I just love living in such a self-indulgent post-modern world. I think it was Bob Schieffer who said that the media haven’t gotten any better or any worse, they just report on themselves a whole lot more now. On that note, guess what’s big in the newspapers these days? Newspapers!
I’m not sure if the newspaper business has high biorhythms right now, or if feelings of introspection are spilling onto the printing press, or if everyone just has Pulitzer fever. Whatever it is, there has been a stack of newspaper stories about newspapers recently. Here are a few. And don’t think I’m not aware of the fact that I’m writing in a newspaper about newspapers writing about newspapers.
First up: New York Daily News vs. New York Post. This age-old rivalry has been inching toward war in the past few years. Basically, in their quest to scoop each other, the two publications screw up a lot. Then they make fun of each other about it. In 2004 the Post printed in giant bold face type, “Kerry’s Choice: Dem Picks Gephardt as VP Candidate.” For those of you that have forgotten the 2004 presidential election’s subtle nuances, Kerry actually picked John Edwards. The Daily News had a field day. The Post, whose crown jewel is Page Six, regularly harps on the Daily News for printing yesterday’s news in their gossip column. But when your paper builds its reputation on its gossip column, it is bound to backfire. Jared Paul Stern, who contributed to Page Six has been accused of demanding money from kagillionaire Ron Burkle in exchange for not running negative stories about him. Somewhere, Tara Reid is slapping herself on the forehead saying “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Naturally the Daily News is completely up in arms about this, but you may be surprised to note that they didn’t break the story. Who did? As the New York Times puts it (yes, it’s writing about it too), “As for how The Post covered its in-house scandal – well, in classic self-congratulatory Post style, it ran a brief story on Page 3 last Friday that included the boast, ‘The Post broke the story on its Web site yesterday.’”
We’ll blame that one on the biorhythms.
Now I turn to my own publication, the Oregon Daily Emerald. I was delighted to read the story about busting the kegger on Friday (“Party promoting Brown-McLain prompts audit,” ODE Apr. 7), and thought the staff here handled it perfectly. I only wish they had called me to go to a party and buy beer as part of a fact-checking mission. But I digress; it was a fabulous piece, very well done, and exposed a possible violation of campaign rules, something I wish the bigger newspapers would do more of. On Monday our Editor in Chief Parker Howell wrote a full page column on the story and the tactics the Emerald used to get it (“Emerald strives to serve voters, cover kegger ethically,” ODE Apr. 10), and subsequently took over the entire Commentary page, bumping all other content. Will it start a war between Commentary and News? Will we suddenly start demanding our columns on the front page?
That idea is not as foreign as you think. The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and the Sun Herald of Biloxi have both printed editorials on the front page of their respective publications, according to an interesting piece the New York Times did on them Monday. This is where my column goes from easy-to-swallow commenting to lump-in-throat developing pride. Apparently, the residents of the Gulf Coast are reading the newspapers with a new-found hunger for news. While the national media, save maybe Anderson Cooper, have stopped talking about the effects of Katrina, that doesn’t mean the residents of the area can forget just as easily. They are living in it, unable to move on, and the local papers reflect that. The newspapers have become indispensable to the residents. As the New York Times puts it, they are “all Katrina, all the time,” and they should be.
The writers at these papers have been through everything their readers have, and both are up for Pulitzer Prizes. The two papers have developed a bit of a rivalry, but it is a healthy, respectable rivalry, not like those immature Yankees I mentioned earlier. I hope both papers are honored with a Pulitzer. They deserve it. They are shining examples of what newspapers should be in America: A public service reporting the news readers need to know. I am proud to say I work for a paper that works the same way, even if we are sometimes a little self-congratulatory.
So I guess newspapers are just like a big group of friends. There are the papers who need to put others down to feel good about themselves. There are the papers that tell anecdotal stories about themselves to make a larger point. And then there are those papers that beat all the odds, the ones you can’t help rooting for because they worked so hard to be where they are. And of course, like all friends, these papers talk about each other constantly.

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