Newspaper movies to be thankful for…

… or not. Some of the movies I’ve linked to here are decidedly not “Citizen Kane” or “All the President’s Men.”

But students in my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Film, Fiction & Popular Culture” class may be happy to know that YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other sources have trailers, clips and sometimes full-length feature films relevant to their final research projects on Newspaper Movies and related fictions — projects that are due in a couple of weeks after they return from Thanksgiving break.

Of course Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and the local video store can also rent films, but the number of resources available for free online is impressive.

I’ve been collecting links to films available online — not always great films, and certainly not an attempt at a “best” or “complete” list of films with journalists in the plot. For the most complete source I know, see Joe Saltzman’s Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture website and database.

For others, just do a Web search for “best newspaper movies” or “best journalism films” or a variation on that theme. You’ll find scores of newspaper columns, blogs and websites where reporters, editors, critics and fans have compiled their own lists. A few examples, some of which I’ve linked to elsewhere:

• http://psacot.typepad.com/ps_a_column_on_things/journalism-movies.html
• http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/journalistsmovies.html
• http://trueslant.com/caitlinkelly/2010/04/17/the-10-best-journalism-movies-ever-made/
• http://pfauth.com/blogtips/movies-for-journalists-reporter/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_journalists

My other contribution to this list-making is a page about the dozens of “newspaper films” that were also presented as radio dramas. It’s part of my larger site, JHeroes: Newspaper Heroes on the Air, where I’m documenting the portrayal of journalists in old-time radio dramas of all kinds.

I’ve broken my collection of YouTube links by decade or part of a decade, to keep the screen-loading time manageable. (Some pages still may load very slowly.) They are all on the “Video” drop-down/fly-out menu at the top of the page, but here’s a shortcut: Newspaper Films. And here’s the full set, a mini-menu I’ve added to the top of each page:

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Overview | 1920s | 1930-35 | 1936 | 1937-39 | Citizen Kane | 1940-45 | 1946-49 | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s

Note: I don’t maintain any of the uploaded files at YouTube, Vimeo or archive.org. From time to time, those sites discover that some of the videos people post are still under copyright protection and take them down at the “rights” owner’s request. If I have linked to one of those posts, my “player” code will also cease functioning.

Top 20 Lessons for Journalism Students from HBO’s “The Newsroom”

…and 30 other random observations, many out of order (think before talk). Some are true, some not. Some are less “top” than others.

For links to reviews of the show and the Hemingway-Gellhorn film, see my previous post. HBO customers can get online videos; the rest of us can use HBO’s official The Newsroom website for supplementary information and synopses of episodes.”

Class assignment in the fall will be to decide which items on this list are true and/or important — and to make your own list, preferably thinking and talking more slowly than Sorkin characters. The more linear-minded may number their lists. I took the numbers off this one, and wish I could randomize it. The class: Portrayal of Journalists in Film, Fiction and Popular Culture.

Yes, I’ll probably edit this a few times before September.

• A democracy needs robust, honest journalism.
• Talk fast.
• Think fast.
• Opinions are O.K. when you have the facts and say where you got them.
• We’ve had enough of slogan-filled talking-head shouting-matches.
• Every pretty blonde with a power-puff question is a sorority girl.
• Sorority girls’ parents may sue if you’re not nice.
• Have a walking-around knowledge of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Frank Capra, contemporary Musical Theater, and  how to tell one from the other. (Tip: Read Joe Saltzman’s book about all the journalists in Capra films, 1920s-’40s. Watch some of them on YouTube, starting with the first 1928 link.)
• Don’t call Rocinante a donkey.
• Know the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
• Know who wrote them.
• Use the phone.
• Take notes.
• Beware patriotic buzzwords like “Freedom.”
• Believe in freedom.
• Have a sense of history and a sense of greatness.
• Office romances are essential to journalism movies.
• Anchors make millions.
• Producers do the work.
• On-camera reporters just turn up when you need them.
• Teleprompters are for wimps.
• Tough, strong older women mentor younger women by instigating romances and promising shopping trips.
• Work for a place that buys you Moleskine reporter’s notebooks ($12) not the $17-a-dozen spiral kind, or buy your own.
• Have a head full of walking-around knowledge, including facts and figures. (Know how much of your tax dollar goes to the N.E.A., how many Americans are in prison, more. Only the most obsessive will double-check to see if you’re right. When you use them in your reporting, be right.)
• Someone spouting statistics in the middle of a panel discussion is probably making up 80 percent of them.
• Don’t trust people in authority to tell you how important something is; even an Associated Press yellow alert may be posted by an intern who doesn’t have time to raise it to orange or red.
• Being there as a loyal intern can result in good things.
• Loyalty counts.
• Love counts, but complicates things.
• Respect your parents, even when lying to them.
• Respect your s.o.’s parents. Etc.
• Apologize.
• Do your best.
• Demand the best from others.
• Speak your mind.
• Let business leaders speak their P.R. platitudes if they give you something honest at the same time.
• Multi-millionaire geniuses and Peabody winners with battle scars can be condescending.
• Indians don’t mind being stereotyped as “Punjab” or “the I.T. guy” if they are really bloggers and closet science geeks. If they are under 50, they probably never read a “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip anyway. (Was Punjab also in the musical, “Annie”? If so, see rule #1.)
• Learn how to get people on the phone.
• Learn how to use the hold button.
• Blog.
• Use Twitter.
• Figure it out.
• Say condescending things about your audience, like “Speak truth to stupid,” but don’t really mean them.
• Don’t mention Hildy Johnson, Mary Tyler Moore, Lou Grant, Murphy Brown, Network or Broadcast News.
• If you want all the excitement of real reporting, such as watching journalists pore over stacks of library charge slips, see “All the President’s Men.”
• Remember people’s names.
• Remember significant statistics up to eight digits.
• Pick your college roommate wisely, and stay in touch.
• Pick your older sister wisely, and stay in touch.
• Take that grade school build-a-volcano project seriously.
• YouTube!
• More than 70 years after “The Front Page,” the best journalists still talk tough and drink straight whiskey. Protein bars are for losers. 
• It’s all about vertigo.

More links about the series and the recent Hemingway & Gellhorn
film.

Theory worth testing: The angriest negative reviews of The Newsroom were written out of guilt by reviewers who think they should be doing serious journalism themselves instead of writing about HBO entertainment programming and wishing it were better. (See Murrow on, “merely wires and lights in a box.”)

Final random observation: Anyone so taken with Jeff Daniels as a news anchor that they want him to step out of the HBO set and move to CNN hasn’t seen “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”

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For video of episode 1 of The Newsroom and links to reviews of the show and the Hemingway-Gellhorn film, see my previous post.

Undead Journalism: A Summer Book List

The semester’s over, so now it’s time for the professor to hit the books…

OK, so perhaps I’ll also find time to tune up the banjo, guitar and ukulele, restring the old autoharp I bought a little while ago, and track down the old songbooks with “Newspapermen Meet Such Interesting People” and maybe “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy.”

But my reading list is already growing like mad, with everything from Appalachian murder ballads to a zombie apocalypse.

What do they all have in common?

Newspapers and journalism, of course. By August I’ll have expanded my list of possible readings (Books: The Truth with a Dragon Tattoo) for students enrolled in my fall course, “Portrayal of the Journalist in Film, Fiction and Popular Culture.”

I’ve already had interlibrary loan get me a microfilm copy of a rare “boy’s book” about a teenage news photographer, by Mildred Wirt Benson, creator of the Nancy Drew series. I’ve already read a couple of her Penny Parker books about a teenage girl reporter (Benson, a reporter, liked Penny better than Nancy), and I’m curious to see why the photographer series didn’t, er, develop.

The more adult items on my own summer reading list right now are Alchemy of Murder, The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, Anna Zenger and maybe Mira Grant’s “Newsflesh” series, although I’m not sure I want to be tempted into a zombie trilogy (Feed, Deadline, Countdown) — even one with that bloody RSS-feed icon on the right as one of its book covers. Come to think of it, I lost a chunk of last summer to a trilogy-plus-one that featured Nellie Bly and Sherlock Holmes on a trail of bloody murders with echoes of Dracula and Jack the Ripper.

For a dose of reality and inspiration, I’ve  ordered real-life newspaper hero Philip Meyer’s autobiography, Paper Route.

I’m also intrigued by The Daily Edge pages and videos promoting Richard Hine’s Russell Wiley Is Out to Lunch, but I’d rather read about reporters solving crimes or chasing zombies than try to find a barrel of laughs over Dilbert-style business-consultant nitwits and clueless publishers destroying the newspaper business. (Actually, what alerted me to the book was when Hine followed me @bobstep on Twitter, and I noticed his profile line “I wrote a novel about zombie newspapers in the age of vampire social media.”)

That’s enough for now. I’m keeping the list on its own page at JHeroes.com, which in the fall may double as a discussion page for the course. Visitors welcome!

Sing a song of journalistic responsibilities…

I wonder if you have to audition for the Society of Professional Journalists chapter at Columbia?

I wonder if there will be a sing-along at the national SPJ convention? With just a little more pitch control, this could be journoGlee! (Click through to YouTube to see the singalong lyrics.)

More: The group’s singing minutes include this tribute to getting employed… “Let’s call ourselves the SPJ band…“

Thanks to Deborah Potter for the link…

By the way, more than a half-century ago there were newspaper people singing about their jobs. Pete Seeger resurrected one of those tunes some time ago, and I added it to my old blog. (Lyrics included.)

Looking for it today, I found an older recording, by Earl Robinson and Vern Partlow — just audio, but including the more critical “publishers are such interesting people” chorus and Partlow’s Newspaper Guild verses.

The song also was updated and recorded in the 1960s by Steve Addis and Bill Crofut… with more recent jokes, a little sexist quip about Jayne Mansfield (or about media sexism?), and nice harmonies. But there’s less hint of leftist sympathies or union recruiting, with the reference to “press-titution” coming after Jayne instead of the original linking of publishers and advertisers.

Did you notice the Nixon verse — “He says he’s through with politics…”? History fans will deduce that it was written after his failed bid for the California Governor’s seat in 1962 and his “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” speech to the press, seven years before Nixon became president. And if you’re curious about the reference to journalists being sent to jail in Germany — in the 1960s — this Wikipedia page on the “Spiegel scandal” may help.

Here’s the verse some recordings left out, from The People’s Song Book, 1948:

Oh, publishers are such interesting people!
Their policy’s an acrobatic thing.
They shout they represent the common people.
It’s funny Wall Street never has complained.
But publishers have worries, for publishers must go
To working folks for readers, and big shots for their dough.
Oh, publishers are such interesting people!
It could be press-titution, I don’t know.

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Personal note: I met Bill Crofut in 1981 when he was teaching occasionally at Wesleyan University. I don’t recall whether we discussed this song, but he did tell me that he learned to play the banjo from Pete Seeger in exchange for helping work on Pete’s house on the Hudson River. Maybe “Newspapermen Meet the Most Interesting People” was part of the lessons.

Crofut said their paths diverged during the Vietnam War, when he and Addis were musical ambassadors for the U.S. State Department and Seeger was mightily against the Vietnam War. Addis and Crofut visited South Vietnam; Seeger visited the North. (From the title, I suspect there might be something about that in Bill’s book, “Troubadour: A Different Battlefield,” published in 1968. Maybe I’ll add it to my summer reading list.)

Bill Crofut wasn’t teaching banjo at Wesleyan that year. He told me he had heard that legendary Irish singer Joe Heaney didn’t have enough students to support his commute (by bus, I think) from New York City to Middletown, Conn., so Crofut signed on as a student. I did the same. I thank them both for the opportunity. Joe moved to Washington state the next year and passed away in 1984.