The Elder Statesman

By Bill Duncan
The View From Here

In the half century since I began my career as a journalist, a few things have changed but I didn’t realize how much it had changed in terminology until a friend, Charles Becherer, gave me a 1929 journalism textbook “Writing for Print,” in which he penned a note: “Maybe you can learn something new?”

Journalism today is much the same as when I started in the 1950s and not much different from the text in Becherer’s book. The one exception I find is that today’s newspaper reporters are better writers. In my era, every story was formulaic- written with the five Ws and one H — who, what, when, where, why and finally, how.

In journalism school it was pounded into us that all these elements had to be written in the lead of the story so that the reader would have a capsule of the story if he read no further than the first paragraph. Today stories are written in a narrative form that is much easier and more pleasant to read.

We were also taught to write for a fourth-grade mind and never use words that would cause the reader to refer to a dictionary. The book emphasized this with a Don Marquis poem:

“I do not work in verse or prose,

I merely lay out words in rows;

The household words that Webster penned,

I lay them end on end.”

Today’s reporters are writing for a better educated reader.

While I will give them a high score for writing skills, I don’t give them a high score for accuracy, but as an old newspaper editor of a bygone era, I don’t entirely lay that blame on the reporter and that is where some of the modern changes in journalism come into play.

My old journalism professor, Lee B. McConnville, explained the importance of spelling a person’s name right: “The average person only gets his name in a newspaper three times in his lifetime. At birth, at marriage and at death. In all three instances, it should be spelled correctly.”

Michael Arrieta-Walden, writing in his column “The Public Editor” in the (Portland) Oregonian, noted: “The most common error we correct … stems from misidentifying a person. And yet it’s probably the most crucial information about a subject we can provide.”

In my day, editors read and checked copy for accuracy before it was sent to the rim — a term today as ancient as I am. I am not talking about the semi-circle desk used in some television news studios with the talking heads reading off TelePrompters. I am talking about the horseshoe-shaped grouping of desks of editors who process copy from reporters in a newspaper office. The rim was eliminated when computer cubicles replaced the traditional newsroom configuration.

Copy editors on the rim checked stories for accuracy as well as a host of other reasons. From the rim, the stories went to the typesetters, then a galley proof was made for the proofreaders.

My newspaper career was spent working on metropolitan newspapers in California. The proofreaders were mostly retired English professors who could spot a split infinitive or a misplaced comma in a flash — not to mention grammar and spelling errors. There were still errors in newspapers, but it seems to me fewer than there are today.

In the 1929 textbook, several chapters emphasized accuracy and fairness with such admonitions as, “get both sides of a story. Don’t manufacture quotes. Don’t exaggerate in order to make the story more interesting.”

The modern newspaper is much different from the ones I experienced as a working reporter. That became obvious recently when I called the local newspaper because I wanted to speak to Gerald Heidrick, a printer I had known for close to 30 years. I asked the phone operator for the “back shop.”

There was a long pause and then she said: “We don’t have a back shop.” That term died along with the Hell Box where discarded type made a distinctive clinking sound as it joined other slugs and leads to await the melting pot.

The methods are different but the profession remains an honorable and vital link to our free society.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470 or via e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com)

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 10:23 am and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.