The arc of decline

I recently posted that I would sooner endure another bout of Covid than subscribe to The Baltimore Sun, which despises the city in which it publishes, to the gratification of racist white suburbanites. A longtime reader commented, "Sun was in decline long before Smith and Williams." 

That is true. I was there to witness it. The Sun's copy desk was a prime spot for viewing the fate of the paper. We were not in charge; we did not make the big decisions. But we saw what everyone else was doing, and I was present to see it. 

In September 1986 when I came to the copy desk, the paper was still essentially the one the A.S. Abell company had run for generations. Recently acquired by Times Mirror, the paper was essentially still the A.S. Abell staff, with some bright spots but overall a little stodgy. That was about to change.

Times Mirror, run out of Los Angeles, was prosperous, and so were all its newspapers, so it operated with a loose rein. Times Mirror brought in John S. Carroll as editor of The Sun, and he immediately began to enliven the paper. He brought in new talent (some of it from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which got certain local noses out of joint), he fostered enterprise reporting, and he encouraged me to hire the smartest people I could find for the copy desk. The '90s were a glorious decade for the paper. 

But in 2000 the Chicago Tribune acquired the Times Mirror papers, and a generation of decline began. 

It was not entirely the Tribune's fault. Newspapering was undergoing an upheaval and readership and advertising began to drop, slowly, then sharply. Having no vision, Tribune management reacted as other newspapers did, gradually reducing the staff by buyouts and cutting back on content in a doomed effort to maintain the stock price for the shareholders. (Tribune also wasted time and resources in an internecine battle with the Los Angeles Times, a larger, more prosperous, and better newspaper than the Tribune.) 

Even with diminished content and reduced staffing and resources, we continued to struggle to do the kind of journalism that Baltimore expected of The Sun. We won a Pulitzer Prize five years ago for exposing Mayor Catherine Pugh's corruption. But the decline was irreversible. 

In 2021 The Sun was acquired from Tribune Publishing by Alden Global Capital, a notorious hedge fund known for acquiring newspapers and scraping off the cash flow. (That was the point at which I took a buyout after 34 years as a Sun editor.) 

But Alden Global turns out not to have been the worst possible owner. Alden cared nothing about journalism. If you published quality journalism and met your revenue target, Alden was happy. If you published trash and met your revenue target, Alden was happy. 

But a year ago The Sun was acquired by David Smith and Armstrong Williams, whose Sinclair-influenced journalism has led subscribers to flee by the tens of thousands. There is not much left of what once was there. 

Harold Williams's 1987 history of The Baltimore Sun includes a passage in which Baltimoreans of the 1880s referred to The Sun as "a once-great newspaper." It is common for readers to express both affection and derision for their local newspaper; that comes with the territory.

But it is true that The Baltimore Sun is a once-great newspaper. I had the privilege of being there as a witness and a participant in its greatness. Now what has been lost cannot be recovered. 

For all the saints

 At 74, I carry quite a roster of the dead along with me, as must be the case with other septuagenarians. So many are gone: family, classmates, teachers, mentors, colleagues, neighbors, fellow parishioners. 

In the daily walks in which I review my list of gratitudes, I try to include at least some of those whom I no longer see. After all, it is because they saw something in me, something to foster and encourage despite my faults and limitations, that I became who I now am.

Though they are no longer in the world, their persistence in memory means that they are not completely gone, not so long as my memory still holds and honors them. 

That, I think, is where we live best, not in our occupations and accomplishments or other transitory things, but in what we do to uphold one another that leaves us still present in someone's grateful memory. 

What prompted this reflection was coming across an online post of the Lux aeterna, set to the "Nimrod" section of Elgar's Enigma Variations. I invite you to listen to it and think about the people for whose lives you remain most grateful. Whatever you may think about this life or a next life, they remain in the light so long as we remember them. 

Processed prose

 Somehow things that occur are not enough in themselves but must be identified as a process. A little dip into the corpora show how common this has become. It is part of the writing process in which a noun is made more impressive by appending an abstract noun that adds nothing to the meaning.

Some examples:

If you are injured or ill, you go through the recovery process.

If you are building a house, there is the construction process.

If you are applying for a job, you endure the interview process. That would be a component of the hiring process. 

If you are turning ore into metal, you are involved in the smelting process. 

If you are making an album of your singing, you go through the recording process.

If you are proposing legislation, it will go through the review process, and perhaps the public hearing process as well. 

If you are looking to add a child (or pet) to your family, you may pursue the adoption process.

If someone dear to you dies, you experience the progressive stages of the grieving process. 

Should you be engaged in the editing process, let me suggest to you that words like recovery, construction, interview, smelting, recording, review, public hearing, adoption, and grieving may be perfectly adequate to indicate what is going on, and you might then profitably engage in the pruning process. 

The Copy Editor's Code

 Our domain is factual accuracy, spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and house style, making all of them clean and correct. 

We hold that all human beings, ourselves included, are born with an innate propensity to error. 

We are skeptics, approaching each text with the suspicion that something in it is faulty, and that we will find it. 

We stand in the place of the readers, asking the readers' questions and experiencing the readers' puzzlement, seeking to make the text clear and meaningful for them. 

If you don't know, look it up; if you're not sure, look it up; if you're sure, look it up anyway.

We cut the wordy and the infelicitous, healing, like surgeons, with the knife. 

We assist the writer in achieving their purpose.

Sometimes the most we can accomplish is to take the defective and leave it merely mediocre.

We protect the publisher from embarrassment and damage. 

We know to take our hands off the keyboard when something is good.

We leave the work better than when we took it up. 

We can talk among ourselves about writers' frailties and foibles, but not publicly. 

We work anonymously, free from vulgar desire for public recognition.