News Is a Verb (Library of Contemporary Thought)

Rating:
Summary: Required reading: Hamill has the solutions
Review: Buy this book for all the journalists you know and love -- and don't forget the publishers. Veteran New York newsman Pete Hamill has the solutions to so many of the problems plaguing modern newspapers: sliding standards of accuracy, the blurring of the line between news and entertainment, stagnant circulations in the midst of population growth. It will inspire those who want to be journalists and remind the veterans why they fell in love with news in the first place. NEWS IS A VERB should be required reading in every newsroom and journalism school.

Rating:
Summary: Eloquent, angry, provocative call for saving US newspapers
Review: Pete Hamill is one of the best and savviest newspapermen who ever drew breath, and this book is his eloquent, angry, provocative call for saving American newspapers from themselves and the bean-counting, self-important owners and managers who have no instinctive grasp for the news business. Hamill, former editor-in-chief of THE NEW YORK POST and THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, writes with energy and power, evoking the great days of the newspaper business without marinating himself or the reader in smarmy nostalgia. Reading Hamill's cogent formula for revitalizing American newspapers as they enter the twenty-first century, you want to believe that American journalism's best days can be ahead, rather than in the past. This book is a true instant classic and a public service of the highest order; Thomas Paine would have been proud, and Joseph Pulitzer would have been delighted. -- Richard B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School, and Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor in American History, Brooklyn College/CUNY (and I used to carry a press card).

Rating:
Summary: Good sense
Review: The problems Hamill identifies in newspapers coexist in magazine journalism, where I worked for most of a 25-year career.

For starters, the corporation has overtaken the newsroom. Along with downsizing, cost cutting and concerns for shareholder value, come certain malaise. Hamill disparages today's "tabloid" journalists, but his complaint covers the entire news corps just as well. I learned recently that one major news magazine now determines whether or not to report a story based on its research costs per page of the expected count. Since the best stories always cost most to produce, this system ensures that the best stories will not be written.

Good old tabloid reporters, he avows, would be appalled at the slovenly way the word "tabloid" is thrown around and at most current practices--what I call "state-of-the-art." Old-timers didn't pay streetwalkers for stories, he notes, or "sniff around the private lives of politicians like agents from the vice squad." On breaking news, they did not "behave like a writhing, snarling, mindless centipede, all legs and Leicas," but rather "found ways to get the story without behaving like thugs or louts."

Old-timers also believed what too many newspaper reporters and publishers have forgotten--that they should act as ombudsmen for the public (my term). They have instead traded that role for consumerism, denying fundamental responsibilities to instead give readers entertainment, "what publishers, in their omniscience, think those readers want."

Without healthy newspapers, Hamill understands, no democracy can function and evolve. He reminds us that 65 reporters died in Indochina to bring us the truth, that reporters have continued to die in wars ever since--in Lebanon, Nicaragua, Bosnia and Peru--"and a lot of other places where hard rain falls." The total is now higher--of course, including 8 reporters in Afghanistan, and Daniel Pearl, murdered in Pakistan because he was Jewish.

But Internet and television relentlessly pull readers away. From 1970 through 1990, U.S. newspaper circulation remained roughly static at 60 million.

One result is a decline in quality of which the reporters, editors and publishers are all too aware. Another is that newspapers start to lose money and die. A third is the promotion of self, celebrity journalism. Newspapers today peddle "the same obsession with big names" as everyone else. I couldn't agree more. Witness the celebrity television and movie stars hired as news anchors by CNN.

Finally comes the loss of reportorial humility. Hamill writes that few reporters are today like David Remnick of the New Yorker, remaining properly humble. Those rare souls "are uninterested in working as hangmen," because their sense of proportion prohibits it. They know they cannot reach as deeply into the secret places of the heart as great fiction. "People lie to themselves as well as others," Hamill writes. "The journalist is always a prisoner of what he or she is told. The truth is always elusive." Without humility, reporters actually believe they can hit the ever-illusive bull's eye.

But the largest casualty is the deflation of journalism's key currency--truth itself. It is defeated by conditions best described in George Orwell's fiction, conditions that have become reality. To reporters today, murderers are not killers, but activists, and terrorism is a cause celebre.

Hamill correctly savages newspapers and their current culture. "Trust is the heart of the matter," he writes.

Too bad more editors and reporters don't trust the mass of readers with the good sense to tell them that they have the most critical story wrong. They trip themselves up on old-fashioned hubris. Alyssa A. Lappen

Rating:
Summary: Essential reading
Review: This book reminds me why I want to be a journalist. I have read and re-read News Is a Verb and each time it never fails to excite and inspire me. Mr. Hamill's notions of the purpose of a newspaper and ideas about how to effectively cover a city are inspirational. In addition, News Is a Verb has greatly improved my impression of tabloid papers -- a genre which I previously scorned, and was sometimes wrong to do so. My only criticism of Mr. Hamill is that he does occasionally appear bitter over the several misfortunes of his career, despite his disclaimer to the contrary. In particular, his personal attack on Donald Trump, though perhaps understandable, is a little over-exuberant. He loses a little credibility here, I think. His distrust of newspaper publishers is probably well-founded. That one caveat aside, this is a fabulous book and deserves attention from anyone interested in the field of journalism.