I just love Maureen Dowd’s latest column. I’m a sucker for tales of journalism’s “glory days” when it was soaked in as much booze as ink. And she starts the column out with a killer anecdote:
Ben Hecht describes his years as a cub reporter at The Chicago Daily Journal starting in 1910. It was a time when reporters were still “exotic adults,” he writes, and journalism was considered by many as “a catch basin for hooligans, bar flies and minor swindlers.”
The first thing Hecht did was get his girlfriend, who was “in harlot servitude” when they met, hired as the “first girl reporter” at the paper for $12 a week by pretending she was a … niece of Edith Wharton [That was before she was caught "selling her services" in the newsroom.] ….
The next thing Hecht did was plot with his colleague Charles MacArthur — they would later write “The Front Page” — to revive a hanged criminal with a shot of adrenaline and then charge newspaper editors around the country $50 each for the “exclusive” on the “Walking Corpse.”
Anyway, writes Dowd, maybe newsrooms need a little of the old vice to survive in trying times. And maybe it’s not just about adding a little glamour to a business that’s been corporatized within an inch of its life. Maybe newspapers can harness their cash registers to a little vice.
I was actually going to blog about Mark Zuckerman’s proposal, in Forbes, to legalize sports betting on newspaper websites, but Dowd tracks down some interesting people to give it more contest:
Nick Pileggi, who wrote the books and screenplays for “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” sees no downside. “It would be a wonderful, huge blow against organized crime because the money would be taken out of what the mob gets,” he said. “And every state has a lottery so nobody from the state is going to stand up and say ‘We’re against gambling.’ ”
He said that if newspapers would stop being so stuffy, they could set up A.T.M.-style machines in lobbies and at newsstands and “take over a business that the mob now does illegally worth $20 to $40 billion a year.”
Of course, being Maureen Dowd, she ends the column with a reductio ad absurdum, but it doesn’t have to be that absurd, really. Newspapers already offer a games page — crosswords and Sudoku are probably one of the most popular parts of the paper. And newspapers have long histories of reader contests, some with big prizes. Why not charge readers for some of those contests — and why not let them win some money, if they happen to be really good at some of the games of skill or chance.
Other ways that I see where vice could be harnessed to save newspapers include printing the paper on smokeable hemp or that old standby, Page Three girls.
Nick Pileggi, who wrote the books and screenplays for “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” sees no downside. “It would be a wonderful, huge blow against organized crime because the money would be taken out of what the mob gets,” he said. “And every state has a lottery so nobody from the state is going to stand up and say ‘We’re against gambling.’ ”
He said that if newspapers would stop being so stuffy, they could set up A.T.M.-style machines in lobbies and at newsstands and “take over a business that the mob now does illegally worth $20 to $40 billion a year.”
Grant Hamilton
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