Bittersweet call of the anarchists’ den
About a month after I turned twenty-five, I started work at The Globe and Mail where I spent most of the next thirty-six years. The newsroom had a drop ceiling, with glaring fluorescent lights and rows of desks where men and women sat at computer terminals, midst clouds of cigarette smoke, often wearing sunglasses to protect their eyes from the green glow of the screens. None of it looked healthy but it was intriguing, like a beatnik club without jazz or maybe a drug lab.
The computer terminals, linked to a mainframe, were a recent innovation. Many writers still pecked out stories on typewriters. The editors rolled up their pages into a scroll and placed it in a plastic canister which was inserted into a pneumatic tube which took it to a downstairs room where a typing pool entered them into the system.
The building, which was open around-the-clock, was as self-contained as a space station or a submarine. If you wanted to check the history of a story, you went to the “morgue,” a rolling file of microfiches and clippings stuffed into alphabetically-arranged envelopes. If you wanted to eat, there was a terrible cafeteria that served food with names like steak shape and vending machines for the off-hours. If you wanted to sleep, there was a room behind the cafeteria with couches on it, where people lay resting all hours of the day and night.
It was not very professional but, as our features-section editor, Ed O’Dacre, used to say, we were a newspaper of amateurs, meaning we were in for love, not careers. Another senior woman editor and columnist told me gravely that we should understand working at The Globe was not a job but a calling.
My particular calling was to be young, fun guy as a copy-editor and staff writer for a tabloid insert called Fanfare. I got the job by selling three freelance articles to The Globe, including an interview with Gary Gygax, the creator of a new game called Dungeons and Dragons, though long-distance phone charges to his Indiana home exceeded my $50 freelance payment. Fanfare, with entertainment listings and sassy pop culture coverage, was intended to compete with the free alternative weeklies. Fanfare, which was often cited as an example of the dismal trend to “disco journalism,” a sting that wasn’t lessened by being literally true; one of jobs was maintaining a page of capsule reviews of buzzy new discotheques.
My manager, a woman barely older than me, was a chain-smoker who wore men’s white shirts, sunglasses and blood-red lipstick. She went over every story I wrote, cursing as she pushed to make every sentence flashier, more controversial. I learned that she was better-humoured and less attentive when I was funny so I injected jokes into my copy. When I wrote a story without them, she’d look annoyed and say: “Go back and Liam-ize it.”
I developed a reputation for being a “good light read” and I was assigned to rewrite a lot of freelance articles, though I was the worst kind of editor – one who makes every writer sound like him or her.
Though far from friendly, the older staffers were attentive. I was confronted almost daily on my failures of grammar and punctuation and the norms of the newspaper. When writing a review, don’t review the audience but the work. Never say someone is incompetent, just say they got it wrong this time. If you want to stay around, be productive. Often, that meant losing sleep, churning out stories at a violent pace to avoid being on the chopping block during the next round of cutbacks. Some rules were quaint: I once described someone as flamboyant and a resident word cop, dictionary in hand, informed me that the word meant flame-like and had to go.
We didn’t have Google or Wikipedia; we had a man named Martin Lynch who provided all answers: The depth of Lake Victoria, the atomic number of argon, the length of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. One day, it was said, Martin would discover one more fact and his head would explode, sending brain matter across the newsroom.
After about five years, I was ensconced in the arts section as a rock critic. There were a group of us, in our 20s or 30s, a college-educated generation, children of the New Journalism. We dished and dissed each other’s work and wrote to amuse and impress each other. The star writer of our section was the film critic, Jay Scott, who had been wooed by The New York Times and other papers, but stayed with The Globe for the freedom it provided.
We had a lot of freedom. On the arts editor’s desk there was a journal and each morning, we scribbled down what we were going to write that day. Nobody asked us what our angle was or if the art was good. The rule was simply the best story got the best play.
In the world outside of the building, I knew that The Globe and Mail was a business paper, the house organ and mouthpiece of the Canadian establishment, where the wealthy exchanged information about each executive appointment and art sales and read comforting conservative political opinions. But inside our corner of the grubby building, with the smoke, the desks piled with stacks of old papers, it felt more like an anarchists’ den.
In my mind, I often drew an analogy to religion. My mother, who struggled with her faith, used to say that there was a Catholic Church Spiritual, the ideal institution of hope, faith and charity, and a Church Temporal, where people made destructive, fallible decisions.
My Globe and Mail Spiritual was a place of clear, witty, intelligent writing offering an alternative to the lowest-common-denominator of TV news and prepared you to face the day. Then there was the Globe Temporal, what others dubbed The Grope and Fail, the paper that I tossed across the breakfast table in irritation, full of derivative opinions, stuffed-shirt writing and endorsements of conservative politicians I despised. On those days, the goal was to get to the end of the shift without too much embarrassment.
As we all know, the digital revolution, over a 20-year period from the mid-90s, led to the Great Newspaper Diminishment: the loss of 30 or 50 per cent of newsroom jobs, the increasing mash-up of ads, editorial, lifestyle, news, entertainment and gossip. While the change was drastic, it was also a culmination of a kind we’d witnessed for years, as publishers pushed to make newspapers more appealing to people who don’t like to read: More pictures, shorter stories, more lists, side-bars and “value-added” consumer tips. Marketing gurus had already determined that advertisers, not the readers, were the real customers. We were in the business, as our publisher told us, of “delivering readers to advertisers.”
And then the fickle advertisers found better, cheaper and more pervasive vehicles – Craigslist and eBay and Facebook – to find their audience. The marketing consultants offered us a bad news-good news message: We were all lemmings heading over the cliff, but, fortunately, we were still at the back of the pack.
Many of us were in denial. In my case, I was literally in the dark. As a movie critic, I’d sit in theatres in the mornings or at night, and write my reviews in my basement. When I read my morning paper, I could see the attrition: Classical music and art criticism disappeared, dance was farmed out to freelancers, pop music coverage became increasingly selective. Movies and television, the entertainment that everyone knew, were fairly safe. I couldn’t convince my managers that the Cannes Film Festival was important and the Golden Globes really weren’t, but I had a job.
Then, suddenly, as the staff shrank and the competition for readers’ attention increased, competition increased. We were compelled to write gossip, business stories, shoot videos, blog, tweet and post around the clock, plugging up the ever-increasing number of news holes.
Every newspaper, apparently, hired the same consultants. Advertising friendly, content-light articles on food, health and exercise would bring back readers. They didn’t. Computer tablets would save the industry. That didn’t work, either.
If there was a single moment when I knew we were screwed it was in 2012, the opening day of the Toronto International Film Festival, the day that the Globe’s arts section melded with the new Life section. I had a long interview with the Austrian master, Michael Haneke, about his Palme d’Or and Oscar winning film, Amour, a devastating drama about an elderly man who euthanizes his ill wife. The interview was placed atop a new advice column in which a reader asked what she should do about her husband leaving dental floss in the shower drain? I wished the response had been: “See above: Why not stick a pillow on his face?”
Our arts section was gutted, amputated, stripped-down for parts. Yes, there was still good writing but we didn’t really expect people to cover a whole beat. Some conscientious section editors continued to try to protect their writers and focus on their strengths but too many were happy to push us to match stories from Gawker and Buzzfeed so we looked as though we were keeping up.
As revenues dropped, the proverbial Chinese wall or information barrier between advertising and editorial, became porous. Editorial leadership began to sound more like advertising cheerleading. “Believe in the brand!” instructed our editor-in-chief and we vomited a little in our mouths. Human resources started using phrases like “toxic morale” to describe the workplace. We were journalists after all. We were supposed to disdain propaganda, even if it was for our side.
I look to the movies for inspiration. “A free press, like a free life, is always in danger,” said Humphrey Bogart’s character in Deadline USA, a 1956 film noir about an editor trying to fight injustice and keep his newspaper afloat. (Yes, the newspaper business has been in decline since the 1950s.) Cynicism, journalists’ supposed deformacion profesional, has always been about that disappointed idealism. Journalism is a romantic line of work – travel, celebrity, the chance to change lives and improbable luck of being able to write with some measure of independence.
For me, the thrill was gone. I retired from The Globe in 2015, a few years early. At the farewell party, I said I discovered I liked journalism too much and needed to stop before I became addicted. An amateur again, I write, for free, for a web site.
Some days, I still have a vision of my Newspaper Spiritual, when I read three or four pieces of strong writing in one issue, and I’m reminded of the collective genius of the system. I look back in amazement, thinking of older journalists, who, for no personal reward or prestige, encouraged and harassed me to do better, for no other reason than they wanted to produce something admirable.
When I was working at the paper, on a non-embarrassing day, I’d emerge from the tunnel-vision of a deadline and I’d pass another writer on the stairs, heading up to the slightly-improved cafeteria, or out the door to go home. Even if we’d never spoken and knew each other only by our faces and bylines, we’d exchange a wave or a nod. I think we all understood how hard it was to do this job well and, on days when things came together, how satisfying and worthwhile it could be.
LIAM LACEY was employed at The Globe and Mail from 1979 to 2015 as a feature writer, Western arts correspondent and critic of rock music, theatre, television, and, for 20 years, film. After rashly retiring to Spain in 2015, he returned home 18 months later. He currently writes for the web site original-cin.ca and freelances on travel and film.