For lack of what is found there [by Julia Shipley]

As a kid growing up in the 1980s, I took the train to school.

When I boarded the train in the morning, what I saw first was not a sea of faces, but a field of newsprint, a hundred paper cubicles made of the morning edition, each concealing a commuter behind it. 

Sitting beside these readers I couldn't imagine what they found so fascinating, the whole ride toward the city almost silent save for the sudden crackle of a tuning page.

When I was 19 I got a job at weekly newspaper. Yet again, my proximity and interest to the actual news was still at arm's length--my job was "press assistant."

True, I had found the job itself by hunting through the newspaper's want ads, and perhaps deep down I harbored some unconscious desire to write something that made people disappear inside their attention spans, that would hold them still as they rode toward their employment obligations, but at the time, I was just grubbing for more cash, so I added this new position to my roster of jobs that summer.

To report to work, I headed around the building to the back door where 50 gallon drums of used solvent and ink waited to be picked up. My boss was Ron (it was actually something else, but let's play it safe). He was in charge of this bus- length behemoth: the newspaper press, which, with its rollers and grippers and gears and ink spouts and conveyers, spat out the weekly newspaper. Under Ron's guidance I helped swab off the old ink, reload enormous spools of newssheet, grease the moving parts, re-ink the press, and when it was press time, my biggest responsibility was to stand at the end of the conveyor belt and gather up the issues of the paper as they came off the press, yes, hot, and stack them into teetering tower for the distribution staff to grab and tie into bundles and stuff in trucks.

An embarrassment to admit this now, but my first understanding that news was gathered (like a crop, like cotton or blueberries) "in the field" and processed by people called "reporters" who turned it into columns of words, stories that compelled all the adult world, came from those Wednesday afternoons when I was working in the summer sultry press room, bending and hefting 20 issues at a time off the conveyor. As soon as Ron started up the gargantuan machine whose clanking, banging and whirring began disgorging the first issues, the writers all came trotting out from the newsroom to whisk open a copy and make sure their work was perfect. 

Once, a quarter of the way into a press run, Ron abruptly shut it down. A flub had been found in one of the major advertiser's big sale notices. All the newspapers we'd collected and stacked? Trash. Ron and the ad salesman fixed the gaffe and then, we began again, printing the weekly circulation of 14,000 newspapers.

In my off hours or on my way to and from other jobs I'd see the paper for sale by the checkout counter or disheveled on a diner table or tucked under someone's arm and I'd feel a quiet pride. Perhaps it was the sheer physicality of it that eventually "rubbed off on me" (like the ink embedded in the grooves of my hands). Or perhaps it was the impression of those reporters jogging out in their clean slacks and collared shirts to see what they'd made, disappearing into their work behind the paper cubicle it made around them as they examined it. Though I was unaware at the time, something stuck with me.

Twenty years later I applied to work at a weekly newspaper again. This time I came in through the front door.

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

Great title, great photo, and how lucky we are to have you writing on this subject. I miss the daily newspapers of my youth, and there were so many of them in NYC. -- DL