NO NEWS IS NO NEWS
Meyer, Ernest L.
No News Is No News By ERNEST L. MEYER NOW for us on the newspaper telegraph desk has begun the season of the great doldrums. For year on brutal year we were cocks of the editorial roost; through...
...Yes, we were kings of the Fourth Estate, we who handled the foreign news which a dozen teletypes and tickers fed us with their endless din of disaster...
...On these occasions the City Staff stirred into life...
...There is theatrical horror in the starvation and brutali-ties of the concentration camps, of Buchenwald and Bataan, but there is horror as dramatic and far more widespread in the hunger and suffering of millions in the post-war days of reconstruction and resettlement...
...We feel abused and bewildered at the sudden letdown...
...BUT peace, if they had real imagination, doesn't...
...We recall, with tears, that almost daily and for months on end the Times ran eight-column streamers, often two and sometimes three, to play up adequately the gore of the global war...
...They enjoyed a flashing moment in the spotlight, then flopped morosely back into their fox-holes, and the precinct legmen yawned over a game of parchesi with the night desk sergeant...
...telegraph desk are saddened by the whole business...
...Yet until news editors accept that point of view we shall have, increasingly, stories on page one about Gunman Slays Three On Fifth Ave...
...There are portents that the overlordship of the telegraph desk is definitely on the wane...
...But we, we of the telegraph desk, triumphantly uncorked a D-Day, and a V-E Day, and a hundred massacres in between, and a whole saga of horrors and huzzahs ending in V-J Day...
...And the local tidbits from Bronx and Brooklyn were impaled on spikes already overflowing with local tidbits from Manhattan and elsewhere...
...Peace, they think, ends that...
...Timidly they sent their local offerings to the news desk basket, savagely the news desk bellowed to hell with Bronx and Brooklyn when we had Berlin and Bataan, to hell with Broadway Beut Sues Beast when we had the Battles of the Bulge...
...Ah, how the City Staff smirked and strutted on these gala days, how they gloated over the spikes where the telegraph desk copy was painfully impaled, how they lorded it over us when our top stories were exiled to the hinterlands somewhere behind a Macy ad...
...BUT now, alas, our prestige grows daily more precarious...
...For news purposes our city was condemned as long dead and buried, this cockeyed, seething city of seven million which next to Washington, D. C, was rated as the hottest in the business of hatching headlines...
...AT rare intervals, to be sure, the City Staff came up with a really thumping Park Avenue murder mystery or a sensational piece about an Army bomber smacking into the Empire State Building...
...For years we have hogged the pages with stories mainly of wholesale death and disaster...
...Somewhere in the back of the editorial room, we were vaguely aware, huddled forlornly a handful of ghosts, anemic souvenirs of the once-robust, once-swollen and swaggering City Staff...
...We fear that their new ascendency will give the City Staff a swelled head, for they are of a stripe naturally arrogant and will not accept their new laurels with the becoming modesty with which we of the telegraph desk have always accepted the honors which are, of course, only due us as the backbone of the newspaper business...
...And they believe, most of them, that "news" means something dramatic on a giant scale, something that can be visualized like a Battle of the Coral Sea or buzz-bombs over London...
...typewriters were unsheathed from their casings, releasing a faint fragrance of moth-balls, and rewrite men, pallid as zombies, emerged from the telephone booths where for months they had been embalmed...
...through our hands flowed the stuff for great headlines, often so many and so urgent that the news desk would wring its hands and beg piteously that we cease and desist...
...The war ends, and with it horror and headlines...
...It merely changes the shape and the stuff of drama...
...We believe that the theory of news value is all wet...
...Yet the flood came on inexorably, the daily grisly grist of battles begun and battles won and lost, of armadas blasted and cities laid waste, of atomic bombs and war's end and the dove of peace roosting, slightly sullied, in the ruins...
...We regained a prestige only slightly tarnished by the rare impudence of the City Staff...
...We of the...
...What is far more horrifying is that of the stories on page one sometimes as many as three or four are of local origin...
...But of late the Times has acquired a distressing habit of appearing without any banner headlines whatever to proclaim the potency of the telegraph desk...
...while an "unnewsworthy" economic yarn affecting the lives of millions is buried in the back pages with the obituary notices...
...Study, for example, the more recent front pages of the respected model for newspaperdom, the New York Times...
...A thoroughly conceited and contemptible crew, this City Staff...
...For years, however, the seasons of the resurgence of the City Staff were brief and infrequent...
...There is a maxim to the effect that "no news is good news," but hard-boiled editors believe that no news is simply no news...
...And the whole front page and the dozen pages that followed were packed with telegraph news, while the pick of the City Staff offerings was shuttled to the humble half-obscurity of page one, section two...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 39
