11 November, 2024 6 6 Comments

The Romance of Journalism

November 11, 2024 By 6 Comments

Jeff Pearlman’s podcast is a love letter to writers.

I have a famous namesake.

Jeff Pearlman spells his last name with an “a” but there have been a few times where we’ve been mistaken for each other.

Jeff and I both write. He successfully, me not so much.

The “other” Jeff is a New York Times bestselling author who has had his work made into an HBO series “Winning Time” which tells the story of the NBA’s “showtime” Lakers. Me, I’ve been on local TV, despite having a face for radio.

Jeff and I know each other. He reached out a few years back when he ran for local office in New York.

I think he wanted to know if I had any left-over campaign signs. Anyway, we struck up a friendship and Jeff interviewed me for his series called “Quaz” (don’t ask me what it means). The Quaz covers a range of people from John Oates (the quiet half of Hall & Oates) and ESPN anchor Linda Cohn (my childhood friend and big sister of a close friend) to business leaders and girlfriends of the Kevin Arnold character on the Wonder Years. Let’s just say it’s an eclectic and fun collection. I’m proud to be a part of the canon. Here’s a link: https://jeffpearlman.com/2016/03/01/jeff-perlman/

Anyway, these days Jeff is doing a lot of things from writing his next bestseller, a bio of Tupac Shakur, to building a Tik Tok following (over 200,000 followers) and hosting a beautiful podcast called “Two Writers Slinging Yang.”

Rarely can you describe a podcast as being beautiful, but “Two Writers Slinging Yang” is a warm tribute to journalism and journalists. What I love about it is that Jeff features those who toil in the trenches. We see plenty of “celebrity” journalists on cable TV and other podcasts, but Jeff shines a spotlight on the journalists who rarely get (nor seek) shout-outs.

Examples include Scott Agness, a beat writer who covers the Indiana Pacers and Indiana Fever and Sarah Leach, a crusading editor of the Holland Sentinel who was wrongly fired by the evil corporate overlords who have put a nail in the coffin of local journalism throughout our land.

Jeff describes “Two Writers” as a labor of love, a chance to celebrate writers he admires.

My favorite recent episode is an interview with a young journalist named Sam Pausman, a writer/photographer for The Wrangell (Alaska) Sentinel. Sam relocated 4,284 miles from Maine to rural Alaska to take his first journalism job for a weekly paper in a town of 2,000 people.

The podcast focuses on Sam’s efforts to connect with people he doesn’t know in a community he doesn’t know in a place far, far from home.

Sam’s an earnest young reporter, dogged and sincere in his desire to learn his beat and serve his readers.

Sam doesn’t own a car, lives over a bar/restaurant and does it all—including schlepping papers and learning to love the local cuisine.

I was swept away by his story, and I related to large parts of it. I too moved (1,321.1 miles) to take a job at a newspaper soon after college. I too worked hard to connect with people I didn’t know in a community I didn’t know.

I also schlepped papers at my first full-time newspaper job from the officers of the Valley News in Vestal N.Y. to the post office after we spent hours putting mailing labels on the front page over pizzas with my co-workers in a musty room in an old school. I never had more fun.

At the time, I felt journalism was a calling. My calling. I’ve since had a few others. But I look back at those old newspaper days with great fondness. I saw myself in Sam and thanks to Jeff Pearlman I got to meet him via Spotify.

I think about my old newspaper days often. I worked in newsrooms brimming with characters. They were smart, creative, sarcastic, funny and tough. They taught me so much.

In the newsroom of the old South Florida Newspaper Network I remember the presidential election of 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected. I worked near two old scribes—Syd Magill and Al Kaufman who had seen it all. If the young reporters said something stupid—as we were prone to do—they corrected us. Syd with a smile and a pat on the back. Al with a cutting remark. I adored them both.

For the life of me, I can’t remember what happened to Syd. I just know that he left the paper before I did. But I do remember the day that Al was laid off, by the same corporate B.S. that Jeff Pearlman often laments on his podcast.

Seeing Al pack up his desk and say goodbye to a career he loved hit all of us hard. Shortly thereafter I decided to leave of my own volition to start my own publication and become an entrepreneur. I wanted to control my own fate, even though being on your own is a lonely, hard and risky choice.

I have no regrets, but more than a few scars. I was a lucky one—it worked out for me. It didn’t for many of my old colleagues, one of whom ended up living in a car in a Boca parking lot. I met him for a cup of coffee one day, having not known about his rough road since we parted years before. He showed up with a broken arm—someone had reached into his car window and tried to rob him. He fought back and broke a bone.

“Jeff,” he said. “I can’t afford to lose what little I have. I have nothing more to lose.”

Those words stung. He offered to sell me his autographed photo of Muhammad Ali. “The Greatest” had come to Deerfield Beach back in the day and I remember when my colleague went out on that assignment. I was jealous, I wanted to meet Ali.

Of course, I didn’t want to buy his prized possession. And he turned down my offer to help. I never saw him again and I don’t know what happened to him, but I think about him—a lot.

If you’ve been in journalism in recent times, you saw the best and the worst of this important but often maligned profession.

My namesake Jeff Pearlman shares it all. He shines a spotlight on the people doing great work and the people who have been bruised by this business.

A guy like Sam Pausman, talented, sincere and courageous deserves success. I hope he finds it. We need journalists. They are not the enemy of the people; they are the shining lights of Democracy.

 

 

 

 

28 November, 2022 4 4 Comments

The Last Newspaper

November 28, 2022 By 4 Comments

Ken Tingley has written a love letter to the local newspaper.

A few weeks back, I wrote about cleaning out a junk drawer and finding an old Delray Times newspaper from 1995.

I worked for that paper for about a decade from 1987 to 1996 when I left to start my own education newspaper.

I’ve been blessed with a lot of interesting and great jobs/roles in my life, but none better than being a reporter for the old South Florida Newspaper Network.

It wasn’t the pay (we made very little money).

It wasn’t the perks. (There were none unless you count free parking).

It was the people and the job itself.

Newsrooms attract funny, smart, talented, creative, and idealistic souls.  It was a joy to work with them in a wide-open office where every day was an adventure.

You get to hear about the interesting stories your colleagues are working on, the colorful characters they are chasing and the “you can’t make this stuff up” things you see when it’s your job to report what’s going on in town.

I know it’s fashionable to bash the press these days. “Fake news” is the latest adorable saying meant to undercut the credibility of the only industry protected by our Constitution. It is protected because a free press is essential to a Democracy.

I’ve been on both sides of the pen so to speak. I spent years as a journalist covering people making news and I’ve been written about, which is far less fun.

I’ve seen amazing reporters and I’ve seen some bad ones, but there’s no doubt in my mind that a free press keeps us a free people.

I’ve been thinking about the role of local newspapers a lot these days.

When I moved to South Florida in 1987, Delray Beach was covered by four newspapers: The Sun-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, The Boca Raton News and the Monday-Thursday Papers (my alma mater and the precursor to the South Florida Newspaper Network). On big stories, the Miami Herald came to town.

You had to work hard not to know what was going on in Boca and Delray.

And the level of coverage spurred civic engagement. More people voted. More people attended Commission meetings (they weren’t at 4 p.m. when anyone who works can’t attend) and more people volunteered because they knew what was going on and when you know what’s happening, you’re more likely to want to be involved.

Everyone knew their city commissioners, county commissioners, school board members and state legislators. They attended charettes and visioning conferences, they showed up to protest or support projects and they relied on the local papers for information. In other words, there was a community  ‘water cooler’ and local reporters competed fiercely for readers, so you saw a lot of “enterprise” reporting not just dry meeting coverage.

In hindsight, it was a golden age. Not only for newspapers but for civic engagement. We never thought it could end.

But it did.

Not with a big crash, but with a slow-motion agonizing fade that saw newspapers shrivel up, or in the case of the Boca News—die. Even the vaunted Monday-Thursday Papers went away.

My friends in community journalism found other careers in public relations, marketing, advertising and sometimes in fields that had nothing to do with writing or communications. One former senior newsroom guy that I knew, ended up living in his car in a Boca Raton parking lot. The last time I saw him, he had his arm broken by someone who tried to rob him while he slept. We met and he was offering to sell me memorabilia from his career. It was a sad and terrible end to what had been a good run.

But as much as the people in the field suffered and were forced to reinvent themselves, the communities they covered suffered as well and continue to pay the price.

Today, there is no water cooler.

We have Facebook which often spreads misinformation, one monthly newspaper that has an odd bent (in my opinion), a few lifestyle magazines, a few newsletters (one is anonymous which undercuts its credibility) and a podcast or two with limited audiences.

We are poorer because our newspapers have gone away. The Sun Sentinel and Palm Beach Post are sad shells of their past versions, and the few reporters around don’t seem to have any history in our community. We lose something real and valuable when institutional memory becomes forgotten history. Coverage suffers without context; it’s like coming into a movie that’s half over and pretending to know the plot.

I recently finished a wonderful book called “The Last American Newspaper” by Ken Tingley. It’s a poignant book that tells the sad story of The Post-Star, an award winning newspaper in Glens Falls, N.Y.

The paper was a local powerhouse and even won a Pulitzer Prize for its editorials, an almost unheard-of victory for a small newspaper.

But the Post-Star was ambitious and committed to the community it served for over a century. The newsroom—led by Mr. Tingley— reported the news fairly and accurately, surfacing important issues from teenage drinking and domestic violence to homelessness and the financial troubles of the local hospital, which also happened to be a major advertiser.

Because the Post-Star did its job so well, the paper sparked important conversations that often led to meaningful change.

But over time, as the Internet came to dominate, the Post-Star lost revenue and no longer had the resources to produce the in-depth journalism that communities need to thrive.

The diminishment of local journalism is an important issue that needs to be addressed by every community in America. But especially here, in fast moving complicated South Florida.

I’ve long believed that it is easier to find out what is going on in Kabul, than it is to find out what’s happening at City Hall. That’s not good if you value community and if you care about your tax dollars.

Rogues thrive in the darkness where brave reporters once shined a light.

I don’t have any answers. In my opinion, nobody does.

I keep tabs on my old profession and see a few promising seeds: local newsletters that sell subscriptions, online newspapers, city-oriented podcasts etc. But there’s nothing like a newspaper. The magic of opening something you can touch and discovering something interesting and noteworthy.

We will lose a lot when the last newspaper vanishes. We already have.

 

 

7 March, 2022 10 10 Comments

Where Have You Gone Dave Concepcion?

March 7, 2022 By 10 Comments

Big Red Machine Shortstop Dave Concepcion

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved newspapers.

Not the online version, but the physical paper—-ink, ads, and smudges.

Over the years, I have watched our local newspapers shrink and that has hurt our sense of community and frankly our Democracy too.

When it’s easier to find out what’s happening in Ukraine than it is to know what’s happening at City Hall that’s not a good thing. We need to know as much as we can about both Kyiv and Boca/Delray.

But through it all, through the layoffs and shrinking local news hole, there was always the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

I love both papers.

The writing, the in-depth reporting, the investigative journalism, the photography, and the sheer amount of news from all corners of the globe.

As a subscriber to both papers (and USA Today too for the sports and entertainment news), I’ve come to rely on the papers every day.

I never thought it would end.  But then again what lasts forever?

Apparently, the great employee shortage has hit the newspaper delivery business. I just can’t get the papers delivered. So, this week, after weeks of calls, complaints and credits I reluctantly pulled the plug. Sort of.

I fired USA Today, which became so thin you could read it cover to cover in five minutes. I put the Times on warning—miss one more Sunday and your done and I worked a deal with the Journal that has them mailing me the paper. Remarkably, I get the paper the same day it’s printed, except of course when there is a weekend or holiday then I get Saturday’s paper on Tuesday. Sigh.

I know I sound like an old crank, but so much of what I once enjoyed is fading away.

Movies—- in a real theater.

Magazines.

Bookstores.

Record stores.

Chicken wings that don’t cost $6 bucks a piece.

I remember when baseball was relevant and can still recite the starting lineup of the Big Red Machine (a Hall of Fame infield except for poor Dave Concepcion).

Today, baseball is canceling games (post-Covid!) because they can’t figure out how to carve up billions of dollars at the same time young fans are moving onto other interests.

Why would baseball hurt itself like this? It would be like Delray shutting down Old School Square and bringing the Boca Museum to the  heart of our city….oh wait bad example. That’s happening.

Oh well, it was sure good while it lasted.

And we do have the memories, don’t we?

We live in an era of constant change and I’m good with most of it.

I love the new restaurants, novel concepts like food halls and the emergence of boutique hotels and craft cocktails.  Have you tried the “Trail Mix Mai Tai” at Driftwood in Boynton Beach? Who knew that macadamia, almond, banana, and lime could work so well together?

Yes, I have one foot in the here and now, but the other is cemented in nostalgia. Sometimes I get stuck.

Still, I’d sooner leave home without my wallet than my iPhone and I love how whenever I have a question Alexa is there to fill in the blanks.

When I hear a  new song, I fire up my Shazam app and it leads me to Spotify where I can add that song to my personal playlists. I do miss Neil Young on Spotify and if given a choice I would choose Neil over Joe Rogan every time, but that subject is for another day.

So, I’m not a technophobe, even if I still long for the best of the old days and a lot of what I stream was recorded fifty plus years ago.

(Exceptions include Jason Isbell, Leon Bridges, The Lumineers and Nathaniel Rateliff among others.) I do listen to new music, contrary to the accusations of my friends.

But something has shifted since Covid. Something fundamental and I believe lasting.

We broke some old habits and adopted some new ones.

One of the habits appears to be work.

Have you been anywhere recently? There’s no help to be found. Understaffed restaurants, hotels without enough personnel, professional offices that are desperate to fill key positions.

I read in the Wall Street Journal (on the rare day it showed up) that 4.5 million people roughly around my age (50 something) retired during the pandemic. With their stocks soaring and their home prices higher than ever they woke up one day and said, “that’s enough.”

So, they left their careers and are busy pursuing QTR (quality time remaining). Who can blame them?

We live in a world where someone can pick up a virus in a wet market in Wuhan, China and a few months later they can be a statistic.

Might as well sell your house and move. But where?

Maybe north?

But it’s not just the boomers who are opting out, offices are going remote and while that may be an appealing option for many, I do wonder what it does to company culture and to our social lives and mental health.

Many millennials are stuck behind screens and can live anywhere as a result.

Some have opted out of the race and get by living on their parents’ couches and taking work in the gig economy.

Two plus years of no events, no in person meetings and limited socializing have changed something very fundamental about who we are.

For example, my hometown, Delray has always been a very social place with lots of things to do.

But the calendar, while still full, is no longer full of social events and our gathering place Old School Square is dark. I know, I promised not to write about OSS anymore. But it’s ironic that the community’s gathering place is now devoid of—community.

So where will this all lead? And what problems will we need to solve?

We will need to figure out how young people get a foothold in the real estate market— not an easy task in a red hot location where prices seem to soar daily.

I saw a house sell recently for over $2 million in Osceola Park. Wow.

I hear our local public schools are barely half full, that’s a sea change from a few short years ago when we were debating where to put all those portables.

Yes, this place and this world is changing.

I wonder where it’s all going and how we’ll navigate the currents.

As for newspapers, I remember when kids coveted a paper route. You couldn’t get a Newsday route when I was growing up on Long Island.

Those days are long gone. Now apparently, the newspapers can’t field a team. Another nail in the heart for print journalism. Ugh.

 

11 February, 2019 0 Comments

Deadline Artists

February 11, 2019 By Leave a Comment

Russell Baker was an inspiration to a generation of journalists.

 

These last few weeks have been special for those of us who love newspapers.

The great newspaper reporters were being celebrated and it was wonderful to read about their exploits.

Sadly, the great Russell Baker passed away at the age of 93, but his passing led to an outburst of writing and appreciation by those who loved his work.

The best selling author of “ Good Times” and “Growing Up” and a long time New York Times columnist, Russell Baker was an American original. His writing sparkled with insights and humor. They just don’t make em like Russell Baker anymore.

On the heels of Baker’s passing,  HBO released a documentary called “Deadline Artists” which chronicled the colorful careers of New York tabloid legends Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin.
They broke the mold when they made those guys.

Breslin wrote legendary stories on the JFK assassination and the Son of Sam killer by veering away from the pack and finding angles that other reporters missed.

That’s not an easy thing to do.

For instance, how do you stand out from the horde of reporters covering that fateful November day in 1963?

Answer: You find the doctor who treated the president and glean all sorts of details about his day before he gets the fateful call that would change history. What did he eat for lunch? What was he doing and thinking right before being called to do the impossible: save a gravely wounded president. That’s how you file a story that adds to the record and humanizes history.

As for Hamill, well he was dashing and lived a large life in a large city.

All three journalism giants practiced their craft during a golden age for newspapers in New York when the Times, Post, Herald Tribune and Daily News carved up New York and covered every square inch of the Apple.

I read book after book about this era of newspapering because newspapers were my first professional passion and frankly I couldn’t get enough information on those days and those characters.

I grew up with Newsday and my local weekly the Three Village Herald, a paper I would later write for—albeit briefly.

I caught the last great wave of the newspaper life working for papers in upstate New York and right here in Delray and Boca.

I shared newsrooms with people who worked for some truly great papers and some supermarket tabloids too.

They all had great stories.

About life.

About life on deadline.

About mistakes they made.

About scoops they scored and scoundrels they nailed.

There was just no better place to spend a day than a newsroom with creative people who wrote, edited, designed, photographed and ultimately glued and pasted the stories of this community on great big “flats” before they were sent downstairs to run on the great big offset presses that were just awesome.

The pay was terrible. The stress could be crazy. The deadlines stressful and the sources weird, wacky and wonderful but what a job!
You went out and found stories. You came back to the newsroom and told them.

Nobody told them better than Baker, Breslin and Hamill.

They were gold standard we strived to match but never did.
But my oh my did we have fun trying.

2 July, 2018 5 5 Comments

Better Angels….

July 2, 2018 By 5 Comments

They got the ‘damn paper’ out the next day. Those of us who know journalists knew they would.

It’s dangerous to be a journalist.

Five were murdered last week in Annapolis, Maryland.

It’s dangerous to tell the truth and dangerous to share a community’s stories because there are people who don’t want the truth to be told. Especially if it challenges their worldview or their actions.

We are living in a society that’s rapidly dividing. One of the symptoms of that division is we now have our own set of facts. You have yours and I have mine.

And that’s dangerous too.

The most dangerous people in our society are those who are so cemented in their politics that no amount of information, no science, no research, no argument, no amount of logic can get them to consider another point of view.

So some angry, twisted and lethally armed lunatic who lost a defamation suit against the Capital Gazette newspaper decides to walk in and murder his community’s fact seekers and story tellers.

Journalism is a tight knit profession and having been in the field for a long time (in a prior life) you tend to know people in newsrooms throughout the land. I didn’t know Rob Hiassen even though he worked at the Palm Beach Post in the 90s. But I knew his nephew Scott Hiassen who covered Delray in the 90s.

Scott’s dad is Carl Hiassen, a legendary Miami Herald columnist and bestselling author. Carl was Rob’s brother and now Rob is gone for good. And it makes me sad. It makes me angry.

It stings because I’ve worked in newsrooms and they are full of life, humor, knowledge, stories, history, smarts and talent. The people who work there are overworked and underpaid. They work there—if they are lucky to have a job these days—because they love to write, they believe being a journalist is important work, they know in their bones that what they do every day is essential to Democracy.

They don’t always get it right. They miss stories. They make mistakes. There are reporters and editors who are biased—some of that comes with being human and some of it comes because they play favorites and also because they are human. I think we forget that sometimes.

 But there are many journalists who do an amazing job writing the first draft of history, who ferret out the facts, tell the stories, and do the investigations. There are many who report on the everyday too—the often boring city commission meetings, the stories on budgets, taxes, police, high school sports, library programs etc.

If we pay attention to their work, we learn about our communities. If we tune out, we lose out.

There was a time when newspapers were the water coolers of our towns and cities. They were on every lawn, every morning or every week and they kept us informed as neighbors. They built community. They gave us a common frame of reference.

The Internet changed all of that. Newspapers are struggling which is unfortunate because they are still essential to our Democracy and the health of our communities.

You can’t get local news on the Internet in many, many places. That’s starting to change but the business model is still evolving and the big challenge is finding the revenue to support quality journalism.

Even though I long ago left daily journalism, journalism has never left me. I still see the world as a reporter does. I enjoy stories. I look at things and say to myself ‘now that would be a great story’ and I get disappointed when the journalists on the local beat here in Delray Beach and Boca Raton miss what I know to be happening. Trust me, the best stories go untold.

We even invested in a local newspaper because we believe in the power of the medium and the need to cover stories and express opinions even if those opinions rankle the powers that be.

We didn’t buy a local newspaper because we saw it as a quick path to riches and fame. We bought the paper because we care about our community and we want to tell stories that may otherwise go untold. Our July issue—fresh on the stands is a case in point full of stories on local people, businesses, events and charities.

In the absence of a professionally edited and curated water cooler we get the wild west—trolls, haters, rumors, falsehoods, innuendo, misogyny, racism, bots, hackers, content farms—real fake news which is different than news you don’t like or that doesn’t toe the party line.

We are at a dangerous inflection point in America.

We are labeling the free press a danger to our Democracy when in fact it’s a guarantor—regardless of its imperfections.

I’ve been on both sides of the notebook so I know what it takes to do the job. I tried to get it right when I was on the local government, features and police beat. I tried to give context, I tried to quote people correctly and I tried to get the facts right and explain it in a way that made sense.

My old editor, Tom Sawyer (his real name) drilled into his troops the need to get out into the community. He implored us to develop sources beyond the usual suspects, dig for information, double and triple check names, facts, figures etc. He urged us to listen and write stories that explained how decisions—budget, zoning, policy—would impact our reader’s lives.

We frustrated him at times. My lasting image of him in my mind’s eye is Tom with his head in his hands, his face red, his eyes tired from reading and being challenged by a group of free-spirited storytellers. Yeah, sometimes he barked at the moon, but we knew he liked us.

On my first day on the job, 31 years ago this month, he took me to lunch with a few others to Tom Sawyer’s restaurant on Boca Raton Boulevard. I was 22 and very happy to be in Florida and to have a job. He assigned me to a place called Delray Beach, which is where I ended up living because it was much more affordable than Boca. It was all friendly until he told me that they named the restaurant after him and therefore I should never let him down or disappoint him. I was gullible (journalism cured me of my gullibility in short course) and I believed him, sort of.

I went to work in a newsroom with wonderful people, who were smart, funny, ferociously curious, fearless, creative and mostly nice.

Since that special time I have worked in a slew of other places with a bunch of other special people but nothing was as consistently interesting/creative as that old newsroom on East Rogers Circle and later on Fairway Drive in Deerfield Beach.

So I suspect that the newsroom at the Capital Gazette was special too. And to think of five people killed, others injured and terrorized in such a creative and important place….well it just really stings.

We best find our ‘better angels’ as Abraham Lincoln implored us to do before the Civil War. Or we will repeat history and ruin a damn fine thing, which is America itself.

 

3 August, 2016 0 Comments

The Return of Print? Perhaps

August 3, 2016 By Leave a Comment
Print promotes concentration and allows for an immersive experience.

Print promotes concentration and allows for an immersive experience.

I’m a print guy.

Oh, I love the Internet, have a blog, enjoy Facebook, know how to tweet and read the New York Times on my smartphone. But I still love books, real books. And I still love print newspapers and read two a day and the Times in print every Sunday.

So I was thrilled to see a terrific column by Colin W. Sargent, editor and publisher of Portland Magazine this month extolling the many virtues of print.

I subscribe to Portland Magazine and eagerly await its arrival every month. I fell in love with Maine two years ago during a birthday trip to the state and especially enjoyed spending time in Portland, a great, walkable little city with amazing restaurants, a vibrant art scene, live music, festivals and a picturesque waterfront.

This month, Sargent wrote about the many benefits of print, citing research done by cognitive literature scholar Susanne Reichl of the University of Vienna who says when we read we actually lose ourselves while reading books, magazines and print newspapers. Good writing transports us and in a world full of noise, our minds can use the escape.

Sargent writes that when he reads he gets swept up in the stories and descriptions and that he becomes more “fully human” and that’s why we will always have a need for print material because the digital experience is just not quite the same thing.

“Pop-ups, streaming, email alerts and other interruptions can’t help but prevent us from reaching deepest into the reading experience,” he writes. “The internet may be irreplaceable, but so is real reading with a real book or magazine.”

Naomi Baron who has studied the difference between online reading and reading print materials says her research clearly shows that readers pay more attention and retain more information when reading print.

Students multi-task three times as much when reading online than when they read hard copy and therefore don’t connect emotionally to digital material, she says.

Sargent’s prediction: a print comeback is coming soon to give us relief from the cacophony of the internet.

His advice: “buy all the print newspapers you can right now, because they are on the eve of a renaissance.”

Well, we did. (shamless plug: Delray Newspaper, Boca Newspaper) So I sure hope he’s right.

No less a sage than Warren Buffett is also bullish on local newspapers and magazines. He doesn’t believe in regional papers, but small papers that serve their markets well have some life left in them, says the Oracle of Omaha.

So maybe our desire to connect emotionally with the written word; our need to concentrate and move away from the screen (for just a little while) and our need to avoid pop-ups, texts and email notifications will give newspapers, books (I wrote one of those too) and magazines (go Atlantic Ave) a bright future.

I sure hope so.

 

 

 

30 November, 2015 0 Comments

History Before the Digital Age

November 30, 2015 By Leave a Comment
An ad from 1995 for Caffe Luna Rosa..wonder if Fran will honor the coupon?

An ad from 1995 for Caffe Luna Rosa..wonder if Fran will honor the coupon?

It’s hard to throw away your history.
But sometimes you have no choice–especially if you are building a new kitchen and losing closet space in the process.
And so part of Thanksgiving weekend was spent deciding what to keep and what to ditch. It was agonizing–for me anyway.
I was a newspaper reporter for the old Delray Times back before the digital age and since 1987 I have lugged my old newspapers to various addresses. They take up shelf space and some of the clips are yellow but they represent an important part of my life–they also cover a pivotal period of Delray’s history.
I covered Delray from 1987 through 1997 from the Doak Campbell era through the Tom Lynch and Jay Alperin mayoral terms of office.
It was an important era, representing the beginning of Delray’s revitalization highlighted by Visions 2000, the Pineapple Grove Main Street designation, the Decade of Excellence and the first All America City bid.
There were lowlights too–political infighting in the 80s, a revolving door of City Managers and key city staff until 1991 and lots of controversy over issues such as race, drugs, crime, policing and labor relations.
But it was mostly a progressive era, marked by progress, relative unity and vision.
I wrote about it all; issues large and small and it was a great job giving me a bird’s eye view of how a city works.

I rode with police officers, followed a young father through drug rehab, interviewed criminals, artists, entrepreneurs and even actor Burt Reynolds who filmed an episode of his detective series “BL Stryker” at the Cathcart House on South Swinton. His first words to me: “I hope you’re not with the Enquirer.”

It was a great ride, writing about efforts to get something going on Atlantic Avenue, sitting through strategy sessions about the future of North Federal Highway (rife with prostitutes, an adult bookstore and vacant lots at the time) and rejoicing when a coffee shop opened downtown.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that decade spent writing about Delray was great training for my tenure on the City Commission, enabling me to see how issues emerged and requiring me to find sources on both sides of the issue.
Our newspaper came of age after the demise of the respected Delray News Journal and we “competed” against the Post, Sentinel and Boca News.
But we wrote more–at least 6-8 stories a week, plus restaurant reviews, school news, social calendars and local sports. We covered Delray like it was the White House beat. It was fun and never boring.
So it’s sad that the paper never had an archive or was digitized.
Because while I successfully “saved” a few (ok more than a few) papers, even I –a notorious pack rat– have to admit that I can’t keep it all and have a…..oh a new kitchen.
So….they will be recycled.
A decade of local history, arguments over whether to build a golf course clubhouse or a hot dog stand, debates over replacing Ken and Hazel’s with a movie theater, stories about the beginnings of Pineapple Grove, efforts to buy the Paradise Club, stories about MAD DADS, the beginning of community policing, the early years of the CRA, the beginning of legendary careers–Chris Brown, Rick Overman, Joe Gillie, Bill Wood, stories about Banker’s Row, protests on the beach, the first Art and Jazz on the Avenue and the purchase of a 100 foot Christmas tree will live on in our memory and oh yes the several hundred papers I managed to squirrel away. Shhh..don’t tell my wife.

 

16 November, 2015 1 Comment

Prayers for Paris

November 16, 2015 By 1 Comment

Paris

Paris is on our minds today.

As it should be.
We ache for the shocking loss of life and we agonize over what’s happening in our world: violence, hatred, terror, extremism.
Paris is known as a city of villages and despite its distance from our shores we relate and connect.
Paris is a city of art, culture, freedom, beauty and romance. It’s an idea and an ideal.
And so we grieve when that’s attacked.
Saturday morning the board and staff of Old School Square met for a strategic planning retreat and Paris was on our minds. And we discussed–albeit briefly–concerns about security in our own hometown.
The terrorists targeted art and music and sports venues. They targeted vibrant restaurants and bars–where people gather to savor and enjoy life with friends. We built our own city around that vision. Boca Raton too.
And so this attack–sadly only the latest in a series of disgusting, despicable and ultimately cowardly acts–seemed to penetrate very deeply.
I read a lot of opinion pieces over the weekend suggesting what might be next and how we might combat the ISIS scourge.
The best piece I found was in The Atlantic because it delves deep into the ideology. We must understand it if we are to defeat it and we must defeat it. Here’s a link. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
Spotlight 
We went to see “Spotlight” at the Cinemark Boca.
It’s a must see film, expertly written with terrific performances by a stellar cast.
Why is it must see?
For two reasons:
1. The story of the Boston Globe’s investigation of priests molesting children and the cover-up by church hierarchy is an important story to tell and understand because the abuse proved to be systemic and worldwide.
2. The movie is also a primer on the importance of great journalism and the power of newspapers. Spotlight refers to the name of the Globe’s investigative team, three reporters and an editor who concentrate on big stories– the kind that take months to unearth.
As we move with blinding speed to the digital age, we seem to be losing this kind of journalism which is critically important to Democracy and societal accountability.
As much as we enjoy social media and the wonders of the Internet, we do lose something when there is no community water cooler.
Having spent 15 years in newsrooms, the movie touched a chord in me and reminded me why I fell head over heels for newspapers as a young man. There is no better job than to write and report and affect change as a result.
Sadly, the business model has changed and journalism–community journalism has taken a beating.
Technology can’t be blamed for it all, newspapers were complicit in their decline by failing to invest in writers and all but eliminating enterprise reporting the very thing that the Internet cannot do. It’s a real head scratcher because there is still an audience who wants and needs to know whats really happening at city hall and in their neighborhoods and schools.
An investment in relevancy may prove to be profitable but newspapers seem loathe to spend on the newsroom and so the decline continues.
The community loses when this happens, because important stories go unreported and innocent people are often victimized as a result.
Spotlight shows the power of old-school shoe leather reporting.
What a movie. Superb.