By Jack Limpert

On September 11, 2001, I was having breakfast with Brian Lamb, the founder and longtime head of C-SPAN, at the Mayflower Hotel on DC’s Connecticut Avenue. When we got there at 8:30, another dozen or so journalists were in the dining room—Al Hunt, Bill Kristol, and others.

We had a nice breakfast and about 9:45 we left, stopping to talk with some of the other journalists and then heading back to our offices. When I got to the Washingtonian’s office, two blocks away, the magazine staff was sitting silently in the publisher’s office, staring uncomprehendingly at the TV.

A recent post, “We’re Journalists and We’re a Lot Smarter Than You Are,” said that journalism has changed with more journalists making it clear that they think they’re a lot smarter than their readers or the people they cover. More on why there’s more attitude and opinion in news stories.

Watergate made heroes out of Woodward and Bernstein. More young journalists wanted to be like them: Make someone resign, become rich and famous.

Henry Fairlie wrote a Washingtonian piece in 1984 about how journalists were getting rich. Get on television talk shows, get big checks by making speeches. Journalists increasingly could make big money and do just enough reporting to get by.

Longtime Democratic leader Ted Van Dyk suggested yesterday that the Washington Post and New York Times now publish too much “daily snarky commentary” about President Trump and no longer are acting credibly or responsibly. If their coverage has become somewhat unhinged—and I think Van Dyk is right—how and why has it happened?

First, the Post and the Times are highly competitive with each other. The Times still remembers the Post getting most the credit for helping drive President Nixon from office in 1974 and the Times was incensed when Hollywood, after lionizing the Post in “All the President’s Men,” seemed to credit the Post instead of the Times for the disclosing of the Pentagon Papers in last year’s Tom Hanks-Meryl Streep movie “The Post.”

In  1968 I was a Congressional Fellow in the office of Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Ted Van Dyk was Vice President Humphrey’s chief of staff. Ted, who now lives in his native state of Washington, has been active in Democratic politics since 1961, serving in the White House and State Department and several Democratic presidential campaigns. Here’s his Facebook post about the New York Times column written by an anonymous person who says he works in the Trump White House.

By Mike Feinsilber

When I was the writing coach for the Washington bureau of the AP, I wrote a memo about the overuse of adjectives. A particular target was the word “very,” which I argued performs contrarily to the writer’s intention—it dilutes what the writer intended to underscore. “Very,” I said, was never useful.

One of the bureau’s best writers dissented in a mumble heard round the newsroom.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’d rather be very rich than rich.”

In the 1960s publishing was very different—hot type, composing rooms, and unions. In 1965 I left UPI to edit a paper in Warren, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, and during that first week I was in the newspaper’s composing room, learning how to help lay out page one. I saw a change that should be made and touched a line of the type on the layout table.

The composing room, noisy from all the linotype machines, went dead silent. “You do not touch the type,” a voice said.

In 1966 I moved to San Jose, California, to edit a group of six weeklies. They were printed on offset presses.

Yesterday’s post (How to Trust and Value Your Own Thinking) by former New York Times journalist Verlyn Klinkenborg was about writing in your head: “You’ll learn to be comfortable in that dark, cavernous place.”

It drew a harsh comment from Barney Collier, also a former New York Times journalist: “His dictates about how to construct a story are both ill-conceived and silly.”

Klinkenborg’s advice to his students had struck me as odd but interesting and I figured he had a Ph.D from Princeton and had taught at Harvard so he should be worth listening to. Barney disagreed with enthusiasm.

By Mike Feinsilber

Years ago, I read in a book about what copy editors sitting around the rim at the New York Times did in idle moments. They composed tongue-in-cheek headlines about ancient events. I can remember only one of them, how the Times might have reported the deliverance of the Ten Commandments:

Moses, on Sinai,
Gets 10-Point Plan

Whimsy is back at the Times, once called “The good, gray lady.” Here are some of the Times’s recent headlines:

On a story reporting how Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, had after weeks of cat-and-mousing, agreed to testify at a congressional hearing:

Much has been made, rightly, of 2018 as the “Year of the Woman,” with a flood of female candidates running in midterm elections. But it is also the year that a new generation of military veterans—many who served post-9/11—are entering politics. Some 400 veterans are running for Congress alone. That could mark an inflection point for politics. Veterans account for just 19% of today’s Congress, down from peaks of 75% in the House in 1967 and 81% in the Senate in 1975. McCain’s sterling example gives reason to hope that a fresh crop of politicians who have proven their commitment to country could help pave the way for solutions to our broken politics.