My “Newspaper Days: A Journal of the Plague Year” has just appeared in the summer issue of the Southwest Review. It is an excerpt from a still unpublished book I wrote in 2007. My timing was excellent, not just because 2007 turned out to be a momentous year in American journalism, or because it ended up being my last full year at the newspaper, but because most of the characters in the book – the theater critic, the TV critic, the home & garden editor, the food editor, the book editor, the travel editor (me) – held positions that no longer exist at the newspaper.
