Reviews for Newspaper days

The average rating for Newspaper days based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-22 00:00:00 Edward Gonzalez I immensely enjoyed this part of H.L. Mencken's memoirs, reminiscing about his days as a young reporter and editor in Baltimore at the turn of the last century. Of course, more time had passed between his era and when I started in the newspaper business than the time I've been in the business altogether, but still, there were so many aspects of the profession that were familiar to me. I came into the business in the late 1960s, just at the end of an era in which most reporters were not college educated, where smoking was common in newsrooms and many still had flasks stuck in their desk drawers. In that sense, many of Mencken's memories were similar, but in his day, the profession was held in even lower repute and the drinking was much, much heavier. His newspaper, the Baltimore American, was one of three morning papers that competed in the growing port city, and some of his best stories are about the ways in which he and rival reporters would come to agreements to run the same stories so they didn't look foolish in front of their editors, and -- and believe me, this doesn't happen now -- colluding to make up stories that had plenty of vim and spice and just enough vagueness that the editors couldn't catch them. In one particularly vivid anecdote, he recalled an inept heavy drinking reporter who was told he had to find a good story by the end of the day or he'd be fired. A newfangled invention at the time were arc lights for downtown businesses, and since it happened to be raining that day, it struck the reporter that an electrocution story of some passerby touching his umbrella to the arc light would save his bacon. It did indeed, but soon, the utility companies threatened a huge lawsuit against the newspaper as frightened business owners stopped using the lights. The utilities were ready to testify to the absolute safety of their lights, and it looked as though the newspaper was doomed until one day, a pedestrian actually did get electrocuted through his umbrella, making life imitate art. Mencken also tells a vivid story of the great Baltimore fire of 1904, the largest urban calamity between the Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake, and the herculean efforts his staff made to cover the event, which destroyed 20 city blocks, first by printing at the Washington Post, and then in Philadelphia, where a special train was chartered each evening to ship the Baltimore papers to eager newsboys at the depot. Also mixed in is the fantastical story of a young farm girl from Red Lion, Pa., who showed up at the train station one day and demanded to be taken to a house of ill repute. Turns out she and her boyfriend had gone too far one night, and all the romance novels they had read together had convinced her the only future left for her was prostitution and dying in the gutter. Mencken and a fellow reporter managed to convince her to return home and marry her suitor, with the help of the madame, who had no desire to recruit such an innocent into her ranks. This brings to life another era that still has enough connections to present day journalism to make it a wonderful rollick.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-29 00:00:00 James Green This might of been an interesting book if Mencken was able to rein in his outsized ego. In one account, Mencken, a young newspaperman living in Baltimore and whose only other experience was working in his Uncle's cigar business, gets a jump on the other papers by astutely describing a naval battle of the Russo-Japanese War which has yet to take place by sheer deductive reasoning. I think to enjoy Mencken, you have to think as much of him as he did himself. And that's a tall order.