Latest installment from an ink-stained wretch

From Elsa:
"I thought of you during my late morning coffee and Sunday New York Times routine a while ago. Maureen Dowd has a column, "Slouching Towards Oblivion," which is another piece on the downward slide of newspapers. (Let me digress: as you may already know, the headline is an illusion to Joan Didion's book "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," which is itself taken from the poem "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats. Yeats' poem also supplied the title for Chinua Achebe's wonderful book on Africa, "Things Fall Apart," as well as the oft-repeated observation that "the center cannot hold." In any case, I once had a journalism professor at BU who said that anyone who wanted to to learn how to write should study Joan Didion's work. To this day, I consider her to be one of the great essayists of our time, just brilliantly descriptive no matter what she writes.)

Back to the matter at hand. Dowd's column is a reflection on her interview with Phil Bronstein, of the San Francisco Chronicle, and it got me thinking again of newspaper days gone by. Bronstein, as she recalls, was once married to Sharon Stone. I remember attending some newspaper meetings where the major entertainment seemed to consist of reported sightings of the then-happy couple. Similarly, some years before that, a newspaper executive was married to another blonde bombshell, Barbara "I Dream of Jeannie" Eden. Their attendance at a publishers' convention was another example of "ooh, look, there she is!" as they swanned around the hotel ballroom.

Journalists, both then and now, live in a celebrity-loving culture just like everyone else. There's nothing profound in that observation. But I realize that there was also a time when celebrities loved print journalists right back. It was a mutually symbiotic affair. There was many heady days at newspaper conventions when the rich and famous were glad to meet and greet the Fourth Estate and subject themselves to probing questions. In particular, one convention in Denver was a huge success mainly because Warren Beatty and Robert Redford made a swoon-inducing doubleheader on the dais. (Yes, both Beatty and Redford are shorter than they appear on screen, but no one seemed to care. I was in an elevator with Redford at one point, and even in his cowboy boots, he was barely taller than I. But I still remember that he had a golden glow, almost as if he'd been lit from within. Looking at his craggy face now, I realize he just spent a lot of time in the sun. However, I still prefer my honey-dipped memory, complete with a fond recall of my younger self, struck mute with awe.)

Anyway, celebrities--both the Hollywood kind and the ones who lived near the Potomac--got something out of these encounters. They wouldn't have done them otherwise. Newspaper giants like Kay Graham and Abe Rosenthal once opened their grand homes to run the kind of salon that "Salon" can only dream about today. Actors, authors, pols and Supreme Court justices all milled about in style with suitably salivating press lords and ladies. Both presidential candidates and newly elected Commanders-in-Chief felt duty-bound to give keynote addresses to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the American Newspaper Publishing Association conventions held each April. Now the publishers' trade group is known as the Newspaper Association of America, with the sad but timely acronym of NAA. The American Society of Newspaper Editors bowed to the dwindling revenues among its membership and simply cancelled the convention that should have been held earlier this month.

Like Kay and Abe, the glory days of my journalistic youth are gone. The bold-faced names go on Larry King or Chris Matthews. They have their own websites. They even blog and tweet. Do they need actual newspapers anymore? Neither Maureen Dowd nor Phil Bronstein had an answer for me this morning."