Thursday morning the new intern returned from the postal arts center with the November break’s accumulated mail, most of it from those scoundrels at Optice Altamont. “The Tri-State-Area’s best Television, Phone, and High-Speed Internet with service windows every other Saturday in months containing the letter G. Please download our app to select a four-hour availability block so that our technician can come explain how adjustments made to the wiring inside your residence or place of business will be your financial responsibility. Act now and get a free month of Disney Plus! (With 5-year premium service contract. Not to be combined with other offers.)”
The youngster’s task from there was to sort and prioritize the contents of the two bins.
We instructed them to first segregate the commercial dross from the mail of possible substance and to prepare the former for curbside pickup.
But the tyro quickly hit a snag. Junkmail these days includes a clown kit of unrecyclable components—fridge magnets, foil seals, fake credit cards, tinsel panels, vinyl window-clings and the like—and the front desk’s scissors and staple remover were clearly insufficient to the separation task.
Without speculating aloud what prior interns did—nor observing that we have not yet heard of the Village penalizing anybody for improper sorting (and there is no way we would escape a tip about that)—we instructed the youngster to put the entire commercial pile into the general landfill bin and set them to the more intellectually satisfying work of placing bills and checks into the finance box and then reading and categorizing all the other correspondence, particularly letters to the editor.
But it was not long before the novice reached another impasse.
“When they call us communists, cancel-culture gestapo, or snowflakes, that means they are on the right. And when they call us heartless boomers, dinosaurs or corporate lackeys that means they are on the left. But what pile should they go in when they say that we are, let’s see, ‘hacks who would not know good local journalism if it showed up in your sad excuse for a lobby with Pulitzer and Polk ribbons around its neck’?”
That, we told them, would go in the crank pile. We took the note and immediately recognized the double-spaced courier of F’s Selectric III. F is the former publisher of the long-defunct Tree Streets Intelligencer and perhaps the world’s last remaining postal troll. He never forgave us, to hear our sources tell it, for popularizing “the B.M.” as shorthand for his native Briarcliff Manor. F has always been one of those people who is better at exhaling opinions than inhaling facts.
But his message adumbrated the good question the intern was now raising—What IS good local journalism?
We went to the shelf and pulled down our office copy of The Northern Westchester Handbook of Local Reportage.
The guide, written when our region was something of a proving ground for journalistic talent, lays out much wisdom.
There are basic procedural dos and don’ts—
Do, whenever possible, interview in-person versus by [at the time] telephone.
Don’t bury the lede—unless your editor specifically tells you.
Do all you can to avoid -ly adverbs.
Don’t use the same noun, verb or adjective twice within four paragraphs.
Do prefer the active voice to the other kind.
Don’t have pronouns attempt to jump any objects to which they might possibly also adhere.
Sixty-five pages in length, the material got smaller from there—
the intricacies of how to introduce a person’s name and then fairly shorthand them later in the piece
using [at the time] two spaces after a period
the appropriate honorifics for town board members and council-people
a style-guide for recipes
how to pick which common name to use for a plant or animal when there is more than one listed (e.g., mayapple versus American mandrake)
And its topics got larger, too, indeed all the way to the definition of—better than good—great local journalism, which we presently read aloud.
Great journalism wields the scalpel of truth so deftly that the reader’s indifference is excised without anesthesia, and without complaint.
The intern scratched its chin, mouthed what appeared to be the word Wow, and asked us where that definition had come from.
We told them everything in The Handbook had been an NWRG effort and the convention had been not to attribute authorship.
“Like The Economist.”
We explain that the decision at the Northern Westchester Reporters Guild was made not to disguise a staffing shortage but to help ensure that professional egos did not get in the way of professional results.
“Did you say guild—like in Dungeons and Dragons?”
We said we did not know much about Dungeons and Dragons guilds but that the NWRG in its heyday, was among the more respected local journalistic outfits in the nation.
They asked what the guild did, besides publishing a handbook.
We explained that before the Internet—before Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and Google and Zoom—it was incumbent on people with similar interests to come together in person.
“In the meet world.”
We nodded and explained that socializing, networking, passing tips, sharing intelligence about printers and town officials, identifying continuing education opportunities—all of it was most efficiently done in-person, with actual meetings.
“So, what happened at these meetings?”
We recounted that typically we would review minutes from the prior gathering, vote them into the record, and then proceed through the agenda, which would have been ratified at the conclusion of the prior meeting.
“And what would be on the agenda?”
We gave a list of standard topics—budgets for holiday parties and junkets to Albany, discussions of advertising, printing, copyright law, photography, library- and delivery-fees, etc.
“Sounds pretty meaty.”
We assured that them it was, particularly when we got to Research and Development.
“Research and development? For a guild?”
We described how we periodically fielded tests to help reach new readers—exploring topics and headline strategies, front-page layouts, paper choices, lead-retention and circulation tactics, and assured them that these were often dynamic, passion-filled exercises. We gave the for-instance of discovering that headlines with clearly-identified villains always do better than those without.
The intern asked for an example of this practice and we pulled out our hand-screen and pointed to a story on Lohud.com:
‘Why some Westchester cemeteries are hosting solar power installations.’ This was journeyman’s work, we observed. Cemeteries have some emotional resonance. Solar power does, too. But what if one were to throw some bad guys into the mix? What if it read, instead, ‘Cemetery operators conspire with power companies to generate electricity.’
The intern admitted there was no contest.
Though not a local story, we found an even clearer illustration in The Daily Star, a U.K. tabloid whose stories, for some reason keep popping into our feed. ‘Jeff Bezos hits back at critics for saying there are bigger problems on Earth than space.’
We asked the intern if they were tempted to read this article.
“I don’t know. There are a lot of Bezos stories these days.”
We suggested it might instead read, ‘Jeff Bezos hits back at humans for saying there are bigger problems on Earth than space.’
“But that’s—”
We asked if the words were not still accurate and factual.
“I guess. And it does play the villain note louder, it’s true. So, in essence, you guys were, like, doing clickbait strategies before there was anything to click.”
We supposed this was true.
“What else did you cover in research and development? What about content? Did you test for types of stories that resonated with the readership? What about crime? Institutional racism? Environment? Education? Were some areas more popular than others?”
At this point we wondered if this intern might possibly be a spy. It had been at least a decade since we had encountered a person under the age of fifty taking such interest in journalism. But spies get paid, and our current circulation and finances make it hard to imagine anybody giving money to infiltrate our organization. Even with the coming breaks from the Build Back Better program, a mercenary youngster would do better to join the rest of its able-minded peers and go into finance.
So, we decided to go ahead and usher the unusually perspicacious youngster right to the heart of things. Who knows, maybe this will be the one—the next Bloomberg or Murdoch (only hopefully with not so active a Napoleon complex as either of those two)—who works its way up from the mailroom and guides us across the rising digital ocean. We let them know it was not so much the what to cover as the what not that is the key. Every semi-seasoned journalist knows to say yes to the Four S’s: Scandal, Sybaritism (which includes recipes, health, travel, fashion and entertainment), Spectacle (which covers natural and human-caused disasters as well as real estate), and Sport (which subsumes politics), but few ever articulate the four Ps: Probity, Pedantry, Perspectivization, and Population. Any of these is as dangerous as a new social media platform and, so far as we know, only The Handbook has ever articulated them so well.
The intern asked for a definition of each, and we quickly rattled them off. Probity is espousing a piece of uprightness—for instance a story on the environmental consequences of not properly sorting your recycling.
Pedantry is taking on a professorial tone in the explanation of a situation or phenomenon, especially one that might provoke an identity-issue response—like endeavoring to make clear the mechanics of vaccine physics.
“Mansplaining,” said the intern, nodding.
Perspectivization is harping on scale. Like lining up what the residents of, say, Chappaqua spend on broadband versus what the town spends public housing programs.
And the last P is Population. One does not directly discuss this ever—it is a third rail of local journalism. One does not discuss it in relation to school budgets. One does not discuss how the human population of Northern Westchester is greater than the U.S. Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Greenland, Tuvalu, and Liechtenstein combined. One does not discuss how there are more cats and dogs (about 139 million) in the U.S. than there were voters (about 133 million) in the country’s 2016 elections—which would also, by the way, make one guilty of Perspectivization. And one never, ever discusses how the Wackerbarths have already had several more children than is conscionable for the environment, the school bus driver, or the family’s finances.
“And why not?”
Because, we told them, it risks the Big D.
“Degree?” they said. And then showed us a video by a band called Wet Leg.
It was not the most ingenious melody but it had some appeal and we made a note to ask M, our music critic what she thinks of it.
Then we told the intern that the Big D we were talking about was Death. Death of mood, Death of conversation, Death of subscription, Death of advertising revenue. For a local journalist, wandering among the Four Ps is the surest way to bring on the Big D.
“But why population so much? Isn’t it a lot more specific a topic than the others?”
We considered getting into it. Telling them how modern capitalism operates on a perpetual growth model and that society’s central nervous system—the Professional-Managerial Class—works best when kept in a state of perpetual indifference, which can only be maintained atop a swelling mountain of disenfranchised workers. And how our suburban bailiwick is a carefully maintained PMC construct, a zone that protects its residents’ indifference, shielding them from the human realities of urban population centers while still allowing access to its economic fruits.
But some truths are too dark to impart to somebody who is not old enough to drink at a bar.
We told them we would sort the mail ourselves and then rummaged the front office file cabinet till we found the disk.
“What is this?” the intern asked as we handed them the almost hand-sized, thin plastic square.
We explained what a TRS-80 was and instructed them to go search the Internet for a service that can take this floppy disk and extract the printer files for The Northern Westchester Handbook of Local Reportage. Because, if that did not work, they would have to recreate the text and layout themselves, working from our physical copy—a painstaking project that would last into the next semester, if not beyond.
And we suggested, when the job was done—provided we were in a good place with Covid—we might call a guild meeting and let them attend.
“For reals [sic]? A guild meeting? Where?”
We tell them we often used to gather at Squire’s, in Briarcliff.
“The guild meets at someplace called Squire’s.”
We told them, while they were researching on the Internet, to look up the restaurant and make sure it was still in business, and that they had terrific burgers.
“You mean out there in the meet world.”
We had a sudden suspicion they might be vegan and suggested we could maybe instead do one of those nice farm-to-table places we have read about down in Tarrytown.
“Oh no,” they said, examining the thin black disk in their hands. “Let’s do this by the book.”
We tried not to beam as we showed them the password to the lobby Internet terminal.