All: This Is My Last Day - Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16
On June 21, 2007, United Press International celebrated its 100th anniversary. Well, "celebrated" is generous. Here is how Philip Stone, UPI Helsinki in the 1970s, put it: "Yes, there is still a UPI today, but it is not even a shell of its former self, having moved from bankruptcy to bankruptcy to new owner to new owner. And Thursday marked a rather sad anniversary – UPI – that is, what is now called UPI, turned 100 years old. Regretfully, many of those "Unipressers" no longer with us would turn in their graves at what they would see those initials representing today."
He was not alone. Many former Unipressers marked the day with sadness.
This from Emil Sveilis: "I'm sorry, but however crudely I put it, the UPI I knew is dead. Just because the logo still exists, it does not mean that it is the same UPI organization that we all worked for and toiled for. This centennial celebration is a lot of PR and puff to reunite this current outfit with the honorable name of UPI, no matter how much we bitched and groaned when it was still a viable company. I'm sorry, but I would not partake in this project."
Another, Art McGinn, weighed in with this five years earlier: for the record: there are some ex-unipressers, or at least this one, who see no legitimate connection between the current bearer of the name united press international and the news organization which the public has associated with that name. beyond that, best wishes to them all. art ex-sx

On July 11, 2007, Editor & Publisher reported:
UPI Staff Cuts Include White House Correspondent
By Joe Strupp
NEW YORK -- United Press International is cutting 11 positions from its Washington, D.C., bureau, including its lone White House correspondent, Richard Tomkins. The move marks the first time in its history that UPI will have no one on that beat.
We learned on the following days that the United Nations beat, run by veteran Unipresser Bill Reilly, would also be discontinued -- also for the first time in UPI's history.
The official word:
Changes at UPI
Yesterday we started implementing changes at UPI that have been the subject of rumor for some time. I want to explain what those changes are and why we are making them. It has been clear for many years going back to earlier owners that UPI could no longer compete in the market as a general news agency. When News World Communications bought UPI it sought to control costs and improve revenue and has succeeded in both in recent years. In addition, current management has diversified and refocused UPI content in order to find a new market niche where we could once again be successful. That was why the specialized segments in Health, Energy, Security, and International Intelligence were created two years ago.
They were designed to combine existing expertise at UPI with market possibilities that research had identified. Of course, there were no guarantees and the segments themselves were always considered as active tests of the market.
Unfortunately, while the segments have earned money, the gap between revenue and costs remained significant and was not closing quickly enough to justify continued investment in them in their existing form by News World. As a result, from July 31, we will be changing our product lineup. We will focus our global intelligence coverage more tightly, concentrating on defense intelligence, with an emphasis on emerging security threats, defense strategy and security technology, and resource wars. Our health coverage will continue in the form of Consumer Health Tips. NewsTrack will continue to publish as will News Pictures. As a result of the changes, eleven editorial positions will be eliminated.
Looking to the future, UPI will actively explore possibilities in new media and interactive forms of journalism to capitalize on the opportunities offered by emerging digital technologies.
Everyone whose job is affected by these changes has been informed. I want to stress that none of this is any reflection on the quality of work or the commitment of any of UPI’s outstanding editorial staff.
They are the unhappy but unavoidable result of market imperatives. I want to offer my thanks to everybody for your loyalty and a job well done. To those who are leaving you go with our gratitude and best wishes for the future. To those who remain, let’s make the most of the opportunities before us.
Warm regards,
Michael Marshall
Here's what UPI provided to the Illinois secretary of state for publication in a book that office published every two years. What's quoted comes from the 1963-64 and the 1965-66 editions:
United Press International serves more than 150 daily newspapers, radio and television stations in Illinois. These subscribers are among more than 6,000 throughout the world served directly by the manifold facilities of UPI. ... available to subscribers in 111 nations. UPI maintains 264 bureaus in 62 nations, and employs more than 10,000 full- and part-time reporters, telegraphers, photographers, editors, and technicians. UPI dispatches are translated into 48 languages and are fed out over a communications network of 500,000 miles of leased land and underwater circuits and a series of intercontinental radio teleprinter channels.
In 1982, UPI employed 1,737 people in more than 800 newspaper subscribers and more than 4,000 broadcast clients around the world. In 1989 -- only seven years later -- UPI employees numbered about 650.
When Marshall announced the company's changes in July 2007, the joke among former Unipressers was: "They are eliminating 11 positions. Does that take their personnel to minus 5?"
In a release, UPI stated that the change in focus was needed for "increased competitiveness and profitability among consumers of news and analysis in a 21st century media marketplace."
It continued:
“UPI provides news, video and photo content worldwide in English, Spanish, and Arabic to traditional and online media outlets, governments, businesses, policy groups, and academic institutions, according to company officials.
"UPI is taking initial steps to strengthen our coverage of international hot spots seeking on-the-ground coverage from our international network of journalists," Nicholas Chiaia, UPI's chief operating officer, said in a statement. "We are also exploring various options for training aspiring journalists in international news coverage.”
On Oct. 13, 2007, Billy Joe McFarland, who worked in the Portland, Ore., bureau, said the “beginning of the end for UPI came for me in February of 1982, shortly after Publisher Fred Stickel of The Oregonian told me as we exited the building together that UPI was up for sale for $1. That devaluation spelled sinking ship of UPI with its Oregon clients and after Bobbie Ulrich left for The Oregonian's sister paper -- the Oregon Journal earlier -- I said hello The Oregonian -- "I accept your fourth and final offer to come through your doors to continue my journalism future as your new Regional Editor ... beginning Feb. 2, 1982. From the floor below I saw the beloved UPI slowly sink into near oblivion.”
Vin Crosbie, a professor at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, who had worked sales for UPI in Albany and New York City, said: “To UPI's sales people (most of whom had news backgrounds), UPI's end was perceptible by the late 1970s.
"It had become apparent by the close of the 1970s that American newspapers didn't need two full-service wire services. Note the verb that I use is need. Most of the 1,450 dailies in the U.S. no longer had local competitors; less than 30 U.S. cities had more than one local newspaper. The few dailies with local competition found that they could publish quite well, thank you, with one full-service wire plus one or two brand name supplementals or their own corporate chain's supplementals. They began to see that having a second full-service wire (one that delivered fewer stories) as a luxury, not a necessity. Meanwhile, more and more of the 1,420 other dailies that had no local competition chose to use the bigger full-service wire, the AP.
“Nails were added to that coffin when in the 1980s President Reagan 'deregulated' the FCC, dropping the requirement that radio station licensees must have news operations. Both the AP and UPI lose huge amounts of broadcast business due to that.”
As the year 2007 was drawing to an end, the Associated Press was hearing at least the beginnings of the death knell. On Nov. 2, 2007, Rich Ord, CEO of iEntry Inc., who could have had a vested interest, wrote in WebProNews.com that "AP is dead ... killed by blogs and aggregation."
According to Ord: "Blogs are the new AP." Journalists and aggregation services, which started with NewsLinx.com in 1996 (founded by me!) and which now include Google News, Topix, Techmeme, WebProWire and the new Blogrunner have made the AP much less relevant. There are now tens of thousands of bloggers around the world providing coverage and analysis of current events too! It comes down to why pay when you can get the news for free."
Advertising Age reported in 2008 that one of every 12 media industry jobs had disappeared since May 2002.
"The U.S. Media industry lost nearly 20,000 jobs over the past year and nearly 8,000 since a post-recession ad recovery began in May 2002.
“Newspapers get the blame; staffing at papers has tumbled 30 percent since its 1990 peak. Internet media companies and search portals are media's biggest job creators, but digital job gains are just a fraction of overall media losses."
Steven A. Smith retired as editor of The Spokesman-Review in October 2008. He had served as editor of The Statesman-Journal in Salem, Ore., and The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.
On July 31, 2008, Smith posted something he called Still a Newspaperman, reprinted here with his permission:
I am a newspaperman.
For some unexplainable reason, I am compelled to say that tonight.
Something is coming, some turn in the media universe, a turn in the future of my newspaper. A turn that will mean the end of me, of us.
There will be reporters. Editors. Something called online producers and multi-media coordinators. Mojos. Slojos and Nojos. Bloggers, froggers and twitters.
But there won't be newspapermen. At 58, I am among the last of a dying race.
And what a race it was. An American archetype.
A newspaperman was a writer. An author. The true, first voice of history. A newspaperman chronicled the life of his times on old Remingtons with faded ribbons. A newspaperman wrote on copy paper, one story in one take. If he wanted a copy, he used carbon paper. If it didn't sing, it was spiked.
A newspaperman edited with pencils and always had a ready stack, freshly sharpened, at the start of every shift. A newspaperman smoked at his desk. And if the managing editor wasn't paying too much attention, he might steal a drink, too. A newspaperman knew how to eat well and finish off the meal with a stiff drink and a fine cigar -- all on the company dime.
A newspaperman wore black slacks, a bit worn. A short-sleeved white shirt and a thin black necktie. A newspaperman owned one pair of black wingtips for his entire career.
A newspaperman had nicknames, raunchy, rude and unashamedly affectionate nicknames, for all of the linotype operators in the basement. A newspaperman reveled in the composing room heat, the smells of melted lead and oily black ink.
But the newspaperman was most at home in the newsroom. A loud, smoky, smelly place. Wire machines. Real phones with loud rings. The morning news meeting held in the men's room, the last two stalls on the right, each editor doing his business while conducting business.
The newsroom was a place of boisterous rough housing, crude jokes and tough insults, none taken too seriously, unless they were taken seriously, in which case there might be a bit of a ruckus, maybe a swing or two.
And the characters. The copy editor who barked like a dog. The old city editor who ate reheated fish for lunch. The former war correspondent, hobbling around on one leg, the other lost to drink not combat.
The newsroom was no place for the meek. The young newspaperman knew that when the managing editor threw a coffee cup at his head, the proper recourse was to duck. There was no HR department ready to take a complaint.
The older newspapermen had their heroes. Ben Franklin. John Peter Zenger. Horace Greeley. William Randolph Hearst. Joseph Pulitzer, maybe. William Allen White certainly. And because he had the heart of a newspaperman, Edward R. Murrow and, later, maybe Walter Cronkite.
For the aspiring newspaperman, heroes were the veterans who welcomed him into the newsroom, all the while expecting he would stay quiet, pay his dues and eventually prove himself under fire. The brightest, most ambitious, most talented young newspapermen were grateful for every day they were able to work next to these great, principled and talented men.
Of course, they were not all men. And in this politically correct world, there are some who think the term "newspaperman" is inherently sexist. But the greatest newspaperman with whom I ever worked was Deborah Howell. Don't ever tell me Deborah Howell isn't a newspaperman. In our world, it was the newspaper that defined us, not gender.
A newspaperman knew the meaning of a deadline. He felt a chill when the presses rumbled at midnight and would look for a reason to be in the press room, slipping an early run paper from the conveyor to give the front page a quick look and maybe also to see his byline in print.
Newspapermen worked hard and played hard. The bartender at the dive across the street knew how many beers each reporter could consume between editions. And after the last edition went to press, the bar lights would be turned up just enough to let the newspapermen read those papers pulled fresh from the press.
The newspaperman was respected in the community. There was a mystique, a glamour that really didn't exist but which the newspaperman happily cultivated. In the movies, the editors were Cary Grant. Or Clark Gable. Or Jack Webb. Or Humphrey Bogart, the greatest of all.
The young newspaperman wanted to be Bogie, standing in the press room, screaming into the phone, "That's the sound of the press, baby." The young newspaperman aspired to challenge authority, defend the defenseless and right wrongs. If he was a Don Quixote with a pen, his windmills were politicians, bureaucrats, crooks and thugs. He thought of his job as a calling and truth was his holy grail.
The old newspapermen have died or are dying. One of my great mentors, Dan Wyant, passed away just a week or two ago. The younger, my generation, are fading, too, facing a future in which journalists serve products and platforms not communities and their newspapers.
The young Turks have become the old farts. We pray at the old altars.
We worship the old gods. The new media moguls have their shiny new religion. And our passing is seen by them as both timely and just.
But there is more to be lost than warm, rosy recollections. It's not all about nostalgia.
No instrument will ever serve the public interest so relentlessly as the daily newspaper. New media will successfully distribute data and information. "Communities of interest" will develop around niche products. And while print newspapers will survive to serve a small, elite audience, they never again will serve the larger geographic communities that gave them life and purpose. Democracy will have to find a new public square.
Even as I try to articulate a coherent and meaningful future for my newspaper and my craft, even as I struggle to innovate, to experiment, to manage a frightened workforce, I weep for what is lost. Oh, I still hang on to the trappings. The fedora. The rumpled raincoat. I have the aging wingtips and 25-year-old ties. My battered old typewriter can still churn out memos. But the life I aspired to, that has defined me for nearly 40 years, is going, is mostly gone.
It is a sad thing. And tonight, I find myself mourning the fading, disappearing American newspaperman, the bison of the information age.
The wooly mammoth and, bless us, the dodo.
Tomorrow I'll try to think again about what happens next.
Steve