THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.
PERMALINKS:
THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY
THE EUGENE DAVID GLOSSARY
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[I]n wanting to make a timely movie, an honest movie, Wright also made a film about the death of newspapering.
Images of pages rolling off presses, of delivery men tossing copies on doorsteps, of the tactile pleasure and permanence of "print" are contrasted with reporters and editors packing their belongings into boxes, marriages failing, of the "buyout" recital that managers give to journalists they're laying off.
Lopez is a star, a name columnist, "layoff-proof" it is suggested in the film. For now. But others (Stephen Root, Catherine Keener) are facing the ax in that same office (crowded at the beginning of the film, not so much by the end). An industry, one the film suggests fills a vital function in civic life, sputters its death rattle. That the film is still an elegy and not a eulogy seems weirdly optimistic.
Whatever is going on in the economy at large, we print people (especially we print movie reviewers) are all staring down the barrel of a gun and don't need to be reminded of that by a movie. The only thing that could have made this film more timely is the vast increase in workload--the social networking, Twittering and blogging, frantic efforts to expand our reach and our "branding" as the business model for our business scrambles for anything that hints of "reinvention."And [SIC!!!!!] that notion of "print" vanishes.
These are the things that stand between us and the polished, considered writing that so many of of [SIC!!!!!] us got into this industry to do, something the movie Steve Lopez does on legal pads, scraps of paper, wherever, just to get it into print. That's what is being lost.
It's enough to make you want to sit in the car, listen to Beethoven and have a good cry.
And then we remember all the things that got us rooting for the demise of your biz in the first place. When we get home, we'll listen to Spike Jones and have a good LAUGH.
(Via the usual Romy, whom this left in tears, no doubt)