It fills the hole …

By Johnny D. Boggs

Frank Luksa was a longtime sports columnist when I joined the Dallas Times Herald staff in 1984. And I have used one of his sayings a lot over the years.

It even came to mind now and then after Charlotte Hinger talked me into blogging for Type M for Murder every other week for six months. As many of you know, it’s hard to tell Charlotte NO!

Well, six months ends today.

And this Western novelist-magazine writer-photographer-wannabe songwriter-film historian-former newspaper journalist and hack – the same guy who used to tell anyone who asked, “I write for a living. I don’t have time to blog.” – figured something out.

I can blog.

Well, maybe it was never provocative, awe-inspiring or halfway good, but I hope you got something out of it once in a while. A laugh. Or … If This Guy Can Write For A Living, Anybody Can.

Shucks, I even told Charlotte to hit me up again if she needs to. Just let me get through the projects I must finish this year. Including one deadline that, oh boy, is tomorrow.

Sure, I didn’t always figure out how to get the blog posted right. But that’s because my college-junior-techno-savvy son wasn’t around to help. Hey, I started out on a manual Smith Corona. (Sometimes I wish we still used typewriters.)

And I found myself reading Type M For Murder blogs, too. Learning. Laughing. Nodding. Blogging has a purpose.

You folks have talent. Keep it up. I might not be posting, or even commenting, but you can bet I’ll be reading when I can.

Back to Frank Luksa.

Frank had also worked at the Fort Worth Press, Fort Worth Star-Telegram (where I went after the Times Herald folded). After the Herald was being turned into a parking lot, he moved to the Dallas Morning News, where he kept sharing his opinions till he retired in 2004. He died at age 77 in 2012.

He covered the Dallas Cowboys, beginning with their inaugural season in 1960, and kept writing about them throughout his career. It didn’t take me more than a year in Dallas to grow to hate the Dallas Cowboys and loathe football in general. Frank covered the Seoul Olympics in 1988. He would file his column, call in, and if I happened to be editing his piece, as soon as we had OK’d everything, he would have me transfer the call to his home so he could talk to his wife.

When the newspaper closed three years later, I wondered if those long-distant charges had something to do with it.

But I always liked Frank. Hey, I liked columnist Skip Bayless, too. Both were professionals.

Skip was a wordsmith. You went over any changes you made with him. Frank, well, he had seen just about everything. And often, when he filed a column, he would tell me:

“It fills the hole – if not the need.”

Borrowing Frank’s saying and the newspaper symbol -30- (for END OF STORY) is a good way to sign off. 

-30-

Preventing Brain Fade

By Johnny D. Boggs

             Brain Fade.

My favorite bit of sports jargon/slang comes from my newspaper days. If you include college, part-time work, freelancing and almost 15 years in what was then a highly competitive/drive-you-to-drink market in Dallas-Fort Worth, that covers 1980-2001. The phrase comes from NASCAR – stock-car racing – which I found myself covering and editing during much of my career. You see, when Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram editors learned I came from South Carolina, they figured I knew all about goin’ racin’. Well, I did attend school with NASCAR Hall-of-Famer Cale Yarborough’s daughters.

             Covering races or editing articles about races, I ran across Brain Fade a time or two.

There’s not much a driver can do at 190 mph when his car throws rod or a tire blows, but when a driver does something completely stupid – and maybe wrecks other cars – that, folks, is Brain Fade.

So whenever an editor or proofreader (yikes, or even a reader after a book/article is published) calls my attention to a stupid mistake, I chalk it up to Brain Fade.

Most Brain Fades I attribute to newspaper training: Write fast. File on time. Pray that the copy editors catch anything that will get you in serious trouble. Make it better for the next edition.

Sure, when I sit down at the desk, I think: This book isn’t due for months, take your time, don’t type so fast. I remind myself of the advice a high school writing teacher gave Robert A. Caro, who went on to have a successful newspaper career before becoming a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer:

“The trouble with you is that you think with your fingers.”

For a few minutes, I slow down. Then that newspaper DNA takes over and I’m back at 120 words a minute.

My goal always is: Cut down on Brain Fades.

In Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, Caro recalls that when he moved to book-length works he started writing his first drafts with pencil in longhand – just to slow that write-fast instinct. “It doesn’t hurt,” he says, “but you get calluses.” My handwriting, however, stinks.

One night on the sports desk at the Dallas Times Herald, a fellow copy editor theorized on why we caught more gaffes on paper proofs than while editing on computers. His reasoning: The eye-to-brain connection rebels from a computer screen. So print your proof out on paper. And recycle so we don’t kill as many trees.

Another tip I’ve heard: Read your work aloud. (But I hate my voice.)

Or change your point size and your font before proofreading.

Hey, we’ll try anything.

Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief of Random House, had an interesting essay in the September 25 New York Times Book Review. One line, as writer and editor, especially struck a chord:

“I still aim for unadulterated perfection, at least as far as books are concerned. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.”

I’ll keep on trying.

 

Ink In Her Veins

 By Thomas Kies

The headline in my county’s Sunday newspaper is “Nothing to See Here”, referring to the efforts of local politicians to get a bill passed eliminating the requirement to post public notices in the paper.  They would like, instead, to post them on the county website.  

Yet another attack on newspapers. 

The protagonist in my Geneva Chase Mystery series is a crime reporter for a small independent newspaper that’s on the brink of being purchased by a media conglomerate.  Geneva is based on several women I’ve worked with over the years when I too worked in the newspaper and publishing business.  

It’s a business that I loved.  I did everything, including working as a pressman on a Goss web press in Detroit, becoming a staff writer, eventually becoming an editor, then moving into advertising management, and ultimately becoming the publisher and general manager of a magazine publishing house here on the coast of North Carolina. 

 I even delivered newspapers during a blizzard in one of the company’s ancient, rear-wheel drive vans.   Yikes.

The business was exciting, interesting, and fun, but filled with the pressures of working on a deadline.  

Unfortunately, the business has changed.  The combination of the Great Recession, the effects of the Internet, and Covid-19 has been disastrous for newspapers.  Their main source of revenue is advertising and all three of the factors I presented have shrunk that revenue stream.  

Before the Great Recession, the housing market was booming.  Real estate companies were spending a fortune in the classified section of newspapers, along with car dealerships, and companies looking to hire employees.  

Starting in 2007-2008, the housing bubble burst followed by cascading disasters in employment and consumer confidence.  Companies who always knew about the Internet, suddenly found it very attractive.  It was cheap and easy to use.  

The lucrative classified pages in newspapers diminished to a disastrous level. The advertising in the main pages of the paper also either got smaller or went away altogether. 

According to a New York Times article in December of 2019, over the past 15 years, more than one in five papers in the United States has shuttered, and the number of journalists working for newspapers has been cut in half, according to research by the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism. That has led to the rise of hollowed-out “ghost papers” and communities across the country without any local paper. “Ghost papers” are publications what have severely cut the staff in their newsrooms making any kind of investigative reporting non-existent. 

Covid-19 has delivered even more pain to newspapers.  When the world shut down in March of 2020, stores, shops, bars, and restaurants all closed their doors for months. Advertising became even scarcer.  Even with the world starting to open back up, the number of pages in your local newspaper has become less and less.  

An unexpected circumstance from the experience of working from home, more newspaper companies are closing their newsrooms, having offsite printing companies produce their publications, and selling their buildings and assets.

A huge part of the joy of working for a newspaper was being with the people you worked with.  Yes, the pressure of daily deadlines could lead to fraying nerves and in-office tension.  But at the end of the day, these people were your “newspaper family”.  Even though I’ve been out of the business for more than ten years, I still stay in close touch with a lot of them even if it’s through social media on the Internet.

Speaking of the Internet, the way people get their news has changed dramatically.

The transition of news from print, television and radio to digital spaces has caused huge disruptions in the traditional news industry, especially the print news industry. It’s also reflected in the ways individual Americans say they are getting their news. A large majority of Americans get news at least sometimes from digital devices, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2020.

More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults (86%) say they get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet “often” or “sometimes,” including 60% who say they do so often. This is higher than the portion who get news from television, though 68% get news from TV at least sometimes and 40% do so often. Americans turn to radio and print publications for news far less frequently, with half saying they turn to radio at least sometimes (16% do so often) and about a third (32%) saying the same of print (10% get news from print publications often).

The point of this rambling blog is that even in fiction, I’m transitioning Geneva Chase, crime reporter, into going freelance, working gigs for her newspaper on occasion, and working for a company called Lodestar Analytics that does open-source research as well as instigating deep dive investigations.  

Personally, I still like newspapers.  I get the paper out of Raleigh every day (even they’ve stopped printing on Saturdays, however) and my local newspaper (which has cut back from three days a week to two), as well as the Sunday New York Times (which seems to be flourishing).

I also subscribe to a digital Washington Post feed and routinely scan other websites (all free) for news from around the globe. I’m a news junkie and the Internet feeds my addiction. 

Still, I’m happiest when I’m writing scenes where Geneva Chase is working in the newsroom.  She’s got ink in her veins. I’d like to think that I do too.

My Canned Personal News

I get a lot of my news on-line. That's a terrible idea. I now realize this practice prevents me from developing an informed opinion.

Instead of a trained journalist with a broad knowledge of the affairs of the world meeting with a seasoned editorial staff to select the most important items to publish for the good of the commonwealth, I'm offered mostly drivel based on my viewing habits. To my great shame, I realize that I have brought this on myself.

Viewing photos of the royal babies is a lot more fun than coping with my dismay over pictures featuring refuges or the latest war torn area. As to ads, it didn't take much for merchants to figure out that I'm a sucker for any site featuring yarn or sewing techniques. I freely admit to being a yarnaholic. Knitting helps me keep my sanity.

Formerly, I kept abreast of the news through print editions of newspapers. The columns and the headlines were not tailored for me. Opinion sections were persuasive and well-reasoned. My overly liberial orientation was kept in check by brilliant conservative columnists such as David Brooks whose arguments added a different dimension to my thinking.

Print is expensive. On-line is not. That's why I started gathering news on-line. I'm thinking of biting the bullet and subscribing to my favorite newspaper. It's a patriotic decision. Yes, honestly!

I think we owe it to these United States to maintain a free press and we cannot if we Americans insist on "news we can use." Give me news I cannot use. Even news I don't like. How about a dose of opinions I don't agree with?

Where are the fashions I cannot wear? I would like to know about them anyway. Why is my news now only about Americans? That was not always the case.

We are living in perilous times. Staying secluded can't be a good idea.