Back on this post, we had a sidebar about the film “State of Play” — Kathryn mentioning that I really should see the original British series, and I will certainly put it in my Netflix queue. As it happens, though, I saw the American film over the weekend, and it was, mediocre.
I’m reminded of it again today because I went by to visit folks at The State, and ran into Sammy Fretwell, and told him I had thought about him over the weekend. That’s because the one detail the filmmakers got right in Russell Crowe’s depiction of a reporter, aside from the fact that he worked on a ridiculously old PC, was his workspace. I would say “desk,” but this was the sort of workspace that has worked itself up into a fortress, with piles of papers, magazines, newspapers, files, publicity packets, all sorts of stuff in unsteady towers of material dating back 10 years and more, stacked on desk, credenza, nearby filing cabinets, and other items of furniture that can no longer be identified.
I saw that and thought, “Sammy!” (And I say this with all respect; Sammy’s a great newspaperman. He’s awesome. This just happens to be a common characteristic of great newspapermen.)
Beyond that, the screenplay was evidently NOT written by anyone who had ever worked at a newspaper. The characters just weren’t right. And they said ridiculous things that only non-journalists would ever say, such as “sell newspapers.” You know how people who want to criticize a paper for a story say the editors just ran it to “sell newspapers?” That’s always a dead giveaway of a clueless layman. I’ve never met a journalist who spoke or thought in terms of “selling newspapers.” Most journalists didn’t care if you stole it, as long as you read it. Selling was the concern of the business side folks (and a poor job they’ve done of it in recent years, huh?). Another real prize bit of dialogue, which you can hear on the above trailer: “The newspapers can slant this any which way they want to…” Who wrote this stuff?
The one really true bit was during the credits, when they show the Big Story that the movie was about going through the production process and onto the presses. They got that just right. I’m guessing that’s not a tribute to the knowledge of the writers. The producers probably just asked a newspaper to produce a page with this story on it, put it on the presses and run the presses. And THIS part got me. I haven’t really felt nostalgic about the lingering death of my industry, but this simple device of putting the camera on the actual physical processes sort of gave me a lump in the throat — the film coming out of the imagesetter, the plate being made, the plate being fitted onto the press… THAT was real.
But nothing else was. Not even the messy desk, as it turns out. When I mentioned it to Sammy, he said I was behind the times. He took me over to his little fortress in the corner, and it was NEAT. He had gotten permission to take three days off from covering the news and spent the time imposing order. It was freaky.
Sort of made me want to go back and make sure the imagesetters, platemakers and presses were still there…
Related Posts
Oh, Brad, all editors want to sell newspapers. They just don’t say so out loud in front of the news staff.
I was this on an airliner on a very dim screen and so — was the whole movie filmed at night?
My desk is ridiculously messy, but not as bad as others. Actually, nationwide, newspaper desks are far neater than they used to be, for two reasons:
* Visits by fire marshalls.
* When you’re riffed and have an hour to clear out, it’s too much stuff to dump in the car. Not to mention the security guards making sure you’re not taking company paper clips.
and maybe more stuff is stored online? I know my desk at my last firm job was a whole lot neater because I could store a lot of stuff online and more easily access statutes and cases and documents there when I needed them.
Man, that’s cold with the one hour to clean the desk out….
You know, Burl may have it right. After all, as a former co-worker informed me on Facebook, I haven’t worked in a newsroom since the end of 1993 — I spent the last 15 years of my newspaper career in the rarefied air of the editorial board. Here’s what that colleague (whose name I’m withholding at his request) told me:
“Please do not quote me on your blog by name about this. But, man, I think you spent too much time on the third floor in the late 90s, early 2000s. Were you around during the [former editor’s name also withheld] era? The explicit reason given to us … back then as to why went to the huge screaming headlines, overabundance of sports … news on a1 was: ‘It moves papers in boxes.’ We did it for the specifically stated reason that big headlines and pictures and Gamecock news above the fold drove single-copy sales higher.
“All that said, at first I was terribly upset about those decisions for the reasons I’m sure you would imagine. But eventually I realized, as old Henry Price told me in copy editing lab back in the early 90s, that the job of a newspaper was to sell papers. If bigger photos and headlines and Gamecock news on a1 meant more people bought the paper and read what I thought was important, then so be it.
“Other than that, I agree with your overall review of State of Play. My favorite un-real moment, however, was when Crowe was writing the huge story at the end and just hit send and walked out. As if he wouldn’t have to sit through 10 freaking edits first.”
There’s no question that over the last 20 years, newsroom executives were forced to be more business-conscious. That’s not a criticism of The State by any means, or a criticism of anybody, really. It’s just the way things were trending in the industry.
I distinctly remember a moment in the mid-80s when I worked at The Jackson Sun in Tennessee. Top executives of our owners (The Des Moines Register and Tribune Co.) were visiting us, and there was an open question-and-answer session. Our managing editor Johnny Malone, an old-school journalist, stood up in the meeting and said to Mike Gartner and the rest of them something along these lines: “I never in my career, until very recently, was told to pay attention to the bottom line — ad sales and circulation figures — but now I hear about that stuff all the time. And I don’t like it; it’s not right.”
This was kind of a shocking moment, because Johnny was no rabble-rouser. He was a good soldier type who often said that whatever he was asked to do, he figured it beat chopping cotton back in Sweet Lips (the actual name of his hometown in rural West Tennessee). But Johnny had had enough, and he stood up and let it be known.
I don’t even remember how the question was answered, but I remember Johnny asking it, and I honor him for it.
In those days, we thought the end of the business was going to be direct mail. Newspapers were resisting advertisers going to inserts rather than ROP (run-of-press ads, the ones on the actual news pages, with news copy wrapped around them), not just because we made more money on ROP, but because if your ad’s in an insert, you can just as easily send it through the mail as via the newspaper. Later, as the business got REALLY bad (and we looked back on the 80s as a golden era), newspapers were glad to get the inserts…
Kathryn, here’s a look at a newspaper under siege, from the “newspaper war” blog I maintained at the time. Note particularly the security guards on 3/9/01. And the only photo in history showing my desk uncluttered.
http://www.pacifichistory.net/public_html/NEWSFILE/NEWSMAR2001.HTML
Wow–that’s really cold.
I do remember hearing about employees at a midsized white-shoe law firm like the one I practiced at during the 80s in Chicago arriving at work one Monday circa 1989 to find the doors locked. The firm had gone under over the weekend. I believe that news was the start of my gut problems. Anyway, I never wondered about how they got their “stuff” out.
A few years before that, my firm had started “billing for paper clips” as I put it–recouping everything it could–copies, faxes, phone calls, and pushing us all to market market market. I learned a lot of valuable skills for later in life, but it was not at all what I had signed on for just a few years before. One of the most gentlemanly rainmaking partners got rightfully outraged at one meeting and pointed out the insulting aspects of sending a company a bill for $25K and tacking on $12.36 for copies and phone calls.
Amazingly, the firm is still thriving.