By John Sheridan
After listening to Carl Bernstein recall his days as a 16-year-old copyboy and then a reporter at the Washington Evening Star, chronicled in his recently publish memoir, "Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom," my early days as a "paperboy," delivering the Philadelphia Bulletin to the rowhomes of my old neighborhood, came to mind.
Delivering the Bulletin after school was the first job of many Philadelphia boys, giving us early job experience, especially with handling money. Becoming a paperboy was an introduction to a corrupting sub-culture unlike anything we had experienced at home or school; for the "branch," where boys picked up their newspapers, was a de facto clubhouse where we were introduced to smoking, cursing and dirty jokes.
The first thing a paperboy learned was the art of folding a newspaper, so he could throw a paper onto someone's porch from a bicycle ― just like in "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Leave It To Beaver," two popular TV shows which portrayed an idealized American suburbia.
And the first words out of a paperboy's mouth on entering the Branch were, "How many [newspapers] in a bundle?", because the number of papers in a bundle changed from day to day and, therefore, would determine the weight of papers a boy had to carry along his route.
A steady decline in readership, during decades of "white flight" from city to suburbia, caused the Philadelphia Bulletin, established in 1847, to fold in 1982. It's hard for this old paperboy to imagine Philadelphia without the Bulletin reporting on the city's great sports scene. The Sports Page, after all, was the only page we read.
It's also hard to imagine a literate society without newspapers. And yet newspapers across the U.S.A., including the Washington Evening Star, have folded because of a decline in readership and competition from internet news sources.
This is a sad situation, since reading a newspaper at home after work, in a cafe or on a park bench used to be a common pastime of literate people. Anyone walking past Sejong Center for the Performing Arts would notice a life-size sculpture of a gentleman reading a newspaper while sitting on a bench.
The quality of a city's newspapers gives it status and respectability, as well as coveted Pulitzer Prizes for the papers.
Colonial Boston claimed to be America's Athens not only because of Harvard College, but also because it published more newspapers than any other city.
After a Boston apprenticeship, a young, ambitious Benjamin Franklin left the city for Philadelphia, where he was first and foremost a newspaperman, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette. And the crusading newspaper editor, who challenges a lawless element in a frontier town, is a common motif of the Western genre.
One would be hard-pressed to name a famous American writer who has not done a stint at a newspaper.
Walt Whitman was an editor at a few New York papers, while Samuel Clemens first used his nom de plume Mark Twain as a reporter at the Territorial Enterprise in Carson City, Nevada, and Jack London was a war correspondent, covering the Russo-Japanese war (1904-05) for the San Francisco Examiner.
Both O. Henry and H. L. Mencken were Baltimore newspapermen, while an 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway started honing his prose style at the Kansas City Star. And a number of famous Southern writers, including William Faulkner, have worked in the newsroom of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
America's newspapers do have unique names. My favorite is the Sacramento Bee, whereas Winston Churchill said that the Cleveland Plain Dealer was the best name for a newspaper. And then there is the Daily Planet, where Clark Kent (a.k.a. Superman) is a "mild-mannered reporter."
It is the duty of newspapers, the so-called Fourth Estate, to be the conscious of society, exposing all forms of governmental, institutional and corporate corruption. They are society's watchdogs.
This social responsibility was a force to be reckoned with in the late 19th century, when crusading journalists, "the muckrakers," attacked greedy "robber barons" and corrupt politicians. They targeted monopolies, which had a stranglehold on America, and political machines, which had turned burgeoning cities flooded with immigrants into fiefdoms.
By contrast, "yellow journalism" ― sensational practices to sell newspapers ― was the low form of late 19th-century journalism. Big city newspapers of that era competed fiercely for readership; those that "scooped" rivals with sensational news sold more papers.
Common newspapermen became respectable "journalists" after the Watergate political scandal gave their profession unprecedented power and status.
Once "All the President's Men" (1974) ― a detailed account of events leading up to President Richard M. Nixon's ignoble resignation ― was made into a Hollywood film starring Redford and Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, respectively, the young Washington Post reporters who unraveled the whole scandal, everyone wanted to be a sexy investigative reporter. Today's investigative reporters keep the muckraking tradition alive.
Newspapers, and the machinations of press barons, are a popular motif with Hollywood. In "Citizen Kane" (1941) ― Orson Welles' masterpiece ― Charles Foster Kane begins his career as a crusading newspaper publisher but dies a compromised megalomaniac who has crushed rival papers while building a publishing empire.
William Randolph Hearst, the press baron on whom the film is based, was powerful enough to start a war, in 1898, between America and Spain, over Cuba, by screaming "Remember the Maine," a call to arms, from his New York Tribune newsstands.
Today, "Citizen Kane" would be based on Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media tycoon who broadcasts his right-wing political views via Fox News.
John Sheridan (sherbo77@yahoo.com) calls himself an "urban flaneur" living in Seoul.
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Delivering the Bulletin after school was the first job of many Philadelphia boys, giving us early job experience, especially with handling money. Becoming a paperboy was an introduction to a corrupting sub-culture unlike anything we had experienced at home or school; for the "branch," where boys picked up their newspapers, was a de facto clubhouse where we were introduced to smoking, cursing and dirty jokes.
The first thing a paperboy learned was the art of folding a newspaper, so he could throw a paper onto someone's porch from a bicycle ― just like in "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Leave It To Beaver," two popular TV shows which portrayed an idealized American suburbia.
And the first words out of a paperboy's mouth on entering the Branch were, "How many [newspapers] in a bundle?", because the number of papers in a bundle changed from day to day and, therefore, would determine the weight of papers a boy had to carry along his route.
A steady decline in readership, during decades of "white flight" from city to suburbia, caused the Philadelphia Bulletin, established in 1847, to fold in 1982. It's hard for this old paperboy to imagine Philadelphia without the Bulletin reporting on the city's great sports scene. The Sports Page, after all, was the only page we read.
It's also hard to imagine a literate society without newspapers. And yet newspapers across the U.S.A., including the Washington Evening Star, have folded because of a decline in readership and competition from internet news sources.
This is a sad situation, since reading a newspaper at home after work, in a cafe or on a park bench used to be a common pastime of literate people. Anyone walking past Sejong Center for the Performing Arts would notice a life-size sculpture of a gentleman reading a newspaper while sitting on a bench.
The quality of a city's newspapers gives it status and respectability, as well as coveted Pulitzer Prizes for the papers.
Colonial Boston claimed to be America's Athens not only because of Harvard College, but also because it published more newspapers than any other city.
After a Boston apprenticeship, a young, ambitious Benjamin Franklin left the city for Philadelphia, where he was first and foremost a newspaperman, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette. And the crusading newspaper editor, who challenges a lawless element in a frontier town, is a common motif of the Western genre.
One would be hard-pressed to name a famous American writer who has not done a stint at a newspaper.
Walt Whitman was an editor at a few New York papers, while Samuel Clemens first used his nom de plume Mark Twain as a reporter at the Territorial Enterprise in Carson City, Nevada, and Jack London was a war correspondent, covering the Russo-Japanese war (1904-05) for the San Francisco Examiner.
Both O. Henry and H. L. Mencken were Baltimore newspapermen, while an 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway started honing his prose style at the Kansas City Star. And a number of famous Southern writers, including William Faulkner, have worked in the newsroom of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
America's newspapers do have unique names. My favorite is the Sacramento Bee, whereas Winston Churchill said that the Cleveland Plain Dealer was the best name for a newspaper. And then there is the Daily Planet, where Clark Kent (a.k.a. Superman) is a "mild-mannered reporter."
It is the duty of newspapers, the so-called Fourth Estate, to be the conscious of society, exposing all forms of governmental, institutional and corporate corruption. They are society's watchdogs.
This social responsibility was a force to be reckoned with in the late 19th century, when crusading journalists, "the muckrakers," attacked greedy "robber barons" and corrupt politicians. They targeted monopolies, which had a stranglehold on America, and political machines, which had turned burgeoning cities flooded with immigrants into fiefdoms.
By contrast, "yellow journalism" ― sensational practices to sell newspapers ― was the low form of late 19th-century journalism. Big city newspapers of that era competed fiercely for readership; those that "scooped" rivals with sensational news sold more papers.
Common newspapermen became respectable "journalists" after the Watergate political scandal gave their profession unprecedented power and status.
Once "All the President's Men" (1974) ― a detailed account of events leading up to President Richard M. Nixon's ignoble resignation ― was made into a Hollywood film starring Redford and Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, respectively, the young Washington Post reporters who unraveled the whole scandal, everyone wanted to be a sexy investigative reporter. Today's investigative reporters keep the muckraking tradition alive.
Newspapers, and the machinations of press barons, are a popular motif with Hollywood. In "Citizen Kane" (1941) ― Orson Welles' masterpiece ― Charles Foster Kane begins his career as a crusading newspaper publisher but dies a compromised megalomaniac who has crushed rival papers while building a publishing empire.
William Randolph Hearst, the press baron on whom the film is based, was powerful enough to start a war, in 1898, between America and Spain, over Cuba, by screaming "Remember the Maine," a call to arms, from his New York Tribune newsstands.
Today, "Citizen Kane" would be based on Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media tycoon who broadcasts his right-wing political views via Fox News.
John Sheridan (sherbo77@yahoo.com) calls himself an "urban flaneur" living in Seoul.
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