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‘Late Edition’ is Bob Greene’s tribute to local journalism
You define your relationship with journalism as a “love story.” You practiced journalism for 45 years. Was this love worth 45 years?
I still love going out and finding stories as much as I did the first day I walked into the city room of the [Columbus] Citizen-Journal. The way we get our stories to the readers may have changed, but what hasn't changed is the great feeling of finding and telling a good story.
“Late Edition” is a tribute to local journalism. How will the death of local journalism shape American journalism as a whole?
Local newspapers help their communities to realize, every day, that they are, in fact, communities. When the newspaper hits the front steps of all those houses in a town every day, it's like an announcement to all the people that this is, really, a community, just by the fact that the reporters and editors have worked all day the day before to find out what is going on in that community. If the local papers go away, so does that town's sense of place.
One of the epigraphs of your book is from the movie “Dirty Dancing”: “It's not the changes so much this time, Tito, it's that it all seems to be ending…” Do you refer just to the end of printed newspapers or also to that of journalism?
Just the printed newspapers -- reporting and storytelling will go on, but it looks as if the printed papers will not. Which is a big loss for the way life itself feels, I think -- that's what the story in "Late Edition" is all about: what it is we're losing.
What you did not see coming was that “the computer screens would become the newspapers.” Let us be optimistic; thanks to computers, a Turkish newspaper can conduct an interview with you. Isn't that a good thing?
It's very good -- I was just thinking the same thing right before I got to this question. There are a lot of great things about our new way of communicating. But I have to ask myself: Is it possible to fall in love with a computer screen? Currently, there is a debate among some Turkish columnists about the “information business” and newspapers. Some columnists say that newspapers have to change and “information” should be a small part of a newspaper. Do you agree? How do you think newspapers will survive in the “Twitter-YouTube-Google news” information era?
Information is what newspapers have always been about. I don't know why a newspaper would have a reason to exist without the duty to provide information to its community. It wouldn't be able to call itself a newspaper. Of course, that brings up another question: Is it a newspaper without the paper? I don't know what will happen to the word "newspaper" itself.
In the book, you mention Ronnie Rummel's question, “If you had a choice, would you live in an average apartment or in a really great car?” After your days on the CNN Election Express, what answer would you give today?
The CNN Election Express was a great way to see America, but we always pulled up to a hotel by the side of the road when it was time to sleep. I don't think even Ronnie Rummel would want to live in a bus -- even a bus that's a great mobile television studio on wheels.
What was the most unforgettable moment of your journalism career?
It's not so much the well-known people I've interviewed and traveled with -- Richard Nixon, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and others whose names are known in every house in the world. It's the small stories of people no one knows -- people whose stories would never get told unless a reporter came along and took the time to listen to them and talk with them. That's what I have always liked to do best.
In our paperless future, do you believe some journalists of the next generation will also fall in love with journalism? Or will this “love story” just become nostalgia?
I hope that people will be falling in love with news, and the news business, forever. I don't know if there will be newspapers around to fall in love with -- I hope there are. The world would seem very empty without them.
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