There was a wonderful instance of old media meeting new media in the New York Times yesterday, as the Travel section ran an editor's note stating that in a recent Q&A the travel blogger Matt Kepnes recommended travelers use a specific credit card, a card that, editors discovered somewhat belatedly, the blogger links to on his website, receiving money any time someone clicks on the link.
And a few pages back, there was this priceless line in an article extolling the homey pleasures of Miami: "Later we went to Coral Gables, a lushly decayed residential neighborhood..."
I had a dream the other night that I was back in the newsroom. Old friends were catching up, an orchestra was playing classical music in the lobby, and the new editor was the current travel editor of the Miami Herald. I was planning to take her to lunch to discuss my budget.
I haven't watched an entire episode of The Newsroom; occasional glimpses have been enough to show me that it's overly dramatic and overwritten. But I'm glad it's been approved for another season, because - who knows? - it may help me get my book about a year in the life of a disintegrating newsroom published.
My coverage of a newsroom is less dramatic (inevitably) but it still has narrative tension (how could a book about a newsroom in 2007 not?). It is infinitely more realistic than the TV show (I lived it) and a whole lot funnier.
Publishers?
Yesterday I received a mass e-mail from a reporter at the Miami Herald saying that she was writing a story about people taking time off for July 4th and suggesting that I might have some insight.
Specifically, she wanted to know if I and my employees were taking July 4th off, and if so, how many days.
So much for insight.
And so much for journalism. I suppose some recipients were flattered by the e-mail, the fact that their hometown newspaper wanted to hear from them.
But as a subscriber, I braced myself for another useless product of people journalism taking up valuable space in my morning newspaper. As a former journalist, I felt happy that I was no longer working in a newsroom.
I had lunch yesterday at the Riverside Market with two old friends from the Sun-Sentinel (one down from DC) and a former bookseller who used to hang out with folks from the newsroom.
As ex-newspaper people do, we drank beer (Swamp Ape getting an enthusiastic thumbs up), remembered colleagues, cursed managing editors (old m.e. wounds heal slowly). I told the story of the m.e. who, when she was at another paper, reportedly said in a news meeting, after the photo editor had announced that two polar bear cubs had just been born in the city zoo: "Nobody wants to see pictures of polar bear cubs."
On the way out, Rob mentioned a reporter who was no longer with us. He said that at his funeral a colleague got up and began his eulogy: "I was the last in a long line of people who thought they were Bill's editor."
I was in a post office in Boca Raton yesterday, addressing an envelope, when the woman at the counter turned and asked, "Mr. Swick?"
"Yes," I said happily.
"I thought that was you," she said. "I read you all the time in the Sun-Sentinel."
"Thanks very much," I said, "but you know, I haven't been in the paper for a long time. I was laid off in 2008."
And instead of marveling at her ability to imagine a presence for nearly four years, she sympathized with me over my unemployment.
While she did, it occurred to me that newspapers were quite possibly on to something. (Because this was not the first time that this had happened.) I wondered if publishers had discovered that they could lay people off - even high-profile people, with columns and mug shots - and readers would think that they were still there, appearing week after week in their usual places. In my particular case, I had appeared in the Travel section every other week for 19 years; the idea of my now not being there was, to some subscribers - even after four years - more inconceivable than the idea of my disappearance. This despite the fact that, instead of my words and my face, readers now see those of Rick Steves. That I am to some of them more real than Rick Steves pleases me immeasurably.