Brooks on Books: Morning Miracle by Dave Kindred

If you love newspapers, you'll likely enjoy "Morning Miracle," acclaimed writer Dave Kindred's look at "The Washington Post's" struggle to redefine itself in the Internet era. But you have to really love newspapers. As Kindred admits, this book, subtitled "Inside the Washington Post: A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life," is a valentine to the profession, a mostly admiring look at the paper itself and the whole idea of journalism itself and especially working in journalism. What this book is NOT is a blueprint for how newspapers can survive in this digital age. In fact, I wrote the book was "mostly admiring" because Kindred indicates, despite his massive respect for the journalism skills of the individuals involved, that part of the reason for the "Post's" economic losses and massive layoffs, buyouts, and such that have depleted the staff in recent years is that the folks steering the ship were slow to adapt.

There is a tone of melancholy throughout "Morning Miracle," but not of the depressing variety. It's more the "folks getting together at the bar and singing sad songs but enjoying the hell out of reliving their memories" kind of sadness. Kindred loves the "Post," loves the industry, and he clearly hates the thought of print going extinct. But as he tells the story of how we got to the point where we have to entertain that kind of thought, he includes plenty of strong evidence for what makes newspapers at their best essential components of not just the media, but of our lives. You have to already share that view on at least some level, though, or you might be a little turned off by some of the pedestal-placing of newspaper journalism.

Kindred, best known as a sportswriter, takes a broader approach in his look at this single publication. He basically hung around the "Post" for a while and talked to all sorts of people, and he mixes his own reporting with the accounts of Posties past and present and a good dose of history. I think the early part of the book, in which Kindred writes an effective, entertaining account of the newspaper's origins and development, including the fascinating saga of its most notable publishers, the Grahams, makes this a worthwhile read by itself.

Then, however, Kindred serves up profiles of a variety of "Post" individuals and some of their most influential works. I like the variety in this section, as the writers range from investigative reporters like Dana Priest to feature writer/humorist Gene Weingarten.

After that section, Kindred delves into the various strategies used over the years to try to integrate "The Washington Post" into a post-Internet media landscape. There is a lot of inside baseball kind of stuff here, perhaps not as compelling to the average reader as to news junkies, but I thought it was great. I canceled my subscription a while ago after getting fed up with the price increases and the content decreases, but I do have some nostalgia for the glory days of "The Post"...or at least the "not-dying" days. This is a fun book for those of us who appreciate the value of a good newspaper and regret the medium's decline.

"Love is News" (1937) and the Newspaper Movie

Yesterday I whined about the decline of newspapers. Today, The greatest Cable channel known to Man is running a festival of print journalism movies. And last week I watched, via Fox Movie Channel, the 1937 Tyrone Power flick "Love is News." All of this has me thinking: The death of newspapers is terrible news for movies.

How will we replace all those great scenes of grizzled newsmen (and women) sitting around cracking wise and pounding out copy on their keyboards (typewriters or even better, of course)? Or the rush of reporters to a bank of phones so they can call in stories to "the desk" back at "the office"?

It's bad enough we lost fedoras and little cards that say "PRESS" and giant cameras that blind everyone in the scene with a supernova of a flash. It's bad enough we said good-bye years ago to the classic scene of a scrappy bigmouth yelling "Extry! Extry!" causing characters to stop in their tracks, wheel around, and grab a copy of that latest edition so they can confirm the shocking proclamation. "Yep...Mrs. Flanagan's cat DID find way back home."

Now we run the risk of losing all those other great newspaper movie cliches. What, you want to see a dramatic scene of a blogger rushing to his keyboard to upload a wise-ass review of a State of the Union speech. Of course not! Maybe so-called New Media and New Journalism can replace Old Newspapers in real life, but who cares about real life? In the movies, newspapers will never be replaced.

Fortunately we still have old flicks like "Love is News" to remind us of better days. This isn't a great one, even as screwball-ish newspaper romantic comedies, but the cast works hard. Reporter Tyrone Power tricks heiress Loretta Young to get a story, then she tricks him right back, which leads to all sorts of hijinks for the better part of an hour and a half as they fall in love, menace each other, and argue, not necessarily in that order. All the while, Power squabbles with his colleague Don Ameche, who gets to act exasperated a lot while Power gets to look dashing.

"Love is News" is hurt by a too-long sequence in which the leads are in a small-town jail. Despite Slim Summerville doing his thing as the judge in charge of the place, the story drags for a while. Plus it's tough to really get into the Power/Young pairing, and the movie just feels overall like one that is straining to be much more clever than it really is.

But it's entertaining enough, offering small roles for the likes of George Sanders, Jane Darwell, Stepin Fetchit, and a not-sleazy-as-usual Elisha Cook Jr. And it has plenty of Newspaper in it. We need to preserve films like this to remind the whippersnappers what journalism was like back in the day...or, more importantly, what Hollywood told us journalism was like back in the day.

What this country needs is a good 25-cent newspaper

Do you folks realize that "The Washington Post" costs 75 cents weekdays now, while a copy of "USA Today" is a full buck? This would be way too much even if the newspapers WEREN'T shrinking, both in quality (due to personnel attrition through buyouts of veteran talent and layoffs, as well as other cost-cutting measures) and in size (Thinner sections and even physically shrinking the dimensions of the newspaper, as the "Baltimore Sun" just did).

Whenever I visit my parents over the holidays, my mother--who is the best, by the way--often indulges my newspaper habit by picking me up a stack at the store. This past year, I was shocked at how much even the small locals were, let alone the national tabloids. My habit is becoming almost like smoking--increasingly expensive and decreasingly practiced.

It's a death spiral, with newspapers making themselves less appealing to loyal readers while somehow trying to capture the new or disloyal ones. I love newspapers and I've had a habit of looking at a daily rag or two for decades now (OK, I'm not that old, but "decades" is kind of dramatic, so I'm going with it because more than one decade=decades). When I moved down to the greater DC metro area, I thought one of the coolest things about living here was access to an affordable subscription to the "Post." What had been an expensive occasional Sunday treat back home was now a part of my daily routine.

Now, though, the paper I loved is no more. The end of the stand-alone "Book World" section on Sundays is just the latest in a line of moves that have decimated all the things that made the paper unique. I don't care if I can get similar (or the same) content on the Internet. I spend too much time on computers already; I want a newspaper I can hold in my hands, lay out on the floor or table, and throw in a pile until my wife yells at me for not recycling it quickly enough.

I want that newspaper every day, and I want SEVERAL on Fridays, for the movie reviews, and several more on Sundays for all the Sunday-only features, but not at the prices they're charging nowadays. Besides, those features are on the way out, leaving less and less to justify overpaying at the local grocery store. The "Post" is raising its subscription rates, and that's just another good reason to say good-bye when my current term expires.

That said, if I could pay a quarter a day, I'd be tempted to stick around. As long as there are the comic strips, the Sunday ads (although Circuit City is out of business and Best Buy has given up in my area, making it harder to hunt for DVD bargains), and the entertaining sports columnists, there will be content in a newspaper for me to enjoy. But not at these prices.