When you regularly write for money on a deadline, you find yourself turning into a collection of habits. You write about the same things over and over again: South Korean defense posture, German industrial dysfunction, the perfidy of this or that government organ. (Or, closer to home for this column’s dozens of devoted readers, life in the press, literary hobbyhorses, and bars.)
Maybe originality is overrated. Maybe the small shoebox of things you know and care about enough to return to is your personality, that real you every American teenager is trying to find. I’m not so sure, though. Or maybe I don’t want that to be the case. I mean, do I really want part of my core essence to be the now-closed Uno’s at Union Station? Good Lord.
You go through your books. Here were brave efforts toward broader horizons! Physics textbooks; radio electronics manuals; bird guides; cookbooks for exotic cuisines; grammars of half a dozen languages that you never really got around to learning, German, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Tibetan, Hebrew, Hittite. You go through your desk and find the little keepsakes from the handful of trips you made outside the fifty-mile radius that has limned almost your entire life: porcelain hot-air balloons, museum tickets, a pressed poppy from one of the mounds at Marathon. The basement is a dusty graveyard of hobbies that you never have time for: recorders, shotguns, free weights. Somehow, you just never get around to becoming interesting.
So you’re back to the things you always write about—the Yankees, feeling short of money, the vague dissatisfaction of middle age. Then there are the ways you always write about them; these are even more damning. The rhetorical question, the O. Henry turn in the final line of a column, the strained allusion to one of the five writers you know pretty well. Otto Friedrich, the now mostly forgotten veteran of the golden-age of the glossies, wrote for Harper’s a blistering analysis of the newsmagazine style pioneered by Henry Luce’s TIME, titled “There Are 00 Trees in Russia.” Among other criticisms—centrally the fact that the newsmagazine is fundamentally a tool for propaganda rather than information—he ridicules the bag of tricks for getting a newsmagazine feature going: “The ‘weather lead’ is always a favorite because it creates a dramatic tone; because, by so obviously avoiding the news, it implicitly promises the reader more important things to come. Then there is the ‘moving-vehicle lead,’ most often a description of a plane landing. … Another favorite is the ‘narrative’ opening involving an unidentified person.”
Friedrich was writing in 1964. The product on offer is the same, but there are a few more colors, and the execution has gotten worse. You’ve got your song-lyric epigraphs. Your tonier sorts of writers, or at least the aspirationally tony, take their cues from Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe and now jump into the first-person editorializing game without much of a sense that they’re doing something naughty. (So far as I can tell, not one in ten of the under-twenty-five set can tell you what a straight news article in a major paper is supposed to look like.) It’s still tics and hobbyhorses all the way down.
No wonder the press is dying. They’re going to replace us with machines. You can go read about it. First to go will be wire editors and your more stats-oriented sports reporters. Actual shoeleather reporting will stick around at least as a luxury product—the machines can’t do interviews. A handful of high-level editors and fact-checkers will be there to Q.C. the machines, along with some John Henry stylists (doubtlessly legacy acts who are already successful) who hold out stoutly until they can draw on their 401ks. Everyone else will be swept away.
Including, perhaps, the industry’s humble hotel-bar comedians, the columnists. The press has been in free-fall almost my entire life, but I somehow thought it would last my time—long enough, anyway, or with enough mossy niches that a few of us could grab and hold on to for a decade or three. I’m less sure now. Tics and hobbyhorses, hobbyhorses and tics. A life in the press, persistent gloom, a few quotes. You know me, hypocrite reader: Are you sure a machine hasn’t written this? Would it seem so very different?
