Lost Love

A newspaper story

More than fifty years ago, I worked for The Wall Street Journal in Pittsburgh. In many respects, I had the time of my life. The city was at its zenith, economically powerful and environmentally sparklingly, its historic cleanup having been accomplished by Democrat brains and Republican money. At one press event I still remember, US Steel Corp. served more shrimp than I had ever seen.

The newly appointed editor of the Journal was Peter Kann, an omnicompetent journalist recently home from a tour in in Vietnam. Memories of Bernard Kilgore, inventor of the modern Journal in the years after WWII, still loomed large.

There we five of us in the bureau, four of them seasoned business reporters. We worked 9-5, taking turns as the garbage man, to stay a few hours longer, in case something happened between quitting time and the papers deadline. There were interesting assignments: Parkersburg, College Station, Oil City. Best of all, readers loved the paper. They always told us so.

After six months, I quit.

My girlfriend hated Pittsburgh. She never moved there. She wanted to live on the other side of I-95. I took a job in Delaware, where several old friends were hoping to buy the Wilmington News Journal when Dupont Co. sold it. Something told me I lacked the patience to become good WSJ reporter.

Behind me I left a story, as much about the Journal as me. A few weeks earlier, Sports Illustrated had noted three quarterbacks from the same little town in Pennsylvania were scheduled to start the season for prestigious universities – Penn State, Notre Dame, and the University of Pittsburgh. All, the magazine stated, were from the poor down-river city of McKe’s Rocks.

I learned in the course of my reporting that only two of the three still lived in “the Rocks,” The third had moved with his family to a prosperous suburb nearby where he would lead a better team and be seen by more college teams’ scouts.

I wrote a wistful story about de-industrialization and sent it off to New York in time for opening day. The next day the Page One editor spiked it. That evening from LaGuardia, I took a cab to Mike Gartner’s apartment, and knocked on the door. He invited me in and gave me a beer.

We took turns. He listened, not without some amusement, while I explained what I thought was a scoop. He then explained that the paper didn’t publish downbeat A-Heds (A-H described a distinctive headline style): never had, never would. Fifty years later it’s still true. Their whole point is to supply some off-beat humor every day. I was too green to know it yet. I finished the beer, shook hands, and went home. Thanks to our kindly bureau chief, the Journal paid for the round-trip.

I attempted to sell the story as op-wd it to editorial page editor, Robertb Bartley, then new on his job He didn’t want it either. A month or two later, Telling the story to a colleague twenty years later, Terry Minsky exclaimed: “That was you? I heard you carried a shotgun!” By that time I was economics columnist for The Boston Globe.

I tell all this to underscore my point: I loved The Wall Street Journal. After I joined the Globe, I wrote a column about the inheritance of the Journal from the famously genteel Boston Transcript. (Clarence Dow grew up in Boston reading the papert.) Even today, some touches remain: “please turn the page” to its jump.

The Bancroft family sold Dow Jones, in 2007, to Rupert Murdoch. Things changed, not all at once, but gradually. Before long, Murdoch appointed a new editor from London. Gerard Baker was often accused of bias an and after , Afte was so clearly biased that, after five years, was removed from the newsroom and given an op-ed columna time, he was given a column and moved to the op-ed page. There were other tremors. But the integrity of the news report remained substially unchanged and does to the present day. The editorial pages, veered further right, continuing its feud with Hillary Clinton.

This summer I quit The Wall Street Journal for a second time. I cancelled my print subscription, Then I renewed my subscription to the Financial Times instead. I didn’t want two. Even this was a difficult decision, but after twenty-five years of reading it daily, I had concluded that it is a superior product, least for people like me.

That sentence stopped me abruptly after I typed it. What sort of person am I that the FT is so congenial to me? I thought about it Looking over the weekend edition in the morning, I decided that it is because I yearn for a well-rounded life. (Like the WSJ, the FT doesn’t publish on Sunday.)

The FT is a daily newspaper founded in 1888, in London, to follow news about business and economic trends. Its compass has greatly enlarged since then. The Brits call it “the pink sheet.” Americans describe it as orange, for the hue of the paper on which it is printed.

The table of contents of a daily edition tells you little. There is a smaller quantity of general news in its front pages than in those of other leading newspapers: five or six interesting items, on three or four pages, , carefully written, without jumps. (This is harder to do than it sounds.) One or two of these items often are sometimes off-beat; The New York Times provides a useful parallax view.

Five or six pages of business news come next: companies, financial firms, economic trends. Then come two pages of price listings, set in agate type. They serve as punctuation. ( I use them to wrapng birthday presents.)

Now we have arrived at what magazines call “the back of the book.” A page of criticism: music, theater, art exhibitions, films, depending on the day. On the page opposite is “The Big Read”, a full-page staff-written essay on some current topic. I usually glance at these, put some aside to send to a friend, and then don’t. On Big Read’s the flip sided is the editorial page is, with its sober voice of the editors at the top of the page, rotating columns by specialists (Martin Wolf is anchor of the op-ed page) and dependably interesting letters from readers.

On the op-ed pags is to be found Janan Ganesh who writes about culture and politics as “Citizen of Nowhere.” Born in Nigeria, educated at the University of Warwick and University College London, Ganesh is the single best columnist I have ever read, better even than Lucy Kellaway, who wrote with whimsy about daily life in the business world. She serialized a sly novel about goings-on in an executive suite, then quit the FT to teach high school math.

The Life and Arts section on the weekend is the knockout. A lead essay by someme some culture hero; the “Lunch with the FT” feature; a donen ahead-of-the-market bools. Wardrobes I will never see, places I have never been , hotels I will never stay at, actors and playwrights I will never meet, dishes I will never taste, have never tasted: I could go on and on. Never mind the over-the-top magazine, printed on glossy clay paper, that arrives as part of the package most weekends. How to Spend It is what Vanity Fair used to be, but on quaaludes. The WSJ’s pale imitation? Books never appear in its fashion shoots. In the FT, they are always there.

So there is the answer to my overnight question. What kind of person am I? One who wants to know something, not much, about how the upper-half thinks, how the once-percent live. The FT is a time and attention allocation model of a fantasy world of well-balanced life. It is not the world that I live in. It is a reminder of how life should be organized. Less attention to newspaper headlines. More attention to private goods: it was the decision that Lucy Kellaway made.

Yet barely a month after cancelledmy subscription, the phone rang. Lsdsnale A representative of the WSJ wondered if I would be interested in a digital subscription for $120 the first year? Without much reflection, I said yes. I missed the columnists there whom I habitually read: Walter Russell Mead, Karl Rove, Peggy Noonan, and the irrepressible Holman Jenkins. Once again, I skim the three editorials.

Financial Times, I love you. But you never forget your first love.

Endit.