Book Review: Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post: A Great Newspaper Fights For its Life

Article first published as Book Review: Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post: A Great Newspaper Fights For its Life by Dave Kindred on Blogcritics.

There is something misleading about the main title of Dave Kindred's book on the recent history of The Washington Post: Morning Miracle. Anyone aware of the epic problems the newspaper industry has been facing with the emergence of the internet not to mention 24 hour cable news and the general financial debacle seeing the word "miracle" applied to the Post might well be forgiven for thinking the book was about how the paper managed to beat the odds and maintain itself in the grand tradition of Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham, Woodward and Bernstein, Donald Graham and Len Downie. That at any rate is what this reader expected; that isn't quite what this reader got.

The tradition is there. There are plenty of stories both old and new about the paper's great years: Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, of course, but also about more recent coups. There are detailed accounts of the stories that garnered the Post six Pulitzer prizes in 2008, especially the expose of the poor treatment of veterans at Walter Reed, the coverage of the shootings at Virginia Tech and the feature story on virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell busking in a busy D.C. subway station. Significantly, these unprecedented successes came even as the paper was losing money, losing circulation and downsizing to try to cope with the intractable problems that might well lead to its demise. Quality reportage, it seems, was no guarantee of survival.

An impassioned defense of importance of the daily newspaper for the social and political fabric of a community is there. And while it is for the most part the kind of lament one has heard repeated over and over again for the past few years, as one paper or another folds its tents and drifts off into the 'nethersphere,' it does ring with a sense of truth. If newspapers can’t earn the kinds of returns necessary to justify long form investigative reporting and news gathering facilities around the world, who is going to do it? Who is going to speak truth to power? What the newspaper does is necessary in a vital democracy, the argument seems to go, even if no one is willing to pay for it.

What is not there is a solution. It's not there, because no one has yet figured one out. The Post, like the other major newspapers has tried and is continuing to try different models to find ways to use the internet to help save the print journal, to diversify its holdings, and to reinvent its voice for the local community. Some of these seeds have borne fruit; some are yet to blossom. Whether they will ever be able to bring back the good old days, whether the newspaper will ever be the kind of force it was back in the day when Ben Bradlee walked the newsroom remains to be seen. If there is a miracle, it is in what The Washington Post was and what it might be again, not what it is.

Kindred has a truly romantic attitude towards journalism and the people who practice it. The most interesting parts of the book are the profiles of the individual reporters and editors who inhabit the newsroom. These are the people who will wake at dawn and spend the next twenty three hours chasing their story. They will gobble down fast food and guzzle coffee as they pursue leads. They will corner the powerful and ask the embarrassing question, and ask it again and again until they get an answer. They will bleed red for their story, and they will do it all on their day off. Who, he asks, wouldn't want a job like that. These are people who love what they do and they would do it for nothing, or maybe meal money. The newsroom of today may not move to the incessant beat of the typewriter keys, but for Kindred it is still the newsroom of The Front Page.

There are nicely done verbal portraits of some of the old warhorses. Walter Pincus: asked why the septuagenarian was a reporter, he answered, "To change the world." There are the mid-career hot shots. Dana Priest: five months pregnant she takes an assignment to Baghdad: "This," she says, "is what I'm living for." There are the callow 'wannabees.' James Hohmann: started his own paper reporting on his family and selling it to them for a dollar a copy. He was five years old. Kindred has a real knack for getting at the essence of the people he describes. Some of them may be cranky at times, but they are always committed. He is not inclined to show anyone's clay feet.

The one major exception is Katherine Weymouth, the Graham niece who takes over running the paper and has the responsibility of turning its fortunes around. She doesn't come across quite as nobly as some of the 'real' news people, but even here he treats her with kid gloves. Responsible for the policy of buying out a number of the Post stalwarts, for changing the culture of the paper, and for trying to return it to profit at the expense of some of the traditional newsman's cherished values, she would have been a ripe target. Yet although criticism is implicit in much that he has to say about her and her short tenure, he never really attacks her.

Morning Miracle has a lot to say about the plight of the newspaper industry in the first decade of the 21^st century as illustrated in the story of one of the great papers as it struggles to remake itself and reaffirm its place in the media hierarchy. Unfortunately though it may be a losing battle, it is one that Kindred at least feels needs to be fought. Given the current landscape, if it, or any other newspaper manages the trick, it will indeed be a miracle.

Book Review: War, by Sebastian Junger

This article was first published at Blogcritics

War, Sebastian Junger's account of one American platoon's experience fighting in a remote outpost in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, is intended to give readers an idea of what war is really like for the soldiers on the front lines. It is based on Junger's experiences as an embedded reporter, and it has all the advantages that first-hand gives a writer, but it also has its disadvantages, and unfortunately at times the disadvantages seem to outweigh the advantages.

Advantages first, there is definitely a sense of authenticity about the book. Battle Company's life at the Korengal Outpost (KOP) and its various outliers is described with authoritative detail, whether it is the arrangements for handling excrement, the computer games, the problem making a cup of coffee or the pictures of bikini clad young ladies tacked to the walls among belts of ammunition. He describes the physical discomfort—the heat, the bugs, the dirt. He stresses the boredom. There are the occasional patrols. There are the random firings into the compound. More often than not, these seem to be welcomed as relief from days of inaction. Besides, as Junger sees it, these are men who get an adrenalin rush from battle. War may be hell, but it sure can be exciting.

Junger focuses on the sociology of the platoon, the interaction of the men, their dependence on each other and the cohesion that that dependence fosters. He does his best to try to explain what makes young men willing to risk their lives for their comrades, to understand the obligation they feel for each other. He describes men running to their deaths to try to help someone who has been wounded, men having been wounded going AWOL from the safety of the hospital to return to their buddies. There is a group dynamic that is stronger than the individual's self interest. The platoon is like a family. These men are like my brothers, one soldier tells Junger. Oddly, perhaps, they hide their love for each other by wisecracks about their sisters and mothers and by beating the crap out of each other. On the other hand perhaps this is not so strange. These are, after all young men, young warriors; strong emotional attachments may not be easy to admit. That some of them eventually do is probably a testament to their trust of an author who has done his best to become a part of the unit.

But it is in that becoming a part of the unit that at least some of the problem with Junger's book is manifest. Too often the attention is on him. Many of the men in the platoon are little more than names. They come to life sporadically and then fade into the background sometimes disappearing entirely. Some never become more than names. It is always Junger that is front and center. There is nothing wrong with that if one is writing the story of the adventures of a war correspondent. If what you are writing the story of a group of young men fighting anonymously in what seems like a hellish environment, it's probably a better idea to keep yourself off to the side.

Junger took five trips to Afghanistan during 2007 and 2008. The longest, he says, was for about a month. The book however doesn't actually emphasize the chronology. This can be confusing to the reader. It is not always easy, if it is even possible, to distinguish the relationships between events. Of course, this is not meant to be a historical account still chronology can be useful to keep the reader grounded.

If there is one man who stands out, other than the author, it is Sgt O'Byrne. The book begins with O’Byrne in New York six months later and it ends with his problems getting home from Italy when he is mustered out. In a sense this focus is intentional. As Junger says at the beginning of the book, "I came to think of O'Byrne as a stand-in for the entire platoon, a way to understand a group of men who I don't think entirely understood themselves." Despite the hardships, despite the danger, despite the military snafus, Junger sees these soldiers as men who revel in what they do. In battle they have found something valuable. He ends his book with a quotation from O'Byrne: "Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in."

On City Room by Arhtur Gelb

Reading Arthur Gelb’s 2003 memoir, City Room, today in the current gloomy newspaper environment with its dire predictions for the future of print journalism is a little like reading the eulogy for an old friend just about to be lowered into the grave. It is a loving testament to a day that is going fast despite the fact that some of the Jeff Jarvis persuasion might well say good riddance.

Gelb began as a copy boy and steadily moved up the ladder—reporter, rewrite, editor—straight to the top echelons of what was then arguably the world’s most influential news organizations. And while he was climbing that ladder, he had a front row seat for many of the great events of the middle years of the twentieth century. City Room is something of a tourist’s guide to those events and to the people great and small, who moved and were moved, shook and were shaken. Whether it was investigating police corruption in New York City or the election of Harry Truman, the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King or the prison riots in Attica, he seemed to be around to report, oversee, and direct. A Renaissance man: he covered the police beat; he covered theater and culture; he covered politics.

All the journalistic stars are there, sketched out, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with their warts exposed, but always with love: Scotty Reston, Abe Rosenthal, Punch Sulzberger. There hardly is a name he doesn’t drop. Indeed the book is as much a love letter to the institution to which Gelb devoted his life as it is the story of his life, and it is only fitting, because from the very start journalism was less a profession than it was a passion for the young Arthur Gelb. Always a lover of the theater, Gelb’s vision of the newspaper world was as much formed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur as it was by the realities he eventually encountered.

The Front Page, Hecht and MacArthur’s 1928 comedy, painted a romantic picture of the crusading reporter fighting for truth, justice, the American way—and just maybe the scoop of the lifetime. It is a picture sure to enchant, investing as it does the world of journalism with the kind of feisty refusal to bow down to authority that is the stock of youthful rebellion. The journalist speaks truth to power. What more could any young, ambitious man want? The city room that Gelb describes, at least in its essence, could well have been the set for The Front Page. There were the hard drinkers. There were the hot shot reporters with connections all over the city. There were the ethical idealists who couldn’t be bought off a scoop or beat out of a story. Here was the idyllic vision made real. It is not often that a man is lucky enough to live out his fantasies; City Room certainly makes clear that Arthur Gelb was one of the lucky ones.

Still, there is no doubt that this is a eulogy. The world Gelb describes is gone. Newspapers are downsizing when they are not outright going out of business. Younger audiences are getting their news from the internet, and newspaper publishers have not figured out how to use the internet for their own profit. Perhaps, however, it is too soon to write the obit. As Tina Brown, the tamer of The Daily Beast, agreed on a recent BBC Americana podcast, internet news sources other than those of the newspapers themselves have not yet managed the kind of local, national, and international reportage readers have come to expect from an organ like the New York Times. There may be hope for print journalism yet.

Meanwhile, Arthur Gelb provides a look back at its rich past, filled with enough anecdotes and insights to make of his book something more than a nostalgic trip down memory lane. The reader can only feel how fortunate it was for Gelb that he got out of the business before what may be its decline, if not its fall.