Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Briscoe and his coworker Helen Loomis are two characters in the book that have extreme nostalgia for the way things were. Helen especially, who fondly remembers the days before baseball was “played by millionaires for millionaires…”

Me too! [Laughs.] She’s a little of me too.

Well, how much of that nostalgia is rooted in reality? Did the newsroom really use to look like something out of His Girl Friday?

You know what the best newspaper movie of that era is? Deadline — U.S.A. with Humphrey Bogart. I think it’s the best newspaper movie, followed by His Girl Friday and All the President’s Men, and some of the others. Sweet Smell of Success. But when I first [started working at a newspaper], I thought I had gone to heaven. It was rowdy; it was obscene. Nobody got paid enough money, so that they couldn’t move to the suburbs even if they wanted. It was essentially a bohemian trade. A guy would get drunk, throw a typewriter out the window, and go up the block and work for the Journal American. There was a way to do that. The word you used, “nostalgia,” is exactly right for that. Because I feel nostalgia is a genuine emotion. It’s not sentimentality, which is a different thing. Nostalgia is an ache for the things that are gone, that actually existed and that you experienced. I don’t care about any concept of heaven. I was in it. And it was awful in some ways. Nobody had enough money. The Post in those days was on 75 West Street, and they had no air-conditioning. And right across the river, before there was a Battery Park City, there were the United Fruit Piers. So you had the most giant mosquitoes in the history of mankind float into the city room if you’re working nights, and you’d type and slap all night long.

Glamorous existence, that.

Yeah. I didn’t want to go to bed.

Briscoe would rather retire than work for the new website. Is there any kind of fundamental difference in a writer’s approach to publishing on the Internet and publishing in a paper?

No. I think writing is writing. There’s a difference between writing a tweet and writing for a newspaper, but that’s like trying to learn haiku or something. But I don’t think there’s a difference. What I tell the students over at NYU, where I talk about craft, is that the piano didn’t write the music, Mozart did. You have to write at the top of your talent, and it has to be right.

I think what’s going to happen — we’re seeing it now — is the professionalization of Internet journalism. I’m for the [New York] Times or the Wall Street Journal charging for people to have access. This is not a public service. You have to pay money to send someone to Afghanistan. But I’m reasonably optimistic, having seen a lot of these kids at NYU. They have the passion. They want to have lives that are not about making ten million dollars. They’re not saying “Gee, if I could only learn to write this sentence better I’d be famous.” They’re not driven by that. They want to have meaningful lives.

I noticed that you have old comic strips on your wall. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but aren’t you a little old for comics?

Well, I don’t keep up! I don’t sit around and talk about the greatest new manga that just came out or anything like that. But they’ve played a big part in my life. You can see I have all of these original cartoons on the wall. But they were an entryway for me to get into newspapers, because I was a follower of the daily comic strips in the age of the narrative. There’s still a part of me that when I’m laying out a story, I think [the way] comic book artists do. It was no accident that Updike was a comic freak when he was a kid. Vonnegut, other people. That’s how they started reading.

What are your writing habits like?

It depends on what stage I’m at, because, particularly with fiction, I write longhand. And that was part of getting the journalism out of my hands. It was an accidental discovery thirty-odd years ago. Because I was doing both for a long time. The two ways I dealt with the split were, first, a nap. When I’m finished with the journalism, take a nap and somehow the subconscious starts to make the shift for you. But I’ll write four or five pages longhand, and then I’ll go to the computer and transcribe them, which gives me a second draft. And then sometimes momentum carries me another four or five pages. The longhand was the key to it, though. It felt more like a handmade thing.

As a tabloid, the New York World milks stories like the fatal shooting of a Stuyvesant High School student, giving it big play on the front page. Do you believe this is ethical journalism? How much of this story do you think belongs in the news? What does the student’s death (and readers’ interest in it) say about society?

What does Richard Elwood, the publisher, symbolize to Sam Briscoe? Why does the future look so bleak for newspapers?

Do you think Sam was right to say that what was being reported on CelineWire.com wasn’t real news? Were you surprised that this gossip website was doing better than a newspaper? What do you think it says about the current state of print journalism?

What role does Bobby Fonseca play in the novel? How does he differ from Sam, and in what ways are the two alike?

Ali Watson echoes a lesson from the 1960s: “Never create guys with nothing to lose.” How does this lesson apply to his son, Malik Shahid? How does it apply to Josh Thompson?

Sam is ashamed that after learning of Cynthia Harding’s death, he automatically thinks about how to cover the story in the World, including what the headline should be. Do you think this is a defense mechanism to help him avoid confronting the tragedy? How does Sam cope with the news at first? How does this change over the course of the novel? How do you think he will manage in the future?

Why do you think Jamal’s thoughts on jihad changed after his haj? How much of an impact do you think having a wife and child had on his change of heart? If things had gone differently for Malik and he too had become a husband and father, do you think he would have turned away from radical Islam?

Josh is surprised to see a society murder on the cover of the World instead of coverage of Iraq or Afghanistan. Were you also surprised? Why or why not? How do you think a newspaper should balance its coverage of global and local issues?

Lew Forrest reminisces with Consuelo and says that he loved her, even though he also loved his wife. Do you think it’s possible to love two people at the same time? Why or why not?

Helen Loomis wonders if she was a storyteller like Scheherazade, telling stories to stay alive. Do you think this description also applies to Sam? What do you think will become of him when the paper is gone?

What role does nostalgia play in Tabloid City ?

Do you think Myles Compton gets what he deserves? Why or why not?

Bobby Fonseca recalls a professor at journalism school telling him, “Ya gotta learn to forget. Ya gotta leave all the pain in the city room. Report it, write it, and go home.” Do you think Bobby, Helen, or Sam is able to forget? How much of the pain that they witness as reporters and editors do they each carry around?

Why do you think Malik blames his father for everything? What went wrong in their relationship? Do you think there was anything Ali could have done to reconcile with his son before it was too late? Do you think their final confrontation was inevitable?

What do you think prevents Josh from acting when he has the opportunity?