Death in the Family

The front page of the Annapolis Capital-Gazette on the day after a shooting in that paper's newsroom killed five. Despite the tragedy, they "put out out a damn paper" the next day. It's what we do. 

So at this point, I would imagine that some of you are getting tired of all the goings on about journalists and community newspapers on this blog.

But you must admit, it hasn't been a banner week around here or in my business.

Although, and apparently I can't repeat this enough, the Pottstown Mercury may have re-located out of Pottstown, it will continue to publish. I'll be working out of my nifty little home office right here in Pottstown, which I spent the hot part of the weekend setting up.

Still I will miss the company of my co-workers, dwindling though their number may be.

But my loss is nothing compared to that experienced in Annapolis. As I said, not a banner week for newspaper newsrooms.

One of my former co-workers, Michelle Karas, sent me a column by Miami Herald and Pulitzer Prize winning humor columnist Dave Barry on the subject of that shooting.

You can read it by clicking here.

I've been a huge fan of Barry for a long time, particularly when I used to read his columns to my wife while she was pregnant. Then I found out he graduated from my high school, Pleasantville High School, the year after I was born and his first job was at the Daily Local News in West Chester, where he was paid $93 a week. (I'm not sure the pay has increased much since then....)

Anyway, my attachment grew, the fewer our degrees of separation became.

There was a line in his column that caught in my throat when I read it to my wife Sunday night.

Since that first job, "most of my friends have been newspaper people. No offense to any other profession, but these are, pound for pound, the smartest, funniest, most interested and most interesting people there are. They love what they do, and most of them do it for lousy pay, at a time when the economic situation of newspapers is precarious, and layoffs are common."

And I began to think about what a small extended family we newspaper people are and getting smaller all the time.

Michelle is working for The Gazette in Colorado Springs now, and Chris Six, whose column you hopefully read yesterday in this space, is now running two weeklies in Virginia. Caroline Sweeney is out in Kansas now as a TV reporter and the irrepressible Brandie Kessler is still at the York Daily Record.

Dan Robrish is running the Elizabethtown Advocate and Joe Zlomek, the former publisher of The Mercury, is running his growing empire of digital Post publications, which began with The Sanatoga Post -- this despite the fact that the guy already has a full-time job.

Michelle didn't know this when she sent Barry's column, but I applied for a job at The Capital many years ago.

Shortly after The Mercury was purchased by the then-dreaded-now-long-gone Journal-Register Co., once known as the champion of cost-cutting until the current owner, the rapacious Alden Global Capital, showed us all how it's really done, the late Walt Herring, the departing editor, advised me to find another job.

"Don't dawdle here," he said.

This was before Pottstown fully had its hooks in me and it seemed like good advice, so I snagged an interview at The Capital. No job offer came and the rest is history, well, at least family history anyway.

But it did get me thinking this weekend about "what if?" Had I gotten a job there, would I be among the dead? Would I have been like crime and courts reporter Phillip Davis, live-Tweeting from under his desk that his newsroom was under attack? (That's where my wife put her money.)

Would I have been one of the many who came back to the office to do what they always do, gather the facts and share them? I like to think so.

Journalism is certainly under attack these days, from economic forces, political forces and, as seems to have been the case in Annapolis, by people who have a grudge they want to settle with a gun.

But despite the glamour of being occasionally threatened, or being called "an enemy of the people," it gets harder and harder to make a living, raise a family and pay a mortgage working in a newsroom these days.

Many, like Frank Otto, Rosemarie Ross, Eileen Faust, Cheryl Thornburg, Eric Devlin, Chuck Pitchford, Pat Sommers, Kim Toth, Kaitlyn Foti -- the three horsemen of the photographic apocalypse, John Strickler, Kevin Hoffman and Dan Creighton -- and particularly my boss of nearly 20 years Nancy March, have left the business, mostly for aforesaid economic reasons.

I heard from many of them Friday on the last day in the newsroom at The Mercury building before it was shuttered, sharing memories and regrets. Tom Hylton, former editorial writer and one of our two Pulitzer Prize winners, came in to have a last look around.

All because while some of them may have left the business, the business has left its mark on them.

By way of example, some of you may know March still does some part-time paginating work for us but is primarily focused on her new passion, "Pottstown Works." 

But I ran into her after the chamber of commerce luncheon last week and she remarked on the presentation made by Peggy Lee-Clark about all the new businesses opening in Pottstown.

Nancy was particularly interested in Cedarville Engineering, which moved here from Chester County and is taking over the upper floors of the bank building at High and Hanover streets.

"We've got to get them into the paper" she said to me intently, completely forgetting that she no longer decides who gets into "the paper." This was not hubris, it was habit.

I just smiled, and agreed. She read my face, grimaced, and told me to shut up.

It is like any other family of un-related people who all love the same thing, don't always love each other, but always drop what they're doing to make deadline.

We don't do it for the money and fame, although some of us do it a little bit for the adrenaline (I'm looking at you Frank and Brandie). Barry had it right again when he wrote:

"The news people I know are still passionate about what they do, and they do it remarkably well. And here's the corny-but-true part: They do it for you. Every time they write a story, they're hoping you'll read it, maybe learn something new, maybe smile, maybe get mad and want to do something."

And so although I didn't know any of them, I'll risk an accusation of presumption and say it's not hard to imagine that I knew something about what those killed in Annapolis were like; what they thought was important and the passion they had for the vocation, because it is so, so much more than a job.

And I know I know why those who survived, those 10 bylines that appear on the next day's front page of The Capital, did what they did in the immediate aftermath.

They "put out a damn paper."

Because that's what we do.