Four of my radio productions helped make 1971 The Golden Year of Old-Time Radio… if I do say so myself.

High Vaultage by Chris and Jen Sugden (highly recommended; an homage to Terry Pratchett) contains a description of journalism:

The public is a ravenous beast, a slavering animal that cannot be sated. Its jams drool even now, and all you can do is feed it news every day and hope it doesn’t bite your entire arm off as you do.

On my journalism quote page, Ray Ring’s description of journalism: “I can tell you what its like to work for a newspaper.

Imagine a combine, one of those huge threshing machines that eat up a row of wheat like nothing, bearing right down on you. You're running in front of it, all day long, day in and day out, just inches in front of the maw, where steel blades are whirring and clacking and waiting for you to get tired or make one slip.

The only way to keep the combine off you is to throw it something else to rip apart and digest. What you feed it is stories. Words and photos. Ten inches on this, fifteen inches on that, a vertical shot here and a horizontal there, scraps of news and film that go into the maw where they are processed and dumped onto some page to fill the spaces around the ads.

Each story buys you a little time, barely enough to slap together the next story, and the next and the next.

You never get far ahead, you never take a breather, all you do is live on the hustle. Always in a rush, always on deadline, you keep scrambling to feed the combine.

That's what it's like. The only way to break free is with a big story, one you can ride for a while and tear off in pieces so big, the combine has to strain to choke them down.

That buys you a little time. But sooner or later the combine will come chomping after you again, and you better be read to feed it all over again.”
–Ray Ring
from his novel Arizona Kiss

But First, this important massage from the Swedish Prime Minister: Naked Gun opened Friday. I literally laughed at every scene. Please go see it.

More writing making you conscious of my writing about the writing of this column.

When the Internet began, I was so excited. Free of the constraints of paper, Internet articles could be as long or short (almost never short) as they needed to be. As the old saying goes, an article should be like a man’s shorts: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.

That length appears to be 750 words, the length of a N.Y. Times op-ed article. That is the aspirational length, not the prescriptive length of this column each week. It restrains my darker instincts. Just like cheap Hollywood movies; you have to be more creative when you are constrained.

The National Press Corps Described Perfectly. And along the same line,

“Those of us forced to read the London papers sometimes speculate about which is greater: the average British hack's sloth, mendacity, ignorance, obsequiousness, capacity for drink, or aversion to paying for that drink. Smart money tends to split between the latter two.”
–Larry King, an American journalist in London, April, 2002

Also:

Keillor is reported to have said the President had to
"sit and eat fish with a group of people who would regard your downfall as a professional opportunity."
-Garrison Keillor, NPR (from memory by a correspondent)

[Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham (2020) is a counter-factual novel, depicting Hillary’s life if she hadn’t married Bill Clinton. It includes this description of the national press corps that perfectly matches my perception of them, both personally (I have known several) and from stories I have read.]

It really wasn’t that I loathed the press, as was often reported by members of the press; it was that I profoundly distrusted them. They were, for the most part, funny, observant, and intelligent— many had degrees from fancy universities—and I knew they were hardworking because, for much of the time, they literally kept the same schedule I did, attending the same rallies, driving between the same small towns in Iowa or New Hampshire, flying in and out on the same early-morning and late-night flights (though not literally on the same plane—at this point in the campaign, my team still flew on a relatively small Gulfstream, and it wouldn’t be until the general election that, God willing, the travelers would be invited onto my campaign’s 737).

But most political journalists were so childish, so distracted by shiny objects in the forms of gaffes or scoops or arbitrary details they imbued with meaning that simply wasn’t there. The journalists’ desire not to be bored was palpable, but campaigning, like life, was often boring. Thus, in their hunger for novelty, they read shifting alliances and enmities into minor personnel changes, described mindsets they guessed at based on posture or body language, competed with each other for meaningless scraps that they could present as breaking news.

They constructed elaborate narratives based on scant evidence. They also were self-righteous and self-congratulatory; they assumed that, in other fields, they could make salaries many times what they currently earned, but they believed that journalism was a noble calling. And yet, on a day-to-day basis, they were people who fought over electrical outlets, who were simultaneously obsessed with their—and my—campaign weight gains and with the availability of meals and snacks. They shamelessly critiqued my appearance while, in some cases (this was true of both men and women) visibly going days at a time without washing their hair or changing their clothes.

Like children, the journalists wanted to say and write whatever they wanted about me and then for me to be glad to see them, for me to like them. Unlike children, the journalists drank a lot and sometimes had romances with each other.

My mentor Edwin Diamond told me, “Any story worth reporting is worth selling twice… or more.” He called that “slicing the baloney.” Many was the time in my journalism career when I sold a story (lightly rewritten) to two or three publications.

The best example was when I, as a reporter in the business department,  appointed myself the banking reporter of the Oregon Journal (the same way I appointed myself the wine reporter).

While working in the Bank of America public information department, I had gotten to know Geoff Brouillette, the San Francisco bureau chief of the American Banker daily newspaper. When I moved to the Journal, he would pass me story ideas. I would report them, run them in the Journal and then dispatch the result to him, as a side gig. A half century later, I don’t recall how I sent the stories (no fax or Internet in 1978), but he got the stories and I got paid.

Consider this a tip for any freelance writer: sell it twice.

(Thank you Brendan Leonard of Semi-Rad for reminding me of this with update 21 for Patreon supporters)

In my second professional job, at United Press International, writing long was a sin. In those days, newspapers received our news at the rate of 60 wpm on teletype machines. There was no room on the wire for an extra word. Bureau manager Don Davis said to me, “The Bible tells the story of the creation of the world in 800 words. Surely you can do a two-car fatal in 750.”

Who, me? Writing too long? Well yes, for most of my professional career. (see item above, with regard to writing songs too long)

There were a couple of exceptions. I cannot for the life of me remember whether, at The Tech, I called myself a “rotary shit-spewing machine” or whether that sobriquet was planted on me by someone else. One thing I know for sure, it came in handy when a new advertisement came in on production night. The number of news pages was always determined by the number of ad pages. We need to fill a page in the next hour or two. A tabloid newspaper page contains 80 inches of copy, 20 pages double-spaced with one inch margins. I filled the page in 90 minutes. I wrote as fast as I could type.

In the summer of 1973, I was a 20-year-old intern at Portland’s afternoon daily newspaper, the Oregon Journal. The 48-year-old Goodyear Blimp came to town.

The paper ran big pictures of the blimp (free publicity), but wanted a reporter to ride on it and describe the experience (a good story). I had less to do than the real reporters, so they sent me.

That was the day I learned that Goodyear doesn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to take downshots of football games. The blimp exists to reward dealers and their best customers with a unique experience, one whose rarity makes it precious and motivational. Before boarding, I also learned (to my relief) it is filled with helium, not the explosive hydrogen that destroyed the Hindenburg.

That summer I flew in two other hovering aircraft: an extremely noisy helicopter and the quieter but not silent (gas jet) hot-air balloon from which I threw out promotional  packets of the relatively new Lipton Cup Of Soup. I was also taken up in a glider, which creaks and groans and is full of wind noise.

Blimps are noisy when the motors are running. When the motors are cut, there is silence in the drifting blimp that is literally incomparable. It is as close as a human can come to safely flying with their own wings, looking down at the Earth far below. Anyone would be willing to sell a lot of Goodyear tires to gain that experience.

Among the memorable moments of my 30 years in journalism were shaking hands with President Reagan, shaking hands with Jimmy Carter during his campaign, and driving a Boston Green Line train on the Riverside Line at 1 a.m. Still, flying in the Goodyear blimp is right up there on the list.

This year marks a century since the birth of Edwin “I’m Not A Professor” Diamond, the greatest single influence of my life, outside my family and the Usual Gang Of Idiots (inside joke). I don’t have his exact birth date, I just know it was in 1925. So this is his centenary year.

I am proud to say that if you Google “Edwin Diamond Obituary” my tribute to him is the fifth result and the first picture. The crack about “I’m not a professor” was his way of throwing shade on MIT, which refused him tenure (in part) because he didn’t have a Ph.D. As a result of this ill-advised decision, New York University was able to lure him away with tenure and the end of his weekly commute to Cambridge from his home in Manhattan. I presume at NYU he was Edwin “Call Me Professor” Diamond.

He will always be Ed to me. I still think of him regularly, 28 years after his death.