A Scrivener’s Lament

A Scrivener’s Lament

By Tom Davidson

At heart, I’ve always been a newspaperman. I didn’t become a journalist until I reached adulthood, and even then it wasn’t the career path I thought I’d take, but I have fond memories of watching the older man who delivered papers in our neighborhood on his bike, whom my father would often bullshit with and offer a glass of ice water to as we sat on our front porch.
At different points in my formative years we were subscribers, but with a corner store a short walk or bike ride away, I spent a few minutes each afternoon tasked with the chore of picking up the paper and getting to spend some spare change on penny candy.
It beat taking out the garbage or washing the dishes; burning the papers was perhaps the only thing I enjoyed more, but it wasn’t until me teen years that I was allowed to do that.
The paper was our window to the rest of the world: It told us what Tom Holden and Walter Cronkite didn’t have time for in their 30-minute telecasts, which I remember watching on an old black and white console television.
I was bred to be a reader and in addition to the vintage Hardy Boys mysteries, James Fenimore Cooper and Charles Dickens novels on my bookshelf, I read the paper when my father was finished with it.
We passed each section around the living room or front porch after dinner. I can still spend hours reading baseball box scores and statistics. I also came to enjoy reading Mike Royko’s daily diatribe and the stories chronicling Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini’s boxing prowess.
I hung on every word of the sports pages and absorbed enough of the rest of the news so I was informed, even at a young age.
I graduated high school and decided I wanted to be a writer and by that I mean William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway, not Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. I wanted to be a “real writer,” I suppose.
Still, I was drawn to the newspaper office at Bowling Green State University – even though I studied serious “creative writing” instead of journalism - and I vaguely recall penning a couple columns criticizing the college president during the blizzard of 1993, when we were the only school that remained open in the state.
From my first walk into the dingy, dimly lit, cluttered sanctuary of that newsroom I came to realize that being a reporter wouldn’t be a bad idea.
I moved home and wandered a bit, dreaming of writing instead of doing it, working two-bit jobs where I developed some skills talking to strangers, and stumbled upon a newspaper job in Greenville.
I re-read Russell Baker’s two memoirs in my first weeks on the job there and checked out every book on journalism I could from the library.
I was hooked on the job from the first car crash I covered and have been listening to police scanner tones since, chomping at the bit as I race to the scene of whatever’s happening.
I’ve been lucky in my career thus far, learning the ins and outs of small town government that’s dominated with talk of sewage and zoning, covering high school field trips and assemblies and village fairs.
Since moving to Sharon, I’ve been able to cover major national stories like Hurricane Katrina, the local cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Shenango Valley’s tie to the Great Migration of the early 20th century.
I’ve also witnessed the decline in the trade brought on by the explosion of the Web, cell phones, and this Brave New World of corporate media conglomerates concerned about an ever-shrinking bottom line and declining circulation.
My dad didn’t live long enough to see me become a newspaperman (I prefer that term to journalist) and many of his contemporaries are also dead or dying. New, younger readers aren’t buying newspapers because they’re informed by Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets: they expect their news to be free and publishers have yet to figure out how newspapers and other publications will survive in this paperless, wireless world.
I’m stuck in the middle, young enough that most of my career is in front of me, but old enough to lament the heyday, back when I was still in short pants and I was just happy to buy the paper, some Swedish fish and Jawbreakers.
I like the smell and feel of newsprint and remember how the ink would rub onto my hands on muggy summer days, especially, and how when it was all read and digested I could burn it in the backyard barrel.
Now, the industry itself is burning into ashes. I got hot in the newsroom today over something silly and it’s taken me a couple hours to cool off and realize this is my calling; that it’s not anyone’s fault we’re understaffed, overworked and underpaid: at least no one in my newsroom.
The days when families were press barons like Charles Foster Kane’s filmic portrayal of William Randolph Hearst are over.
The Chandler’s of Los Angeles, the Ochs-Sulzberger’s of New York and the Meyer-Grahams of Washington have long taken their products public and Wall Street, not Main Street, decides the course.
I’m re-reading David Halberstam’s chronicle on the media, “The Powers That Be,” published in the 1970s. Then, it was thought to be a profile of the rise of the modern media, but now I see it as a warning bell tolling the inevitable decline of news as we know it.
We have yet to figure out how to compete for and attract new readers in this new age. I used to be one of gaggle of reporters covering an event, now I’m often the only person asking questions and watching as local leaders make important decisions.
Coverage areas are shrinking and don’t overlap much anymore; the news hole and staffs are smaller; people are busier these days and don’t have time to read 500 words on a topic when they can get the essentials in a 10-second sound bite or a two-sentence tweet.
When William Faulkner accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, he said he “declined to accept the end of man.” Paraphrasing him, I decline to accept the end of newspapers.
But we have our work cut out for us.
We must figure out how to compete with the 1,000 camera phones that were disseminating then-candidate Barack Obama’s Youngstown campaign appearances two years ago as I was struggling to take notes and snap photographs.
We’ve got to become essential again, and more relevant. I miss overhearing people discussing the stories of the day in coffee shops and the telephone calls from people who were outraged at a particular story – the messenger takes a lot of shots – but most days, people lack that passion anymore.
Apathy is abundant and young people don’t seem to care what’s in the paper unless they’re looking for a job, and even then, there as likely to depend on the Internet instead of the want ads.
I don’t like it a bit.
It scares me, because even with an ipad or smart phone, the Internet remains a digital representation of words and images. One might be able to read it on a hand-held device, but what’s being looked at doesn’t exist in the facile way a newspaper or book does.
Web sites go down from time-to-time, batteries die and there are power outages; but one can read a book or newspaper by candlelight, or even write a letter with pen-and-paper, not that anyone does that anymore.
Just as people were scared and suspicious of Gutenberg’s printing press, I’m fearful of this new digitized world, much like old-school football coaches must have been after the inception of the forward pass.
To continue the football analogy, I’m at heart a Buckeye fan and I prefer Woody Hayes’ “three yards and a cloud of dust” to the flashy “wildcat” passes of today’s overpaid superstars.
Day after day, I keep writing what I like to call “three quotes and a cloud of dust” – that’s a short, accurate, descriptive story of a basic news event for you non-news junkies.
But we’ve fumbled the ball too many times lately and the fans, our readers, are no longer rooting for us.
I wish I had the answers to turning it all around, but I’m just a shoe-leather scribe out in the streets of my naked city, trying to scoop the Facebook crowd in style and avoid being a mockingbird duplicating the Twitter tweets.
Read all about my travails in your local newspaper.

Fear & Loathing in Northeast Ohio

Fear & Loathing in Northeast Ohio

By Tom Davidson

They’re burning LeBron James jerseys tonight, now that the King has handed down his decision after about 40 minutes of sports commentary hell tonight.
Apparently, somewhere, someone was losing sleep over the decision, although I suspect it wasn’t Mr. James, and I question whether the move carries with it any actual importance in today’s sports world.
What doesn’t need to be hyped is that this is yet another blow to a region that’s been battered, both on and off the fields and courts of play.
It’s the area the mills left long ago, for cheap-agent contracts overseas; it’s the place where the Tribe has toiled on the baseball field without a championship since 1948; the place the Browns abandoned for the greener pastures of Baltimore.
It’s a place where a team that won 111 times in 1954 was swept in the World Series, a place where the football gods played a series of cosmic jokes in the 1980s on hapless Browns fans.
Knowing several of their ranks, I have no doubts that The Drive, The Fumble, and The Drive II, left permanent psychological scars.
The Tribe turned the corner and started winning when the powers-that-be in baseball went on strike and canceled a World Series. They lost to a Braves team that was better-coached, then stumbled against the Marlins in a collapse that rivaled the Browns losses against the Broncos in the football playoffs of the 1980s.
The Cavs were the third, perhaps lowliest of the sports franchises until they found their savior seven years ago. Then, LeBron seemed like the gift of manna in the Old Testament that kept the Hebrews alive. When the team started winning, “King James” as they called him, seemed to be even Christ-like.
That’s no more.
It turns out, he was just another Judas and betrayed them.
What maddening for the Cavs and their fans, is money wasn’t the motivating factor, winning was. He gave the team seven seasons to produce a winner and it came up short.
Who can blame him for signing with a team that plays in the playground of South Beach? Where he can hobnob with superstars instead of maybe shaking hands with Drew Carey... plus there’s no state income tax in Florida and the climate beats the winter on the shore of Lake Erie.
He’ll be away from a region that’s so stuck on losing it can’t find a way to win when it counts, even with him willing all of his magical talents on the court.
What remains in Cleveland is a legacy of losing it isn’t able to live down, even with a homegrown hero of James’ stature.
“The Decision” is the latest in a long-line of sporting anomalies to curse Cleveland. For the rest of the nation, the question now is “Was it worth the hype?”
In the greater Cleveland area, there are no questions now, it’s just another kick below the belt that leads to a grimace, tears and a resigned feeling that losing is a way of life.