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March 24, 1998 Humphrey Bogart, move over. We're hiring a new editor for our paper. The successful candidate will be a far cry from the stereotype played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1952 movie "Deadline USA." His chain smoking, whiskey chugging guy who ran a newsroom full of copy Editors has been replaced by a different kind of editor. In Bogart's days, editors wore green eyeshades and yelled "Copy," and a copy boy would run a page of copy to the pneumatic tubes where they shot up to the composing room to be set in lead type on mammoth linotype machines. From there, it would become the next day's paper--the news--tangible, portable and king of the media hill. In today's computer-driven newsroom, the editor won't be concerned with the next day's "paper," because the buzz word these days for what we publish is the "product." Consultants even talk about the number of entry points or elements on the front page. You know them better as photos, stories, and graphics.
That was 45 years ago, however, and we've lost many papers since then. There were seven dailies when I grew up in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, down to three today. Many of the survivors nationwide switched to morning publication after evening papers started dying in droves in the late 60s and early 70s. Fewer people wanted to read a paper with news edited before noon when they got home from work because they could get the fresher news from television's evening news shows. There is an apocryphal story about the change in our profession that goes back to 1965 when Winston Churchill died. Life magazine chartered a 707 jetliner, ripped out the interior, and turned it into an airborne color lab and magazine newsroom. By the time the jet landed in New York after a seven-hour flight from London, film had been processed and edited over the Atlantic, and the magazine was ready to go to the mammoth Donnelly printing plant in Chicago. There was only one problem...millions of people had already watched the funeral on live television, and weren't as interested in seeing Life magazine as they once would have been. There is immense competition when it comes to delivering news and advertising information. What had once been a news monopoly in many cities, is now a part of a big mix. Readers and viewers now chose from radio, network television (which, in turn, is threatened by cable and Satellite television), the Internet, shoppers, the Yellow Pages, and so on. A former editor of the La Crosse Tribune, one of our sister papers, wrote a "white paper" about the state of the profession a few years ago. He urged journalists not to get hung up on how the news is delivered...whether it is by fax, computer, or a traditional bundle of newspaper pages. Our concern, he said, is to make sure that no matter how the news is delivered, we are the ones who keep the franchise of gathering that news. When John Gaps of the Associated Press covered Princess Diana's funeral last summer, he was shooting with a digital camera. His still images could be sent worldwide within minutes of being taken. Photojournalists at some newspapers, including the Orlando Sentinel, are now even shooting still images for the newspaper as well as video for the newspaper's cable television station .
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Mark
Hertzberg
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Contributor
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Behind
the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism |
