Journalism – The TellAllmarketing Blog

PR Flacks Then And Now

Posted on January 27, 2021February 3, 2021 by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

When I started out in business journalism 30 some-odd years ago, PR flacks were viewed strictly as an annoyance.

They called on the phone incessantly to tell you about some “news” or other, but there was no guarantee that the U.S. Postal Service would deliver the press release by the time they called.

When it was a big story, they might messenger it over. But I once saw my boss at DM News, the legendary Joe Fitz-Morris, get red in the face and berate a PR person when Ad Age received an announcement before we did.

This was the same Fitz-Morris who reveled in breaking scoops on the World Of Advertising radio show and in DM News.

Another irritant was corrections. Usually, they were about context—we did tend to sensationalize things at times.

The flacks would call to hector us and demand redress. I was intimidated by them, but not Fitz-Morris.

He would tell them to write a letter to the editor, and in one instance snarled, “I disagree with what you’re saying, but I’ll defend to your death your right to say it.”

As for more minor errors, our policy was that if we spelled the name wrong, that was the way it should be spelled.

Soon, I learned that PR people were obstacles to finding the news: The minute someone hired them, you lost direct access.

One of my best sources sold his firm to a larger outfit. We were about to exchange a bear hug at a conference when one PR flack blocked him and another physically restrained me.

Oh, you poor old fool. When I returned to the rigors of daily journalism a few years ago, things were different.

Instead of the phone calls, I now receive dozens of PR emails a day.

Many of them start with the daunting word EMBARGO in the subject line, alerting me that the news won’t be live for weeks, or even months, in some cases.

These people are taking a big chance on my limited clerical skills. I suggest that Gmail set up a folder called “Embargo,” right next to Promotions.

Worse yet is when they offer you a report of some kind. To even access it, you have to first prove you’re not a robot, picking out the CAPCHA pictures that have stairs or motorcycles in them.

I’ve concluded that this is some kind of digital dementia test.

Then you have to formally request the report, specifying your company size, number of employees and revenue, details I don’t know and wouldn’t share even if I did.

Within minutes of the request, the phone rings—it’s a salesperson noting that I had downloaded the report. I always explain that I’m a reporter, not a candidate for a $600K software package. What a waste of his time and mine.

That said, it’s amazing how much of the work PR people try to do for you these days—it’s almost like the chef who does everything but chew the food. They provide easy-to-read synapses in cover emails, which are often easier to read than the actual press releases.

They spot typos in real time. And they put in case studies from end users, something we were always after in more innocent days. Not that they trust reporters–they often record interviews, in both audio and video forms.

I must be getting soft. It’s amazing that I’m so fond of many of the PR flacks I have known, then and now.

We Work At The Jollity Building

Posted on September 28, 2018October 28, 2019 by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Work recently took me to a WeWork facility in midtown Manhattan, where an upstart with no standing can rent a few feet of space and establish a New York presence. I waited in the shared space or Hot Desk area, where prices start at $450 a month; the coffee and wi-fi are thrown in. People lounged around with their laptops and smartphones, as they would in a Starbucks. Then there are the offices in back, which start at $450 but probably average out at around $2,500—my interview subject, from a foreign company, was located there. It made me wonder if the founders of this outfit ever read The Telephone Booth Indian, A.J. Liebling’s masterpiece on the Jollity Building, circa 1942. It seems to be built on the same business model.

Mostly occupied by hustlers who tried to make a buck or two by “promoting” people (i.e., swindling them), the Jollity Building had a similar sliding fee structure to We Work’s (in 1942 dollars). At the bottom rung were the Telephone Booth Indians, who simply hung out in in the lobby for free and used the telephone booths; often they could not afford the price of coffee and a pastrami sandwich, but they lived in perpetual hope of making a score.

Upstairs, there were spaces for rent on a monthly basis. But you had to see Morty, the rental agent, who refers to the renters as “heels.” Liebling writes:

Morty usually reserves the appellation heel for the people who rent the forty-eight cubicles, each furnished with a desk and two chairs, on the third floor of the Jollity Building. These cubicles are formed by partitions of wood and frosted glass which do not quite reach the ceiling. Sufficient air to maintain human life is supposed to circulate over the partitions. The offices rent for $10.00 and $12.00 a month, payable in advance. “Twelve and a half dollars with air, ten dollars without air,” Morty says facetiously. “Very often the heels who rent them take the air without telling me.” Sometimes a Telephone Booth Indian acquires enough capital to rent a cubicle. He thus rises in the social scale and becomes a heel. A cubicle has three advantages over a telephone booth. One is that you cannot get a desk into a telephone booth. Another is that you can play pinochle in a cubicle. Another is that a heel gets his name on the directory in the lobby, and the white letters have a bold, legitimate look.

The vertical social structure of the Jollity Building is subject to continual shifts. Not only do Indians become heels, but a heel occasionally accumulates forty or fifty dollars with which to pay a month’s rent on one of the larger offices, all of them unfurnished on the fourth, fifth, or sixth floor. He then becomes a tenant. Morty always views such progress with suspicion, because it involves signing a lease, and once a heel has signed a lease, you cannot put him out without serving a dispossess notice and waiting ten days. A tenant, in Morty’s opinion, is just a heel who is planning to get ten days’ free rent. “Any time a heel acts prosperous enough to rent an office,” Morty says, “you know he’s getting ready to take you.” A dispossessed tenant often reappears in the Jollity Building as an Indian. It is a life cycle.

One of the few legitimate tenants is Hy Sky, a sign painter who serves the heels in setting up their usually unsuccessful scams. He laughs when painting the signs because he knows he “will receive the only dollar that is likely to change hands in the transaction—the dollar he gets for painting the sign,” Liebling wrote. Often, Hy Sky would call Morty to say, ““Morty, pop up here and see the character I got here! He is the most phoniest character I seen in several years.”

The name Jollity Building was fictional, but it was based on a real place, or a composite of such places. Of course, two big differences between Jollity and We Work (beyond the clientele) is that you had to buy your own coffee at a counter in the old building’s basement, and We Work doesn’t have a dance palace on the bottom floor.

Runyon Ala Carte

Posted on July 8, 2018September 1, 2019 by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Now this may not qualify as a Ph.D. thesis, but it’s time someone did a study on the presence of food in Damon Runyon’s stories. Did you ever notice how many of these classic Broadway tales involve eating in some form? Take Butch Minds the Baby.

One evening along about seven o’clock I am sitting in Mindy’s restaurant putting on the gefilte fish, which is a dish I am very fond of, when in come three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore, and Spanish John.

The narrator, a not-particularly warm hearted character who deals with types like these in a friendly but guarded way, never gets to finish his meal. He says:

“It is a nice night.”

“What is nice about it?” asks Harry the Horse, who is a thin man with a sharp face and sharp eyes.

Well, now that it is put up to me in this way, I can see there is nothing so nice about the night, at that, so I try to think of something else jolly to say, while Little Isadore keeps spearing at my gefilte fish with his fingers, and Spanish john nabs one of my potatoes.

In Breach of Promise, the narrator is in Mindy’s enjoying some cold borscht, “a most refreshing matter in hot weather, such as is going on at the time” when he is approached by the same three characters, and “some of my cold borscht goes down the wrong way, and I almost choke to death.”

Not to worry: They seem quite friendly, and in fact Harry the Horse pounds me on the back to keep me from choking, and while he pounds so hard that he almost caves in my spine, I consider it a most courteous action.

In Tobias the Terrible, the narrator is partaking heartily of some Hungarian goulash which comes very nice in Mindy’s, what with the chef being personally somewhat Hungarian himself. In Broadway Complex, he is eating a sturgeon sandwich, which is wonderful brain food.

Mindy’s of course, is the fictional version of the real-life Lindy’s, which Runyon described like this in his Hearst newspaper column:

Breakfast in the old Lindy’s on Broadway near Fiftieth around 1 p.m. is a big deal. It assembles the sporting, theatrical, and musical Broadwayfarers, boxers, bookmakers, actors, agents, ticket brokers, radio fellows, song writers, orchestra leaders, newspapermen, and cops most of them still sleep-groggy but shaved and talcumed and lacking only their java to make them ready for the day.

Mindy’s is not the only place that the narrator eats. On Tuesdays, I always go to Bobby’s Chop House to get myself a beef stew, the beef stews in Bobby’s being very nourishing, indeed, and quite reasonable, he says in Gentleman, the King! And in Undertaker Song, he enjoys a small portion of baked beans and brown bread in the dining car on a train to Boston.

Food is used as a prop in these stories to set up the premise and establish the narrator as someone who (like Runyon himself) sits endlessly in restaurants, picking up gossip and stories. And perhaps it is designed to intrigue out-of-town magazine readers, few of whom would ever set foot in Manhattan or its dining spots.

Typically, the meal leads to some kind of episode. In Butch Minds the Baby, the narrator accompanies the thugs on a safecracking job with a baby in tow. In Broadway Complex, there is a ruckus right there in Mindy’s: Annoyed by a character named Cecil Earl, Nathan Detroit reaches out and picks up an order for ham and eggs, Southern style, that Charley, the waiter, just puts in front of Upstate Red, and taps Cecil on the onion with same.

He goes on:

It is unfortunate for Cecil that Nathan Detroit does not remove the ham and eggs, Southern style, from the platter before tapping Cecil with the order, because it is a very hard platter, and Cecil is knocked as stiff a plank, and maybe stiffer, and it becomes necessary to summon old Doctor Mogg to bring him back to life.

Sometimes, the narrator does not consume the food being described. In The Bloodhounds of Broadway, steaks and hamburgers are fed to a pair of dogs who solve a crime. In Situation Wanted, he says: One night in in the summer of 1936 I am passing in front of Mindy’s restaurant on Broadway when the night manager suddenly opens the door and throws a character in a brown suit at me…

…Naturally, I am greatly vexed, and I am thinking of stepping into Mindy’s and asking the night manager how dare he hurl missiles of this nature at me, when I remember that the night manager does not care for me either, and in fact he hates me from head to foot, and does not permit me in Mindy’s except on Fridays, because of course he does not have the heart to keep me from enjoying my chicken soup with matzoth dumplings once a week.

This fondness for Jewish cuisine has convinced writer Adam Gopnik that the narrator is Jewish—“the steady run of gefilte fish is in there to type him, as corned beef and cabbage might an Irishman,” he writes. But I’ve always assumed the narrator is Runyon himself. He seems to be a person brought up elsewhere (in Runyon’s case, Colorado) who deems Jewish people and Jewish things among the attractions of the Big Town.

Anyway, the narrator is careful to distance himself from Jewish characters, as he does from just about everybody. In Dancing Dan’s Christmas, he is drinking and singing Christmas carols in Good-Time Charley Bernstein’s speakeasy on Christmas Eve, but personally I always think Good Time Charley Bernstein is a little out of line trying to sing a Jewish hymn on such an occasion, and it almost causes words between us. And he falls easily into using Jewish stereotypes (along with Italian- and African-American stereotypes). For example, there is his description of Izzy Cheesecake, who is called Izzy Cheesecake because he is all the time eating cheesecake around delicatessen joints, although of course this is nothing against him, as cheesecake is very popular in some circles, and goes very good with java.

He adds that this Izzy Cheesecake has another name, which is Morris something, and he is slightly Jewish, and has a large beezer, and is considered a handy man in many respects.

Runyon himself was a prodigious eater of Ashkenazic favorites, typically ordering the following for breakfast at the dairy restaurant Ratner’s, according to biographer Ed Weiner: “Half a grapefruit, a big bowl of vegetables and sour cream, a big slab of boiled white fish, a bowl of kasha, an order of blintzes, a big piece of coffee cake and coffee as fast as you can refill my cup.”

All that said, Runyon’s two food masterpieces are Lonely Heart and A Piece of Pie. In the first, Nicely-Nicely Jones is gorged by his new wife, the Widow Crumb, as she prepares to murder him for insurance, as she has done with several prior husbands. On his first night at the widow’s farm, the new groom is stuffed with round steak hammered flat and fried in a pan, with thick cream gravy, and hot biscuits, and corn on the cob, and turnip greens, and cottage-fried potatoes, and lettuce with hot bacon grease poured over it, and apple pie, and coffee, and I do not know what all else, and Nicely-Nicely almost founders himself.

A Piece of Pie is about an eating contest upstairs at Mindy’s, in which a woman named Violette Shumberger out-eats a championship eater from Boston named Joel Duffle. In this much bet-upon event, they split: Two quarts of ripe olives, twelve bunches of celery, four pounds of shelled nuts, twelve dozen cherry-stone clams, two gallons of Philadelphia pepper-pot soup, two five-pound striped bass (the heads and tails not to count in the eating), a 22-pound roast turkey, two pounds of mashed potatoes with brown gravy, two dozen ears of corn on the cob, two quarts of lima beans, twelve bunches of asparagus cooked in butter, ten pounds of stewed new peas, six pounds of mixed green salad with vinegar and oil dressing, and a pumpkin pie, two feet across and not less than three inches deep. In case of a tie, they are to eat it off immediately of ham and eggs only.

Except for hot dog-eating contests at Coney Island, this type of Olympic-scale gluttony is no longer in style.

Most of Runyon’s classic stories appeared in the early 1930s, during the Depression and Prohibition. Biographers say that his fiction output dried up after that as he concentrated on his column and on getting the existing stories produced as movies, but he wrote at least a few war-era stories, like A Light in France, in which a scamp named Blond Maurice turns up eating blintzes in Mindy’s after it was assumed he had been placed in quicklime by parties who do not wish him well.

…At first I think I am seeing a ghost, but, of course, I know that ghosts never come in Mindy’s, and if they do, they never eat cheese blintzes, so I realize that it is nobody but Maury himself.

Finally, there is Blonde Mink, one of the last two stories Runyon wrote, which starts this way:

Now of course there are many different ways of cooking tripe but personally I prefer it stewed with tomatoes and mushrooms and a bit of garlic, and in fact I am partaking of a portion in this form in Mindy’s restaurant on Broadway when a personality by the name of Julie the Starker sits down and says to me like this:

“Tripe,” he says. “With garlic,” he says. “Why, this is according to the recipe of the late Slats Slavin who obtains it from his old Aunt Margaret in Troy. Waiter,” he says, “bring me an order of this delicious concoction only with more garlic. It is getting colder outside and a guy needs garlic in his system to thicken his blood.”

All this proves that Runyon’s appetite never quit. Neither did his ear, nor the humor and polish he brought to these very entertaining gems, all delivered in the present tense in an argot he alone mastered.

Note: The illustration is the cover of a paperback edition published in 1946. The original hardcover collection, which did not have a food theme, appeared in 1944.

DEAR FRIEND: The Rascals, Rogues and Roues Who Made American Junk Mail, Chapter 26: Black Mail

Posted on March 19, 2017June 6, 2020 by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

To the untutored, 1940 probably seemed like just another year ending in a zero. The movies Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were playing around the country. On the radio, one heard Frank Sinatra singing with the Tommy Dorsey band. But some people were not consoled by such entertainment: The Germans were overrunning Europe, the Jews were in peril.

In March 1939, a charitable group called the Committee of Mercy, had sent a direct mail letter to people of good will:

Dear Friend:

The situation of the intellectual Jews who are still living in Germany in a state of misery, humiliation and ill-treatment attains a degree of horror which cannot easily be described in words. They endure it with great courage. They say:

“We do not mind so much for ourselves. We have made the sacrifice of our lives and of our welfare. We let them take our properties, our wealth, our factories, etc……We do not ask any help for ourselves, but for pity’s sake save our children.”

It was an eloquent plea, but the letter went on to offer anti-Semitic readers a way out: WILL YOU HELP? it asked. Or if you do not care to assist the Jews, will you aid the tubercular, and pre-tubercular children in France?

It’s not known how many recipients took either option. Either way, the letter reminded them, without explicitly saying it, that there could be another war.

Soon there was. And Time magazine hammered it home, both on its pages and in its direct mail pieces. This is America’s year, it said in a letter dated Jan. 2, 1940 and signed by Time’s circulation manager Perry Prentice. It continued:

All over Europe the lights are going out. All over Europe the nights are dark with fear.

But here in America the nights are bright with the lights of a thousand factories as America starts back to work after the long depression — bright with the lights of a thousand laboratories whose discoveries may change the course of history and all the ways of our living — bright with the lights of forty-million homes, where Americans are newly confident that they can find and conquer new frontiers in the American way.

Yes–this is America’s year — so this is the year you need TIME most.”

The letter went on to offer a subscription.

That was soon followed by:

Time has been banned in Germany!

Banned in Russia! Banned in Italy! Banned in Japan!

But here in America, where men are still free to think and learn the truth — thousands upon thousands of new families are turning to TIME each week to help them make the confusing news and war and peace make sense.

In February, at the height of the Phony War, Time sent a a direct mail piece, saying:

This is the dullest war in history…

FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT!

But it’s a tremendously exciting, moving, portentious war for those who know and understand what is really going on…

…tremendously exciting for the readers of TIME.

Two months later, with Hitler now on the march, recipients read this stark reminder:

When kingdoms vanish in the night…

– and nations wake to find the enemy within their gates..

Millions of people snap up each extra as it comes off the press and scan each headline in fear and horror – as puzzled children turn to parents for reassurance and explanation.

The real war had started. And in June, Time reported this

The Nazi Blitzkrieg has swept like a flame —

–over Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Northern France.

In eight short weeks kingdoms and governments have fallen, peoples have been subjugated, the balance of power of the whole world has changed.

It cannot go on much longer, many experts say — the next hundred days should tell the story.

In September, Time continued on its roll.

Dear American

Ours is the tragic previlege–

The tragic previlege of living and taking part in the greatest worldwide military crisis since Napoleon, the greatest American election crisis since Lincoln, the greatest economic crisis since Adam Smith.

And in times like these, when the news is so confusing and so dramatic and so immediately important — no American need be reminded that keeping thoughtfully well-informed is a personal duty.

Meanwhile, there was a struggle between isolationists like Charles A. Lindbergh, whose comments were tinged with anti-Semitism, and those who felt the U.S. had to help defeat Hitler. Among the latter was Henry Hoke, the 46 year-old Baltimore native and Wharton graduate who had befriended Louis Victor Eytinge. Hoke was ever on the alert for frauds who abused the medium, and he felt he had uncovered just such a group.

The Nazis.

The Germans were using the U.S. mails to spread propaganda, and Hoke, whose son Pete had received pro-German circulars at Wharton, took it on himself to expose them. As he wrote later, in a book titled Black Mail, “the German government, through mail issued by specified agencies to selected lists, was attempting to divide the country so that the United States would be helplessly unprepared for future military attack.”

For instance, “the German Library of Information guided by Matthias F. Schmitz (assisted by George Sylvester Viereck), issued about 90,000 copies of a semi-weekly, well printed and written Facts in Review to ministers, school teachers, editors of college papers, legislators, publishers,” Hoke wrote in May 1940 in his magazine. “Purpose: to sell the National Socialist ideology and to prevent preparedness against attack.”

Then he added that “the German Railroads Information Office, guided by Ernest Schmitz, issued about 40,000 weekly mimeographed bulletins to hotel mangers, travel agencies, stock brokers, bankers and ‘small business men,’” to “convince Americans that the Nazi system of doing business was best.”

Hoke wasn’t done: “The American Fellowship Forum, guided by Friedrich E. Auhagen, assisted by George Sylvester Viereck, Lawrence Dennis, and others, issued pamphlets or bulletins to a ‘cultural class,’—educators, civic leaders, authors and a selected list of persons who might be sold the idea that the German mind was filled with nothing but the milk of human kindness for all humanity.”

It took courage to write that, even for an American tucked safely at home in Garden City, Long Island. E. Schmitz, from the German Railroads Information Office, wrote to demand that Hoke retract these “slanders,” and assured him that if he did, “a waiver will be given, releasing you and your publication from further claim.” Hoke noted that the letter “had been sent to my home…not to my office.”

Hoke published his exchange with Schmitz in a special mailing—“I refuse to be intimidated by you or by any German controlled organization. I refuse to have my family intimidated,” he wrote. And he got more outspoken as he realized the scope of the German operation.

“For the first time, it was possible to show how the Nazis had built a large mailing list (estimated at 250,000) of German Americans with relatives in Germany…how Japanese boats brought hulls full of printed material from Hamburg, Munich, Berlin…how these pieces were delivered under International Postal Union Treaties free of charge by the United States. (Under International Postal Treat, the country of origin retains the postage collected,” he wrote in Black Mail. “The country of delivery delivers free. A wash-out transaction to avoid bookkeeping).”

But the Germans were only part of it. Hoke found that Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, the Montana Democrat who had broken with Roosevelt over his court-packing plan, was sending out isolationist mail under his free Congressional frank. Analyzing the addressing on the envelopes, Hoke traced the pieces to a German group: the Steuben Society, Also sending seemingly pro-Hitler mail, for free, was Rep. Hamilton Fish (R-NY), who in 1938 had met with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Europe, and reportedly said that Germany’s demands in Poland were “just,” according to Hoke.

Hoke deplored the anti-Semitism shown by many isolationists. “On April 25, 1941, in Omaha, Nebraska, Charles B Hudson, violently anti-Semitic publisher, admitted to reporters that he had distributed isolationist speeches under the Congress free mailing franks of Senators Worth Clark of Idaho, Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri and Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, and Representatives Oliver of Maine and Bolton of Ohio,” he reported.

Hoke wrote to Wheeler: “Unaddressed franked mail under your signature and under that of former Representative Jacob Thorkelson of Montana, has been distributed by your violent adherent Donald Shea at his anti-Semitic meetings and by Nazi-loving, Jew-baiting Joe McWilliams at Christian Front meetings. Recipients were instructed to address the franked envelopes and dump them into the nearest postal box, without payment of postage.”

Of course, isolationists had a right to circulate their views, although not under franked mail, Hoke argued. Wheeler fought back. “I am not seriously concerned about Mr. Hoke’s misrepresentations,” he wrote in a letter. “In the first place, Mr. Hoke is interested in direct mail advertising, as he himself says, and is opposed to the use of the franking privilege on general principles.”

Wheeler then claimed that “Mr. Hoke makes no reference to the fact that those in Government who apparently favor our intervention in foreign war sent out under various Congressional franks some 2,00,000 pieces of mail all over the United States, much of it distributed by the pro-interventionist committees and organizations.”

Wheeler also falsely wrote that Hoke was employed by the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith, as if that discredited him. Meanwhile, Hoke reported that the supposedly good name of the Order of the Purple Heart was being used as a cover in the scheme.

Events moved quickly. FDR was elected to an unprecedented third term in November 1940. On June 2, 1941, Hoke wrote, “a friend beside a news ticker called me on the ‘phone to beat the headlines…’Henry, you ought to be glad to know,’ he said, ‘the President of the United States has just issued an executive order closing the German Railroads…the German Library of Information…and the German Consulates.’”

Hoke was pleased, although this crusade had practically wrecked his business. But he kept after the Nazi sympathizers, using the techniques of his trade to undo them. For example, friends wrote flattering letters to the appeasers, using dummy names, and soon received isolationist letters addressed to those names, fueling his investigative reporting. And more was to follow.

“We learned from a girl who worked in a locked and guarded room on the top floor of the Ford Building at N. 1710 Broadway in New York City that Ford Motor Car Company employees were compiling a master list of appeasers, anti-Semites, pro-Nazis and Fascists from fan mail addressed to Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, to former Senator Rush Holt and to Representative Hamilton Fish,” Hoke wrote.

He added that “the lists, when compiled, were delivered to Bessie Feagin, circulation manager of Scribner’s Commentator. That explained how some of the dummy names used in writing to radio orators eventually got on the list of the American First Committee and Scribner’s Commentator. But why the Ford organization? But why…a lot of things?”

Feagin was eventually hauled before a grand jury, as were many others, including Hamilton Fish. “No one knows what Hamilton Fish told the Grand Jury on December 5, 1941,” Hoke said. “Someone was pulling every possible string to have the case buried.”

Two days passed. Then: “Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, just as our little family sat down to dinner…the flash we feared came over the radio…Pearl Harbor!”

Time wasted no time in getting letters out:

Dear American:

And now the news is happening to us!

Its unpredictable turns and changes are altering the whole course of your life — the job you work at, the town you live in, the clothes you wear and the food you eat.

The news is happening to you in the Pacific — and sudden developments in Malaya and the China Sea, at Singapore and off San Francisco, in Tokyo and Manila and the Dutch East Indies can change your life more than you can possibly change it yourself.

The news is happening to you across the Atlantic — where Russia bleeds Germany white, where American tanks fight the Axis in Libya, where Britain waits tense for an attempted invasion – and your life and my life, the safety of our families and the future of our children all wait on tomorrow’s news.

The news is happening to you at home — where new laws and new regulations pour out of Washington – where entire industries are changing over to war production, where uniforms fill the streets and the whole nation moves with a new unity and determination.

Yes, the news is the biggest things in our lives today – stirring and vital and very near us all. And it is very confusing.

And that is why this is the year you need TIME most.

Despite this development, and the collapse of the America First organization, the flow of isolationist mail continued, some letters containing vicious attacks on “the Jews.” George Sylvester Vierick was indicted by the Federal Grand Jury for failure to give a true statement of his activities in registering as a german agent, and held on $15,000 bail. (Nazi agent).

Hoke recorded the scene:

“11:30 P.M. Judge Lawes appears and the courtroom is filled with an air of dignity…and tension. The jury walks in a semi-circle at the side of the bench. Viereck stands before the jury and glares. The clerk reads each count and the foreman answers—‘Guilty’…six times. Vierecks lawyer asks that the jury be polled. Viereck glares at each juror as the question is put six times, an the answer six times is ‘Guilty.’ Seventy-to times Viereck hears his ‘fellow citizens’ say the word ‘Guilty.’ The big marshal standing behind George Sylvester Viereck takes out his handcuffs and the Nazi agent goes out through the back door. Court adjourned.”

It was the last blast for Viereck—and also for junk mail. As they had in World War names disappeared from iists—these men were unreachable. Not that it mattered– there were paper shortages that prevented mail pieces from being printed. And there was nobody to send them, for copywriters and list brokers were now in uniform. Except for the mail sent by charitable fundraisers, like the people who served coffee and donuts to servicemen, the business was on hold.

Chapter 27: The Veteran’s List

Take The Best and Leave the Rest

Posted on September 5, 2016November 18, 2016 by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Max Shulman should be alive to see this. The creator of Dobie Gillis wrote a story in 1948 or so in which Dobie has to turn in an English paper or flunk out of college.

Fortunately, his girlfriend works in the library, and she loans him her pass. The night before the paper is due, he goes down into the deepest stacks, finds a dust-covered book of essays that hasn’t been checked out since 1920, copies one in its entirety and hands it in.

But this backfires. His professor is so impressed with the piece that he enters it into in a statewide competition. Dobie is a finalist, and wins a trip to the state capital. Then it turns out that one of the judges, a bearded, white-haired old man who can barely walk, is the author. Dobie has visions of the electric chair.

The winner is announced—it isn’t Dobie. But as he is leaving, the old man stops him and says, “Mr. Gillis. I’m very flattered that you chose my old essay to copy. Of course, you understand I couldn’t give you the prize.”

Such was college humor in the 1940s (as well as I can remember the story). And the punchline was that Dobie, who inspired a generation of high school goof-offs on TV, got away with plagiarism.

Not everyone does. You can be expelled from school, fired from your job, have your book recalled or be turned into a national laughingstock while your husband runs for president. But Benny Johnson has.

Remember Benny? He was fired by BuzzFeed in 2014 after readers found “41 instances of sentences or phrases copied word for word from other sites,” as editor Ben Smith put it in a blog post, according to Mashable. Unlike Dobie, who at least stole a distinguished essay, Benny allegedly copied listsicles and other trashy material.

It should have been a career destroyer. But he landed on his feet—he’s now working for IJReview. And he was outraged last May because Gawker threw in a little sneer about the plagiarism after he beat them on a story, according to Betsy Rothstein writing in The Daily Caller.

“This is the 4th time this year that Gawker has been forced to aggregate news that I broke,” he wrote on Facebook, according to Rothstein. “This must be hard for their editors who so joyously cheered my ‘demise’ in journalism. Every time they have to push one of my stories, they leave me a little love letter at the bottom of the article. Like Babe Ruth said, ‘It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.’”

These days, there are two capital offenses in journalism: making up facts, and plagairism. If you believe the folklore, both practices were more common years ago, and you were just as likely to be fired for missing a story while sleeping off a hangover.

How did Benny survive in the age of instant online scrutiny? Probably because he draws traffic.

Well, far be it from me to deny redemption to Benny, or anyone. But spare me the excuse that he never went to J school, as some apologists have suggested. Do you have to go to J school to learn that it’s wrong to murder or steal? Most of us are taught in first grade not to copy our friend’s test papers.

Related posts:

41 Shades of Gray

Enough Storytelling—Let’s Tell the Truth

Gay Talese Has a Cold

Posted on April 7, 2016March 7, 2021 by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Haven’t the Twitter twits got anything better to do than beat up on 84 year-old Gay Talese?

Talese got himself in trouble last week by saying, in effect, that he was not, as a young journalist, inspired by any female reporters—an admission that created a firestorm in social media.

He made the remarks during a panel at Boston University. And he was promptly given a failing grade.

Jerks, fools, classroom-bound jackasses…get a life.

Here’s what happened. You tell me if our nonfiction master deserves to be pilloried.

As reported by Sridhar Pappu in The New York Times, the poet Verandah Porche put Talese on the spot by asking, “In addition to Nora Ephron, who were the women who write who were most, who have inspired you most?”

Pappu continues, using transcripts provided by Boston University:

“‘Did I hear you say what women have inspired me most?’ Mr. Talese said.

“‘As writers.

“‘As writers,’ Mr. Talese said. ‘Uh, I’d say Mary McCarthy was one. I would, um, [pause] think [pause] of my generation [pause] um, none. I’ll tell you why. I’m not sure it’s true, it probably isn’t true anymore, but my — when I was young, maybe 30 or so, and always interested in exploratory journalism, long-form, we would call it, women tended not, even good writers, women tended not to do that. Because being, I think, educated women, writerly women, don’t want to, or do not feel comfortable dealing with strangers or people that I’m attracted to, sort of the offbeat characters, not reliable.”

It was a classic “gotcha” moment, almost as if Trump or Hillary had been caught in a gaffe. Talese, who does not own a cell phone, found out that he was infamous from a redcap at Penn Station, and then from his wife Nan, a prominent writer and book editor.

He tried to clarify his remarks in an interview with Pappu , mentioning that he once wanted to write like Carson McCullers. (A very high bar to set). But the flap was only beginning.

Roxanne Gay tweeted, “I hope no one expected Talese, who doesn’t wear jeans, to think well of women.” (Huh?) There were wildly inaccurate headlines saying that Talese admires no female writers at all. Some self-publicists have charged that he hates women.

Let’s step back for a minute. What I think Talese was trying to say in Boston was that there weren’t many women journalists around when he was young, especially any doing long-form literary journalism. And if so, he was right, particularly on the paper he worked on, that Gray Lady, The New York Times.

Granted, there were a few women in the business. In those days, if the folklore is correct, the stereotypical female reporter was a wizened person who smoked cigarettes as she hunched over a typewriter.

On some papers, female writers were called “sob sisters,” because they were given human-interest stories to cover, and had free reign to write emotion-charged copy. Thus, the best writing in newspapers was not on the front page, but in the women’s section and the sports columns.

I’d argue that Talese, while he clearly transcended it, came right out of that sob-sister tradition: Although a fine reporter, he distinguished himself more as a writer than a scoop artist. And I have a confession to make: As a teenager, when I knew him only by his byline, I thought Talese was a woman. Who else would have a name like Gay, and who else could write these deeply sensitive portraits of people?

Then I learned that Gay is short for Gaetano, and that he happens to be a man. And, yes, he has tended to write about men—Sinatra, DiMaggio, Floyd Patterson, the heads of the so-called Bonanno crime family. And nobody has done it better.

As for his performance in Boston. I suspect that Talese is uncomfortable on stage: He’s too much the reporter. Asked a tough question, he floundered for a moment.

If he had been prepared for that query, which I bet was designed to cause the exact effect that it did, he could have named Janet Malcolm, Lillian Ross, Janet Flanner or Joan Didion, whether or not he had read them. And he would have gotten away with it, given the superficial level of this discussion.

But he was set up—and caught. And now a deadly academic sensibility is creeping into it. Every time you turn around, someone is naming yet another female writer Talese should have read when he was climbing out on girders to report on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Why not Scheherazade, as one wag suggested?

It has turned into a feeding storm. It’s so easy for these coddled literary poseurs to attack a man formed in another era. They are, as author Katie Roiphe implied to ABC News, trying to police people’s inspirational influences.

Let’s not forget that Talese still writes deeply sensitive profiles that younger writers should emulate, and that his critics can learn something from him about accuracy.

For more about Gay Talese, click here.

The Grace of Gay Talese

Posted on April 12, 2015July 27, 2016 by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Corry. John Corry. A name easily remembered, easily forgotten.

Forgive me if I’ve gotten a single word of that wrong, but I read it decades ago. It’s the opening of a profile of John Corry, a New York Times reporter who covered the Kennedy-William Manchester book affair in 1967, by America’s nonfiction master: Gay Talese.

At that time, I could quote many such leads by Gay Talese, and I suspect I wasn’t the only one who could. He developed a flowing narrative style that resembled fiction but wasn’t, and left a permanent imprint on journalism.

Take his 1964 book, The Bridge, about the building of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge in New York. It was reissued last year. Far from being an engineering treatise, The Bridge is a classic about the men who built the structure: Courageous, hard-drinking itinerants known as boomers.

Talese follows them everywhere. In one chapter, Danny Montour races up the New York State Thruway at 90 miles an hour on a Friday night, on his way to a Native American reservation near Montreal. He’s sipping gin, and has already had several drinks in a bar. Talese presents this in a style similar to cinema verite. If he has any fear in the car, he does not reveal it, for he is there as an observer, not as a character in the story.

In another chapter, Talese gives a heart-rending account of Gerald McKee’s fall into the Narrows. My family distantly knew the McKees, and was horrified as I read this passage aloud. As Talese writes of the boomers, “All have seen death.” Yet he also captures the poetry and romance of the boomer’s life:

The boomer’s child might live in forty states and attend a dozen high schools before he graduates, if he graduates, and though the father swears he wants no boomer for a son, he usually gets one. He gets one, possibly, because he really wanted one, and maybe that is why boomers brag so much at home on weekends, creating a wondrous world with whiskey words, a world no son can resist because this world seems to have everything: adventure, big cars, big money and gambling on rainy days when the bridge is slippery, and booming around the country with Indians who are sure-footed as spiders, with Newfoundlanders as shifty as the sea they come from, with roaming Rebel riveters escaping the poverty of their small Southern towns, all of them building something big and permanent, something that can be revisited years later and pointed to and said of: “See that bridge over, there, son—well one day, when I was younger, I drove twelve hundred rivets into that goddamned thing. “

Talese wrote that while still a reporter at The New York Times, but he soon left to write profiles for Esquire, like his famous 1966 piece: Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.

Talese never interviewed Sinatra, but he managed to reconstruct the period in the singer’s life when he was turning 50. He observed Sinatra filming, recording, taping a TV show with a cold, cavorting in Vegas with the Rat Pack and confronting the writer Harlan Ellison over his attire in a private club.

But Talese also witnessed the effect of Sinatra’s work on people, as in this scene in which Sinatra’s record, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, is playing on the stereo in the club:

It is a lovely ballad that he first recorded ten years ago, and it now inspired many young couples who had been sitting, tired of twisting, to get up and move slowly around the dance floor, holding one another very close. Sinatra’s intonation, precisely clipped, yet full and flowing, gave a deeper meaning to the simple lyrics – “In the wee small hours of the morning/while the whole wide world is fast asleep/you lie awake, and think about the girl….” — it was like so many of his classics, a song that evoked loneliness and sensuality, and when blended with the dim light and the alcohol and nicotine and late-night needs, it became a kind of airy aphrodisiac.

That is justly ranked as one of the best magazine articles ever written. But it wasn’t easy getting so much on a reluctant subject like Sinatra. To do it, Talese had to hang out, spend time with people and conduct saturation reporting, habits that are in short supply these days, he complained in an interview with Dan Rather:

“When you go into a newspaper now, everybody’s behind a screen,” he said.“ And too much of their reporting is obtained through the communications, they can Google their way through the day almost, these people. And they’re not getting outdoors enough. They’re relying too much on the vantage point of the world that is the parameters of the laptop screen.”

Rather observed that Talese was of the school that depended on the telephone and shoe leather.

“… The phone? In the early 1950s when I came out of college and got a job [at the Times], the phone was the new technology, and those old timers said, ‘Never use the phone. You have to go there, you have to be there, you have see these people, you have to look at their faces, study their expression, their gestures, it’ll tell you more than just what comes out of their mouth.’ I believe there’s truth in that to this day, and I have adhered to that.”

Yes, he has, especially for books like The Kingdom and the Power, Honor Thy Father, and Thy Neighbor’s Wife. But he broadened his approach with his 1992 masterpiece, Unto the Sons, adding scholarship and family memory to his literary skill set. To call this work a memoir is to trivialize it. It’s a history of Italy, from ancient times through the Risorgimento and the two world wars, and in it we encounter figures from Garibaldi to Mussolini, and a raft of Taleses who live in the Calabrian town of Maida.

Some of these family members escape their lives in Southern Italy. Talese’s father Joseph joins a cousin in Paris, works with him as a tailor, then relocates to America and takes over a tailor’s shop in Ocean City, New Jersey. where he starts a family.

Talese, whose humor has always been subtle at best, pokes fun at himself here to great comedic effect. In one scene, he describes his clumsiness as an altar boy, in another his botching of a test in school. And there are more laughs when his father tries to get him to wind spaghetti on a fork without using a spoon (and Gay gets validation in his own mind from an unexpected source).

But this is a serious book, written with a rare depth and grace. We end up caring very much about the Talese family, and understanding things that could not have been easy for Talese to express—for example, his father’s complex feelings toward Mussolini. While not a Fascist, Joseph takes Il Duce’s side in late-night arguments with a cousin in Brooklyn, when the children are drowsing and the younger wives are washing dishes.

What could Joseph possibly see in Mussolini, a Northern Italian who was reviled in the south of Italy?

…Pride and defensiveness about his Italian origins made him resentful of those who debunked Italy—which, at long last, was now trying to rise above its reputation as an unmilitaristic nation of bad soldiers, retreaters, and imboscati shirkers. What a relief to have an Italian leader who invaded other nations for a change, as opposed to remaining at home and hiding in the hills waiting to surrender to yet another conqueror of Italian soil.

Young Gay Talese was more Americanized, and there is a shocking scene between father and son after the Allied bombing of Monte Cassino in Southern Italy. It’s the climax of this powerful book.

How is Gay Talese holding up in his 80s? Pretty well, judging by his articles in the New Yorker. He captures Tony Bennett recording with Lady Gaga, and describes how faith helped fuel the baseball career of New York Yankee manager Joe Girardi.

In his Sinatra profile, Talese observed, “Many Italo-American boys of his generation were then shooting for the same star — they were strong with song, weak with words, not a big novelist among them: no O’Hara, no Bellow, no Cheever, nor Shaw; yet they could communicate bel canto.”

That’s the only thing on which I’ve ever disagreed with Gay Talese. What about Mario Puzo, whose pre-Godfather novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, has been compared to Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep? What about John Fante?

For that matter, what about Gay Talese? True, he’s of a younger generation, and has specialized in nonfiction, but for me, he’s in the same rarefied class as Cheever and O’Hara. How fitting that he found his way to The New Yorker.

41 Shades of Gray

Posted on July 31, 2014September 5, 2016 by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Another hot shot writer is in trouble for alleged serial plagiarizing. Benny Johnson was fired by BuzzFeed last Friday after readers found “41 instances of sentences or phrases copied word for word from other sites,” as editor Ben Smith put it in a blog post, according to Mashable.

There’s no reason for gloating, although I suspect some grizzled reporters are doing just that. I can hear them asking if Johnson, BuzzFeed’s viral politics editor, ignored the ethical training given out in J-school.

But it’s the wrong question, given the nature of BuzzFeed and Johnson’s alleged offense. Maybe Johnson didn’t even go to J-school.

He seemed to specialize in what are now called “listicles” – trashy, specious lists, as in: “7 Signs That Your Dog Is Having an Affair.” Like the best content curators, he borrowed liberally from others, but without crediting his sources, Smith admitted.

Yikes. It’s bad enough to plagiarize renowned works of fiction or history. But listicles?

Yet “curation” apparently is the basis of BuzzFeed’s business model. Adrian Chen wrote on Gawker in 2012 that BuzzFeed has “built a lucrative business on organizing the internet’s confusing spectacle into listicles easily comprehended by even the most numbed office workers.” Chen added, though, that “many are highly derivative rip-offs from other sites, cleaned up and reproduced without crediting their sources.”

Has it changed since then? Maybe. “Go to BuzzFeed.com and click on any one of its lists. In very fine print, buried below each photo, there will be a link to another site — usually Reddit,” Dylan Byers sneers on politico.com.

Byers also offers this explanation for how Johnson went wrong:

“When BuzzFeed reporters wrote, they were subject to the same rules as everyone else. Sure you could draw facts from elsewhere — everyone does — but you had to write it in your own language.

“At some point, Johnson probably got lazy and started inserting text into his posts the same way he had been inserting photographs — by pressing Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. His mistake was that he forgot to put quote marks around it and add “according to.”

That seems right, although it’s all part of a viral content system designed for people with short attention spans.

And let’s not forget Johnson’s worst alleged offense:plagiarizing Wikipedia.

I used to joke that I’d fire any reporter who used Wikipedia as a source. There are too many small factual errors (and probably many big ones). It’s a slipshod practice.

But if you do sneak it in, at least have the courage to admit it. I’d hate to be the editor who had run an apology for ripping off Wikipedia.

Don’t think this is limited to listickle writers—book authors and academics also quote Wikipedia, which in fairness doesn’t purport to be a primary source. When did everyone get so lazy?

Here’s some free advice. If BuzzFeed is indeed focused on curation, it should source everything—it’s as simple as that. There’s nothing wrong with compiling a content sampler if you attribute pickups and include links.

For their part, writers should follow Robert Caro’s rule and source every single quote or paraphrase. Don’t worry if it bogs the copy down.

And Benny Johnson? One can guess that he enjoyed his moment in the sun. Or maybe he didn’t—it had to be stressful. Either way, what’s his future?

Fallen journalists rarely make it back—there are too few jobs even for good reporters. But that may be changing, along with other things in publishing. A clever person with a good business head could start his own site, or find another one to hire him. And like other nine-day wonders on the Internet, he may find that he is forgiven as long as he drives traffic and dollars. So much for ethics.

Winchell in Runyonland

Posted on February 3, 2013February 1, 2018 by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

No reporter of a certain age can pass up a book about Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, least of all one that promises to tell “The True Untold Story.”

Granted, there isn’t much left to be said about this duo. Winchell, the gossip columnist and radio star, has been picked apart by biographers; so has Runyon, whose stories inspired Guys and Dolls. Still, I sprang for Trustin Howard’s Winchell and Runyon: The Untold Story, because I’ll read anything I can get my hands on about them.

They were an unlikely pair, given their backgrounds. Winchell, Jewish, grew up on the Lower East Side. Runyon, a lapsed Protestant, was born in Manhattan, Kansas, and he was almost 20 years older than Winchell.

But those differences were outweighed by their similarities. Both were famous, both had come up the hard way. They loved the night life. And Runyon seemed to wish he was Jewish. He would go into Ratner’s, the dairy restaurant, and for breakfast order “Half a grapefruit, a big bowl of vegetables and sour cream, a big slab of boiled white fish, a bowl of kasha, an order of blintzes, a big piece of coffee cake and coffee as fast as you can refill my cup,” according to The Damon Runyon Story by Ed Weiner.

Howard is a TV comedy writer who started with Joey Bishop. He’s no historian. The book is slight, amateurish in spots. And precision isn’t his strong suit.

To hear him tell it, Runyon and Winchell became friends just before World War II. But Runyon used Winchell as a model for his character Waldo Winchester a decade before that.

And unless I’m misreading it, Howard seems to imply Runyon got drunk with Winchell at Texas Guinan’s in the 1940s. In 1913, as several biographers have reported, Runyon woke up on a train without knowing how he got there and never took another drink.

Finally, it isn’t quite accurate to say that Franklin Roosevelt “took to the airwaves to declare war on Japan”—he spoke before both houses of Congress, and Congress issued a declaration that Roosevelt signed. But let’s cut Howard some slack: He’s not trying to be Robert Caro. What he’s done here is present scenes—vignettes, almost—that he says have eluded formal biographers.

There’s Runyon’s account of how he lost a bundle on a race at Saratoga. (The male horse he’d bet on stopped to romance a female horse). There’s Runyon telling Winchell he’s right about “that little German asshole” (Hitler).

There are their jaunts around the city on the so-called dawn patrol. There’s Winchell consoling Runyon over his failed marriage. “We’re complicated guys, Damon,” he reportedly says. “Our work is our life.”

The anecdotes are believable, even without sources. And Howard doesn’t try to mimic Runyon’s style, a weakness of many writers who tackle Runyon as a subject: He’s got a voice of his own.

That’s All?

All too soon, we get to the story of Runyon’s visit to the vet with his cocker spaniel Nubbin. (Howard calls her Nubbins, but I’ll stick with the version that Runyon used in his column).

Nubbin needed a tonsillectomy. And Runyon confessed that his own throat was bothering him. The vet offered to take a look. What he saw alarmed him.

It turned out that Runyon had throat cancer. Doctors removed his voice box, but it was only a temporary reprieve. Winchell’s knees buckled when he heard the news, Howard writes.

Winchell was said to be a hard man—willing to ruin people. But he attended to his dying friend for nearly two years.

“The two of them truly become inseparable,” Howard writes. “And as Winchell promised a very sick Runyon, they are constantly at the track, the ball parks, the theatres, the nightclubs, just anywhere they can find some kind of action.”

The voiceless Runyon communicated by passing notes to Winchell. They exchanged good-natured insults. “I do not mind awaiting daylight in some pleasant deadfall but walking around is no good for me and Walter cannot show me that it is of any benefit to him, either,” Runyon wrote in his column. “Because while he walks around a heap, he always has a beef about not feeling any too well, and he gets balder by the minute.”

Runyon covered FDR’s funeral in April 1945, attended by a nurse, and continued turning out his column. “He writes on instinct,” Winchell said, according to Howard. “And no matter what he’s going through—his words never lose that edge.”

But Runyon was running out of time. He died in December 1946, at age 66, and Winchell honored him by starting the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund. As Howard tells it, mob boss Frank Costello donated $25,000 and cons in prison sent whatever they could. Winchell and Runyon’s children dropped his ashes over Manhattan from a plane. And Winchell opened a note that Runyon had left him: “I found that an irresponsible reporter in front of a typewriter can do more damage than a drunken surgeon in an operating room.” What an epitaph. The book ends, and at this point I will pay Howard the greatest compliment any writer can get: “That’s all?”