One of the
first indicators that told me the newspaper business was going irretrievably
downhill came when I attended a ten-day seminar for editors and managing
editors at the American Press Institute, located back then, in 1987, in Reston,
VA. The aha! moment came during the session on lifestyle sections.
The seminar
leader, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, had sent us questionnaires to
fill out beforehand. One of the questions was, “Does your newspaper run a
gossip column?” I said we didn’t.
Imagine,
then, my surprise, when the session got under way and the chap produced samples
from the papers present of what he called gossip columns. They were, without
exception, the columns in which we printed the boring stuff people wanted us to
print (“John Smith was named to the advisory board of the Heart Assn.”). It was
what we printed to get people off our backs so we could cover the real news.
Planet
earth to instructor: If people WANT you to print something, it is, by
definition, NOT gossip.
You Could Look It Up
Webster’s,
by the way, backs me up on this, its first definition referring to “personal or
sensational facts.” Call me jaded, but Smith’s affiliation with the heart
association does not seem personal or sensational in any way.
Gossip is
Walter Winchell asking who was the tycoon making woo-woo with a chorus girl at
the Stork Club Thursday night. Gossip is Herb Caen reporting that the prominent
political figure who just died unexpectedly was a case of mistress’s nightmare:
a fatal heart attack during the height of passion. That’s what I’m talking
about!
Participating
in gossip, either as a teller or a listener, is supposed to be a vice, even a
sin, which it certainly wouldn’t be if the gossip consisted of Smith’s
appointment to the heart association board. I have my doubts about the sin
part. To me, gossip is simply human, and I would hope a just and merciful God
would see it that way.
Really,
it’s just a sign of interest in people and a grasp of what they really are.
Samuel Johnson once said that a man who is tired of London is tired of life.
You could substitute “gossip” for “London” in that sentence and it would be
just as true.
A Small-Town Pastime
Gossip is
frequently connected with small towns, and in those places no sentient human
being can be under any illusions about the probity of his or her fellow citizens.
That may be why Americans simultaneously romanticize small towns as being virtuous,
while fleeing them in droves for the past 120 years.
In my
second Quill Gordon mystery novel, the characters are cooped up in a remote
fishing lodge and housebound by rain. Gordon and his sidekick spend a fair
amount of time gossiping about the other guests, and the other guests were no
doubt doing the same about them. Gordon’s sidekick actually serves as sort of a
Greek chorus, making comment on the action.
The third
book, now in the outline stage, will be taking a close look at the community
structure of the town where the story takes place. Will there be gossip about
the inhabitants? You bet your sweet bippy there will. It is, after all, a
murder mystery, and most people get murdered for a reason. You would have to
spend a lot of time reading newspapers to find a case where the reason for the
crime was that the victim won the coveted spot on the Heart Assn. advisory
board, and the killer was mad with jealousy.
