Downtown by Pete Hamill

Author:Pete Hamill [HAMILL, PETE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759512979
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

And so my present as a newspaperman was always accompanied by the past. Bennett and Greeley, Pulitzer and Hearst hovered near me as I was taught my craft. There was one other immense ghost in the room: Joseph Medill Patterson, who had started the tabloid New York Daily News on Park Place in 1919, moved it to a new Raymond Hood skyscraper on Forty-second Street in 1929, and built it into the largest-circulation newspaper in the United States. For one major reason, the tabloid was made for New York: It was easy to read on subways by men and women in a hurry. In the booming 1920s, almost everybody was in a hurry. Patterson’s tabloid was bright, accurate, funny, thorough, and lively about sports, filled with a variety of service features, along with heavy emphasis on show business. It featured the best photography in the city and called itself “New York’s Picture Newspaper.” Like Greeley, Patterson had once been a socialist, even managed a campaign for Eugene V. Debs, and after socialism faded as a personal passion, he still insisted on making a newspaper for the common man. That often meant making a newspaper for the immigrants to New York and for their American children. Certainly my father was not alone in becoming an American through the Daily News sports pages. He never did get to read The Federalist Papers.

Patterson died in 1946, but the News was still the largest game in town, even though some newspapermen detected a weakening of its energy and stylishness. My own New York Post had become a tabloid in 1943, with Dorothy Schiff, a proud liberal, as the publisher, but remained in 1960 the seventh in circulation among the seven New York dailies. It made up for lack of funds with literary style and a brave liberalism (in particular during the dark days of McCarthyism). The sports section was aggressive and well-written. The columnists included Murray Kempton, which was like having Henry James sitting across the city room banging on an old Remington typewriter. My own instructors included a brilliant, hard-boiled editor named Paul Sann, a young editor named Ed Kosner, a sour copy editor (and superb writer) named Fred McMorrow. The staff was small, so there were few specialists. On the same night you could write a murder, a labor dispute, and a fire. Everybody took part in the process, cracking jokes, making remarks, showing a kid how to fix a lead. Most nights, I never wanted to go home.

I quickly realized that newspapers were among the institutions that bound together the many different people of the city. In their own way, they were as important as baseball teams, public schools, and the subways. Television was, of course, everywhere now in the New York night, and its stars were known to millions. But many New Yorkers, after viewing the news on television, still needed a newspaper to make it feel real. And in those newspapers, the basic formula hadn’t changed since the days of the giants of Park Row.

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