By MICHAEL TITTINGER is somewhere between being Editor in Chief of the Daily Press and being an unemployed screenwriter. He
IT WAS WITH A HEAVY HEART, AND A heavy mai tai in hand, that I mulled over my decision to leave the Daily Press while vacationing in Kaua’i last week; the memories of five years in and out of the newsroom streaming through my mind like the waterfalls coursing through the wettest spot on earth.
That ought to be the last misbegotten metaphor I write for the paper.
But as I pondered weak and weary — actually, it was more drunk and bleary — I thought of you, dear reader, and the mostly one-sided conversation we’ve been having these past few years. I say “mostly” because two of you actually stuck in my craw even as I surfed, snorkeled, hiked and crashed out in our little island house. The fact that they were there, jockeying for position in my mind alongside hula dancers, kava-drinking circles and slow-curling waves was no small feat considering we were holed up in a jungle house devoid of Internet, TV and cell phone reception. It was kind of annoying.
Still, there they were — Ron Lowe and Neil Macaulay — hanging around in Kaua’i like the dinner guests who not only stayed too long, but then drank all the Meyers’s rum and passed out on the wicker porch couches. Lowe is the perpetual letter writer who e-mails his politically charged missives to the Daily Press newsroom on a daily basis. Macaulay is the grammatical Nazi who points out every metaphorical misstep and participle left dangling in distress.
Every paper has them, their respective versions of Lowe and Macaulay. Neither seems like the type you want to kick back with in Kaua’i and throw down some Kona Longboard longnecks, but at the end of the day, I was glad to have them around. They make us better — us journalists, and us readers.
Lowe, who’s railing about Mike Huckabee or something in another letter smack dab next to this column, has been coming under fire for not writing about local issues, not writing about issues covered in the Daily Press, even not writing letters that are long enough. A preposterous amount of space in the letters section has been devoted to others’ letters wanting the paper to wipe him out from inclusion in the paper. Yet, there he is each and every week, banging out three, four, five letters — short, concise and clean. All the i’s are dotted, the t’s crossed.
The fact of the matter is, there’s no bottomless well of letters from our readers, sometimes the cupboard is downright bare. We’re thankful to have readers such as Lowe. He’s engaged, thoughtful and unwavering. Our other readers should be so interested. The surest way to knock off another letter writer from monopolizing space is to write letters yourselves. Most readers don’t seem to get that.
Then there’s Macaulay, whose condescending tact leaves most of us smarting, but whose critiques of our grammar are usually spot on. Being a Catholic school product, his thorough dressing down of us in the newsroom feels, to me, like a nun rapping me over the knuckles with her metal ruler every time I let slip some slang. I take offense to Macaulay’s charges that our community paper has “deplorably low standards of English grammar” and that “we just don’t seem to care,” but at the end of the day, the mistakes he brings to our attention can be used as a learning tool, or at least a refresher.
I realize most readers can’t appreciate what goes on behind the scenes at a daily newspaper, preferring to let the curtain remain between the news gathering process and the public. It ain’t an exact science, folks (yes, I know ain’t is not a word), just a group of hard-working, journ grads trying to inform, educate and entertain the masses as best they can.
Do we not bleed? My successor should start slathering himself in urea to toughen up his skin. Prepare to be besieged by callers, e-mailers and snail mailers with two cents to offer on time management, but decidedly little in the way of content.
And that’s the rub. Those same readers don’t always grasp that they are as much a part of the paper as us staffers. Their news tips and ideas will lead to stories. Their submitted pictures end up on the front page. Their letters and op-eds comprise our opinion pages and shape the very voice of the newspaper.
As I sat on my Kaua’i porch contemplating whether to take Ron and Neil kayaking by sea turtles, hiking the Napali Coast or to Kapa’a for burgers and beers, it struck me that the Daily Press will do fine without me, for it was never mine to begin with. I was just a hired hand.
This newspaper is yours, do with it what you will.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 9, 2008. Read the original PDF.