The Last Good Owners

            A wise old newspaper editor — it may have been Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, but I’m not sure — was once asked by a journalism student if the editor was the key to a good newspaper. He shook his head.

            Nope, he told the kid, the most important person in a good newspaper isn’t the editor, or even the publisher. It’s the owner. Without an owner who’s willing to spend money on news coverage and stand up to threats, no editor, however good, can accomplish much.

            If it was indeed Bradlee who said that, he spoke from experience. His owner was Kay Graham, and she was a great owner. Nothing lasts forever, and the Post is now under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. So far, from what I’ve read, he seems willing to spend money and try different things, but the jury is still out on whether he’ll attain great-owner status.

All in the Family

            Great newspapers have typically been a labor of love for families that had been in the business a long time and regarded the paper as an extension of their identity. I’m thinking here of families like the Grahams of the Post; the Ochs and Sulzbergers of the New York Times; the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times, and the Binghams of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

            And, to be fair, there were always plenty of terrible family-owned newspapers, where the crusading spirit of the founder had long since faded away, and the descendants were content to make no waves and cash the quarterly dividend checks.

            From the 1960s to the 1980s a great many family papers were bought by large chains, which saw their monopoly on a local advertising market as something worth a premium. In a few instances, the chains made the paper better (if for no other reason than it could hardly have gotten worse) by bringing a scintilla of professionalism to it.

            In most cases, though, the chains were content to cut the staff, cut other expenses, and raise advertising and circulation rates to a level that a local owner would have blushed at. The customers might not have liked it, but for years those papers were cash cows generating profit margins of 30-40 percent, sometimes more.

Gone Are The Days

            The Internet killed all that, beginning in the mid 1990s. The newspaper business will never again be a place where you could almost put a chimpanzee in charge of the operation, and still sit back and collect hefty rents from the advertisers and subscribers. The gutting of the old business model, though, has rained on the just and the unjust alike.

            There are a few weekly papers and small-town dailies that are still doing all right, and that have owners who care about the paper and what it means to the community. But of the four owners I mentioned earlier, only the Sulzbergers are still running the paper as a family operation. The Times is the best there is now, but it’s limping along financially.

            A lot of smart people don’t think newspapers will be around much longer, and if something comparable were rising to take their place, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Some day the Times may no longer exist, or will exist without the Sulzbergers, whom I think of as the last good owners, in some greatly diminished form. All I can hope is that it doesn’t happen for a long time, and that I’m not around when it does.

Learning Writing by Reading

            There are several ways of learning to write well, and one of them, certainly, is to learn by reading good writing. My junior high school journalism teacher, Jack McDonald, understood this. He taught us the fundamentals of journalistic style — the five W’s, how to write a lead paragraph, the inverted pyramid — in short order, as we were putting out the student newspaper for one semester only.

            So after the brief instruction, he added, “If you really want to know how to write a good news story, read the front page of the Times every day and do what they do.”

            That would have been early 1965 in Southern California, so he was of course talking about the Los Angeles Times, which, under the direction of Otis Chandler, was rapidly becoming one of America’s best newspapers. Situated in an area that was booming economically and growing rapidly, the Times could spend all the money in the world on its news department and still be spectacularly profitable. And they spent it well, hiring top-notch people who taught and learned from each other, producing a paper that was a joy to read.

Learning from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

            I took his advice and read the front page thoroughly almost every day for the next year, and, by George, I learned how to write a news story. Now that I’ve published a mystery novel and am working on another, I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries by other writers in much the same way I used to read the Times back in junior high. That is, I’m trying to watch what they do and see what I can steal.

            Any aspiring mystery writer who could learn plot from Agatha Christie, voice from Raymond Chandler, and sense of place from Tony Hillerman would certainly have a leg up on the competition. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I’ve been learning something else in my readings. You can pick up a lot of writing pointers from a bad book, too.

            Not too long ago I read a self-published mystery that I felt wasn’t very good. You can find it on Amazon, but you’ll have to do it without my help. Attacking an unknown author is bad form; public attacks should be saved for big-buck authors who are coasting, and if you find this particular author yourself, you might disagree with my assessment.

Not So Good, but Compelling

            In spite of the fact that I concluded early on that the book wouldn’t be very good, I read it all the way to the end. A major reason was that I wanted to break down what was going wrong, if only to avoid doing the same thing in my own writing.

            Part way through the book, I realized that one of the major problems the book had was the author’s use of adjectives. In almost every paragraph, there was an adjective that was wrong in some way: it didn’t need to be there at all; it jarred because it wasn’t descriptive enough or overly descriptive in the wrong way; or it editorialized. After all, if you’ve accurately and specifically described what the villain has done, there’s no need to keep referring to him as “wicked.”

            Strunk and White famously wrote, “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak and inaccurate noun out of a tight place.” Bud O’Brien, one of my mentors at the newspaper, used to say, “The adjective is the enemy of the noun.” Like guns, adjectives are good tools, too often wrongly used. The next time I sit down to write, I will be herding adjectives tenaciously and keeping them on a tight leash.