The disappearing magic of newspapers

David Sherman

It chose me. I was six or seven. Teacher said circle the words you know in the newspaper. Those days everyone had a paper delivered. I know, I delivered enough of them. I’d wait for the Star, the big cheese in those days. My father would be pissed if I didn’t put it all back together the way it came so he could read it between dinner and Cronkite at seven. Not easy since the pages were almost as large as me, the Saturday paper only a few pounds lighter.

It became a passion before I knew the meaning of the word, let alone how to spell it or the varieties it came in. Circling big words like “and” and “but,” maybe “politics” on ambitious days. I started waiting for the paper boy, the thunk of the folded paper hitting the apartment door. I loved it.

Then, not sure when, I started thinking this hunk of newsprint in my hand was incredible, even magical. I knew books were written and printed. I read John R. Tunis, sports novels for kids, the high school jock always winning the big games. But how and who could write and take pictures and print all this and deliver it every day? I couldn’t figure it out. I knew my parents couldn’t answer those kinds of questions. They were meat-and-potatoes people. If it didn’t involve putting food on the table, paying the mortgage and making the car payments, it was frivolous.

I was born six years after the war ended. Germany and Japan were still rubble. … My newfound newspaper habit came six or seven years after that. War memories and the Holocaust were fresh, hatred for Germany was still suppurating. My parents lived in Canada safe during the war but my mother would spit, ‘If a German was walking on the sidewalk, I’d cross the street.’ Only survival and escapism via the new medium of television were consequential. Home was not a place of insight and dialogue but the pages of the daily press were, if only I could learn to read fast enough.

Papers were a kind’ve secret obsession. Begged my father for the Gazette in the morning. It was 25 cents a week or something, but I had to beg. Money was tight. Ended up delivering the things myself.

When I was older, I read it all -- the cutlines, headlines, even lifestyles though they called it ‘Women’ or ‘Society’ or some such bullshit. Editorial and op-ed and business, I ignored, except for Charles Gordon and a syndicated American guy, Art Buchwald, also funny. It was a drug and my fix arrived twice a day, ink rubbing off on my hands, always with the mysterious, “How do they do this?”

But when I got the job I had dreamed about, working in the newsroom of the Star as a teenager, I discovered magicians didn’t really cut the lady in half, rabbits weren’t pulled from hats. It was all sweat and blood and spinning plates, tired, ink-stained men down in the dark hell of the typographers’ floor and grease-stained, scarred guys crawling over presses while white guys in white shirts and ties scribbled edits on carbon copies pounded out by a hundred reporters.

Type was set, plates were moulded and slapped on presses. They rolled like turbines on an ocean liner. The building shook, the papers were spit out and piled and stacked and wrapped in bundles and fleets of trucks pulled out and spread across the island and beyond. Every day but Sunday. No snow days.

No magic, just a large machine with multiple cogs designed to draw eyeballs to ads and push opinions to endorse the interests of big business.

The older, wiser hard-drinking and drugging reporters I worked with later weren’t cynics infected by the hypocrisy of politicians or lies of industry. They were cynics because the magic and majesty of newspapers were an illusion. There were and are, here and there, on big expansive papers, “angels,” journalists who were allowed to spend months on stories and therefore tens of thousands of dollars to expose this or that and maybe move the dial of outrage or malfeasance.

But, increasingly, the holes between the ads were filled with copy off the news wires, Canadian Press, Associated Press, etc., for a fraction of what it cost to pay the salaries of a team of reporters to chase stories for months.

It was a business like any other. We weren’t newsmen. Journalists were and are low-wage admen.