'Even a Website Needs Wood'

“Even a website needs wood,” is, to me, the defining phrase of a novel by Pete Hamill titled “Tabloid City.” The book is not Hamill’s best. After his “Forever” painted the vivid landscape of New York City past and present, it has been impossible for him to do better. “Tabloid City” is a murder mystery wrapped in the demise of a tabloid newspaper that very much resembles the New York Post.

Hamill worked at the Post when he was a newspaperman and his main character, Sam Briscoe, editor of the New York World in the book, could be a mirror image of Hamill himself, tired and aging, being pushed out of print by online media. Hamill even evokes the memory of Paul Sann, the actual executive editor of the Post during its heyday in the late 1950s.

Hamill accurately describes the city room of the Post and names some of its other occupants, the photographers, rewritemen and general assignment reporters, who shuttled in and out creating a buzz. I was there too and, like Hamill, I remember how Sann would pluck lines of led type out of page forms on the stone-topped tables of the composing room to make space for new leads on stories in one of five editions each day.

Hot Competition

Newsstand competition drove the daily newspapers of New York City in those days. There were six dailies then, each with multiple editions. There were the broad-sheets, the Journal-American, the World Telegram and Sun and the Herald Tribune, but the battle for the most sensational front page headline was most intense between the tabloids – The New York Post, the Daily News and the Mirror. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were in a class of their own, above the fray, setting their own standard whether anyone followed or not.

That’s where the reference to wood comes from. The large letters that made up the words of the front page headline on a tabloid were made of wood. They would call attention to the hottest story of the moment in letters above 48 picas in size. The reporter who got the “wood” was the star of the moment and editors always wanted to know “what’s the wood” for the next edition to beat the competition on the newsstands.

Briscoe’s dead newspaper is survived by an online news outlet in the book that he cannot abide so as he wants to push his former reporter to go after the hot angle on the story of the murder he tells himself that “even a website needs wood.”

That’s an irony that you can only appreciate if you worked for a newspaper in New York City before the age of computers, when newspapers were composed on linotype machines, the pictures were etched in photo engravings and pressmen actually shouted “Stop the press!”

And That Was That…