism
is the tragedy at the heart of Pete Hamill's
excellent new novel Tabloid City (Little
Brown, 2011). Framed in the span of 24 hours,
from midnight to midnight it follows the final
day of the New York World, last of the great
afternoon tabloids, on its way to going elec
tronic. From tnere, it ripples out into the lives
of the paper's old workhorses, to the horrific
details of the paper's last great story and to
the city itself. Hamill's novel is a love song to
the great newspapers and to New York, and it
is beautifully sung.
The novel is set up as a series of revolv
ing vignettes following a host of characters
as they make their way through the city and
a very bad winter day. Sam Briscoe, editor of
the World and a newspaper veteran, receives
an ominous memo from the publisher and the
news that socialite Cynthia Harding, the love
of the last part of his life, and her secretary
have been brutally murdered.
Ever the newspaperman,
Briscoe swallows his grief
and sends a young reporter
to cover the story, and
his best writer to man the
phones. Meanwhile, the sec
retary's husband, a New York
cop, scours the city looking
for the man he knows did
it. An aging, almost-blind
artist who knew Cynthia
marks the end of her era.
A creepy ex-Wortd reporter
gleefully reports the tragedy
on his blog. A crippled Iraq
vet wheels his way through
the city looking for payback
with a long list of names.
An investment banker leaves
his mistress and flees, the
Bulgarian mob on his heels.
An angry young black Muslim
stalks the streets on a mur
derous, misguided mission.
Needless to say, this is
nothing like that show with
Sarah Jessica Parker, "Vanilla
Sex with White Millionaires
within a Ten-Block Radius
of Central Park West" Nor is
it strictly a thriller, though
Hamill's crime story is tight
and suspenseful. What Hamill
has done is construct a mas
terful novel around glimpses
into the lives of his characters. New (and
often not-so-new) writers often fell into the
trap of over-plotting and under-characterizing,
when the rock-bottom truth of good fiction is
that when you have interesting characters in
an interesting setting, plots inevitably write
themselves. Tabloid City is a virtual master's
course in characterization. Hamill utilizes over
a dozen characters and draws such compelling
portraits of all of them that we come to know
them, and therefore care for them, and all of
the tension of the novel is derived from our
compassion. Furthermore, he has set these
people in a city he loves so deeply that his
adoration for even its ugliest comers comes
out. New York is every bit as much a character
in the novel as Sam Briscoe and his newspa
per, which is as it should be.
Pete Hamill has written the best book I've
read so far this year, and the next six months
are going to be filled with contenders who!!
have to fight hard to top it. Tabloid City is'
filled to the brim with great characters, won
derful writing and a reverence for the heady
days of print so strong you'll want to start
buying newspapers again.
*
John G. Nettles
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