The Web brings the nation's best regional columnists within reach
By LARRY DIETZ
A few years ago I was half of a UCLA-sponsored evening presentation about the L.A. Times. The other half was Otis Chandler, then chairman of the board of Times-Mirror, who had spent 22 years as the publisher of the Times. I expected that the mostly white, middle-class crowd would take Chandler to task for the paper's editorial shortcomings, real or imagined. However, before anyone raised their hand, Chandler said that he knew what the most frequently asked question would be: People, he said, wanted to know why something couldn't be done about the ink that came off on your hands when you read the Times. Sure enough, that's what the audience wanted to know. He patiently promised that the Times was working on a solution.
If only ink smudges were the worst problem that daily newspapers faced. Every survey they take shows that their market penetration is slipping, and that the readers they do have tend to be older. Leaving aside commercial considerations, there's the question of the very function of newspapers. If you get your breaking news from TV, radio or a press service on the Web, where does that leave the newspaper?
Well, they still have their columnists. Though dailies can't compete with CNN for sheer speed of news delivery, most large papers employ at least one writer with a unique regional perspective and a real way with words. Until now, the cost -- for someone living in, say, Baton Rouge -- to keep up with a columnist in Los Angeles was prohibitive. But with more and more newspapers entering the Web, their sites provide a opportunity to read some great writing, with minimal expense and no inky fingers. An overview:
Whatever your feelings about San Francisco, no place has as wonderful a portraitist as Herb Caen. His column runs daily in the San Francisco Chronicle, and can be reached on-line at Chronicle. He recently announced that he has inoperable lung cancer (he stopped smoking 25 years ago; the reach of the cigarette companies is longer than we realize) and I don't want to dwell on the inevitably elegiac quality of his recent columns, but I did enjoy his lines about Melvin Belli, penned after Belli's death:
"When we first met for lunch in the late '40s at El Prado, [Belli's] favorite hangout, he was already wearing custom-made Italian suits, a minor point I mention lest you think that [S.F. Mayor] Willie Brown actually invented the habit. He loved it when I called him Mellifluous Belli, a tribute to his melodious voice that snake-charmed so many juries. He was not so fond of Bellicose, which I coined after experiencing his awesome temper."
After reading Caen, click on Columnists, and then on Jon Carroll. If there's anyone who can write 700-or-so stylish words, 5 days a week, better than Carroll, I don't know who that might be. Sometimes he's only funny (only?): A piece about employees who use their work computers to access racy stuff on the Web ended with "Is there not bad stuff on the Net? There is. Is there not bad stuff in the heads of each and every employee? There is. So the choice is A) staring out the window thinking about bad stuff, or B) honing your computer skills while investigating bad stuff. There is no C), not in this lifetime. To B) or not to B) -- that's the only decision. I apologize for that joke."
Sometimes he is merely brilliant, giving us what could be a hunk of a novel or New Yorker story disguised as a newspaper column. Writing about a trip with his wife to Gualala, on the Northern California coast:
"I was looking at her in a way I can just begin to describe. It was as though our entire history together were a deck of cards, usually packed in a box, but just for that moment opened and fanned out, so that every moment was equally visible. I saw her staring down at her book, rubbing one finger along her cheek, her right leg crossed over her left, her right foot moving in a slow circle, and I saw her doing the same thing in a thousand different rooms, in airports and hotels, on kitchen stools and picnic benches.
"And we just floated together, she reading and me watching, as we have for two decades now, mostly unaware that we were floating, the smaller movements of life disguising the gentle, ceaseless current of daily existence, the trip down the river."
Segueing from the sublime to the city of broad shoulders and big restaurant portions -- if you visit the Chicago Sun-Times, click on Columnists and go to Neil Steinberg, you'll find a nice sensibility about the city: "I know that owning property makes [one] selfish and oversensitive. Jesus could come down to Earth and start curing the sick, and very quickly the neighbors would complain to the city, 'That glow of goodness surrounding His head -- it shines directly into my bedroom window at night . . . The shout of joy the sick give when they're healed -- it frightens my dog!' Still, despite paying a mortgage, my first reaction to news that a giant, 16-screen cinema and shopping center is to be built two blocks from my house, was this: 'Whee!'''
It's not just a guy thing. Down at the Miami Herald, Liz Balmaseda won a Pulitzer for writing about the Latino community. Recently she was on an exercise bike when her trainer began spouting off about death and heaven: "The age of fake fat welcomes you to fake spirituality. It teeters a thin line away from the mind-body wave, so ubiquitous it might as well bear a Swoosh. Spirituality on steroids. You read about it between the lines in sneaker ads. You find it at gyms across the country, on class schedules touting muscles and meditation. It must be the secret ingredient in protein bars."
The columnist who's been writing better, longer is Murray Kempton -- his first collection, "America Comes of Middle Age," published in 1963, has in it pieces which appeared in the New York Post starting in 1950. These days you find Kempton at Newsday, where his prose remains as thickly textured, and satisfying, as a Bach fugue: "The Presidential election has more and more taken over the look of ending before it begins ever since Bob Dole set out to contrive the desolate miracle of converting an already difficult campaign into a hopeless one.
"The worst blunder any national candidate can make is to worry overmuch about his party's base. It is a rock and thus a waste of time to cultivate. Rocks are subject to erosion; but they endure and, for the short term, the soundest policy is to take them for granted and spread your fertilizer elsewhere. Bill Clinton's absorption of that elementary lesson explains his current mastery. His rock is the liberals, the labor politicians, the feminists, the poor and the black. And, no matter how little he does for them, their loyalty is unshakable.
"When a president ceases to worry about keeping faith with a faithful who so adamantly cling to theirs, he may be rationing his honor but he is affirming his common sense."
Great stuff, and all of this bears Otis Chandler out: So many good words, and no smear of newsprint.
Larry Dietz, editorial manager of the News & Reference area of Excite, is finishing a book on the history of Los Angeles and the Chandler family. His e-mail address is LSDietz@ix.netcom.com