Read it and weep: the perilous fall of the Press-Telegram
The story of the Long Beach newspaper carries with it a warning about the future of community journalism.
Thirty years ago, Stan Leppard, a rewrite man on the city desk with phlegm in his larynx and a terminal addiction to unfiltered cigarettes, gave me the best professional advice I ever received. He delivered it shortly before I was about to file a not-very-credible story about a homeless man who lived on the streets of downtown Long Beach and planned to adopt a son.
"Hard to believe, but it does read terrific," Stan said to me, smiling slyly. "Of course, you should never over-verify a good story."
That Leppard offered the ironic advice with a straight face gave me pause -- and, perhaps, saved my fledgling career as a reporter at the Long Beach Press-Telegram. I did not file the homeless-man-adopts-son story. Instead, I re-reported it and found my original to be full of holes and one-sided. But there was a story, one about a mentally challenged ward of the state who had neither the right nor the resources to adopt a dog, let alone a child. As it turned out, the "over-verified" version prompted a reexamination of an unofficial county policy of simply ignoring unqualified applicants in hopes that they would simply get the message and go away.
Newspaper: An article in the March 23 Opinion section about the demise of the Long Beach Press-Telegram stated that the editor was among those who recently lost their jobs at the newspaper. It was the managing editor. Also, the article stated that the Long Beach Independent was an afternoon paper. It was published in the morning.
The Press-Telegram was one of several "farm teams" -- the Santa Monica Outlook and Pasadena Star-News were two others -- on the fringes of the expanding Los Angeles Times empire in the 1970s and 1980s. The P-T's newsroom was straight out of Ben Hecht's "Front Page": a raucous, rowdy, nicotine-stained bullpen of hungry cubs and grizzled veterans all working to get the news out every day. Among others, the P-T produced such future Times veterans as the late media critic David Shaw, former Sacramento reporter Mark Gladstone and columnist Jill Stewart, now L.A. Weekly news editor.
I was still a reporter at the morning paper in the early 1980s when its afternoon counterpart, the Long Beach Independent, printed its final edition. Bottles came out of drawers as everyone from the managing editor to copy boys offered a toast to the passing of an institution. And now, more than a quarter of a century later, it appears that I may yet live to offer a similar toast to the P-T.
