William Tucker gives us a nostalgic look at newspapering back in the day:
I doubt if I ever would have remained a reporter for long if it wasn’t for the constant esprit of the newsroom. It was like no other job. We didn’t even start work until six o’clock in the evening. You would go to your meeting — a planning board, a town council — sit there for two hours trying not to fall asleep, rush down to interview the mayor when it was over, stop for coffee on the way back and arrive in the newsroom around 10 o’clock ready to write your story.
There was an illicit night-owl feeling to it all. We were just getting started while everybody else was going to bed. We had until 2 a.m. The crisis occurred when you realized there was a hole in your story and you had to wake the mayor up at 11:30 p.m. to ask him one last question. “You were at that meeting!” he would explode groggily over the phone. “Why didn’t you ask me then!?” You risked not getting another interview with him for a month, but trying to push an incomplete story past the copy desk was worse.
