Cutrate

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"Cut-rate Journalism: Hard Times at Small Newspapers"
By Robert Hankins
Introduction
Several years ago, I read "MY Times" by John L. Hess.
It's a wonderful account of how he started as a copy-runner in the '40s, and had seen it all, from the old typesetters to the computer age of the '70s. He worked his way up at the New York Times to reporting and editorial slots during the days of "Punch" Sulzberger, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a series he did about a hard-hit neighborhood in New York.
The Times let him hang around that area for a year, talking with residents and filing poignant stories about their hopes, fears and dreams.
Boy I thought, I wish my paper would let me do that. I was at the Orange (Texas) Leader, with a circulation of about 8,000, and it didn't send reporters to cover wars in foreign countries, or state funerals of politicians in Austin.
As for Mr. Hess' book, I wanted to tell the other side of the story, the small newspaper side. Downsizing has really taken its toll, and will continue on. Even the big dailies are getting hit, such as the Dallas Morning News. They actually trained their supervisors how to fire people on a mass basis, then turned around and fired a good number of them, too. Other large papers such as the Washington Post saved millions by reducing print size by an inch in length and width.
In this piece, I touched on the main points, leaving out people or situations that could have happened in any job, not particularly germane to only news. After I wrote three pages of nothing but downsizing statistics (quite boring), I rewrote it as a memoir with the journalism student (or teacher) in mind; or news buffs that might like to read about life at small newspapers. Not that many J-school graduates get to the New York Times. Most will start at small papers and, if they're like me, never get out. I don't mean to discourage anyone from the business, but they might like an idea of what it's like.
You can be successful at small papers, as long as you're willing to put up with the low pay and an environment that constantly changes. Many times you'll question why you're even there, but as Dave Mundy used to say, "News just gets in your blood." As a writer, you either become your own worst critic, or get out while you can.
After the period described here (1995-2002), I became associate editor at Lagniappe magazine, and began a regular column in the Orange County (Texas) Record. I still hope to get to a large paper some day. I am currently editor of The Orange County (Texas) News, a Beaumont Enterprise / Hearst publication.
Robert Hankins
Orange, Texas
March 29, 2006
Chapter 1
Newspapers attract many interesting characters. Some are washed-up actors. Some are English majors who don't want to teach English. And there are even a few that actually went to journalism school. In my case, I needed a job.
To see how I got to small papers, you need to know how I started. The American Press in Lake Charles, La., my hometown, is considered "mid-size." When I was there, it had about 20 reporters (including sports), four or five desk editors and three photographers who eventually went from film and the old darkroom to digital chips.
One morning in 1995, I walked into the Lake Charles unemployment building and waited in line about 10 minutes.
I filled out an application, and was shown the office of Adley Cormier. I'd seen him around for many years. He was active in the community playhouse scene. We knew a lot of the same people.
I was 33, a mass communications graduate of McNeese State. Adley looked at my paperwork. "You know, there's some new casinos in town," he said. "I don't condone gambling at all, but they do offer jobs and give you a paycheck at the end of the week."
I could certainly look at a video screen all day, I thought. Might even pick up a few poker tips.
"I might be able to do that," I said. He studied my paperwork on his desk.
"Let's see if we can find something for you," he said. "I see you have a mass comm degree. I think I heard recently the American Press might be looking for someone. Why don't you give them a call?"
* * *
Newspapers had never occurred to me.
My mass comm degree was basically in radio / television. Journalism wasn't added until after I graduated. I thought back to when I was in high school, when my father talked me into taking a typing course. I asked, "Dad, when am I ever going to need that stuff?" "Well son, you never know," he replied.
My father always had those Ward Cleaver-type sayings. He even looks like Ward, too.
In the 1980s, I was roommates with Hector San Miguel, an American Press reporter; and Glen Meek, a KPLC-TV newsman. They used to talk about city council issues, and I just thought it was incredibly boring. Why would anybody want to do THIS?
But I needed to work. So I called Brett Downer, then-managing editor of the Press, an old college friend. We had worked on a lot of plays together. He told me about a desk editor who had announced his retirement, and would I be interested? He added, "It involves a lot of computer work. Know anything about them?"
"I know DOS commands and can adapt to anything new," I said.
Later, the "retiring" guy decided not to leave, and the position seemed gone. I called Brett after two weeks and asked about it.
"We're thinking about hiring some part-timers to type up obits and things," he said. "It's something we've never really done before, so it's an experiment. You'd only have 20 hours a week, no benefits. Are you interested?"
I didn't have much direction in my 20s, and after 10 years on my own was back living with my parents. Sign me up, I said.
I worked three days a week at the news desk, six computer layout stations arranged in a circle, taking press releases from the fax machine and rewriting to newspaper format. Before I bought my own, I had one of those generic AP style books, often called "a blue guide." For my first week, I bugged the editors with so many style questions they started saying, "Just look in the guide."
I learned the basics: numbers under 10 spelled out, call a trailer a "mobile home;" a garage sale a "rummage sale." The difference between "affects" and "effects." Abbreviate titles from "Captain" to "Capt." and don't say "Los Angeles, Calif." just Los Angeles.
I was told, as many newspapers tell their staff writers, to put the time of an event before the date. That eliminates several commas down the line. At the Press, the layout people liked everything short (except features) so they could get as much news into each daily edition. The usual faxed brief would start out, "The Rotary Club will meet at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 25, at the Pioneer Club. John Smith will speak on the Lake Charles economy ... "
Brett showed me how to make that read better. "John Smith will talk on the Lake Charles economy when the Rotary Club meets at ..."
One of Brett's pet peeves was seeing briefs that began, "The Rotary Club will hold a meeting at ..."
"You don't hold a meeting like a bird in the hand," he'd say.
The toughest phrase to spell, for me anyway, has always been "hors d'oeuvres." It's not used very often, but every now and then you'll find it in releases about benefits that feature cocktail hours. Since my days at the Press, I've always tried to keep a handy file of uncommon words for quick reference.
If you've ever worked in a newsroom, you will have seen the word "theatre," the fancy, European spelling, sent by a local playhouse or performing arts center. AP Style says to write it that way, if included in the official title of the group. Many years later, at another paper, an editor suggested we go with "theater." "We're an American newspaper, and we're going to print modern English," he said. I hate to go against style, but it makes more sense to me, and that's the only AP rule I consistently disregard (my exception would be if writing for an arts magazine).
I learned what an "emdash" was. You see them after datelines, or in the middle of stories in place of a comma or semi-colon. All these things fascinated me, like how the old "30" at the end of reporters' copy had its origins with teletype machines ending transmissions with "XXX." The emdash term comes from the ancient world, where "em" was a standard measurement. The old typesetting machines at early 20th century newspapers had an "em" key on them. Reporters love emdashes because they look cool. Layout editors despise them, because they don't transfer over well to the standard Quark program and have to be tediously re-inserted. I didn't understand that until I learned Quark in 2005. Quark people hate emdashes. A lot of them find it easier to just stick a comma there.
* * *
If I didn't have any work, I'd go see Dorothy Campbell, the "Life" editor, who always had typing needs for recipes, engagements and weddings. My first obit was pretty creepy, but I got used to them. Like most papers, the Press insisted on getting obits from funeral homes, so there would be an official record. Once, I got a call at the desk from a real nervous-sounding man. He wanted to place an obit for his girlfriend, who had just died. "What's the funeral home?" I asked. "Uh, I'm not sure, I'll call you back." He never did.
I said to a reporter, "Why wouldn't the guy know his own girlfriend's funeral home?" Came the reply, "We've had several cases where people try to call in a fake obit. He probably broke-up with the girl, and wanted her to read that she was 'dead' to him."
Not long after I started, James "Jim" Beam, the old stalwart editor who'd come up from sports in the '50s, knew everybody in town and where the skeletons were buried, told a reporter, "Boy, Hankins can type fast." It was Beam who ultimately approved the experimental job I was hired for. For reasons that have always escaped me, a lot of news editors start in sports.
* * *
I was happy. I had money to go on dates and buy a few things. That's all I really wanted. I should have tried to "move up," as my father kept telling me, but I didn't see myself as a reporter back then. I made a few inroads here and there, and wrote a few bylined stories.
Sometimes Sam Tarleton would come in. He was a retired American Press editor who had (again) started in sports and later became one of the first to report the assassination of Huey Long. He would pick up old papers to be thrown away and take them back to his VFW post. We never knew exactly what he did with them, perhaps nothing. He came in to still feel a part of the paper, asking reporters what the latest tips were, interruptions not exactly golden to the editors.
Another interesting character was Fritzi Wilson, who'd been with the paper since 1942. She didn't understand computers, and would call me to show her how to save a file. "I just don't get this new technology," she would say. We had many wonderful conversations when she'd go outside to smoke. That was another funny thing. Every other place I'd worked, you'd see one or two people outside smoking every hour. In a newsroom, half the staff goes out.
I really didn't know how to write an actual news story. I'd read many articles in the American Press, but the ones that always got my attention were by Sonny Marks. He would start with a cool "lede," a clever, inventive way to get you into the piece. Then flesh it out in the next few graphs, but not give it all away. And then you would keep reading. He wasn't the first to do that, but it was great. You could inform and be creative at the same time.
So I did some concert reviews, book reviews and covered a few things the regular reporters couldn't get to. My third article, about Lake Charles musician Danny James, was used as liner notes for a James anthology on the British label ACE. I sent it to them and they paid me $150. Before the story was published in the paper, I asked Marks and Downer to look it over, and they punched it up much better than it was.
* * *
The news gods threw me a wrench in 1997, when I sat in Brett Downer's office to be "let go." Not long after I'd started, a McNeese student signed on under the Press' college intern program. They later hired her full-time. One week I noticed she hadn't been around awhile, and someone told me she took time off to have a baby. Normally she would have returned in six weeks, but that became a year because she got into a custody case with the child's father. When she wanted to return, they didn't have room. Being in a low position and easily expendable, I got axed. Downer called it "a reduction in force."
"I talked them into giving you a pink slip, so you can get unemployment," he said.
"How many others are getting hit by this?" I asked. "You're the only one," he said.
It was nothing to do with my job performance, he said.
I could tell he was uncomfortable. We had been friends a long time. He paced around his office.
I eventually got the impression it was some sort of corporate thing.
Chapter 2
Nonetheless, I was optimistic. There were several small papers around that might have needs for typists or so forth. They didn't offer much in pay or benefits, but at that point, I wasn't picky. As I knocked on doors, I often discovered minimal staffs that rarely had openings. The term "layoff" haunted me as well, the assumption being I was fired for sloppy work.
Bob Hartnett of Lagniappe (a Cajun term for "a little something extra") and Lanny Keller at the Times of Lake Charles were kind enough to pay small amounts for freelance stories. I signed-on with some temp agencies and made a little pocket change. Since I never had print journalism in college, the Press was my training ground. There isn't one situation I now encounter I didn't first learn in the Press' atmosphere. It was the beginning of my career, but I felt just like the old Sam Tarleton.
After that, the only time I glanced at a Press was on the way to the garbage can. I loved throwing those things away. But the rain was falling, and I still had friends there, trying to make it in the world like anybody else. I certainly couldn't hate them for that. And board directors never type obits for $7.50 an hour. [The Press has a history of weird terminations. A few years ago, they gave their ad director the boot because his cancer treatments were bleeding the payroll -- a paper that makes $30 million a year. They gave him a nice severance package, but I’m sure he didn’t appreciate the "apologies."]
* * *
In 1998, I decided to be a reporter. At the Press, it had looked easy.
I'd seen them come in from a story, put headphones on and listen to a tape for 15 minutes, type for an hour and go home.
Of course, there was much more to it. You had to be accurate. Sonny Marks had a sign on his desk that read, "Double-check EVERYTHING, especially cops." And I'd learned at the Press not to quote anyone "off the record." I'd seen many reporters do it, and didn't want to hit the same mire. You might have a better story, but will lose trust in your sources.
My friend Tom Watts tipped me to a job offered by a temp agency in Beaumont, Texas. After I met with those folks, they got me in touch with the Vidor Vidorian, a weekly paper owned by the Luker family since the '50s. As the only publication in Vidor, a town of about 10,000, it was widely-read since the area daily papers (Beaumont Enterprise and Orange Leader) only covered the big issues there.
Randall and Renee Luker, a married couple, hired me. I hadn't worked full-time in nine months. I was paid through the temp agency.
The Lukers, knowing I drove from my parents' house in Lake Charles, a good 45 minutes from Vidor, were nice enough to let me arrive at 10 a.m. Each day I passed over the old, majestic cypress trees of the Sabine River and city of Orange, which divides Texas and Louisiana on Interstate 10. Orange is the county seat of Orange County, Texas. With Beaumont and Port Arthur, the three cities form an area called the Golden Triangle. "Sabine" (Sa-bean) is taken from the Spanish word for "cypress."
In Vidor, I learned the basic reporter's ropes. It's a small, closed-knit community that tends to look at outsiders somewhat suspiciously. A lot of town are like that in some way, but in Vidor you get a double dose. So at times I had to fight to convince people I was "on the level" and wouldn't print anything negative (even for a light-hearted feature about a guy who builds wooden ship models). Randall's parents owned the paper. His mother, "Miss Adair" everybody called her, wrote a weekly column on the front page. His father Merle, as far as I could tell, drank coffee in his office all day with old friends who stopped by. He was a nice old guy though, always very courteous to me.
Randall was editor, and covered the "hard" news such as city council or water board meetings. At the time, to me, those were daunting tasks, although I would learn much later it wasn't that bad.
I was the only other reporter. Randall gave me a corner office with an old computer, and I would type briefs and so forth. I would go out and interview students who won awards, and do features, and cover Vidor Chamber of Commerce meetings where the speaker was typically a state representative.
Randall was a staunch conservative, and I was fairly liberal. You'd think we wouldn't get along, but we could both appreciate politicians, Republican or Democrat, who stuck their foot in their mouths. We laughed about it all the time.
I had to force myself not be so short in my pieces, as I had at the Press. A smaller town meant less news and more space to fill. But in a way, that helped me do longer features.
They gave me an old Canon from the '70s one day and told me get a shot of David Bernsen, a former Texas transportation commissioner running for state rep, at a drug store about a block away.
So I got out there as Bernsen talked and answered questions from residents about high prescription drug costs.
I couldn't figure out how to take the picture. I would point, but it never clicked.
Bernsen kept smiling for the camera, and shaking hands.
"OK?" he would ask. "OK?" with those hands and smile looking right at me. I felt like a fool.
Finally he said to his assistant, "Uh, Chad, could you get over there and show him how to work the camera?"
But the irredoubtable Chad couldn't figure it out, either.
I called Renee and she said, "Oh, that little flip lever, the thing you use to advance the film; you have to hold that out with your thumb and then hit the button."
* * *
Once a week, I would go to the police station and get the reports. My first day there, a corporal told me, "We used to give these out all the time, then the paper stopped running them. We're not going to show them to you if you won't run them." It was apparently some ongoing battle between the paper and police.
So I'd sift through, pick out the accidents, the DWIs, the domestic violence, take some notes and go type them up. The police chief at the time, Butch Reynolds, had been a part of the "Sugarland Express" chase in the '70s, made famous in the Steven Spielberg movie starring William Atherton and Goldie Hawn.
I guess I was pretty green. Vidor police reports referred to suspects as "actors." One day I asked Randall, "So are these guys in a play or something?" He tried not to laugh.
Chapter 3
Around that time, Glenda Dyer, editor of the Orange Leader, made an offer. She'd seen my byline around and called me one day. She needed a writer for the Leader's weekly publication, the Opportunity Valley News, and wanted me, as its sole journalist, to write features. The OVN came out every Wednesday. It had original stories on the front page, and the rest was padded-out with old Leader stuff. I wouldn't have to drive as far to work, and would do four to six features a week. Sign me up, I said.
I started at the Leader Aug. 17, 1998, the day Bill Clinton told the nation he'd been inappropriate with a White House intern. I made about $8.50 an hour, around $17,000 a year, and most of that went up in gasoline to get me to and from Lake Charles. In my four years there, I never made enough to move out on my own.
With me were Amy Bria, Jim McElhatton, Laurie Haynes and Amelia Feathers.
Amelia did most of the features, the others did some features and a good deal of the hard news. Sadly, Amelia would die young after battling lymphoma. I learned a lot from her and the others about writing. She'd always wanted to work at the Orange Leader, her hometown paper. She became my "advice friend" for many years. I could always knock on her door when the bars closed down, and tell her my troubles.
Wednesday evenings became reporters' night at Spanky's Pub on 16th Street. We would talk about the day's events, drink beer and play darts. Sometimes Louis Dugas would stop by to hold court. He was still vibrant back then, a trial lawyer who'd been a former state rep and district attorney. A Jimmy Stewart-talking barrister who could charm the most bitter of people. Everybody loved Louis.
The Leader's newsroom structure wasn't like the American Press. There was no editorial board that met twice a day to decide the direction of the paper. The Leader had one editor, four reporters, me for the weekly, a sports editor and reporter, a part-time rewriter and a guy who laid-out the paper in Quark. The photographer had just left. It always seems forever before someone new is hired. More on that later.
The Leader, around since the 1870s, was owned by Jimmy and Anne Quigley from the '30s up through 1985. At one time, the Leader had some 80 employees. It had a lifestyle section, features, two or three photographers, at least 15 reporters for news and sports. When the Quigleys retired, they sold the paper to Cox Communications, who had it for some 10 years and sold it to American Publishing, who owned it when I started there. A year or so later, American sold it to Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., or as it likes to be known, a lower-case "cnhi." With those changes came smaller benefits, no raises and downsizing.
There's an old saying that the best reporters make the worst editors. Glenda had a master's degree in chemistry, worked for the Beaumont Enterprise briefly and, for a time, ran her own paper. Her best quality was that she loved the news business, but she loved it a little too much and expected everybody else to do the same. She would come in at 8 a.m. and leave at midnight, and was pretty tough to work for. She'd hang over your shoulder. She'd go through employees' trash cans. God help if you were five minutes late, which I usually was.
* * *
The paper had no working darkroom. We spent all day running our film back and forth to chain stores, paying our own money and getting re-imbursed through petty cash. When we could actually be in the newsroom, Glenda wanted us typing, not talking to each other, and discouraged us from doing so even though we often had to exchange information. It was OK to do phone interviews, of course, we just couldn't say hello to each other. When people from other departments walked through and made small talk with a reporter, they'd find themselves with a Glenda lecture. One girl told her, "I'm going to be at this job probably for most of my life. I'm going to have to talk to people at some point!"
My first printed story there was about a guy who, with his wife, went around to nursing homes and sang with guitars. I've always had trouble being an "idea" person, i.e., coming up with new articles for the paper. I try to concentrate on the writing, which I feel is the best part. I've gotten better over the years, still not to my liking, but better. Sometimes, the other reporters would feel sorry for me and give me a few tips.
Many years later, Royal Hopper said, "Out of four or five story ideas in a given day, only one makes it to print."
But I did try. I saw an old abandoned fire engine from the '40s one day in a parking lot, found out its history and wrote a decent feature. One day I saw Jim McElhatton, in desperate need for a story, close his eyes, open the phone book and point his finger on a page. He called the name it landed on, and as happens, the man was a musician. Jim did a quick phone interview, and went to the guy's house for a photo. Another time, he came up with a brilliant idea. He called the first person in the phone book whose last name started with "A," and the last person whose name started with "Z." He wrote a very funny article about how a Leader reporter had brought "all of Orange together in a single meeting."
* * *
When 1999 rolled around, it was time for the dreaded "Progress and Development" issue. The Leader had done it since the '30s, dreamed up by some marketing person as a way to sell ads. It featured several sections: business, health, education, entertainment / tourism and "looking forward." At a large paper, the ad department has copywriters for that. At the Leader, it went to the news reporters.
When "Progress" was all over, we'd worked ourselves to death. In the four years I worked on "progress," we only got overtime for one.
* * *
Amy Bria went to the Beaumont Enterprise, and Glenda asked me to replace her. I was basically the only choice, and she knew I was chomping at the bit to work for the Leader. The Opportunity Valley News stayed around awhile, with no reporter, and the position was never replaced, another way of saving money. Amelia had also left by that time. So now I covered city councils and school boards. It gets very easy after awhile. You spend two hours in a meeting and don't have to take any pictures, unless a special event is going on, and can write stories very quickly. I hated council meetings. They were boring, but at least I didn't have to hit up people on the street for story ideas, which I'd done many times. I stopped using a tape recorder and came up with a form of dictation. As Sonny Marks, a tape recorder man from way back, once said, "I hate to miss a quote." But at the Leader, there simply wasn't time to transcribe the tape.
Speaking of the American Press, I didn't mind doing a few favors for the reporters or editors there when they needed something from Orange. Likewise, they'd send me a couple of quotes from Lake Charles if I was in a crunch. That's a great thing about reporters. Deep down, we all realize we're on the same train.
My biggest problem as a new reporter was interviewing people. I'd bounce around the discussion, and couldn't figure out how to ask that "perfect follow-up question." I'd watch the television interviewers, and of course, some of those things are edited, but it all looked so easy. Then one day I was at the Ramada Inn with a guy briefly in town to direct a charity benefit show. His main claim to fame was once working with Kathy Lee Gifford. I'm still not sure if that's a good thing, but he'd been editor at a couple of papers in the Midwest. So I asked him, "How do you interview people? What's the main deal?"
"All an interview is Robert, is two people having a conversation. Just like we're doing now. You say something and I say something. That's basically the whole idea of it." And there it was.
Later that year, morale at the Leader was so down it was worse than pitiful. Things perked up a bit when Glenda announced she was leaving. She'd made a two-year commitment, and her time was up, at least that was the official story.
Chapter 4
Dave Mundy came in as a tobacco-dipping, beer-drinking ex-Marine, although he hated to be called "ex-Marine."
"Once a Marine, always a Marine," he would say.
A travelling correspondent for various armed-service publications, he arrived at the Leader as former managing editor of the Katy Times, near Houston. He'd won some 30 journalism awards, a no-nonsense guy who had a book published about problems with school districts in Texas. And he started in sports.
His first day there he told us, "I understand the last editor micro-managed. That's not me. You do your work, get in on deadline and we'll be fine."
Having been at papers with structure, and in the military, he named Brian Cox managing edtior (he had replaced Laurie Haynes under Glenda), and me city editor. I heard the argument over the years that the Leader was too small for newsroom titles, and it really was, but I think it helped us manage the chaos a little better.
Mundy had his work cut out. The Leader's press was so old, it printed triple images and was dismantled before Mundy arrived. The Leader's sister paper, the Port Arthur News, took over printing duties. Someone would drive the negatives over to Port Arthur, then truck all the copies back to Orange. Later, they installed a program that could transfer our files to Port Arthur. Everyone in the newsroom loved it, however, doing so eliminated yet another job -- the guy who drove the negatives around.
Dave had a good rapport with the staff. He would basically talk to you like you were a real person. Morale came up pretty quickly. Before, we'd never bothered to turn off lights or computers when we left. For what they paid us, it wasn't worth it. Glenda had discouraged us from sending stories to the AP wire or entering journalism competitions. Dave sent a lot of our stuff to AP Dallas. It was refreshing to see them in other papers, and made even our worst days seem like we weren't just treading water.
I saw Richard Stewart of the Houston Chronicle one day, and he said, "The big news stories like drug busts always get picked up, but I've seen that happen with little off-beat stories too." He had covered the dragging death and trials relating to James Byrd Jr. in Jasper. "One day we showed up at 9 a.m., but one of the jurors was sick and they suspended court that day. So we all needed to file a story. I sent something about cicadas (locust-type creatures common in the South) and it ran all over the world. I got some quotes from a biologist at a college up there, and a few weeks later had letters from Maine and Oregon from people I knew who'd read it."
* * *
Leader reporters never got much of an annual raise, but at least under Dave we received a whopping 1 percent. In conversations with Sports Editor Van Wade, I would say, "Why are you still here? Doesn't the Enterprise try to steal you away all the time?"
"I was here in '96, when Cox owned us," he said. "One year, everybody got a 20 percent raise across the board, and the Enterprise can't beat what I'm making."
Dave wrote editorials that schools were not the problem, and parents were ultimately responsible for their kids. He had his fans, but we got a lot of negative letters. We found not the dictator so common at the Leader, but he was eccentric, as reporters are want to do. He owned three chihauhaus named after famous, dead Marines. And he would do columns about them. "They might be small," he wrote, "but I saw them take down a German Shepherd once." Virtually no one was crazy about a house ad he came up with, showing us posing in the newsroom with the caption, "We kick butt and take names ... then we print them." He thought it a great way to market the "new" Orange Leader. Most of us just rolled our eyes.
Dave also managed to get in a print war with Roy Dunn of the Orange County Record. Dunn started the Opportunity Valley News back in the '70s, basically because he hated the Orange Leader. He printed alternate viewpoints to Leader editorials, built the OVN up to considerable circulation, then turned around and sold it to the Leader. He had no formal news training, but like Citizen Kane, fancied himself a publisher. Around 1990, he returned with the Record, sniping away his dislikes about the Enterprise and Leader.
Dave got hopping mad about it. "He runs AP stories off the Internet, and doesn't even have an AP license," Dave would say. "Then he has the nerve to call the Leader a lousy paper."
And so it began. Roy would attack with the Record, and Dave responded in print. When they finally met at a Press Club of Southeast Texas awards banquet, I expected them to kill each other. Yet they were quite civil. I later joked, "Too many reporters around."
That experience taught me another golden rule: if another paper attacks, it's best to look the other way. If you respond, it makes you look unprofessional.
* * *
Going back to his service days, Dave would come in around 6 a.m. and stay until 3 or 4 p.m. Unlike Glenda, he appreciated a little time off. He would go fishing and had a sideline photography business. After Brian Cox left, Dave named me managing editor, someone to arrive at 2 p.m., discuss the stories we had in the "que" and help put the paper to bed. As city editor, he named Wendy Wilkerson, a crack layout person who got so good, she could do the whole paper in four hours. That's not easy at the Orange Leader. She eventually went to a Scripps-Howard paper in New Mexico, and was moved up to a Scripps wire office because of her unique design talent for "canned" features.
One day, Robert Turner joined the paper. Dave hired the former police officer and private detective to work on cop beats. As a Marine, he was part of a Secret Service detail that guarded President Ford. His first day there, Turner and I covered a robbery of the Bridge City Bank in Orange. Turner wrote the main article. I did a sidebar as a humorous counterpart. We watched as an FBI agent from Beaumont backed his car into one of the "Roman columns" that supported the bank's sign, and the Orange police actually stopped, as a potential suspect, Leader photographer Bruce Twitchell.
Twitchell was a kid from Idaho who dressed like he worked in Vietnam. And maybe he did. He had a flak-jacket with a million pockets to keep lenses and things. "Hey guys," he told police, "I was just out there taking pictures for the last hour. You didn't see me? Look at all these lenses in my car!"
* * *
Election, 2000, the year it took a month to name a new president. We'd all gone down to the courthouse and filed stories. By 11:30 no one was sure who'd win the Bush / Gore runoff. Dave told us, "Go home. I'll stay and put a banner headline up there." The next day, our paper read "Gore beats Bush in close runoff."
"It was 1:30," Dave later said. "NBC was calling it, so I slapped it up there and went home."
And in the days that followed, charity organizations called to get a Leader "novelty" copy of the incorrect headline for auction at benefits. Dave didn't mind telling the Beaumont Enterprise or anyone else about the gaff. He was smart enough to realize he wasn't Superman, at a paper that had many limitations.
I used to get so hungry, food-wise, in that newsroom. Every night one of the sports reporters would come in with KFC, Taco Bell or Wendy's. They'd spend all day at baseball games, but got tired of the ballpark "dogs" We all brought food in at various times. Even at the Press I'd seen it. It wasn't uncommon for two or three reporters to go in on a delivered pizza. Mundy was no stranger to the greasy burger himself. Once, he joked it was the subconscious desire of every editor to have a heart attack by age 45.

Chapter 5
A frustrating thing about editing copy at a small paper is that most new employees can't write good stories. Since the paper can't offer competitive rates for experienced reporters, it has to hire people who've never done it before. They have to learn everything -- AP style, the inverted pyramid etc. -- in a very short time.
I'd had it easy by comparison. I learned everything gradually instead of in the first week. As night editor, I kept waiting for the day I'd turn into a basket case, but never did. Some people kicked trash cans. I don't know how, but I always stayed relatively calm, and it never hurt to hit Spanky's after work. Every night 30 minutes before presstime, something would go wrong. The network server went down or whatever. The news gods never failed to throw us a wrench. Three people would come to me with problems. "Don't worry," I'd say. "It will work out somehow," and amazingly, it always did. You learn how to adjust to those last minute things. Praying doesn't hurt either. Royal Hopper called it "seat-of-your-pants journalism."
* * *
Not long after Dave came, the newsroom got new computers, a step in the right direction. We still had old cameras with no close-up lenses and an ancient photo scanner. We shared an early point-and-shoot digital camera with advertising. It was great for "grip and grin" shots, the most uninteresting subject for a picture, but was terrible with action photos. Luckily Twitchell had his own camera, a very nice one. That was actually one of the requirements for the photographer's position, since the paper wouldn't spring for it.
The Leader developed a Web site, which had to be updated daily. Wendy and Dave didn't have time, so I volunteered and never got rid of it. The old saying of "no good deed goes unpunished" was true.
Of course, we all knew you can't sell a paper without ads, but the reporters resented writing copy for special sections: Valentine's Day, Easter specials, Fourth of July, special Home and Garden Issue. It heaped more work on the newsroom's already hectic schedule.
One interesting "showdown" between news and advertising came when a businessman who sold boats and marine equipment wanted to buy an ad directly underneath the weekly mugshot of Chester Moore, a freelancer who wrote an outdoors column for the Leader.
I showed up one morning and Dave called me in his office. He was putting things in boxes.
"I just gave my two-weeks notice. You might want to be prepared to take over. I'm not going to be the first editor of this paper to put a f***ing ad in the middle of a godd*** column."
We all figured Mundy was gone. However, Leader publisher Craig Stark backed up Dave in the face of cnhi, and the idea was dropped. A small brief about the incident appeared later in Editor and Publisher magazine. It's very rare that publishers support editors, especially in cases of bucking the almighty dollar. The corporate mentality is like a nightmare jigsaw puzzle. You know where the pieces are supposed to go, but they just never seem to fit.
* * *
It was a Tuesday.
I was scheduled to go in at 11 a.m., but my phone rang at 8 in Lake Charles.
Probably some salesman. I let the machine get it.
But I couldn't go back to sleep. It was Dave.
"Some of our people [from Orange] might have been at the Pentagon. We need everybody up here."
Fireballs, towers and pluming black smoke. A plane crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania. The Orange Leader would put out an "extra," which it hadn't done in some 30 years. No one could remember the last. We figured it was probably Armstrong on the moon or Nixon's resignation.
When I arrived at 9, Mundy came out of his office. "OK everybody, someone needs to call the Red Cross. Someone call [U.S. Rep.] Jim Turner's office; he was probably at the Capitol when they evacuated. Call police, fire, the plants and Navy base, they'll be on high-alert status. This isn't going to be easy. We need all copy in the system by 10:30, when I'll lay it out. Negatives print at 11."
Was it baptism under fire? I don't think so, but mostly, to use a Jim Beam phrase, "a well-oiled newsroom."
The banner was "Attack on America."
We didn't have time to spellcheck or proof. The extra came out, and was sloppy compared to others. The Port Arthur News, which usually printed before the Leader, gave itself an extra few hours and printed after us. Their issue looked fantastic, of course.
The Leader had a word misspelled in a headline. I never heard anything negative from the public about it, only reporters at other papers. Even though we were later commended by cnhi and the Leader's publisher, I felt that, as managing editor, the mistake should not have happened, and put the blame squarely on myself. It still bothers me to this day.
But for two hours' work, we put out an extra.
Hector San Miguel had a phrase for people he liked.
"One of the good ones."
That's how I remember Dave Mundy.
There's no doubt the other two editors I worked under at the Leader could have handled Sept. 11 as well, or better than Dave. However, during his time there, I feel that, more than the others, he consistently kept up morale, and remembered what it was like to be a reporter making nothing to get by on.
* * *
Dave was gone two weeks after Sept. 11, terminated by Stark. No official reason was ever given, but it probably had to do with his photography Web site. Eventually, he turned it into a side business to make a little extra money. Although the page featured many photographs of different subjects and landscapes, he also had models, some under 18. He couldn't pay them, but offered girls who wished to model in big cities like Dallas a chance to put something on their resume. If they were underage, he had them sign a release form giving permission to be posted on the site, and require their parents present during the photo shoot. An Orange businesswoman started a campaign against Dave, posting negative comments on Internet message boards. He had his side, the others had their side, and he lost out.
Even I, his ardent supporter, had to agree he should have known better. But perhaps the real trouble with Dave began the day he drove over the Orange County line. Here was this guy from Houston, giving his opinions on things he felt were wrong with the system, and Orange wasn't ready for it. He wrote many positive editorials as well, but few remembered them.
I wish his critics could have known the Dave I knew, a nice guy trying to have a happy life like anyone else, very slowly paying off house notes and credit card bills. I don't mean to canonize, or say he was perfect. Yet in that gone, forever time, the rain should not have been so swift.
* * *
As I was managing editor, Stark had me in his office when I reported to work.
"I fired Dave Mundy this morning," he said. "Do you want the job?"
It was my chance to move up, to make $10,000 more a year in salary. All Stark required was I move from Lake Charles to Orange, and join at least one local civic organization.
I thought about it over the weekend and turned it down. "Exec. eds" at the Leader had a two-year lifespan, after which they would either quit from frustration or be replaced, a prediction that proved right up through this writing in 2006. In the meantime, I told Stark I would serve as "interim executive editor" until someone was hired.
Funny thing was, one week later Stark was gone. I called personnel director from Jeree Powell from Lake Charles one Friday to ask a paycheck question, and she said, "You know Craig's not here, right?"
None of these earth-shaking things seemed to happen while I was actually at work.
Again, no reason was given for Stark's dismissal. My father and I guessed it went back to the Chester Moore incident.
As dad said, "Cnhi might have figured it was time to clean house at the Orange Leader."
Chapter 6
In November, 2001, Peter Rogers came from Colorado as the Leader's new publisher.
He stepped in with high confidence to turn the paper around, but he never could. People were killing subscriptions right and left because we lacked in proofers, and the circulation department was ineffective. Distribution staffers were downsized over the years, just like the newsroom and advertising, and everybody was doing five different jobs.
Rogers came in ready to work. He learned Quark basics and even laid-out a few pages. In December, he hired Margaret Toal as editor. She had worked at the Leader on and off since 1971. Her first job there was to input "agate type," an old term for small-print sports stats. In college, she won a UPI award. She went on to work at the Lufkin paper and the Mid-County Chronicle in Nederland. She freelanced for the New York Times, who had printed her dispatches on the Byrd case in Jasper.
I knew Margaret before she arrived, and considered her a local news icon. She had some great anecdotes. Once I was reading the wire on a day when George W. Bush was to give a State of the Union address.
"He's not speaking until 8 o'clock," I said. "How do they already have the speech up there?"
"The White House gives those speeches out early," she said. "A famous story happened in 1968, when LBJ spoke to the nation. He surprised everyone by saying he wouldn't run again, which they hadn't put in the White House advance copies. So all the reporters scrambled to change their 'ledes' and headlines, and it was the top story everywhere."
Margaret had come up from the days of Bob Axelson, dubbed by Leader colleagues as "Ax." A graduate of the famed Kansas City School of Journalism, he had no problem dressing down reporters in front of the entire newsroom for a slight slip-up. Once, I covered a meeting of Axelson's Kiwanis Club, and left my notepad behind. When I returned to the Leader, he'd already brought it back. Next time I saw him, I thanked him for it. He replied, "Never seen a reporter who lost his notepad," and walked on snarling.
Margaret used to say it was a badge to get griped at by Ax.
* * *
After Margaret arrived, she got rid of two inexperienced reporters, brought Amelia back and never replaced the other position. While I certainly supported Amelia's return, we all rotated on weekends, and the deleted position increased everybody's shifts.
Also around that time, the rewriter's position was done away with by upper management. That meant reporters typed obits, briefs, entertainment news and everything else to get in the paper, in addition to their bylined articles and "special sections" created by advertising.
I'd come in, spend an hour typing obits / briefs and another hour doing the Web page, then updated weather conditions on the wire. I'd get a quick lunch and start hunting stories. But it was that "pan out" thing again, and Margaret would complain how I never had any articles.
"Royal and Amelia never have trouble finding them," she would say. "You're our best writer. We need you out there writing." Royal had the cop beat. If I'd gone to the police station once a day, I'd get three stories, too. I had beats like Deweyville, where news didn't happen much.
Earlier in this book I mentioned how I found it strange that vacant positions took so long to get filled. When I was interim editor, I discovered a very profitable reason. Jeree Powell and I were talking in the hall one day, and she said that at the end of each year, the company added all the salaries of unfilled staff jobs and divided them equally among department heads as a "Christmas bonus."
* * *
Peter Rogers was one of those "team meeting" guys. Let's all get together, write on a big blackboard and draw circles around other circles.
Why did we have so many misspellings? Why couldn't we put out a decent paper?
My answer was we had no proofers.
"We all proof the paper Robert," Margaret would say. And that's true, we did, but we looked at computer screens all day and missed a lot of things.
Rogers would say, "I've been in the news business 20 years, and I've never been at a paper that had proofers."
"Let's hire some retired employees from this paper," I'd say. "They'd come in for an hour, and have something to do. That's what the American Press did. Let's get high school journalism students in here; they can proof the print-outs and put that on their resume. The Leader could be such a great publication if cnhi would just spend a little money on it."
American Journalism Review President Thomas Kunkel certainly pegged it in his AJR column from February, 2006. There, he recalled his days as a desk editor at the Miami Herald with an "unassuming, red-haired, chain-smoking woman" named Margie.
"Margie was a proofreader," he wrote. "Each evening about 9 she'd stroll in, just as we were closing the night's first main edition, grab a full-sized proof of the front page and start reading. She began with the masthead and didn't stop until she'd read the 'continued on' lines. As good as our editors were, invariably Margie would find a goof or three. She was the safety net that emboldened us all.
"Then one day, just like that, the net was gone. As we moved to increasingly sophisticated computer programs to edit and process stories, proofreaders were considered an expensive luxury, a vestige of the days when the final versions of newspaper stories came from Linotype operators, not editors with faces bathed in unnatural light. Margie's departure was a small but highly symbolic victory of the bottom line over quality control."
* * *
Still, there was a little progress at the Orange Leader, but not enough. Rogers came up with a new design for the front page, showing three oranges in a circle, which he borrowed from a paper in Colorado, and it gave the Leader a nicer look.
In early 2002, I did a story about the "Highway Angel," Matthew Joseph, who helped stranded motorists on I-10. That was actually one of my rare ideas. I'd met Matthew after my car broke down and he rescued me. I sent it to the wire, where it was picked up by the Houston Chronicle and Austin American-Statesman, among others.
Another feature I did was about a 90-year-old Orange physician from Yugoslavia, a very charming man with some good "war stories." The Chronicle also picked that up. In the spring, I won best daily column from the Press Club of Southeast Texas, in addition to second place in comment / criticism. My three Associated Press award that year included a story shared with Robert Turner for investigative reporting.
Margaret wasn't impressed. She'd never been crazy about the fact I didn't have journalism degree, and anyway, my awards had been from work under the previous editor. I was extremely proud of the fact that, after my news career almost ended in 1997, I had managed to get stuff in the big papers. I felt better when I read Walter Cronkite's "A Reporter's Life." Not even Uncle Walter has a journalism degree. He may have some honorary ones now, but dropped out of the University of Texas to work at the Houston Post. In 1933, he actually failed an audition as a radio announcer.
* * *
Most reporters find ways to joke about bad situations. It's a good way to let pressure out; usually a story you're not close to. I remember one where a guy shot and killed his lawyer. We watched on television after he was arrested, being led to the lock-up by sheriffs. Several reporters shouted, "Why did you do it? Why did you do it?"
The defendant replied, "You'll have to talk to my lawyer."
Greg Hayes looked up and said, "But how?"
Then there are those when no one dares laugh.
In July, 2002, 4-year-old Dannarriah Finley was taken from her home in Orange. Authorities found her body later in Port Arthur, and, at this writing, no suspect has ever been charged. It took several days for officials to identify her, so Royal and Amelia went to Dannarriah's house every day, as neighbors and friends kept a vigil and talked about what little news there was.
One day, everybody else was exhausted, and Margaret sent me.
It was hot as all get out. People sat on ice chests, burned by the sun and wondering.
Around 2 p.m., police arrived to escort the family to the station. Later, they brought them back.
As word spread throughout the crowd, faces went from one last uneasy yet serene look, to frenetic pain.
I never wrote it in my story that day, but I have a pretty good idea of what hell looks like. People just stood there, and couldn't even figure out how to speak. It was the worst thing I've ever seen. For many years, I had dreams about Dannarriah. She'd stand on the river and wave to me.
And I always waved back. And she always smiled.
Chapter 7
A few months later, we ran an issue on the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11.
It was basically another ad gimmick. The poignant stories of death and despair were left to inserts of grocery stores that loved the USA.
That is not to say reporters don't understand the value of advertising. It is, for better or worse, where our salaries come from. The idea behind ads is that, the more money a paper makes, the better it can grow. You hire more people and improve services, and the paper has more space to sell ads.
That's the theory anyway. Take circulation, which gets downsized. You have people driving beat-up cars, being paid peanuts with no incentive to keep doing it. I've seen a rare one or two who've made a career on it, but most quit anywhere from three weeks to six months.
At the Leader, I never heard of many carriers who gave a two-weeks notice. Most left quite abruptly, after covering routes for other people who had just quit, or were sick, or who just plain didn't show one day. Sometimes, the circulation supervisor would have to cover routes, leaving his in-house responsibilities for someone else until he could return.
So the switchboard lights up. "They can never throw it right." "They always throw it in the ditch." "They never throw it but twice a week." It's not uncommon to have subscribers report the same problem for consecutive days.
And that decreases distribution, and subscriptions go down. It may sound absurd to say carriers should be treated like kings, but I really feel that way sometimes. They're the hardest-working, lowest-paid people in the business, and get nothing for it.
* * *
I've also been at two newspapers that went from free to paid obituaries. In either case, it didn't sit well with the public. It had been done so long, and readers expected free obits. Nowadays, there aren't a lot of papers left who offer them free, and if you're ever at a paper that switches from free to paid, expect some phone calls.
On the surface, it doesn't seem like a lot to complain about. Funerals cost anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000, while the obituary is only $40 or $50. But the public perceives it as something they've always enjoyed being taken away. Newspapers are all about trust, and you lose a good deal of it when you change a longtime thing.
The reason papers do it, of course, is to make more money because they keep downsizing. There are, however, different ways to present it to the public. One paper said, "We lose advertising dollars everytime we print free obituaries." I saw another paper a little more sensitive: "Over the years, we've found that people want their loved ones' obituaries to read as the family would like, not written up in a free manner to AP style. Therefore, we will give families what they want in their time of grief."
The controversy does wither with time, as readers find something else to complain about. But even now in 2006, a lot of reporters I know, myself included, still believe obits should be free.
* * *
September, 2002.
After I left the Leader, I understood why Margaret hadn't shifted my extra duties.
It would have stacked someone else, and they might have left out of frustration. It was them or me, and as eventually happened, just me.
Even if I'd taken the editor's job when I had the chance, it wouldn't matter. I'd have looked for a job in 2003 instead of 2002, and never would have been able to get the funds for an acceptable newsroom.
I'd written a few good ones, but the Leader wasn't right for me anymore.
So I wished everybody luck, bid farewell and hoped they could make it work. That was a hard thing to do. Margaret and I were friends, and I considered her one of my mentors. Looking back now, I don't think we could have compromised. Our ideas about running a newsroom were totally different. When I returned to Orange to clean out my desk, Van Wade let me in the building since I'd already turned in my key.
On the way out, I said, "Well man, it was nice working with you."
"Yeah, same thing," he said. "I'm just glad someone has the sense to get out of here."
Margaret left in 2004. Since then, the paper has gone through two more editors and publishers. As to the question of whether the Leader will grow, it probably won't. I think it just might survive, at least in my lifetime, like some dark ocean creature adapting.
But it should also gaze its dark future. And sometimes, you need to hear what the rain tells you.