Hold the Press: The Inside Story on Newspapers
By John Maxwell Hamilton and George A. Krimsky
Louisiana State University Press,
190 pages, $24.95
John Maxwell Hamilton and George A. Krimsky, both former reporters, dedicate this primer on how a newspaper works to their children–“the new generation of newspaper readers (we hope).” The sentiment is a worthy one because the numbers for newspapers don’t look good. Young people are not developing the newspaper reading habit. The number of dailies has declined (down more than 200 since 1950), and so has the number of cities with two competing papers (down from 73, 50 years ago, to 33 today). Added to the general gloom are all those warnings about on-line newspapers rendering the ink-smudged version obsolete.
To the latter, the authors–one the dean of a journalism school and the other the head of a journalism think tank–reply “nonsense.” They call the newspaper “the most important organizing force for news and information in the world today” and tout it as “the best way to get information to the public on a daily basis.” They’ll get no argument from this reviewer, who considers devouring the morning papers one of life’s pleasures.
“Hold the Press” is a good idea well executed. While news junkies won’t learn much, the other 99 percent of the population will learn a lot. In a text long on anecdote and short on jargon, the authors explain why newspapers are arranged as they are, why so many bylines read “Associated Press,” why newspapers are so heavy with local and domestic news and so light on international news, why so many stories rely on anonymous sources, what sorts of people become reporters, and why so many people tell reporters more than it is in their own interest to tell.
In explaining the difference between off- and on-the-record interviews, they write of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, during Watergate, calling then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who “as much as admitted” that he had authorized wiretaps. Midway through the interview, Kissinger told Woodward that he was not to be quoted–a tactic he regularly and successfully employed when talking to reporters who covered the State Department. Woodward, who did not cover the State Department, refused to allow retroactive restrictions. So Kissinger called the Post’s top editor, Ben Bradlee, and, the authors contend, “The story was held for two days, appearing only after it had been broken by The New York Times.”
The authors also have an interesting take on the Pulitzer Prizes. They quote H.L. Mencken as calling them “imbecilities repeated annually.” Many readers will have had the experience of plunging into a front-page story, usually billed as the first of a five-part series, only to find that it is “jumped” to an inside double spread, thousands upon thousands of words that will be read only by the homebound. Such series, the authors argue, are intended not primarily to inform, but to impress the Pulitzer committee and win the reporter and the newspaper a prize.
They warn the reader never to forget that newspapers are highly profitable businesses, some of which yield profit margins in excess of 15 percent, while, in 1990, the median profit of Fortune 500 industrial companies was 4.1 percent. Not surprisingly, investor Warren Buffett has called the monopoly newspaper “an unregulated tollbooth.” Big profit margins do not necessarily translate into big expenditures on reporting. Most newspapers, the authors report, do not have a single foreign correspondent (it costs about $250,000 a year for each one) but rather rely on the wire services. They can get away with just a few foreign stories a day, many of them about earthquakes and other disasters, because most Americans know little and care less about international affairs–even in these days when the global economy is so much in the news.
Some other nuggets of information: On a typical paper, 19 percent of beat reporters cover sports, 7 percent cover business and 4 percent cover education. USA Today has a policy of placing a photo of at least one woman and one minority on the front page every day. One of the best techniques to coax a subject into talking is for the reporter to be quiet: “People tend to feel uncomfortable unless the conversational void is being filled.”
“Hold the Press” is a good gift for the young person contemplating a degree or a career in journalism. For young people in general, the best gift is the morning paper left on the breakfast table. Any youngster of normal curiosity will eventually start to read it.
