Books Inspired News of the Day

We all know how Hedge Funds ravaged daily and weekly newspapers.

The truth: publishers were ill-prepared for the digital age and the negative economics that ensued.

But did newsroom humor go down with the ship? Did the chuckle die with all those weeklies and dailies?

In October of 2020 I asked Medium readers to suggest a proper title for a humorous novel about saving dying newspapers. Nobody came through.

The working title survived, “News of the Day.”

What is it about? According to the author, 330 pages about Adventures of a Wildly Cantankerous Veteran Newsroom. They are led by a scurrilous one-eyed editor called Big Burt.

The novel was inspired by Penelope Muse Abernathy’s “The Rise of the New Media Barons” and Clara Hendrickson’s “Local Journalism in Crisis” produced for The Brookings Institution. Then along came that Margaret Sullivan book, “Ghosting the News,” summing up what happens to local democracy when local newsrooms shrivel.

Not funny at all.

Except in “News of the Day.” That is the power of fiction.

Previously there have been attempts at parody. The satirical “Our Dumb Century,” purportedly a New York Times Best Seller in April Fools’ Day 1999; or British shots at Fleet Street, “Scoop,” a 1938 novel by Evelyn Waugh; “Towards The End Of The Morning,” a 1967 satirical novel by Michael Frayn; but nothing close to “The Front Page,” an irresistible comedic stage play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

“News of the Day” becomes the digital replacement for paper.

Appropriately, on June 8, 2021, the wraps will come off this attempt to write not a satire or parody, but the adventures of a wildly cantankerous bunch of reporters trying to save the news. At best, it is a novel about a bunch of characters — period. Their story goes like this:

When billion-dollar Hedge Funds decide to revise news empires they destroyed, they recruit Big Burt, the infamous one-eyed editor who rounds up a scurrilous gang of hardened reporters who have seen it all.

They operate out of a former feed store in rural Kentucky with the aid of Chinese technology a decade ahead of U.S. newspapers, expanding and expounding on local news that has been left behind in the digital age.

The gathered news ranges from routine obituaries to black bears trapped with doughnuts, local elections to disgruntled native Americans. All sorts of lives matter as the veterans teach reporting to the next generation of truth seekers.

Some of the reporting touches on secret endeavors in which the Hedge Funds have an invested stake. Covering up back room dealings has never been part of the reporters’ heritage and several versions of invented conspiracies leak to the supermarket tabloids. Will the sensational publicity destroy the true local news revival? Much depends on the rambunctious characters one-eyed Burt has put together. They plow new fields of journalism with fresh minds. Whether it lasts or not depends on how you read Burt’s philosophy: “When you know everything is temporary, especially being infallible, you have reason to hope.”

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