The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press
If the newspaper column is not yet a lost art, it is on its way to becoming a lost practice.
Sure, daily newspapers nationwide persist in a valiant campaign to maintain editorial niches for writers who can hit readers’ funny bones, or craft heat-seeking sentences that ignite subscribers’ intestines. Sometimes, as in columnist Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post, a newspaper strikes gold. As time wears on, however, and as the internet lays waste or siege to more regional editorial voices, print media hounds are left to forage among whatever remains in The New York Times after Maureen Dowd hauls out another column about her Republican brother Kevin, or David Brooks pens another in a series of heartfelt columns about the hollowed-out psyche of our collective American soul. Legions of specialist voices at Substack beckon for anyone with the wallet, and time, to explore multiple takes on not just academic and policy interests but also food, parenting and, in The Isolation Journals, “artistic growth.”
The days when surly American teens might cut out the latest, most contentious newspaper op-eds and pin them with a magnet on the family refrigerator for household argument are gone. The editorial constellation of columnist stars that once guided our national conversation has been replaced by whatever passes for “friends” on Meta, plus the residual echoes of whatever survives a multitude of editorial and social media platforms to qualify as “viral.”
Reading Trillin, the laughs come so fast and easy you feel as if you are hearing his voice straight to the ear, rather than sub-vocalizing his words off the dead page.
Readers old enough to remember the golden age of magazine and newspaper columns can hold their heads in despair, or they can pick up the latest collection of works by Calvin Trillin, a Missouri native (Kansas City, to be exact) and a master of the form. With twenty-two titles propping up the long arc of his journalism career, plus three novels that seemed beside the point given how well he wrote in the realm of plain fact, you will be spoilt for choices.
His latest, The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press, follows eight years after his last published collection, Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America, and the 2011 collection Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff. True to their titles, both Jackson, 1964 and Quite Enough deliver on their promise. In the first, bracing reportage on the civil rights movement reveals Trillin’s prescience and dedication to the right side of history, even as he wrote many of its “first rough drafts,” to use the famous expression. The second chronicles Trillin’s trademark humor in piece after short piece, each one balancing relevant content and punchlines in near perfect symmetry. For example, this passage from a short essay on T.S. Eliot:
“I’m sometimes asked if I’m ashamed of making a living by making snide and underhanded remarks about respectable public officials, and my only defense has been ‘It’s not much of a living.’ But sometimes I do think of what might have happened if my path and T.S. Eliot’s path hadn’t diverged—if, for instance, as a boy in Kansas City I had paid a little more attention in Sanskrit class. Would I have moved to England and started talking funny? Could I have written something obscure enough to be considered profound?” (91, Quite Enough of)
Reading Trillin, the laughs come so fast and easy you feel as if you are hearing his voice straight to the ear, rather than sub-vocalizing his words off the dead page.
The Lede mixes the record of Trillin’s official contributions to the art of journalism with his humor toward the aim of what Trillin describes, in his introduction, as forming “a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer.”
As if to tip the balance toward his earlier career as a straight reporter, as opposed to his storied work as a humorist, the book’s inside jacket photo of Trillin shows him as a young man in 1961, interviewing the civil rights icon John Lewis at a Birmingham bus station. If all this sounds too earnest and clinical, though, worry not. Except for a sober reflection at the book’s closing on his work as a civil rights reporter for Time magazine on what he recalls as “the Seg Beat,” and with a closing paragraph sure to bring a lump to many a reader’s throat, the remainder of The Lede is just as much fun as you might remember from reading Trillin in the many magazines he has contributed to over more than forty years.
The Lede is cut into seven somewhat interlocking parts: “The Trade,” “Reporters and Reporting,” “Big Shots,” “R.I.P.” (i.e., obits of famed colleagues in journalism), “Controversies,” “Niches” and “Closings.” While not entirely exclusive to people familiar with the press, the first four are more inside reminiscences on what it was like to work in, for, and among the U.S. print media during the mid-sixties and through, approximately, the late nineties. Most, but maybe not all, people who spent some of their career in print journalism will smile knowingly while they read. Putting on the guise of an old timer—and being born in 1935, Trillin knows more than mere guise—we get full descriptions of what it was like to manage arguments at the copy desk, to suffer the outrageous egos of section editors, and to be women staffers forced to deal old-time sexual harassment by male colleagues who never gave their behaviors a second thought. Some of these pieces, however, and in particular “Paper Baron,” a longish expose on the capers of Canadian newspaper magnate Conrad Black, are not only too insular to media know-it-alls but too far back in the past for most readers to care. Still, because each is fueled by Trillin’s talent for turning mundane narrative transitions into unexpected trapdoors of wry observation and belly-laughs, each is worth reading, at least in part. Readers who lived in Miami or southern Florida during the turbulence of Cuban immigration north and the nascent drug trade that would come to wash over all of North America will want to turn straight to “Covering the Cops” in part two of the book. Here Trillin chronicles the famed Miami Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanan in all her glory, from “the classic Edna lead” of “the simple, matter-of-fact statement that registers with a jolt” to her ferocious dedication to detail, propriety, and preparedness:
“Keeping the picture and the press release sent when someone is named Officer of the Month may give Edna one extra positive sentence to write about a policeman the next time she mentions him; also, as it happens, it is difficult to come by a picture of a cop who gets in trouble, and over the years Edna has found that a cop who gets in trouble and a cop who was named Officer of the Month are often the same person.” (The Lede, 49-50)
In “Reporters and Reporting,” Trillin spends much of his time cutting his chosen profession down small enough for chuckles (he credits New York Times reporter R.W. Apple Jr. for inventing the “Q-head” form of journalism and also parlaying his Rabelaisian appetite into later covering the food scene) but keeps journalism big enough to earn marks of respect, at least after the reporters are dead. “R.I.P.” bursts with portraits of many of journalism’s most famous practitioners, including Murray Kempton (1917-1997), John Gregory Dunne, spouse to Joan Didion (1932-2003), Richard Harris (1928-1987), and Molly Ivins (1944-2007). Only as a glimpse does Trillin use a judgmental eye when praising his luminaries: “All of them specialized in the observed rather than in the deskbound meditations on the news that are sometimes known in the trade as thumb-suckers.”
The Lede mixes the record of Trillin’s official contributions to the art of journalism with his humor toward the aim of what Trillin describes, in his introduction, as forming “a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer.”
The real fun starts in “Controversies,” wherein Trillin describes, in ascending levels of absurdity, the futility of arguing with editors over obscene words and the press’s struggle of how it evolved to cover the gay rights movement in 1972. He also offers a couple of droll accounts of how small-town newspapers are eventually shown the door by the “respectable leaders” of their community. All ring true and read well enough, but the best piece by a mile—and the closest The Lede comes to an account of journalism’s past that bodes ill for its future—is the 1986 New Yorker piece, “The Life and Times of Joe Bob Briggs, So Far.”
Here Trillin is clearly at the height of his powers. He is in full command of source material that pushes the limits of credulity, is loaded with ethical quandaries, is mordantly funny, and, finally, offers a fascinating study in competition between media. Read it one time for the laughs, then a second time for its not-so-hidden lessons about the meaning of satire, the limits of bad taste, and the ruthless quest for readership that applies equally to our age of “clicks,” “likes,” and “retweets.”
Faced with how to cover trashy, drive-in B-grade movies beloved by the more rural denizens of its readership, Ron Smith, features editor of The Dallas Times Herald, enlisted the young movie reviewer John Bloom for a solution. In 1982, Bloom answered with the invented persona of Joe Bob Briggs, a kind of stunt-double movie reviewer who regaled in watching trashy drive-in horror shows beloved by Dallas moviegoers, then turning in plot summaries and recommendations in brutally honest, rope-burned redneck prose. Billed under the column heading “Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In,” the typical review capsule read like a laundry list of deadpan violence and sundry atrocities: “Sixty-four dead bodies. Bimbos in cages. Bimbos in chains. Arms roll. Thirty-nine breasts. Two beasts (giant lizard, octopus). Leprosy. Kung fu. Bimbo fu. Sword fu. Lizard fu. Knife fu. Seven battles. Three quarts blood. A 39 on the vomit meter. … Joe Bob says check it out.” (181)
Readers responded with enthusiasm, whether in nodding affirmation of Joe Bob’s authentic low-brow writing voice, or with gleeful smirks at being part of an inside joke that mocked the low-brow taste of anyone crass enough to enjoy such movies. On baseball caps and billboards, the newspaper even marketed Joe Bob Briggs, who began to sign syndication and book deals to spread his low-brow, drive-in movie gospel. Meanwhile, The Dallas Times Herald was gradually positioning itself as the champion of Dallas’s minorities, in unspoken opposition to its more traditional competitor, The Dallas Morning News. Feminists and Southern Baptists at times almost joined forces to protest the column, but everyone else reads it for the laughs. Joe Bob’s movie column fortified the Herald’s brand of rooting for the outsider with its renegade readership. Until, in 1985, it all came crashing down. After a Joe Bob column mocking the “We Are the World” pop song for Ethiopian famine relief went awry with racist language, Dallas’s long-dormant Black leadership rose up to kill the column, resulting in friction between newspaper management and reporters and, eventually, helping close the struggling newspaper in 1991.
As rollicking and superlative as The Lede is as pure reading experience, a person can go hungry wanting more analysis from a writer as observant as Trillin. Surely a mind as perceptive to humor would also be attuned to any opportunity for, shall we say, narrative opportunities with more edge, more bite.
Trillin never misses a beat in describing every bizarre detail of the Joe Bob saga, but what makes the article a masterpiece is his account of the aftermath. Media barons and editing teams can have a great time hatching schemes for increased readership, but even invented personae who take on a life of their own must have someone to report to. Someone, somewhere—the “high sheriffs of the newsroom,” as Trillin calls them—must defend the firewall not only of taste, but also ethics. Nowhere in the article does Trillin say any of that out loud. The volume of his meticulous account is sufficiently loud between the lines. So does an updated end-note to the original article, revealing that the promising young Dallas writer was consumed by the monster of his own experiment. Joe Bob Briggs still exists as a media creation; John Bloom, not so much. “Very rarely do I see him anymore,” Joe Bob says when asked about Bloom.
As rollicking and superlative as The Lede is as pure reading experience, a person can go hungry wanting more analysis from a writer as observant as Trillin. Surely a mind as perceptive to humor would also be attuned to any opportunity for, shall we say, narrative opportunities with more edge, more bite. Except for an amusing curio titled “Internetfactchecking.com,” not one of the forty-two pieces selected for The Lede approaches the thorny patches of misinformation and disinformation in our age of social media or ventures anywhere near the fetid swamps of Trumpism.
With Trillin approaching the age of ninety, after a career that started fresh out of the gate wrangling with what he calls the “cornpone Stasi” of Southern police chiefs on “the Seg Beat,” the great writer and humorist may have long tired of documenting other people’s destructive nonsense on deadline. Still, we can be sure that with The Lede and so many other fine books to his name, it would be great fun to read even his rough draft attempts.
