October 1, 2020 Fifty Years Ago Today, I Earned My First Paid Byline. Made
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October 1, 2020 Fifty years ago today, I earned my first paid byline. Made $10. But it might as well have been a million. I had been tapped—well, I was probably the only kid to ask—to cover the Avengers of East Greenwich High School for the too-grandly-named Rhode Island Pendulum (the paper actually only covered East Greenwich, a town of about 10,000 on the western shore of Narragansett Bay). I began my reporting career at that 4,000-subscriber weekly newspaper, and ended it at a 4 million-subscriber weekly newsmagazine. In between were more than 40 years of great stories, great people (some morons, too) and great memories. This stream-of-consciousness is simply one reporter’s take on the fate of his crumbling business as seen atop a half-century’s worth of notebooks. I started out by sitting in front of a convoy of clackety- clack manual typewriters. A much quieter ECRM CRT word processor. Followed by a primitive TI 700 computer, complete with that unspooling roll of thermal paper. Then a TeleRam Portabubble, followed by a Radio Shack TRS (“Trash,” to its fans) 80, to some Toshiba and other Stone Age machines, before landing behind a Mac 25 years ago, upon which, several Apple generations later, this is being typed (I’m sure there’s a couple of technological flashes-in- the-platen I’ve missed, and thankfully forgotten). From Rhode Island to Pontiac, Michigan, to Washington, D.C., in 1979, for the Fort Worth Star- Telegram. Then it was on to the glorious Knight- Ridder D.C. bureau in 1986 (writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press, the San Jose Mercury-News and two dozen others K-R papers, along with 200 more, including the Washington Post, which took the Knight-Ridder wire), to Time magazine in 1994. After 23 years at Time, I’ve been writing about U.S. national security—my bread and butter for four decades—for the Project on Government Oversight since 2017. We’re an intrepid band of nonpartisan, nonprofit do- gooders, dedicated to getting more bang for every taxpayer’s buck in all nooks and crannies of the federal government. It has been quite a ride. From town council meetings in a small New England burg to war councils in Afghanistan and Iraq. Chasing down police brutality in a small town, overtime abuse in a big county, and death-penalty cases before the Supreme Court. Skydiving over Massachusetts and tractor-pulling down Michigan’s Silverdome gridiron. Spending time with green cops, and Green Berets. Flights, so many flights, including memorable ones aboard an F-16 fighter and Air Force One. There was also an older Air Force One, Tail No. 26000, which ferried President Kennedy’s body back from Dallas in an all-bronze casket that was later buried, empty, at sea. My colleagues and I sat in that same compartment 30 years later, when it was reserved for reporters flying with U.S. defense secretaries. Yeah, kinda creepy. Even more so than staying in Fort Worth’s Hyatt (now Hilton), which was where JFK spent his final night when it was known as the Hotel Texas (yes, hotels change owners just about as often as newspapers). Electrifying nights, in and out of newsrooms, reporting on wars and elections. Strapped into UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook choppers crisscrossing Afghanistan, the Balkans and Iraq. We hugged the ground as we flew up and down mountains, and screamed at palm-tree height across deserts, to reduce our chances of being shot down. Midair refueling aboard a windowless E-4B doomsday plane—a flying command post for waging nuclear war—far above the Pacific in the middle of a 21-hour non-stop flight. Time spent watching the America’s Cup races off Newport, R.I., and then watching a supertanker run into an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf from the nearby bridge of a U.S. Navy cruiser pledged to protect her. Sailing the Pacific with the first woman to command a U.S. Navy warship. Rides with cops and firemen along local streets, followed by rides in combat vehicles in war zones around the world. An MC-130 Combat Talon special-ops warplane streaking, lights out, through the Afghan night. The dim red lights inside brought back memories of darkroom days. That was when Tri-X film ruled front pages of newspapers around the world, before digital photography alt-control-deleted darkrooms forever. It’s funny. When reporters get together to reminisce, and commiserate, they often tend to recall the stories behind the stories, more than the stories themselves. And such tales have grown increasingly poignant in recent years as what many of us think of the golden age of journalism rides off—has been driven off?—into the sunset. I became a reporter because I liked being the first to know stuff, and sharing that stuff with others. I guess Watergate was a magnet that inexorably drew me to the nation’s capital, although I didn’t realize it when it was happening. One of my lucky breaks was that I rarely covered politics. The first half of my career was when printing news on paper was the same thing as printing U.S. currency. The second half was watching the same industry stumble, falter and fall into the crumpled, rusty heap it is today, and being sold for scrap. This isn’t a lament for what was. Rather it’s an acknowledgment of what has happened since the collapse of the news business, with all of its pettifog bickering about rules and sources. There’s a direct link between that and the resulting collateral damage inflicted on our country. Nowhere was that more evident than in Tuesday night’s disheartening debut debate between President Trump and Joe Biden. The World Wide Web has become the World Wide Wedge. It’s no longer a Central Bank of knowledge, but a centrifuge tearing Americans apart, pulling them into one warring camp or the other. Yet all evidence shows that most of us Americans are centrists. We are immune to the screeds. So we tune them out. And that gives extremists all the leverage. Taking in a day’s worth of news used to be an adventure. Now it’s the Bataan death march. All those above-mentioned publications where I once worked are mere shells of their former selves. And that may be unfair to mollusks. None inhabits the building it did when I worked there. Herds of metal vending boxes peddling fat papers for a dime or two bits on street corners across America have been replaced with tatty plastic knockoffs, with skimpy freebies on offer. When I first rode D.C.’s Metro subway in 1979 to work at the National Press Building downtown, more than half the passengers had their arms spread wide reading broadsheet newspapers (with a few aficionados practicing the “Brooklyn fold” that sliced the paper’s pages into long, narrow strips by folding them in half the long way, making them easier to handle in tight quarters). There were a dozen or more Washington Post vending boxes at my subway stop; today there is none. By the time I stopped my daily subway rides in 2017, I’d be lucky to find one or two passengers reading papers in my railcar. Trying to navigate the news on a smart phone is not the same. The serendipity factor— stumbling across a story that blows you away, or simply tickles the unknown—has evaporated. The Internet changed everything. The established U.S. press failed to adapt. And, to date, so has the rest of the country. Almost overnight, column inches became column lightyears, with a bottomless news hole to fill. And as reporters struggled to fill this new news hell— “but let’s wait until after the paper’s hit the street tomorrow morning before we post it online”—all kinds of reporters, from charlatans to champions, rushed in to sate the beast. After trying to keep pace by giving away its news for free, newspapers tried to buy back their business model by building paywalls. It was a last-ditch effort after selling eyeballs to digital advertisers came a cropper. But it was too late. There can be no license or test to become a reporter in America. That is the blessing, and the curse, of the First Amendment. Amid a tidal wave of news, responsibility for content’s content has shifted from producers to consumers. And boy, have we consumers failed. We have reverted to childhood, devouring the ice-cream treats that cotton-candy to our political views, while pushing aside the bacon-less Brussels sprouts a well-informed citizenry requires. Mine has been a grand ride, and for that I am grateful. But it has also been distressing, as technology has upended the business model that I was lucky enough to climb aboard during the print-news industry’s golden years. Now that I am in my own golden years (67, thanks for asking), I look back at bittersweet memories wrought by that technology, as much as by publishing pooh-bahs who couldn’t find a pica pole if it were shoved up their nostril. Right out of college in 1975, I returned to East Greenwich, that small Rhode Island town where I’d grown up, to work on the Pendulum. I’d type my stories on a manual typewriter, where I’d routinely blacken my fingertips trying to change the ribbon.