I never got very far in my career in journalism. I got as far as a Gannett daily in Palm Springs and a then-indy Riverside Press Enterprise, Calif (but that was when I went to the dark side of computer tech, because bucks).
Imagine, if you will, that you entered a field of study or skill, and watched it devolve. Let’s say you were an eager biologist, and witnessed the profession reverting to Aristotelian notions of mice “growing” from dung heaps. Or say you became a fine wood maker, sanding to 1400 grit, only to see hacked pieces of wood passed off as art. Or an astronomer, to witness your field re-adopt an Earth-centric cosmology based on Ptolemy. What would you think if you were a nurse or doctor, and realized that the medical field later thought that bleeding a patient out was a good idea? Or say you were a VW mechanic, specializing in the Bugs of the 1960s-1970s, only to find out as you got started that popping off the No. 3 cylinder spark wire was cool, and that sand in the carb was awesome.
Yeah, well, the few of us who recall the days, we’re going to be a bit cranky on the matter. Show me one nurse who wouldn’t be livid about rusty needles. Show me the mechanic who would throw a wrench over sending a car out without oil.
I spent hard years for a degree, put in dues year-after-year in shitholes, faced down mofos who poisoned people, and publishers who fucked me … because it was the greatest job in the world at near bullshit wages. It was fun. It was a young man’s sport. You could look the local powerful in the eye, and even though you were poor, you had ink in your veins, and baby, just answer the question.
To this day, me and my ex (we be pals) will sometimes yabber about the days of paste-up and the copy desk. It’s how we met, me on the A section, especially the A-2, and she taking my page markup lined oh so lovingly … oh where was I? Right. Pica poles. You know you can use those copy editor pica poles as a Slim Jim? I’ll bet you think journos back then used them to steal cars. Please. We used them to rescue damsels in distress. We ran into brush fires. We defied the law. One of us might have solved a crime. All at minimum wage with a fucking degree.
What did I accomplish? Not much by big city standards, I got a small city to stop a slumlord from evicting old people into the streets. I stopped the city of Paramount from building a wonderful resort on top of a toxic waste site. I gave shit to a high school principal who needed to be taken down a rung.
THAT was investigative journalism. That was the shit.
The most money I ever made was writing tech articles for Toyota. It seemed that the worse I did, the more I was paid. At one time when I was real poor, I agreed to write masters papers for foreign students. You think I have a B.A.? I have an M.A. in several fields. I even wrote a pro forma to take over the local newspaper industry. For nothing. I recently finished a 7-year project on my sci-fi novel; it went nowhere, either because I can’t write or failed at character development. But I said to Mom: “It doesn’t matter. I became wiser in the writing.”
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I began in journalism because of Richard Nixon, or rather David Halberstam’s book “All The President’s Men.” That and the subsequent movie launched God knows how many of us fuckers upon unsuspecting city halls. Gawd were we naive.
As usual, born too late or too early.
I was in high school when investigative journalism got cool. It fell on me by accident. I was in 11th grade, cajoled into writing screeds on the campus newspaper’s op-ed pages. The journo teacher and two colleagues got a bit tired of my opinions, or something. And so Ms. Morris, with Dana and Steve hanging about, moves from a conversation about what Robert Plant meant in a Led Zeppelin song to wft? about why the school vice principal up and demoted himself one rung up from janitor.
At this time I realized that : 1) Ms. Morris was a sensual woman in her early 20s, 2) that I have not paid close attention to Rock lyrics, 3) that the school administration’s explanation about the vice principal was full of shit.
Ms. Morris actually goaded my then-complacent mind with a challenge. She said that she hadn’t been “called onto the carpet” for a while, and that I should not worry about “stirring shit up.” Fine, I said, still emerging from my cocoon. A second later I realized that Ms. Morris had asked me to be a man. I mean journalist. Uh. Must prove myself. Got it. On the mofo.
Long story short, Ms. Morris regretted asking me to get her called onto the carpet. My father was threatened, my other teachers were harassed, my car’s coil was taken, the principal got way too snippy, and he went that way after I knifed him, in the literary sense, on the last day of school. Because he got me to stand down on the story. So I put in a piece in the last edition of the 1977 Panther, the only edition the parents read, in the top of the “Students’ Wills.” I willed to the principal the “tapes involving the administration cover-up.” Yeah, snap. He almost slugged me at the grad ceremony.
Look, once upon a time there was this profession, and you started at the bottom. But the field was great. Hell, it went back to Gutenberg.
My profession is in ruins, and it sure as shit started going downhill before anymore heard the phrase “World Wide Web.” Upper management thought the best way to shore up the leaking damn was to slap on more shellack. More graphics. More sparklies.
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This story ends well for me. Not so much for the industry.
I have developed serious skills that translated well into the Internet Age. I built my own little niche of being a middleman and expert in products I sell … because the manufacturers failed the basic business model of … yeah who cares? I cared. People care. I work maybe 4 hours a day. From home. No one owns me. What I miss is being part of a once-legendary industry. I hear we used to make steel, also.