On my early morning runs these days, I can spot a newspaper in the driveway of maybe one house in 20. As an ink-stained wretch who has been attempting to commit journalism for a half-century, that feels like a personal affront.
And now the New York Daily News, which once sold more than two million papers a day, up and fired half its staff.
Hitting even closer to home, those News “layoffs” included 25 of the 34-person sports department. I consider myself a patriot of sports journalism, having practiced the craft since high school and, beginning in 1970, at Long Island’s Newsday.
Furthermore, I have been clinging to the notion that, no matter what, there always will be a demand for newspapers. Radio didn’t kill them. Television didn’t kill them. So, for the past decade, I’ve been teaching a sportswriting course at Hofstra University, on the theory that 21st-Century students can find the same enjoyment I experienced in chronicling the unscripted drama of grand athletic events, which are so often tangled up in community identification. (And politics and big business and considerations of fair play.)
But of course, the Internet happened. Smart phones and iPads and blogs. The Bermuda Triangle of newspapering. Belatedly, I’ve come to fear that old friend Tom Callahan, who has written sports about as beautifully and knowledgably as anyone, had a point when he slyly wondered, “Why not teach something useful—like trolley car driving?”
The world is changing, no?
My first job out of college was at United Press International’s New York City wire service office. We were based in the Daily News building, the Art Deco skyscraper, built during the Depression, with its fabulous lobby dominated by an enormous globe that lent the place—and the business—an almost sacred formality. It somehow reinforced my belief in journalism’s noble status.
Gotham, furthermore, was then a metropolis awash in newspapers. Straphangers devoured the tabloid Daily News and Post on packed subway cars, where standing-room-only necessitated special skills to read the broadsheet New York Times. (Bob Stewart, a senior presence at UPI, schooled me on how to fold the Times, vertically, into quarter pages.)
Soon enough, New York’s Big Three papers became direct competition when I signed on with Newsday, and the Daily News, especially, was a menacing presence because of its vast readership. Any ill-advised show of pride in producing a scoop during my six years of covering the New York Giants was parlayed by a favorite News character, Norm Miller, who would demand sarcastically: “What’s your circulation?” (To which Vinny DiTrani of New Jersey’s Bergen Record would retort, “120 over 80.” But Norm had a point.)
The Daily News was a behemoth, and its sportswriters were minor celebrities, widely known, and so often with a wiseguy whimsy that fit New York so well. Miller, plenty aware of the ephemeral condition of newspaper stories, often referred to the News as “the Daily Fishwapper.” Quickly out with the trash.
Apparently—sadly—the current News owners feel the same way about all the journalistic talent they have tossed aside. Colleagues and former comrades are rightly lamenting how the gutted News has been severely hobbled in its role as political watchdog and voice of the people. Just as devastating, to my mind, is the loss of all those folks who brilliantly dealt with fun-and-games, the crucial diversions from a Real World spinning out of control.
Bob Klapisch, veteran baseball writer now based with the Bergen Record, posted this on Twitter:
“Daily News Customer Service, can I help you?”
“I want to cancel my subscription.”
“May I ask why?”
“You just fired several of my friends.”
“Can I ask what section you read most?”
“Sports.”
“Well, we’re still going to have a great sports section.”
“No you’re not.”
That’s one less newspaper in a driveway.