Sweet Old Bob

About this time forty-five years ago I was apprenticing myself to the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer, in hopes of a permanent berth. One of the people weighing in on my prospects was the news editor, Bob Johnson. 

Sweet Old Bob (sometimes referred to by initials) was an old-school editor, irreverent, sometimes gruff but always fair, never deceived. His habitual response to a pitch for a story to be considered for Page One was "I don't buy on spec." 

He was given to pronouncements in pungent country expressions, as when he described one reporter's prose as "like a cow pissing on a flat rock." When he thought you were not pursuing a profitable course, he would say, "You're looking up a dead hog's ass," the sense being if looking up a hog's ass was not a productive endeavor, looking up a dead hog's ass was doubly nugatory. Or he would simply invoke the traditional pleasantry "Go shit in your hat." 

One night as deadline drew close and he was still waiting for a local story promised for the front page, he burst out, "Goddamn city desk! If they'd written the Bible, you wouldn't be able to fit it in a boxcar! And it wouldn't be done yet!"

Over time I began to master the craft and earn his respect. When the amiable Bill Trutner retired as copy desk slotman, Bob took me to dinner at the Cricket Tavern next door and explained the political reasons for which he could not name me Trutner's successor, instead making me co-slot with another editor. 

In due course Bob fell out of favor with the Gannettoids running the paper and was demoted, replaced as news editor by a stooge. It was when the stooge informed me that henceforth I would be evaluated half on performance and half on attitude that I began to send out resumes. 

We left The Enquirer the same summer, Bob a few weeks ahead of me. He was a gun enthusiast, and the parting retirement gift for him was a pistol. On his last night he amused himself by sitting at his desk and dry-firing the pistol, drawing nervous looks from the editor and managing editor. 

When I tell you that there were giants in the newsroom in those days, I have the proofs. 

A moment in history

 When I was in the third grade at Elizaville Elementary School, the third and fourth grades shared a classroom, and Mrs. Marian Gulley alternated teaching the two grades. 

One day, on a whim, Mrs. Gulley gave me a copy of the fourth grade's American history quiz. I had, of course, listened to her teaching the class, and, bored, I had read the fourth grade's history textbook, a collection of potted biographies of great Americans. 

I scored a 96 on the quiz, the highest grade. 

I proudly took it home, and my mother, from whom I received the gift of sarcasm, remarked, "I'm sure that made you popular with the fourth grade." 

But she kept the test. Forty years later, I found it among her effects. 

AP is not the boss of you

 Benjamin Dreyer levels his impressive scorn at the Associated Press for its decision to go along with Donald Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America--for its U.S. clients. And he quotes this posting from Bluesky: "I teach AP Style at the university level. Yesterday I informed my students they were free to ignore this change. First time in more than 30 years of teaching I've ever said that."

I don't want you blinking like the prisoners just released in Fidelio when tell you that you are not obligated, even if your publication generally follows the AP Stylebook, to observe every jot and tittle in it. 

All right, gasp and get it over with. 

Your publication is free to decide, out of tradition, readers' preferences, or sheer damn cussedness, to establish variances to AP guidelines. Follow the stylebook's online Q&A feature and you will discover that its editors openly acknowledge that the stylebook entries are advisory. On occasion they will even suggest that you disregard the stylebook in the interest of clarity for the reader. 

Now you can get in trouble by varying too much. In my first years at The Sun, the newspaper, aping The New York Times, used courtesy titles, including in wire service copy. So we had a team of copy editors who spent much of a shift determining if a woman was Miss, Mrs., or Ms., filling in military ranks and ecclesiastical titles, and the like. In the '90s a copy desk working group proposed a set of changes in policy, among them deleting the routine use of courtesy titles except in obituaries. The editor, John S. Carroll, pondered the matter for the blink of an eye and performed the misterectomy. 

Overall, the AP Stylebook generally follows common practices of U.S. journalism. The editors have been diligent about updating it (and heaving a quantity of rubbish over the side). You would be well advised to consider its recommendations, if you can remember that they are indeed recommendations, not diktats. 

Gone paperless

My grandparents subscribed to the Lexington Herald-Leader, which was not much of a newspaper before the Knight-Ridder purchase, but as a child I read the comics. My parents subscribed to the Kentucky edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer, and when I was in the seventh grade, my teacher, Ronnie Fern, had us pick a newspaper article each day and write something about it; from that I date my newspaper habit. 

In the summers of 1968 to 1973, when I worked for the Flemingsburg Gazette, I read the Louisville Courier-Journal every morning at work and got to see what a fine newspaper was like. In college at Michigan State I was preoccupied with things apart from newspapering, and in graduate school at Syracuse I once subscribed briefly to the afternoon Herald-Journal and dropped it over the dumbest editorials I had ever seen. 

But in 1980 a series of chances brought me to the copy desk of The Cincinnati Enquirer, where I found that I liked copy editing and was good at it; it was the discovery of what I was meant to do. And it was the start of a forty-five year habit of mornings with coffee and a daily newspaper; the national news, the foreign news, the local news, the editorials and op-eds, the features, the comics. Yes, there were other sources of news and entertainment, but the morning newspaper was the fixed spot of daily orientation. And yes, Boomer that I am, I was characteristic of my demographic; we all had the newspaper habit. 

No more, I think. My colleague Steve Auerweck, once joked darkly that we should replace the "Obituaries" logo with "Subscriber Countdown." And indeed, for decades God has been harvesting the print readership. Still on this side of the turf, I finally dropped my subscription to The Baltimore Sun two and a half weeks ago because its new owner has fatally compromised what was left of its integrity.

Now, each morning, I make a pot of coffee for my wife and me and settle into a new routine. First The Guardian for world and and national news, then The Baltimore Banner for local and state news, then a series of online sites offering news and commentary. There is no longer a single fixed starting point, though I discover that I do not miss The Sun, which became a source of irritation and regret. 

But I do miss the comics. 

Sunset at last

 Last year I canceled my subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post over their inexcusable coverage of President Biden and the presidential election, and over their specious justifications of their conduct. I now subscribe to The Guardian for national and international news, The Baltimore Banner for local news, and recommend that you do similarly. 

This morning I finally took the next step, canceling my subscription to The Baltimore Sun, to which I have subscribed for nearly thirty-nine years and where I worked as an editor for thirty-four years, nearly half my life. 

A year ago this month David Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting bought The Sun, and he and co-owner Armstrong Williams have systematically degraded a once-great newspaper, filling its news pages with low-grade pap from Sinclair and Fox 45. It is the Vichy Sun. I can skip Armstrong Williams's laughable opinion pieces and the op-ed screeds from Republican backbenchers in the General Assembly and nostalgic veterans of the Reagan administration, but the news matters. 

Many members of the staff have left in disgust, at least one who quit over interference with her reportage without having another position lined up. I suspect others hope to achieve escape velocity.  

There are still some people on the staff whom I can hold in esteem, and I have maintained my subscription, despite my disgust, out of solidarity with the members of the News Guild who have been fighting gallantly for a decent contract and reputable editorial standards. 

But as with The Times and The Post, it becomes a question whether as a customer one should continue to give money to an operation one can no longer respect or endorse. The term of my current subscription will run out by the end of the month; in February I will no longer be complicit. 

Where your wits end

I see people writing that something has occurred at someone's wit's end. 

No. 

"Wit" is your "talent at banter or persiflage," your sense of humor. "Wits" are your reasoning power, your sanity. When circumstances have brought you to the end of your wits, you are at wits' end, not at wit's end. 

Kindly note.