My grandfather was a professor of journalism at LSU and an old school newspaper man. He was never without a red pencil and if he found an error in a story one of his old students wrote or edited, it was corrected, cut from the paper, and sent to the offending student. Baton Rouge used to have two daily papers that consistently won awards for journalism, excellence in writing, and investigative reporting. Sadly, the city is now down to a single paper and it is a shell of its former self.
Gramps was a real news junkie as you can imagine. I remember as a boy when CNN first started and asking him if this was a good thing for his profession. My thinking was there would be more jobs.
His response made and impression on me and I never forgot it. Gramps shook his head sadly and lifted his newspaper up and told me, "that is the end of my profession."
Of course, being a young squirt, I asked why. I received an evil eye over the top of the newspaper for breaking an inviolate rule in Gramps house, not once but twice in the same morning. Until he'd finished reading the entire newspaper, excluding classified and ads, from front to back, Gramps was not to be disturbed. This entire process took 45 minutes - he read with amazing speed.
His response has proven to be visionary and right on the money. "Son, there is only so much real news in a 24 hour news cycle. CNN will be forced to resort to opinion and commentary to fill the 24 hours. In short order the distinction between news and the hot air of editorial comment will vanish. Competitors will arise and in order to gain and maintain market share each network will have to resort to embarrassingly bad professional behavior. Ethics in my profession will become a thing of the past."
That was one of those chilling moments as a child that you never forget. Up until that moment I wanted to be a newspaper man like Gramps when I grew up.
It didn't stop Gramps from watching the news networks. After Gramps retired for health reasons my grandmother put a limit on the amount of news she allowed him to watch. It was bad for his blood pressure.
It's a shame. I knew his friends who were professors. They were fascinating people. They knew all kinds of stuff about just about anything. I learned from them, Gramps in particular, that everything was a news story if you looked at it from the human angle. For example, sidewalks. Boring right? Not at all according to my grandfather. Why do we have them? Who benefits from having sidewalks in place? Who got paid to build them? What kind of skills do they have? Was there a corrupt deal in the letting of the contract? He could have rattled off twenty questions that all of a sudden made sidewalks interesting.
This was the same man who introduced me to trains in general and narrow gauge in particular. He took me to Durango three times as a boy and we rode behind the #478 all three times.
Al Harper: If all goes according to plan, train will never shut down again because of fire danger
