I like this piece well enough, but I'm linking to it because the comments are really spectacular. The piece is by Steven A. Smith, the editor of The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington. It looks like he wrote it around 10 pm, and who knows what brought it out. He wrote it as a paen to "newspapermen," a term which he obviously has a lot of affection for and which he uses to define himself. Personally I find the word a little ridiculous; it makes me think of mute members of a cult who creep around at night writing lines of copy all over the sidewalks and tree trunks and car doors, trying to communicate their weird creed to confused suburbanites. Or maybe they roll up feathers and mud and string and other childlike objects into newspapers to make a burnt offering on their converted-printing-press alter to William Randolph Hearst. Or moleman creatures who live in newspaper-encrusted cave lairs that they've patched together with their own spit, hiding out in the crawl space under your house or in the abanadoned parking lot where a factory burned down.

It means something different to him, something I find a little uncomfortable:

"A newspaperman wore black slacks, a bit worn. A short-sleeved white shirt and a thin black necktie. A newspaperman owned one pair of black wingtips for his entire career.

"A newspaperman had nicknames, raunchy, rude and unashamedly affectionate nicknames, for all of the linotype operators in the basement. A newspaperman reveled in the composing room heat, the smells of melted lead and oily black ink."

The writing's hammy, but engaging, with the rhythem of a pulp detective novel. And the content . . . isn't it just plain weird? As one commenter pointed out, "This seems to offer the view that the figure of the public truthseeker in the USian social spectacle modeled himself on figures from a bygone, noir-ish subgenre of fiction. Worth a bit of reflection. What's being protected, what's being pretended, and why?"

There is one paragraph, though, that I find myself drawn to, even though I never subscribed to a local newspaper: "No instrument will ever serve the public interest so relentlessly as the daily newspaper. New media will successfully distribute data and information. 'Communities of interest' will develop around niche products. And while print newspapers will survive to serve a small, elite audience, they never again will serve the larger geographic communities that gave them life and purpose. Democracy will have to find a new public square."

I tend to believe that newspapers could in fact serve the public interest really well--better than anything else--even though my main source of reference is the skimpy, sad, broken little things we now call local papers. I find something appealing about the model of a newspaper: a single place for local [and perhaps also national and international] news, community notices, classified ads, opinions, writeups about concerts or festivals or movies, profiles of artists and community figures, and all of it subsidizing investigations of local politicians and businesses. If more people in a community read the local paper, no doubt it would serve to tie people together, provide a common source of information that they could discuss and a common place where they could communicate with others in their vicinity who they otherwise wouldn't meet. I don't know if this is merely an idealized picture of the local paper, but I think even the ones at St. John's were close to being capable of carrying out this function of tying a community together around words and pictures, and if those two-bit operations could sometimes achieve it, surely a bigger and more professional entity would be able to.

Really, what could replace such a thing?