Like many in my generation, I grew up in a print-bred universe of books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, Bibles (in my case the Douay) and especially newspapers. Information was physical. It arrived printed on Bible paper, on the slick waxed stock of schoolbooks, coffee table books and encyclopedias, and plain newsprint. Other news sources were peripheral. There was always the radio, which had matured its own formats by then. But televised news aired locally for 15 minutes around 5:30, and the national feed came on for 30 minutes at 6.
You could do the impossible: except in the case of global crises — Cuba, Suez, JFK’s assassination — you could ignore the news if you wanted. It was easy. “Don’t you read the paper?” was another way of asking someone if he was an ignoramus.
And you could be confident that what was published was sourced, copyedited, proofread, checked and rechecked, then approved by the desk before it ran. If there was an error, the paper would admit so the next day in a small box at the bottom of the front page, a policy that still persists in the better dailies. A small box: the errors were usually few and minor.
My local paper, the Star-Ledger, whose lineage is traceable to the early 19th century and one of three papers I read each morning, is killing its print edition in a few weeks. Up until a decade ago its circulation was healthy, but the smartphone, the internet and lost advertising ended all that. Assurances coming from middle management are what you’d expect from well-meaning apparats who want to keep their jobs. I feel for them since they do so in the face of a culture that no longer can keep up with the news, and mostly couldn’t care less.
Which raises the question, what is the “news” now? If all you want are the bare facts, or some approximate, you usually need not read beyond a headline or the first graph. Need, after all, is measured on a sliding scale. But this, of course, reduces the meaning of “news” to bare information, which means that the bare info has to be more accurate than ever.
Yet the scrum of news feeds now out there has made accuracy an irrelevance, thrown the meaning of a “fact” into question, and you can forget about “style.” Competition among digital platforms has made not accuracy but profitability the goal. Look no further than Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ bloodless spiking of an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris in the name of greater objectivity.
In a way, what’s happened to the daily newspaper is similar to what’s happened to brick and mortar bookstores. Nobody ever leaves a bookstore without buying more than what they came to buy. It’s the same with a newspaper. Read for information and eventually you’ll drift to something in the column opposite and read that, until you are eventually lost in print. You may even begin to read for that elusive lure of all, style. But the whole time you are in control of the flow.
With even the best of digital news sites, you’re continually nagged by reciprocally interrupting ads timed to physically shift your eyes and refocus your attention. Plus, with few exceptions, style doesn’t matter. Most electronic news feeds are produced by people who can’t write or who just lazily cut and paste others’ copy, which seems to be a pre-req to employment. That is, if they’re written by people at all.
Writing for the paper is no longer what my generation considered it — the confluence of the practical (having a job, finding an audience) and the virtuous (performing a public service). Over the decades, and excepting catbox-liner like most tabloids, the style of newspaper writing in America had acquired a particular measure of grace from novelists and the better historians.
The writing was often memorable. So A.J. Liebling and my personal hero Jimmy Breslin have their own volumes in the Library of America. That world — the world of the Herblocks, the Restons, and editors like Ben Bradlee — is mostly gone, a vague, sentimental rumor.
With your bagel in one hand and morning coffee close by, soon you will be reading from a screen measuring six inches diagonally and swiping through an underverse of uncurated gossip and non fact. You won’t have to worry about recycling or, like a woman I once knew, wear gloves to keep the ink off your fingers. You’ll have bigger things to worry about, but you won’t know what they are.
Barbarese is the author of “Inventions on the Brink,” forthcoming from LSU Press this fall.
