The other day my boss sent me an excerpt from an essay by Pete Hamill. Journalism, the excerpt essentially said, is about telling it straight and trusting the reader to understand you – the truest of truisms. But it was written more eloquently than that, and I was intrigued enough to read the rest of the hundred-page essay today.

I hadn’t heard of Pete Hamill before reading that excerpt. Maybe I should have. His Wikipedia page is long, it has sections and subsections. His bibliography is extensive. There’s a stretch of road in Brooklyn named after him. But he was a tabloid man in New York, and I grew up in a news desert in Oklahoma.

Anyway, the essay – “News Is A Verb” – is a twenty-six-year-old essay, older than me, written from a place of anxiety about the state of the field. Big corporations are buying up newspapers and gutting the staff. Unsubstantiated stories about Monica Lewinsky dominate headlines, the former property of closing factories and local government corruption scandals. Reporters don’t know the streets they report on. It all rings true now, of course.

It begins with an ode to the tabloid writers of old – they were “degenerate gamblers,” they “left wives and children in distant towns, or told husbands they were going for a bottle of milk and ended up back on night rewrite on a different coast.” Some “worked brilliantly for six months and then got drunk, threw a typewriter out a window, and moved on.” And, whether in spite of or because of their quirks and vices, they dedicated themselves wholly to their craft. They were journalists, dammit, and they’d turn out brilliant copy before returning to blackjack or brandy.

Grounded in this celebration of the industry he came of age in, Hamill laments the corporate tide that had already drowned many of the papers he knew. He recalls death spirals in those papers, starting with a trimming of story lengths to save money on print – then subbing out foreign news and government desks with wire coverage – then a slashing of staff, of sections, and a decline in quarterly profits, and a closing of doors and shutting-off of presses. It doesn’t have to be that way, he argues. Print for the people who read the paper, write the stories they say they want to see – those stories about city budgets, about boards of education, about their environmental conditions and, yes, crime – and profits will follow, just as they always have.

That was 1998, and now it’s 2024. His words weren’t heeded, but even if they were, I’m not sure it would have made much difference. He wrote then under the presumption that print would continue to have a place. The paper I write for is all-online, as many papers are. Many of his points are transferable, but many aren’t. You can’t make money from advertisements like you used to, because social media has supplanted news media as a gathering ground for the public. Paywalls aren’t a substitute for the newsstand. And, in a time and place where a pandemic has rocked public consciousness and children are increasingly reared indoors – the nature of reporting isn’t what it used to be, either. On-the-streets journalism is made harder when the streets are mostly empty.

I don’t think Hamill’s priorities are wrong. He writes that a journalist should know every street of their beat, should live in their beat, should know their demographics both by-the-book and by intuition, should be in touch with the real-life needs of readers (and potential readers) of their papers. This is all true, and I think even more important now than it was when he wrote it. But many battles have already been lost. Local journalism was skinned to the bone, and I think now it’s a project of re-grafting the skin together.

I hadn’t heard of Hamill prior to yesterday. I still haven’t read Hershey’s “Hiroshima.” I’ve read maybe twenty pages of Gay Talese. In some ways, this is simply because I’m a bad student of journalism. I don’t read as much as I should, and a lot of that falls squarely on me as an individual. At the same time, I think journalism was a field of ghosts before I ever considered it as a career.

In my two-person newsroom – me and my boss – we do our best to cover two towns, with about 30,000 people between them. I’m the crime desk, city hall desk, everything desk for one of those two towns, and my boss covers the other. He has about thirty more years of experience than I do, and he’ll tell me stories about the environment he grew up in. But they’re memories of memories, in a way – he was a young reporter when Hamill wrote his essay, and his mentors were people like Hamill, who came of age when newspapers were a fixture in civic life, who witnessed their decline from the beginning. The rot had already set in by my boss’s time, and what he witnessed was the progression of that rot to the industry’s core.

My first forays into journalism – well, I’m really still in those first forays, but my very first forays – were in a student magazine that was trying to avert bankruptcy in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. The decline started before my generation got there, and we were mostly unable to do anything about it. We tried selling ads, we tried soliciting donations, but we were still running deep in the red. That magazine is still afloat and even printing, somehow, but I don’t know how – I think we left it with about two issues’ worth of printing costs.

Even in the shelter of student journalism, where everything ultimately matters a little less and more bailouts exist, I think we were aware that we were working from inside a thing that was trying, at best, to survive.

And now, in the real world, my boss is my only connection to a connection to a time when journalism was a widely respected craft. I don’t have the memories that he has, and I don’t have the memories that his mentors had. I’m working off of mostly oral histories and cultural artifacts. The living connection to Journalism with a capital J is severed.

Which, to clarify, isn’t a dig at myself or my employer. I’m proud of the work we do, and I think we do a damn decent job for what we are. But the networks are offline, there are fewer models to emulate, and the relationship between the press and the public isn’t as codified as it used to be.

What that leaves us with is a now-vacant, scorched land with which to build something lasting. There are no retirement plans, no safety nets, no guarantees that our website will be online in three years, or even its archives. I’m a barely-journalist who doesn’t know the titans that came before her and, if I get sick, 20,000 people have no local coverage until I’m able to write again. The town I cover only gets the local news five days out of seven. Things aren’t what they used to be.

There’s an easy-ish road here, and it’s more-or-less the standard career path for journalism grads. I can work a local news job for a couple of years, jump my way from paper to paper, and eventually end up at one of the few still-well-respected national outlets, where maybe I can start thinking about homeownership and other such fantasies. But the town I cover will still exist, and I wonder – for how long can a revolving door of newborn, young writers sustain an ecosystem that used to have an old guard to guide the new? My boss taught, and teaches me, a lot of what I know about the town I cover. What happens when the old guard ages out and there’s no one to replace them?

For now, we’re doing our best – and I’m doing my best – to build something. I keep diligent records of property sales, of court cases, of all sorts of documents, in hopes that my work can become something that outlives any of my career transitions. If I do eventually jump somewhere else, I hope that what I leave behind is something that at least leaves my successor a little better-equipped. I hope someday the relationship between the old guard and the new becomes, once again, part of an establishment, a living thing. I hope more towns have a source of news in ten, twenty, thirty years. I hope I’m part of it.

Small P.S.: If you're reading this on mobile and it's remotely readable, that's thanks to Chia, who sent me code that immediately fixed a display issue this blog had. Thanks Chia.