Where have you gone, Pete Hamill?

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume One, Issue 14

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson
Joltin' Joe has left and gone away

Polly Baker was no credentialed Member of the Press. Oh, Polly was published in all the best places: The Gentleman’s Magazine, the Derby Mercury and the Newcastle Courant. She wrote passionately about the hypocrisies of the day, when courts imprisoned women for having illegitimate children while the fathers walked free.

Polly Baker was no credentialed Member of the Press. But Polly was a great writer, perhaps the greatest of her day. Because Polly was Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin and the Founders would not recognize the modern Press Corps or the way it operates. The press of the Founders’ time was a free-for-all, a jambalaya of anonymous broadsides, partisan volleys, and downright libel ending in swords or pistols at dawn. (Indeed, the push toward libel law was to get people to settle things with lawyers in court, rather than with deadly weapons in duels.) The Founders believed that the best ideas would win as long as they were free to circulate.

This led to practices that would leave modern journalists hyperventilating. Besides writing to publications as Polly, Franklin liked to assume other identities and write letters to Poor Richard’s Almanac. Then Franklin would put on his Poor Richard editor’s hat, and answer those letters.

This is not how a modern Objective Member of the Press with a Journalism degree does things. Not that this matters much; Franklin would not qualify for a job in the modern media.

Neither would Pete Hamill.

If 20th Century Journalism had its royalty, then Pete Hamill was a Prince of the City. New York City, to be specific. Hamill was born and raised in Brooklyn, and he died in Brooklyn. He was for decades one of the most popular and influential columnists in the city, and was editor of both the New York Daily News and the New York Post. He dated Shirley MacLaine, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Linda Ronstadt, had 21 novels to his credit and a movie made about his life.

What Hamill didn’t have was a degree in Journalism. Or any college degree, for that matter.

Of even a high school diploma.

There is a constant cacophony in this country over what’s gone wrong with the media. It’s too liberal. It’s too conservative. It’s too supportive of the status quo.

What happened is much simpler, and much more profound. For most of America’s history the press was a trade; indeed, the union for press people is still called the Newspaper Guild. Franklin literally apprenticed as a printer, learning to do everything from writing the articles to setting the type and running the press.

Hamill got his start as an 11-year-old newspaper delivery boy. After he got out of the Navy, he wrote letters to the Editor of the New York Post until they hired him as a reporter.

And Hamill was far from unique. Every news organization worth its salt had its own Pete Hamill. Even in New York City Hamill was not unique; across town at the New York Daily news was Jimmy Breslin, born and raised in Queens, author of an equally famed column on their city, along with some 15 books. Boston had Mike Barnicle. Chicago had Mike Royko. San Francisco had Herb Caen. And every TV station had a familiar anchor who had lived and reported on the city for decades.

This was possible because the vast number of competing voices of Franklin’s day persisted into the 20th Century. New York City had hundreds of newspapers during the 19th century; when Hamill started writing for the New York Post in the 1960s it was competing with nine other major English language daily newspapers in the city alone.

It is, perhaps, no surprise that Franklin does not meet modern qualifications, given that his heyday as a member of the press was three centuries ago. But how did Hamill get completely passed by in so little time?

While the Hamills and Roykos were apprenticing, Frank Gannett was laying out a different plan.

Gannett started buying up newspapers in 1906. By the 1980s Gannett owned more than 80 daily newspapers across the United States, including its newly launched national USA Today.

Gannett perfected press Economies of Scale. Gannett would buy up newspapers in an area, merging their operations. It would then slash the price of subscriptions to gain readers while increasing advertising prices and cutting costs.

While all of these practices were controversial – Gannett was sued repeatedly – it is one aspect of the cost-cutting that affects this discussion. Gannett realized that the old familiar – expensive – newsroom denizens could be replaced with newly minted college graduates without a noticeable loss in readership.

The idea that a degree could make you a journalist was not a common thought then. For example, Columbia University does not even offer an undergraduate degree in journalism. The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism – housed in the Pulitzer Building, and home of the Pulitzer Prizes – was designed to be a place where successful mid-career journalists went to advance their careers.

The idea was that journalism was something you did, and that you went to school to understand and develop some expertise in the subject of your journalism: Political Science, or Business, or Poland. In the 1990s, the entire Columbia Graduate School of Journalism faculty sported a single Ph.D. And that was in History. (Full Feola disclosure: I was an adjunct professor at Columbia in the mid-1990s.)

Gannett realized the vast majority of readers had no idea who wrote what. Sure, it was great that every newspaper seemed to have a newsroom core formed of journalists with decades of experience, but those guys were expensive. So Gannett started hiring recent journalism graduates, and slashed their pay scale to (generally) six steps.

Gannett’s plan was an enormous financial success. Newspaper consolidation surged; as the money poured in, chains became media companies and bought up television stations.

As individual partisan media outlets were subsumed into the growing chains, there was a huge amount of pushback. The response was to introduce a new breed of press: the professional objective journalist.

Unlike the generations who learned press as a trade, these new journalists would be non-partisan. As chains merged competing outlets, the idea was that these new publications would service everyone by being objective: non-partisan, disinterested, just the facts, except for the clearly identified Opinion and Editorial sections.

There were several problems with this in practice. First, journalists are human. If you have ever had the pleasure of meeting a human, you know that none of them are purely objective, with the possible exception of saints.

Second, the Gods of the Copybook Headings will not be ignored. Do the math: If you graduate college at, say, 22, and there are only six steps in the pay scale, that means you have hit your financial ceiling at age 28.

That doesn’t work.

At some point everyone realized that while the larger papers didn’t necessarily have more steps, the steps they had were higher. So began the great journalism migration. Journalists would start out at a small newspaper, work there for four or five years, hit the pay scale ceiling, then move on to a bigger newspaper.

In a generation, the press went from Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, writing daily about the city where they were born, and raised, and lived, and died, to newsrooms where the “veterans” had moved from out of state when they started work there three or four years before.

Gannett had been right that readers rarely cared if a particular story was written by this journalist or that. But it turns out that they cared very much when the newsroom was filled, in effect, with tourists who don’t know one part of the town from another. Small, simple mistakes that no one born and raised in the city would ever make eroded residents’ trust.

It’s fashionable today to blame public disdain for the media on the rise of the Internet. But the data shows that by 1997 – before the founding of Google, Facebook or Twitter – most of the damage had already been done. According to the Poynter Media Trust Survey, trust in the media peaked at 72 percent in 1977, and had already fallen 20 points to 52 percent in 1997. It has now fallen further to around 40 percent.

The transition from trade to profession broke the relationship between journalists and the cities they covered.

Now it is easy to think that this sad tale of the decline and fall of the journalism profession, while interesting, is irrelevant. The economy hardly runs on journalism.

Except this isn’t a story about journalists. This is a story of how universities became pipelines to the upper-class life: the upper-class jobs and careers and earnings and lifestyle. And how universities continue to pump out more and more of these graduates, who now compete for fewer and fewer jobs.

Where do all the MBAs and such work if the “Apple Computers” and “Intels” of 2050 have hundreds of employees, rather than tens of thousands?

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