Pete Hamill: “Some of this, in my opinion, has been our fault. Over the last quarter of a century, in too many newspapers, we’ve trivialized the newspapers as if trying to capture the TV audience; to capture the youth audience; to capture the ‘dumb guy’ audience. Dumbing the paper down is not smart even as [...]

In an e-mail:
It was a wonderful evening for me, talking to the young reporters, feeling their energy and drive pulsating in the room. It all renewed my cockeyed optimism about the craft itself, no matter how we get it to readers.

“One of the things we’re losing now is the amazing serendipity of the city room. You’d walk through a city room. A guy who’s covering politics while you’ve been off chasing some murder — you begin to have a conversation and you suddenly understand some other thing that should be in a different column, or [...]

“The editor in the office doesn’t really know what the story is. He wants it to be a certain kind of story, but if he’s a great editor, he trusts the reporter who’s there, that he or she knows more about the story being there than the editor sitting in an office. And that is [...]

“We have to be calm. It’s okay to be calm. Being excited and screaming and shouting is not being very smart. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, the toughest guys in the neighborhood — I mean the truly tough guys — never talked tough. They never did. You knew if a guy was talking [...]