Stop the presses! The heralded lives of newspapermen

Since 2004, some 1,800 metropolitan and community newspapers have gone out of business or merged - a challenging environment for journalists whose job is to report the life's blood of a city. Two "princes of print" who'd gotten their starts in the heyday of New York City metropolitan newspapers were Jimmy Breslin (who died in 2017) and Pete Hamill, both of whom are the subject of a new HBO documentary, "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists." Hamill talked with Tony Dokoupil about working the city beat, and offered advice for journalists of today.
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[@jonathanpasch6604]

It used to be embarrassing for a news company to print lies or purposely mislead.

[@tkc5898]

Jonathan Pasch The only person lying and misleading is the current president & his administration. The news company only rebroadcasts the lies that come out of his mouth

[@cherylanderson3340]

Also, it was once against the law to deliberately lie in a news item. Once that law was struck down, it allowed the likes of FOX "news" to rise up & broadcast lies & misinformation deliberately.

[@margo3367]

I still have a library card too for every new city I've lived in over the years. It's free, people.

[@margo3367]

John Kyle Homeless people find warmth and solace in libraries.

[@sebjoeko]

Pete was the closest thing to 'The Bard of New York' that this city every had. Rest in Peace.

[@alicesoto3201]

I was sitting here during the pandemic I’ve been in the house for 12 weeks I love to read but I started running out of books I went into my closet where I keep my books and I’m looking and looking I pull up this little brown paper back doesn’t look very interesting Pete Hamill who is this snow in August didn’t sound very interesting oh well I said I need a book well it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read in my lifeI’m 67 I’ve read a lot of books thank you Pete Hamill

[@alicesoto3201]

Never judge a book by its cover

[@nevincaulfield]

What an incredible Documentary that was. Utmost respect to these legends. Queens to Brooklyn representing all of America.

[@californiascreaming1131]

Very few true journalists now. Asking "who, what, where, why" just facts not biased opinion.

[@donnamariedemaio]

The dumbing-down of America. When did it all go wrong?

[@libertyann439]

This makes me very sad😢

[@rodspence472]

R.I.P. Pete Hamill (1935-2020)

[@tj-kv6vr]

you actually meant the "fake" newspaper stories

[@cherylanderson3340]

It's very sad to see our newspapers disappearing, & the remaining ones struggling to survive. Unfortunately, the cost of putting out a newspaper became so costly, it surpassed the profits. My ex-husband worked at our local newspaper for over 30 years. He was always interested in the newspaper business, & his grandfather had been a typesetter, back in the day. So he began with an apprenticeship when he moved to this city, while attending college here. He was later hired as a reporter, & after many years, worked as an editor, & many years later, as the head of the news desk, until his death. This newspaper was once locally owned, by a very wealthy family. They also owned a radio station, for many years. Then laws changed & they had to sell the radio division. Many years later, the owner died & the family put the paper up for sale. They were bought by another, much larger newspaper in our state, which owned it for many years. Then, as costs of running 2 newspapers grew more daunting, this newspaper suffered waves of cuts to personnel. At some point they bought a new printing press,, & built a huge building around it, relocating the printing & distribution point. Some years later, it was sold to the NYT, which owned it for many years, until they sold it to another owner, who made even more cutbacks to personnel & sold the downtown building they were located in, since the beginning, & for many decades. The cost of running a newspaper kept on increasing over the decades, while readership went down. At one point, people could buy a newspaper for maybe 5 cents, then a dime & so on. Today, it costs $2.50 to buy a single weekday NYT newspaper. The NYT Sunday paper costs $5.00, or $6.00 at an out of town newsstand. When TV came along, fewer bought newspapers, while the cost to put out & distribute a daily newspaper went up, so the cost of advertising in newspapers went up too. Then - a shift came, & fewer wanted to pay increasing costs to advertise in newspapers, since they realized - fewer were reading them. More were watching TV, but not everyone could afford advertising on national TV broadcasts, while some advertised on local TV stations. Many advertisers drifted away from newspapers, & not everyone could afford the increasing cost of a daily newspaper, as the cost of food, housing, fuel & everything was going up too. Many needed a 2nd part time job, to stay afloat - so had less leisure time to spend, to sit down & read a newspaper, when they can listen to the news on radio & TV, while doing housework, cooking, driving, etc.. especially since it could take hours to read some whole newspapers, though due to cost, many newspapers began shrinking in volume. Now, few people are still in the habit of buying a daily newspaper. The cost of putting out a paper increased considerably too. There was the cost of buying paper to print on, & to pay for type setters manually setting up the keys - one by one, by hand, & then inking & re-inking - running thousands of pages, then compiling, cutting & folding, manually. It was a huge process. Even after becoming a computerized process, still running it through an automated printing press, plus the cost of ink & paper, plus the cost to house these massive printers, the cost of daily, physically loading trucks & delivering all those papers to selling points, & paying for those being delivered to homes, began building up. All of these steps burn fossil fuels, & eats through vast stands of trees - which have also dwindled, while the costs of logging, driving to be processed into paper, then delivered to newspaper facilities went up too. Then the huge amount of press & office space to house & pay to produce a paper, plus the salaries of hundreds of employees, etc outweighed the profits - especially since fewer wanted to buy newspapers, only to throw them away a few days later. I know that, in my house, they'd pile up, before there were recycling programs in my city. So it's a dying industry for a host of reasons. It would be great if newspapers could be subsidized by some altruistic body, or even by govt, but then there'd be problems associated with that, as far as real or perceived influence, and then too, there's the reality of the environmental impact to consider. So we can support our local & national newspapers by subscribing to their digital editions. We can all listen to national news, but we still need to be sure we don't lose the local perspective, brought to us by local reporters putting out digital, local reports. So - it's come to this...

[@cherylanderson3340]

While the newspaper industry has all but died, we now have news instantly at our fingertips. Sure there are lots of false leads, but now it's up to us to ask the relevant questions & to keep our objectivity.

[@cornellwaters9089]

📃 Thank You!

[@peggyprose]

Library cards are free, folks!!

[@TXMEDRGR]

Perhaps if newspapers reported facts instead of pushing an agenda.

[@suzsolmin227]

It's also happening in TV now, FOX, CNN, MSNBC...etc everybody has an agenda.