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Visit to the Old Newsroom: The More Things Change . . .
by Mike Hoyt
Mike Hoyt (mh151@columbia.edu) is CJR's
senior editor. He left The Home News to seek his fortune in 1977.
We're
likely to remember our first high school romance with a golden glow, and we
like to keep it that way. I think of a girl who threw her head back when she
laughed. I hear she's okay, but I don't want to explore too much further, really.
Know what I mean?
My first newspaper glows in memory, too. If you can love an institution I loved that one. We're talking 1974, and this paper has had more than its share of life experiences since then. So it was with a measure of trepidation that I went back for a visit. It's the approach of the century mark, I guess, that has us all warily connecting past and future.
We had typewriters in those days, boys and girls, and glue pots! (cut and paste meant just that). We had wastebaskets full of first drafts. We had great fun.
When a Sunday editor found out that a copy boy wrote poetry under an assumed name, he held a dramatic reading in the newsroom, accompanied by reporters in sunglasses beating wastebaskets like bongos. The kid was cured of bad poetry forever. Largely because the young reporters allied with the veterans, the guild was strong. When the publisher — to solve a political problem — named three managing editors, each with an area of responsibility, we used the union bulletin board to give managing editor-slash-something titles to everybody. The obit writer became managing editor/death.
The paper was The Home News, which covered a swath through the center of New Jersey that included rich and poor, industrial and suburban. It was owned by an exceedingly decent man named Hugh Boyd who liked running a solid and aggressive local paper. A carload of us twenty-somethings, in Woodward and Bernstein corduroy, were hired around the same time. We were not so good at things like business and education, but we paid attention.
I got to play Santa Claus one December and report the experience, how the doubting kids had grilled me on the names of my alleged reindeer. I helped put a crooked land-acquisition director in front of a prosecutor. I heard a doctor tell a cop's family that the officer would survive a bullet in the brain.
We got to write about the stuff of life. When an overdosing heroin addict, mistaken for drunk, died in jail on my beat, a detective slipped me a copy of the worn "If-you-find-this" note the man had carried around in his wallet. The addict apologized to his family for his inability to get off junk and noted, in passing, how he'd always wanted to be a policeman. I wrote about a trucker who constructed a huge sign on his flatbed that said "Donna, I'm sorry. I love you. Please marry me." (It worked, too.) I met teamsters union reformers with the guts to risk their jobs and their skulls. As reporters, we learned, you get to meet people at delicate moments in their lives, and you are handed a chance to do them right.
The end of this century has been something of a roller coaster for The Home News. In 1993 Hugh's son Bill sold it to The Asbury Park Press, a larger family-owned daily, and in 1995 it was merged with a Press-owned competitor to become The Home News & Tribune. Then, two years ago Gannett bought both the Press and its siblings, creating a seven-paper cluster in Jersey. The joke goes that Gannett dropped the ampersand and the word The from the masthead in order to save on ink. Gannett has never interfered with editorial or laid anybody off. But it has slowly shrunk staff through attrition to the point where those who care to do a newspaper right are stressed. Since nobody knows just how tight the big chain's embrace will get, there is some fear of the future.
My visit there was brief. I met the editor, Dick Hughes, in his happily disheveled corner office. He did not particularly want to talk about "resource controls," and his de meanor lifted when we began to discuss the paper's work. He gave me a pile of clips to study. They included a generous series on the problems of urban education; a number of well-written local columns; some sophisticated and ferocious health-care reporting. Good stuff.
On the day of my visit the latest of several special sections called Day In The Life had come out. These are all-hands-on-deck efforts, in which a couple of dozen reporters and photographers blanket a town and come back with tales of ordinary living. They were produced and written by people who clearly know the territory. They had a sense of fun and grace about them, as if the journalists who put them together enjoyed the process.
Hughes invited me to call some reporters. I did, and they sounded great to me. They love the work. They complain about the owner. But they say the paper still has a sense of camaraderie and enough veterans to help the young writers keep standards.
On the other end of the phone I could hear laughter and banter, the rising late-afternoon buzz of a newsroom. And not without a pang of memory. It is somebody else's turn to be young and running around New Jersey.
