About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (June 1, 2011)
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. 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