There’s hardly anything more useless, more dated, more past tense than yesterday’s newspaper.
If you have a copy of a newspaper that’s, say, 100 years old, that’s different. It’s a keepsake. I’ve got a framed front page on my office wall at home from 1945 of FDR’s funeral. I’ve got the Broncos’ first Super Bowl win, the McKinley assassination in a paper my mother found at a flea market, a long-ago photo from my hometown paper of my sister and me playing baseball on a chilly February day.
There are boxes piled high in my garage — a fire hazard, I’m sure — full of pre-digital yellowing clips of stories I wrote, stories that I rarely look at anymore but that I can’t quite seem to throw away.
For a writer, someone said, seeing your words in print is nothing less than proof you had been alive.
But yesterday’s paper is just prologue for today’s paper, news to be updated, more thoroughly reported, better thought out or, just as likely, discarded in favor of newer news, of Brandon Marshall’s testimony, of a school shooter’s demons, of health care reform in limbo. In the Internet age, the news can be obsolete before it hits your porch.
If I sound a little maudlin, I apologize. It is not a good day. As I write this, it was exactly a year ago that my old newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, was pronounced dead at age 149, as old as Denver itself.
In the obits, you could read the romantic story of the Rocky’s beginnings, how it beat the competition to become the state’s first paper by 20 minutes. Being first mattered then. With one paper in town, it still matters, but maybe a little less.
There was a party of Rocky people Saturday night, and I’m sure, between adult beverages, we’ll have talked fondly, and not so fondly, of the old times. For me, though, the real reminder of the Rocky — and what we’ve lost — came a few days ago with the shooting at Deer Creek and its echoes of Columbine, and the memory of the awful adrenaline that leads a reporter toward the storm and not away from it.
In school shootings, as in earthquakes or tsunamis, you get to the scene as quickly as possible, then talk to the witnesses, the crying students, the victims’ families, and, with luck, the heroes. Finally, you work furiously to bring the scene to the reader before deadline.
Janet Malcolm famously wrote that all reporters are seducers, in search only of the best story. She’s right, but there is merit to getting the story, merit to finding something like the truth, merit to staying with the story, as at Columbine.
As I got to Deer Creek, a cop at the scene gave me a tip. When I thanked him, I introduced myself as Mike Littwin from The Denver Post. He said he knew. “I used to read you in the Rocky,” he said.
It makes little sense now to lament the days of two papers and how competition makes both better and how much news goes unreported — not when the real issue in many cities is whether one paper will survive.
I read a piece recently by a New York publisher who hoped that real books — bound books, books that fill a bookshelf — will survive in the Kindle era. It’s no scoop that newspapers are, to put it kindly, at a crossroads. I’ve worked for six. Two are gone; three, including The Post’s corporate parent, are in some form of bankruptcy; and one was withdrawn from the market when it couldn’t find a buyer.
But here’s something comforting: An overwhelming percentage of Rocky subscribers now subscribe to The Post, a tribute, I guess, to both papers. There are people, over 300,000 Post subscribers, who still want a newspaper in newspaper form.
Put it down to the 100-year Post-Rocky war, the tabloid vs. the broadsheet, Woody vs. Krieger (now teammates), the fierce loyalty among readers to two long-standing brands. I remember when Chuck Green was at The Post, and he basically, if kiddingly, challenged me to a fight in print. It was all part of the romance that came with the rivalry that is now gone.
Last week, a woman brought her niece to interview me for a school project. She was surprised, she said, by how quiet the newsroom was.
It’s true. The modern newsroom doesn’t look like the one in the movies. No copy boys (or girls). No composing room where a cub reporter would get his hand slapped for daring to touch the hot type. No (well, few) reporters with a whiskey bottle hidden in a desk drawer. No banging typewriters. No ringing teletypes.
I wanted to tell her what Burt Lancaster said in the movie “Atlantic City” when he was looking out at the ocean: You shoulda seen it in the old days.
I got my first newspaper job at age 16. You could get newspaper jobs then. Now, many of my Rocky friends are still out of work a year later. They struggle with more than nostalgia. Theirs is a story that millions of Americans can tell — but a story that only a few know how to bring to print. There’s a brilliant magazine piece in The Atlantic about how long-term unemployment is a societal catastrophe.
It’s a story that needs to be better told, better explained, better understood.
Maybe in tomorrow’s paper.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
