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Late Edition

Name: Late Edition
Author: Bob Greene
ISBN: 9781429984775

by Bob Greene

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Overview

A loving and laughter-filled trip back to a lost American time when the newspaper business was the happiest game in town.

In a warm, affectionate true-life tale, New York Times bestselling author Bob Greene (When We Get to Surf City, Duty, Once Upon a Town) travels back to a place where—when little more than a boy—he had the grand good luck to find himself surrounded by a brotherhood and sisterhood of wayward misfits who, on the mezzanine of a Midwestern building, put out a daily newspaper that didn't even know it had already started to die.

“In some American cities,” Greene writes, “famous journalists at mighty and world-renowned papers changed the course of history with their reporting.” But at the Columbus Citizen-Journal, there was a willful rejection of grandeur—these were overworked reporters and snazzy sportswriters, nerve-frazzled editors and insult-spewing photographers, who found pure joy in the fact that, each morning, they awakened to realize: “I get to go down to the paper again.”

At least that is how it seemed in the eyes of the novice copyboy who saw romance in every grungy pastepot, a symphony in the song of every creaking typewriter. With current-day developments in the American newspaper industry so grim and dreary, Late Edition is a Valentine to an era that was gleefully cocky and seemingly free from care, a wonderful story as bracing and welcome as the sound of a rolled-up paper thumping onto the front stoop just after dawn.

About the Author, Bob Greene

Award-winning journalist Bob Greene is a CNN contributor and a New York Times bestselling author whose books include When We Get to Surf City: A Journey Through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams; And You Know You Should Be Glad: A True Story of Lifelong Friendship; Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen; Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War; Hang Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan; Be True to Your School; and, with his sister, D.G. Fulford, To Our Children’s Children: Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come. As a magazine writer he has been lead columnist for Life and Esquire; as a broadcast journalist he has served as contributing correspondent for ABC News Nightline. For thirty-one years he wrote a syndicated newspaper column based in Chicago, first for the Sun-Times and later for the Tribune. His essays and reporting have been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Greene, a veteran Chicago columnist and author (When We Get to Surf City), offers a glowing tribute to the glory days of America's newspapers and the simpler society they so aptly reflected. Currently a CNN contributor, he remembers his days as a copyboy and other apprentice positions at the Columbus Citizen-Journal and the Columbus Dispatch, two rival newspapers in Ohio's capital city, with the noisy reporters, prying editors, artful pressmen and artisans in the composing room. Greene laments the passing of a proud tradition from the peak year of 1984 with 63.3 million circulation sliding to 50.7 million per day, noting its generational gap of 63.7% of daily readers being 55 years or older contrasted with 33% of readers ages 25-37. Refreshing, respectful and comical, Greene's press-time recollections are meant to be read slowly and savored as the current chaotic computerized information business replaces newsprint, banner headlines and night owl editions. (July)

Library Journal

In a touching homage to the daily newspaper, Greene weaves a wistful tapestry of "the sights, sounds, and smells" of his first job working at his hometown newspaper, the Columbus Citizen-Journal, from 1964 to 1968. He recalls the wonder of his first day as a copy boy and the subsequent years spent writing for the paper's sports and city desks. In his youth, argues Greene, when TV was just beginning to take hold, American families cherished their local newspapers as "the daily scrapbook of a city's life." People subscribed to the morning paper produced by one news organization and the evening edition of another in order to keep abreast of local business, school, civic, and sporting events. Greene also recollects when his "first love," the Citizen-Journal, printed its last edition in 1985, a time when cities could no longer sustain two competing newspapers. This nostalgic look at the importance of newspaper reporting in American life is valuable reading for anyone concerned about the possibility of having no newspapers to turn to for their local news.
—Donna Marie Smith

Kirkus Reviews

A valedictory hymn to the daily newspaper, composed by a lifelong journalist who began his career cranking carbon paper into newsroom typewriters and now blogs from his laptop. CNN contributor Greene, who has written for decades on American culture and politics (When We Get to Surf City: A Journey Through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams, 2008, etc.)-launched his career in the 1960s as a teen copyboy for the now-defunct Columbus Citizen-Journal. The author begins his account in the fall of 2008 aboard a CNN presidential-campaign bus rolling through Columbus and passing the building where his career had begun. Nostalgia grips him and does not let go for the duration of the book. Though never mawkish, the text follows the emotional coming-of-age story of a misfit who found a roomful of other misfits at the Citizen-Journal. Greene describes his various duties at the paper-summer jobs as copyboy, sportswriter and reporter-while he was in high school and college. He recalls the ecstasy of seeing his words in print for the first time-and, later, his first byline and his first page-one story. He cannot explain some of his early impulses-stepping out on the golf course to walk alongside Arnold Palmer during a tournament (Arnie chatted amiably, gave him a good story), writing and submitting copy without authorization-but it's his newshound instincts that he is trying to comprehend. Greene most eloquently describes the atmosphere at the Citizen-Journal-the sounds of clacking typewriters and clattering Linotype machines, the clutter and the coffee-and the colorful personalities of his colleagues. He writes of celebrities who drifted through Columbus-Ozzie and Harriet,Nelson Rockefeller-and muses about the incomprehensibility that anything would ever change. A fervent, entertaining journey back to a time when print media still mattered.