White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Postcards from Edinburgh

Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh.

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Eerie Edinburgh

I play a silly game of characterizing cities as things. Here’s how it goes: If London were a holiday, which one would it be? My answer — no doubt influenced by Charles Dickens — is Christmas. Paris is New Year’s, because I’ve spent a few memorable ones there, feasting, drinking bubbly, and giving cheek kisses.

Halloween? New Orleans, with its haunted French Quarter houses, voodoo and vampire lore, is my pick. But Edinburgh can give The Big Easy a run for its money.

In fact, Edinburgh has just been named one of the top three creepiest cities in the United Kingdom by Skiddle, an events discovery platform, based on the combined number of reported hauntings and Halloween-themed events. According to Skiddle, bookings of ghost tours are way up in London and Brighton, which take the top two places in its survey, and Edinburgh.

A terror tour favorite in Edinburgh, Greyfriars Kirkyard, a church cemetery established in the mid-16th century, is a one-stop shop of horrors, replete with ghosts, ghouls, and bodysnatching.

I would’ve thought that the British tourists would’ve been spooked enough by the economic ghosts of 1979 — a stagnant economy, surging inflation, and waves of industrial unrest, trounced by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s free-market policies in the following years.

Prime Minister Liz Truss, who resigned amid the all the Tory turmoil, was no ghostbuster.

Yes! We Have No Newspapers

There is a newsagent on Princes Street, near the Apex Waterloo Place Hotel. Above the door, hangs a sign for The Scotsman,” the Edinburgh daily, flanked by two smaller signs for other city newspapers: The Evening News, and the Daily Record and Sunday Mail.

My husband and I stopped in to buy some newspapers, keen to read the coverage of the Scottish National Party Conference. But we found none there.

Yes, they had Fyffes bananas, and the shelves were stacked nearly to the ceiling with boxes of “sweet biscuits” and shortbread, especially the shiny red tartan boxes of Walkers Shortbread, advertised on the shelf as “Walkers Pure Butter Luxury Shortbread Top Quality All Size Box 3.99 p.”

I walked up to the cashier, a young man of South Asian origin, and asked if he sold newspapers. He said he gave up selling them because he didn’t want to deal with the “all the paperwork and returns for a few pence on a sale.”

Anyway, he adamantly said, “Nobody ever needs to read newspapers. They have nothing in them, only opinions.”

Surely, I said, there’s a newsagent in the vicinity that sells newspapers. Somewhat grudgingly, he told me to go to the WHSmith shop in the train station.

I left the no-news newsagent and walked to the station. I bought 15 pounds worth of newspapers at the WHSmith because I’m a big-spending nobody.

Sir Jim, ‘The Bonnie Baker’

In read in The Herald that Walkers Shortbread’s profits had more than doubled to 62 million pounds sterling this year, boosted by strong demand in key markets.

In the late 1980s, when I was the editor of a global food industry paper, I interviewed Jim Walker, head of the family-owned baking company, which was founded by Joseph Walker in 1898. In my story about Walkers, I dubbed him “The Bonnie Baker.” He is now Sir Jim, having received his knighthood in the late Queen’s Birthday Honors earlier this year.

Walker told The Herald that it had been “a very, very difficult couple of years” due to COVID and supply problems. “Butter has virtually doubled, and the price of flour has gone up as well,” he said.

Butter was a problem for Walkers in the late 1980s, but for quite a different reason.

In the U.S. cookies market, where Walkers wanted more penetration, it was a bad time for butter. Spurred by food activists, like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, consumers were demanding that cookie manufacturers eliminate highly-saturated fats, from butter to palm oil, in their products.

On a visit to the company’s headquarters in Abelour, in the Highlands, during that saturated fat-cutting time, I offered Walker this advice: Find a healthy butter substitute.

“No, we can’t,” he said firmly. “Butter is one of four shortbread ingredients.”

I offered him another pat of advice: Extend the brand’s product line with chocolate chip shortbread.

This was probably already in the works, but I’d like to think that I was responsible for Walkers adding another ingredient — and going on to become the largest British exporter of shortbread and cookies to the U.S. market.

Buchanan Fish Fight

The Buchanan clan has its first new chief in over 340 years.

“The last Buchanan chief, John Buchanan, died in 1681 without a male heir. Identifying the new chief required decades of genealogical research conducted by renowned genealogist, the late Hugh Peskett,” according to History Scotland, a Scottish heritage website.

John Michael Ballie-Hamilton Buchanan was inaugurated Oct. 8 in a ceremony in Cambusmore, Callander, the modern seat of Clan Buchanan and the chief’s ancestral home. International representatives of the clan’s diaspora – from North America (count conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan) to New Zealand — celebrated alongside the chiefs and other representatives of 10 ancient Scottish clans, History Scotland reported.

“Speaking before the inauguration, Lady Buchanan, said they expected many neighboring clans to attend – despite, in some cases, a long history of rancor,” The Daily Telegraph’s Olivia Rudgard wrote.

“ ‘Spats’ involving the Buchanan clan include a 15th century feud with Clan MacLaren, apparently started at a fair when a Buchanan man slapped a member of the MacLaren clan with a salmon and knocked his hat off his head.

“It ended in a bloody skirmish which killed, among others, one of the sons of the MacLaren chief,” she wrote.

With apologies to Robert Burns, a Scot’s a Scot, for a’ that — and Scotland is a bonnie place to visit.

 

 

When Less Was More in the News Business

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When I first worked at the newspaper trade in Washington, back in 1966, it was a different journalism. I don’t mean the difference in the technology, the 24-hour news cycle, or the ramped up interest in celebrity. I mean something more protean, more organic.

I worked at The Washington Daily News — a tabloid in size but not in mission — and we covered the news in a very traditional way: whatever our news judgment demanded. Although we were a Washington afternoon newspaper, politics was just part of the mix.

The Daily News had one full-time congressional correspondent, and we sent reporters to Capitol Hill when there was really a lot going on. The Washington Post — then as now the dominant paper in town — covered The Hill more intensely, but not with the intensity that it does today.

In short, political coverage was more laid back; not asleep, but not as frantic as it is now. Nobody felt it necessary to record every slip of the tongue, or where a congressman had lunch or, for that matter, with whom. Certainly, nobody felt they should shun the wine list — and few did.

Covering the White House was a simple matter: once through the gate, you could stroll through the West Wing and talk to people. Today, even if you have a regular or so-called hard pass, you are restricted to walking down the driveway to the press briefing room. If you have an appointment, or want to smell the flowers, you have to have an escort – usually a young person from the press office.

Why this is, and what the purpose of this minder is, nobody has been able to tell me. It is so dispiriting to see the equanimity with which reporters accept their prisoner status.

It did not happen overnight, but gradually under president after president. In my time in Washington, reporter freedom has been curtailed at the White House to the point that unless you want to go to the briefing, there is no point in going through the gate. No news is available because you, the reporter, are not at liberty to collect it.

News out of the White House now has to be gained off the premises, on the phone or by the Internet. The briefing room is a dead zone for print reporters, with the television reporters going back and forth with the press secretary, which is what their medium demands. No news is broken except when the president saunters in and things pick up. That is not worth hanging around there day after day.

But the real change is the proliferation of political media, including the dedicated publications like Roll Call, The Hill, Politico, The National Journal and the cable news networks. This means there are more reporters chasing snippets of news. The big issues get lost as often as not while the news hounds are baying after trivia, little non-events, misstatements, or failure to apologize for imagined sleights.

Also, White House staffers and people who work on Capitol Hill have less and less confidence in reporters and are less frank with them. I find very little point in interviewing Congress people these days because they worry that whatever they say will, if you like, go into their record to be dredged up way in the future.

The other great organic change is in reportorial ambition. Back in the 1960s (and I must confess I started reporting in the 1950s), reporters longed to be foreign correspondents; to go abroad and tell us about life in faraway places. Today, with the emphasis on politics, the ambitious reporter longs to cover politics in Washington. So if there is a big international event, such as the Iraq-ISIS conflict, it ends up being covered through politics. What did Obama say about it? Has John McCain been heard from?

This affects both our understanding of an issue, and does nothing to ameliorate propaganda narratives. Over-covering the snippets does not help: it obscures when it should clarify.

A lot of news used to come out of reporters' long lunches with politicians. Now the number of drinks served, as espied from another table, would be the news. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Smell of the Ink and the Roar of Presses

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It was a simple calculation: If I could not make history, I wanted to have a front-row seat to watch it unfold. I would be a newspaperman. What is more interesting to me is that I made that calculation when I was just 11 years old.

After more than 50 years, I am as much in love with newspapers as I was then. But alas, my love is in failing health.

One after the other, the great newspapers are stumbling; and some have fallen, never to get up again. The Boston Globe is on life support, as are many of the titles of the Tribune Group and The McClatchy Company. Two of the country’s most revered titles, The Washington Post and The New York Times are losing money. The venerable Christian Science Monitor and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer have ceased daily print publication and now haunt the Web. Gone is The Rocky Mountain News.

Newspaper closures are not new, but this time the sickness is pandemic. Long gone are titles like The New York Mirror, The New York World-Telegram, The New York Herald Tribune, The Washington Times-Herald, The Baltimore News-American, The Chicago Daily News, The Baltimore Evening Sun, The Washington Star and hundreds of others.

The first great infection was from the impact of television on afternoon newspapers. That changed the whole pattern of newspaper reading. No longer did the newspaper fill the evening hours, television did. Ironically H.L. Mencken, maybe the greatest newspaperman, worried about the health of morning newspapers in a time when evening papers dominated the market.

Television also swept away the great magazines like Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers.

The message here is clear: Few survive, despite long wars of attrition, and despite the best efforts and deep pockets of some publishers.

I am sure that the World Wide Web will grow into its mission as the substitute carrier of the news. But it has a long way to go before it reaches the basic standards of the lowliest daily newspaper.

First, the Web lacks a viable business model. It costs money to maintain a worldwide system of bureaus and correspondents. Then the Web has to find discipline. Its writers need to learn their trade–with respect to the veracity and provenance of both their news and the news on which their opinion is based. The Web also needs an appellate procedure. With a newspaper you can complain to the editor, the publisher and even, in some cases, the ombudsman. Also you can sue. If you are libeled on the Web, it is an indelible stain. So far among the millions of web wannabes only Slate, The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast are showing the way it might be.

For the rest, the Web needs editors. These are the men and women who keep the standards in newspapers, verify the doubtful facts, cut the indulgent writing, and save writers from the humiliation of their own mistakes. The unseen hand of the copy desk is what makes newspaper journalism worthwhile and saves the wretches who write.

For news, neither television nor radio has supplanted the newspaper. They are too ephemeral, too transitory and too inefficient to deal with a complex world. Even at this time, the heavy lifting is still being done by newspapers– newspapers with reduced staffs and demoralized employees.

The production of a daily newspaper is a daily miracle. It involves many disciplines, sometimes many unions, in a management structure that is more horizontal than vertical. The publisher is nominally in charge, but so is the editor, the advertising manager, the printing foreman and the mailing supervisor. In fact, it is the undertaking that is in charge day after day.

The newspaper, especially a big metropolitan newspaper, is akin to a steam locomotive: a great and beautiful beast. In the old days, I loved the clack of typewriters, the smell of ink (it has been reformulated since then), the industrial-scale paper loading, and the tremor when the presses, deep in the bowels of the building, started up. We had pulled it off again.

And I loved the denizens of the newsroom, whether in Harare, London, New York, Baltimore or Washington–my journalistic ports of call. Underpaid sentimentalists posing as cynics all.

I wish the newspaper business well, even as the fever rages. It kept its bargain with me.

Requiem for the DC News Bureaus

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Journalism in its modern form owes everything to the spread of general education in the 19th century. In the turbulent decade of the 1840s, governments in the advanced countries added education to their responsibilities. In a generation, millions of people could read and were hungry for reading materials like The New York Tribune, founded and edited by Horace Greeley.

By the 1900s, newspapers were a great business. As there were many newspapers in many cities, only a few had great influence–and those were primarily in the regional centers of New York, Chicago and San Francisco. They included Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, Joseph Medill’s Chicago Tribune and William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. Newspapers were a means to great wealth, power and prestige. Proprietors saw themselves not only as political king-makers but also as arbiters of fashion, taste and public rectitude.

From the birth of the modern newspaper (greatly sped along by the invention of the Linotype machine at the end of the 19thcentury), newspapers have been a good business. With annual profit exceeding 20 percent, newspapers have been among the most desirable businesses in America. In the 1980s and ’90s, they were bought and sold at enormous multiples. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times looked invincible, eternal.

Then the Internet struck. Sales began to slide and advertising began to relocate to the Web. Publishers realized too late the folly of giving away their content on it. Journalists had favored this because they believed it would mean more readers, and publishers had thought the publicity would benefit them.

Massive adjustment is not new to the newspaper industry. But never has it been so imperative.

The1960s saw the first wave of newspaper closures, particularly in New York where five papers folded. Then, one by one, afternoon newspapers died across the country. Washington and Baltimore both supported two afternoon newspapers, but they began to fail in the 1970s and ’80s.

Once, evening newspapers had been the jewels, bought by men and women who went to work early and wanted something to read before and after dinner. But television was changing the way people got their news.

The workforce was changing too; the service economy was replacing manufacturing. The new workforce read early and watched television late. This lifted morning newspapers into the stratosphere, particularly when they were a monopoly in their home cities. From The Washington Post to The Los Angeles Times, things were rosy. And for small town monopolies, things were rosier–almost a license to print money.

Mass circulation magazines, such as Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post, all hung it up. In their place, there appeared specialized magazines about wine, running, computers and sex. Publishing regrouped and entered what will be seen as a golden age.

The common thread was that the few, the publishers, served the many, their readers. As A.J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” But with blogs, the many are now publishing to the many, commented Andrew Glass of The Politico.

Today, newspapers are an anachronism: perishable products, produced in a factory well before consumption and delivered, as often as not, by 10-year-olds. They are not so different today from the one that Greeley edited. So who needs them? Greeley might have said, “Go to the Web, young man.”

The trouble is you and I need newspapers. We need them to tell us what is happening in Darfur and eastern Congo; why Russia is playing games with gas supplies to Europe; why our veterans are not getting quality health care; and, yes, what are our elected leaders are doing.

Recently, the bureau system of coverage of Washington has collapsed. There is no one to watch the congressional delegation from Atlanta, San Diego or 100 other cities that once employed reporters in Washington who kept their representatives in the light of scrutiny. Twilight has fallen for the news tradition and with it the transparency of government.

There is no indication that Web-only publishers will generate the kind of wealth that will enable them to replace the ailing newspapers. Like radio, the Web favors commentary not reporting. Opinion cannot be better than the reporting that triggered it.

Requiem for Reporting

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The newspaper of the Newspaper Guild tells the terrible truth: traditional newspaper journalism is dying faster than anyone thought. Almost every major newspaper is making drastic cuts in staffing, from The Washington Post to The Chicago Sun-Times, from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch to The Philadelphia Inquirer, and from The Dallas Morning News to The Modesto Bee. Forty percent of the Newark Star-Ledger’s newsroom staff will depart in a buyout wave. Jim Wilse, editor of The Star-Ledger, said 151 buyout offers were accepted in a newsroom of about 330 people.

Here in Washington, the all-important bureaus which make up most of the Washington press corps are being decimated; and I mean that in the current usage of cut by 90 percent, not the original usage of cut by 10 percent. Colleagues and friends abound who are writing books, trying public relations or seeking government jobs.

The cause of the hollowing out of newspapers is well known: the Internet is getting the information out faster, it is mostly free and the reader can access it selectively. The trouble is that the information on the Web is, if it is any good, first appeared in a newspaper somewhere.

Newspapers still keep the record, but they are woefully behind the times. Today’s newspaper makes no concessions to the passage of time. It is produced in a factory in the middle of the night, transported through the traffic, and entrusted to a child for delivery.

 

Worse, the business model is hopelessly outmoded. It relies on a healthy stream of advertising revenue to make up for the poor income from actual sales of the product.

 

The story is the same in all advanced countries. Newspapers are in trouble, serious, mortal trouble. Only in emerging markets are newspaper sales growing, and that often reflects poor penetration of personal computers and government control of broadcasting.

 

Newspapers have suffered electronic competition in the past and survived. They were portable and kept a tangible record of events. You cannot hook up a printer to a radio or a television set, but you can to a computer. Advertisers can even distribute coupons via the Web.

 

H.L. Mencken, America’s greatest journalist, feared for the morning newspapers in his day because all the circulation and wealth was in the evening papers. Television put paid to that.

 

In Washington, until the 1960s, the dominant paper was The Evening Star. After its purchase and merger with The Times Herald (a weak morning paper owned out of Chicago) in 1954, The Washington Post became the most important political newspaper in the country and a cash generator for its owners. The 40-year golden age of the morning newspaper was dawning. Now it is fading.

 

The mighty New York Times lost money in one quarter this year and may repeat the sorry event. The Washington Post is being subsidized by a test-cramming company, Kaplan, Inc. Two once-proud titles, The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, are at the mercy of a man who, in newspaper terms, is a Philistine—loud-mouthed, vulgar and insensitive to the journalistic craft.

 

There are those who would take pleasure in the agony, and what might be the death throes, of the mainstream media, but they would be ill advised. With the death of newspapers goes the health of the Republic. Democracy only works with a vigorous, disrespectful press, demanding and providing transparency in every aspect of life. The press may be disreputable and eccentric, but it is the indispensable partner of the ballot box.

 

Freedom of the press is the freedom to comment and to criticize. But more important, it is the freedom to investigate. Without investigation, government, corporations and even science goes about its business in the corrupting dark.

 

Already, reflecting the collapse of the Washington reporter corps, there has been a falloff in the number of Freedom of Information Act requests. There are fewer newspapers which can afford to have correspondents travel with the president. Newspapers are not detaching reporters for investigative work of the kind undertaken by The Washington Post on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Foreign bureaus, in critical places like Baghdad and Kabul, are not being staffed, let alone Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo.

 

No entity in the blogosphere has the resources to take up the newspaper role.

Opinion is cheap. Reporting costs money–a lot of money. The unintended consequence of this collapse is that the Associated Press will become more important politically and socially than is good for any organization in the news business. The shafts of light will be fewer in the long winter for news ahead.