Supermarket tabs: what do facts have to do with it?
Most young reporters enter the business clutching journalism degrees or diplomas. I came in the back door armed with only a BA and a CV that included a stint at grocery-store tabloids.
My newspaper apprenticeship began in 1978 after I’d quit writing advertising copy for Sears women’s wear. How many blurbs about sporty shorts or trendy trench coats can anybody write without going squirrelly?
Casting around for something different, I followed a friend’s advice to apply to the Midnight Globe empire in Montreal.
I spent my first months as part of a two-person team producing two monthly papers: Close Up (on crime) and Spotlite (on celebrity gossip and other fluff). My job was to churn out copy to fill these little rags. Source material was selected by a sub editor, David, a peripatetic journalist originally from Kuala Lumpur and editor-in-chief Dominick, who also edited freelance-written “true-crime” magazines.
Clippings Dom and Dave culled from U.S. small-town newspapers, Dominick’s magazines or the local French-language tabloid, Allo Police, were compressed into short pieces suitable for readers with short attention spans and limited vocabulary.
Years later, senior editors were surprised at the ease with which I could rewrite New York Times wire screeds into short, snappy items for smaller Canadian papers. The Midnight Globe factory taught us well.
As I churned out my copy, I passed it to Dave, who did the layout and wrote headlines and photo captions.
The crime weeks were hard. Some of the magazine stories I was rewriting were icky. The covers, showing badly lit photos of guys with guns and/or scantily clad girls with ropes biting into their flesh and gags in their mouths, told the whole story. Readers of Startling Detective and other such magazines liked their crime lurid – at least one dead female with no clothes on – but they liked the gun-toting detective to win in the end, so they could wallow in sadism and misogyny while pretending to deplore it.
Stints devoted to Spotlite meant rewriting puff from other papers about minor Hollywood celebrities – anything mentioning Elvis or Jackie Kennedy would be given to the rewriters for Midnight Globe or the National Examiner – or human-interest stories.
I got to write a bit of fiction, fabricating a monthly instalment of Dial L for Love – a first-person account of the adventures of a “liberated” 24-year-old called Loretta. Spotlite had evolved from its earlier format of pornography for the poverty-stricken – 25 cents for 24 pages of smut – and Loretta, though still 24, was no longer a call girl. When I took over her diary, she took a brief hiatus from casual sex. She got a job, cleaned up her act, and was suddenly getting offers of marriage from fat, middle-aged men in mobile home parks in America’s heartland. They sent photos of themselves and their trailers.
Colleagues who had been at the Globe group in those earlier years – tabloid hacks came and went and came back between other jobs – told me that in one memorable episode, Loretta had drawn a veil over a romp too lurid to write about: she’d been “shrimped,” an activity beyond the kinkiest imagination. Avid readers wrote in, eager to know what shrimping involved. Loretta didn’t tell because her ghost writer couldn’t think of anything sufficiently disgusting. I expect a few readers came up with their own definitions.
Spotlite included an advice column – readers could write in and receive wisdom from Dr. Sigismund, whose photo suggested he was a middle-aged European with impressive credentials. One letter came from a 15-year-old who signed herself “Ignorant in Akron, Ohio.” She really was ignorant – didn’t they teach sex education in Akron in the ’70s?
And there were the monthly horoscopes, always vague and always fictitious, but I don’t suppose that would make them any less accurate than other horoscope columns.
“Life is tough, but so are you, Aries. Go show them what you’re made of.”
Was any of this stuff true? Well, sort of. We would rewrite some human-interest stories, scalped from papers across the U.S. If you saw a story about a brave amputee, or a kid who took pride in a talent for blowing enormous bubble-gum bubbles, it was probably true and based on a cutting from a small-town paper.
Dominick stressed the importance of writing for your audience – forget what would appeal to young Montreal readers; we were writing for the great unwashed in the American heartland. Nobody with any education was subscribing to Globe products.
In time, I was moved along the line to the National Examiner rewrite and copy desk. My move coincided with a shuffle of managers, and I found myself working for eccentric tabloid genius John Vader.
Johnny insisted we take production values and style seriously. We did – we fussed over grammar and made good use of our style guides, dictionaries and copy calculators. Three proofs were pulled for every page to ensure there were no errors.
One thing we weren’t expected to take seriously was content. We knew there wasn’t a secret underwater UFO base in Lesser Slave Lake or anywhere else. We knew there were no Secrets of the Crystal Zodiac because said Crystal Zodiac, like submarine UFOs, sprang from Vader’s fertile imagination.
Sometimes an entire story would be invented on the copy desk. That Crystal Zodiac? Well, we didn’t know what it was but obviously it was about rocks and zodiac signs, so we went with a variation on birthstones. We stayed away from diamonds and rubies, offering our readers cheaper options – rose quartz for the romantic Libra, say, or golden brown for the down-to-earth Capricorn.
Other stories were assigned to the reporting team, who worked by phone and were always vague about the work they were engaged in.
Globe products pretended to be all-American – U.S. addresses on the mastheads, mailboxes in upper New York state and a New York phone number that forwarded calls to Montreal. When reporters introduced themselves, they never mentioned Midnight Globe but described themselves as “a reporter at a newspaper in Canada.” Americans didn’t expect to be able to obtain Canadian papers and didn’t ask for details – there were no online editions in those days.
Had interviewees known the context into which their comments were placed, they’d have been stunned. For instance, after TV actor Herve Villachaize, who played Tattoo on Fantasy Island, and suffered from dwarfism, married a willowy model-actress, inquiring minds were wondering why. Leave it to Johnny to come up with an answer to the question: What’s His Big Attraction?
The reporter didn’t bother trying to talk to Camille, the willowy brunette. He contacted a sex therapist from La Jolla and asked, in general terms, how dwarfism would affect a male’s sex life. The therapist’s enthusiastic answers were interwoven with snippets about Camille and Herve taken from the U.S. wire services, leaving the reader with the impression that the big attraction was in the diminutive actor’s pants.
Herve didn’t seem to carry any resentment about the story. I would guess neither the actor nor the sex therapist saw it. Like I said, nobody with any education would be reading a Globe product.
In case somebody did object to being quoted in a sleazy tabloid, every interview was recorded and the tapes carefully filed, just in case they were needed in court. The Globe brass had learned that Americans can be a litigious bunch.
Of course, even tabloid hacks can get caught out. Some years before I was there, Johnny told me, a travel writer had sold a pile of generic people photos taken in public places in Europe. From this heap, an editor had selected a photo of a nun in St. Peter’s Square and captioned her as the mother superior of a scandal-plagued (and fictitious) home for unwed mothers. Unluckily, the nun was not an Italian – who would never have seen a copy of Midnight Globe – but an American sister on a visit. And she worked with people who read grocery store tabloids and showed her the picture.
Embarrassments like that made Globe brass determined to avoid lawsuits.
The British royal family never sues. We felt safe when one writer gleefully took readers “behind the scenes at Princess Diana’s love nest,” guided by only a photocopy of a 10-year-old real-estate agency brochure for Highgrove House. Later, we provided American Doc’s Advice to a Pregnant Princess, figuring generic pre-natal-care tips would be more likely to get the attention of our readers if they came with photos of Darling Di.
Dead people didn’t sue, either. The features editor was a dab hand at interviewing Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and other deceased celebrities with the aid of a Ouija board.
Living celebrities wouldn’t make a fuss if the publicity was positive. If we revealed a sexy starlet’s beauty tips, said starlet seemed happy to have her name in a paper, even a cheap tabloid.
One regular feature of the National Examiner was Mystic Maria. A self-described psychic to the stars, based in Los Angeles, was supposed to write the column. She rarely delivered, so most weeks a co-worker and I wrote it, selecting problems that didn’t require psychic ability. Some people thought we must have developed ESP because, after a while, we could rifle through a pile of unopened letters and pick out a romantic problem, a money problem, a family problem and a health problem. It was easy – fashions change in handwriting as much as anything else. We knew the round, loopy writing with the hearts over the lower-case i would come from a young girl with boyfriend problems. A spidery sprawl came from elderly people with health problems. Young marrieds (money) and their parents (family woes) all had distinctive styles.
The postbag showed repetitive themes. Unmarried women wanted to know when they’d get a husband. Married women wondered when they’d get a better one. A lot of women asked if they’d known a new acquaintance in a previous incarnation; apparently it’s okay to commit adultery with men you knew in a previous life. Adulterous men seemingly didn’t need a justification.
All good things come to an end. In 1982, Globe moved its operations to Florida. We newly unemployed hacks scattered across Canada, armed with useful skills and phone numbers of former colleagues who’d already landed jobs at real papers.
I soon had an offer from the Edmonton Sun. One co-worker became a successful Harlequin romance novelist. A man who’d put himself through law school by reporting for Globe discovered he hated legal work, but became a brilliant editor of Canadian Lawyer.
Many of us went on in mainstream journalism. I was happiest in the soft-news track – lifestyles and entertainment. Editors found us a valuable resource because we’d learned our craft well.
The only difference between Midnight Globe and a real paper came down to the matter of facts and sticking to them.
LIZ POGUE is a retired newspaper sub-editor living in Victoria, BC. She misses getting paid to read recipe columns, book reviews and travelogues.