The green hills of unemployment
by Michael Maiello

I am in the midst of my first hunting safari. I travel with the confidence of a man who can't get lost, because he'll be happy wherever he ends up. The jungle is thick and tends to tangle my feet the ground, the air is so heavy it weighs down my lungs with each breath. My prey must be stalked boldly, or it will escape, but quietly, so it doesn't detect my presence.

I'm out to kill anything at this point. From prize rhinos to rabbits to small for even half a stew. The hunter must be satisfied with anything it kills. It's important to have some prizes in mind, but to always be willing to shoot at scurrying in the underbrush.

This is modern job hunting for a college graduate with some talent for journalism. It's the jungle of the modern print media, an area which has fallen to heavy deforestation, clear cutting by advertisers and stock holders.

Had two interesting conversations with an editor in Annapolis. The first was cheery. He wanted an entry level reporter to provide copy for his paper's new special section covering the western half of Baltimore. His paper was expanding, he said. More coverage, more reporters, more news, and he'd love to take a look at my past work. I sent it along.

I called three days later to hear apologies. The new section had been cut, the new job gone with it. He said staffers at his paper, which was expanding three days ago, were now themselves worried about being laid off.

A paper in Albuquerque with seven openings for reporters plus at least two for copy editors, is leaving all positions unfilled because the shareholders have demanded a hiring freeze. Profits are down. Never mind that profits will continue to drop as an understaffed paper loses quality.M

The guy from Annapolis gave me some interesting advice. He said I was a good writer with definite talent, and assured me I would find a job somewhere. But he warned me that my varied background and work as a columnist made me seem "outside the mainstream." He commented that my efforts in writing fiction are almost a threat to my employability. I should cultivate a new image, he suggested.

I applied for a job in New Orleans as a reporter on the city desk of a major daily. On their jobs board they also advertised a position for a reporter who would "scan television news" for print copy. A very cynical offering on any paper's part.

Papers want mainstream television watchers who make shareholders happy. Hardly a new revelation, perhaps. Maybe I never should have read H.L. Mencken, of Woodward & Bernstein's All the President's Men. That's all over. That's why papers are getting killed off left and right, and why television has taken over as the main source of information.

I don't think it's just that television is, in Marshall McLuhan speak, a "hot medium." It is a different medium, suited towards giving small amounts of information and pictures. Stories rarely go over five minutes, and usually take less than two. Newspapers (especially USA Today) have tried to copy that formula, and it doesn't work for them. That's why no one's reading.

Newspaper reporters used to be writers. Mark Twain, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, the list is prestigious. H.L. Mencken, the famed Bard of Baltimore, had literary ambitions. he published a magazine called The Smart Set which introduced the country to the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Reporters should be literary types.

The big stories are usually not broken on television. Watergate, Iran/Contra, and the Department of Energy experiments with radioactivity on uninformed civilians, all appeared in print. As a medium, television is best equipped to cover natural and disasters, battles, and simple crimes. But it takes print, with its longer format, to tell large stories of corruption and conspiracy.

In an article, a reporter has time to sum up the entire history of an event, to draw and explain unseen parallels and intersections within a story. To cover a flood you need a camera crew, a reporter, and a location. To cover Watergate, you need years of stories and reporters able to accurately communicate the narrative thread of seemingly unconnected events. That takes literary talent. It takes a writer.

I'm sure I'm taking this all too personally. My literary ambitions are threatening to starve me in eternal unemployment. But it's sad to watch the newspapers retreat, when they have a real function to play in our society. I'm not even against television. It's useful. But it is not the best medium for all stories. Both print and television have their limitations. An informed society needs both.

But it doesn't help when newspapers try to stay alive by acting like televisions. Short stories without literary content adds nothing to the old market place of ideas and information. Newspapers should be a home to America's good thinkers and writers. If I can't get a job on that playing field, I'll stop my whining. But it hurts to be told to hide my literary ambitions when I believe they are valuable and necessary.

Michael Maiello isn't above just a little begging for a job. But not so much he'd need knee-pads.

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