Despite my best efforts, I somehow managed to become 66 years old on Saturday.
It wasn't too hard, actually. I went to bed Friday night, woke up before dawn on Saturday and I was a year older. Not wiser, I think, but older.
My birthday weekend actually started Friday night when Elena and I had dinner with Tim Donoghue, a reporter at the Dominion Post who has, like me, spent most of his adult life as an ink-stained wretch. I emailed him while I was in Spain to ask if he wanted to meet for lunch or dinner once I got here to Middle Earth because, though we'd never met before, we'd been in some of the same places at the same time covering stories. It took us a while to make connections but we finally did and chose Friday night to get together.
Now, lest you think I've become a grumpy old curmudgeon, let me say - on the record - that I have nothing against young reporters and editors. I enjoy talking to them; I always enjoyed working with them (well, okay, I didn't really enjoy working with the stupid ones) but now, grayer than I'd like to be, I find that it's nice to sit down every now and then with someone who knows what a Linotype machine is and talk about old times.
Dinner was at his house high in the hills overlooking Wellington Harbor and, like Tim, it was pretty straightforward: fish, chips, some fried oysters and a couple of bottles of really excellent New Zealand chardonnay. His wife is a midwife and these days she's off in Australia working with aborigines so it was just the three of us.
The talk was kind of what you'd expect when a couple of old hacks get together and alcohol is involved: We spoke of how the business has changed over the past 40 years; about stories we've done and stories we wished we'd done; about editors we've known and loved and a few we've known and despised. We didn't leave Elena out of the conversation; Tim managed to weave her into the flow of words throughout the night and it occurred to me that, if I had something to hide, I wouldn't want him interviewing me simply because before too long I'd be telling him everything I knew about whatever it was I was trying to keep secret.
We also talked about how these are tough times for newspapers in the United States. I said that, in my opinion, that's mainly because we've lost our way: We've forgotten that newspapers are bought by people, not demographics, and we have generally ignored people for the past 30 years. Instead of covering their neighborhoods, we've spent too much time and too much money going for the brass-ring, home-run, put-somebody-in-jail kind of story. Those are necessary, of course, but as someone who has done more than a few of them over the years I can say without reservation that they're rare and add that you usually only find them while you're doing the spade work writing those neighborhood stories that are important to people.
That's not how most Stateside reporters and editors see it these days, however. Here's an example: I once had a young reporter tell me that she was leaving the business because she was 30 years old and had not yet won a Pulitzer - and not just any old Pulitzer, but one of the "important ones" like those they hand out for investigative reporting. "I didn't get a masters degree to cover water board hearings," she said.
Evidently not and that's sort of the reason why we've been losing readers for the past three decades because, like it or not, people want to know that their water is clean and that it's not going to cost them an arm and a leg to take a bath next year.
Here, while there are certainly some editors who are more concerned with bandwidth than column inches, there's still a substantial interest in committing good journalism and, as a result, Tim says it's still possible to convince a boss that there's a good story in what might otherwise seem like a routine event.
Bravo.
As the night drew to a close Tim, noticing that both bottles of chardonnay were now empty, offered us a spare room for the night. That, I've found since arriving here, is pretty typical of Kiwi hospitality. We declined, however, because Elena hadn't drunk most of that chardonnay, Tim and I had.
And, besides, we had to get up at 5:30 in the morning Saturday to board a ferry for South Island, but that's a story for Part Two of this birthday weekend blog.
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