When did reporters become "journalists"? When I started out at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 1972, nobody called himself a "journalist." We were reporters, and proud of it. "Journalist" had a snooty air to it and seemed to be reserved for the newspaper trade's bigdome who wrote editorials. The rest of us wrote news stories.
I started out, as reporters did in those days, on general assignment, writing the weather story and tallying the numbers of dogs killed each year on Monroe County highways. Later I did time on the night rewrite desk, working from 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. -- working hours I still pretty much keep. Nobody had a degree in "journalism." You learned your trade by watching and imitating the old guys (there were very few women in newsrooms in those days), some still sharp and on their game, and others wrecked old hulks adrift in the Sargasso Sea of the office, the city desk.
But they could still teach, and my earliest stories fell under the ken of one John B. Kenney, a gruff oldtimer who showed me the ropes. He advised me to add my middle initial, "A." to my byline, correctly observing there were a lot of Irish-American kids with my first (very common) and last (fourth commonest name in Ireland) names and thus help avoid confusion. It was good advice but I didn't take it, and to this day Amazon has real trouble with disambiguating me from a dozen other Michael Walshes, some of whom are priests, authors of books on religion, or Hitler apologists, but none of whom is me.
The job was quite simple: via a combination of phones and shoe leather, get out there and get the story, whether it was assigned to you or you simply blundered into it. Rather than sitting around and advising the president of the United States how to conduct foreign policy, as young bloggers and "influencers" do today, we buttonholed city officials, drove around the neighborhoods (good and bad, and mostly bad), getting to know the town. I did time on the suburban beat (boring), the federal court beat (exciting, since the trial of a crooked cop was a big deal, and the witnesses included a parade of junkies and hookers). It gave me a taste for crime, and indirectly led to my first novel, Exchange Alley, which upon publication got a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection.
Cops, KGB killers and JFK.
Sometime during that period, I wound up on the night police beat. As it happened, Rochester was a great crime town and I was lucky enough to be the first reporter on the scene of the shotgun murder of Domenic Chirico, gunned down at very close range while leaving his girlfriend's home very late one night. Chirico was the personal bodyguard of the local Mafia boss, Frank Valenti, who had earlier been politely requested by his confreres to step down. Shooting Chirico in a quiet residential neighborhood was an escalation Valenti couldn't refuse, and he left for Phoenix shortly thereafter. Page One story.
Another time, some time in the afternoon, I was crossing over the Genesee River via the Main Street bridge when a man in front of me pulled out a gun and shot and wounded the man in front of him. Most of the passersby immediately dispersed but my reporter's instinct was to follow the gunman as far as I could and then get to the Gannett Rochester Newspapers offices and, presto -- another juicy front page story. At one point, management offered my youthful self a spot on the editorial page, but I had to good sense to resist and instead held out for the music critic's job, which became available in 1974.
Since that time, during my years at the San Francisco Examiner and Time Magazine, I managed to be at the second eruption of Mount St. Helens, the "White Night" riots that followed the "Twinkie" verdict in the Dan White trial for the murder of mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk -- after Stonewall in New York City, the first major gay clash with the police -- and broke the story of the discovery of the legendary pianist and Liszt specialist Ervin Nyiregyhazi living in the Tenderloin, a story that made national news and revived the aging artist's career.
While at Time, I was in the USSR (Leningrad, with Vladimir Horowitz) when Chernobyl blew up and at the Berlin Wall when it fell. I have a souvenir piece of it, which I sledgehammered out myself, in my study. After returning from the Soviet Union in 1986, I said in a radio interview with Lynn Samuels, that I thought that the USSR was basically a collapsing third world country and that Germany would be reunited within five years, and everybody laughed. I was way wrong: it was four; the Soviet Union died at the end of 1991.
One might observe that I was lucky in my reporting career, which by the way was most spent in the concert halls of the world, writing about classical music. But as they say, luck is the residue of design. After 25 years as a reporter and critic, I was able to leave the trade to concentrate on my novels, non-fiction books, and screenplays. (Largely: I was the founding editor of the late Andrew Breitbart's "Big Journalism" website in 2010, today part of Breitbart.com.)
Now that newspapers and most serious magazines have been crushed in the mandibles of the mighty Internet, that experiential path is no longer open to young folks today. And while there is an apparently limitless number of outlets for political writing of all types, much of it is either unpaid or very poorly remunerated, almost none of it based on original reporting; when Ben Rhodes said "they literally know nothing," he was spot on.
Instead we get thrice-masticated cud based on "sources" somebody invented for a post on Twitter/X, completely unreliable and often mere trolling or "shitposting" for clicks. Fake news sites abound. Worst of all, most of this "journalism" on both the right and the left is so wretchedly written that it is practically unreadable. Where is John B. Kenney when the craft needs him?
In short, we could do with a lot more reporting and a whole lot less "opinion journalism," with far more real, disinterested reporters and very few "journalists" pontificating about things beyond their ken. Fall from helping, the advent of "AI" can only make things worse, as young writers will now never learn how to properly research a subject and will be unable to separate fact from the increasing fiction blurted out by Chat GPT or Grok. Why, just the other day AI informed me, in a paragraph that was otherwise correct, that I am the former Secretary of Labor. Who knew?
Article tags: AI, journalism, Nyiregyhazi, reporters
