The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Like the old whalers

The Solomon Scan­dals is a lit­tle like a novel that a 19th cen­tury writer might have writ­ten on whal­ing. In some ways it’s a trib­ute to a van­ish­ing way of life—to the print cul­ture as man­i­fested in daily jour­nal­ism. No, paper books are not dis­ap­pear­ing tomor­row. But newspapers of a cer­tain size are on the Net-endangered list.

Even with­out the Inter­net, news­pa­pers would be declin­ing or at least not grow­ing as quickly as before, given how out of touch so many of them can be at times with their read­ers. Still, the Net has sped up the inevitable, com­plete with The Trash Fac­tor (“trash” in the trash­room sense, not nec­es­sar­ily the tabloid one).

The Wash­ing­ton Telegram, the news­pa­per in The Solomon Scan­dals, is imag­i­nary. But I began Scan­dals more than three decades ago, not that many years after I left the Lorain Jour­nal, located in the fac­tory town near Cleve­land, and I can still remem­ber the smell of the melt­ing lead. Today the Jour­nal doesn’t run presses but rather farms out print­ing to another mem­ber of the same chain. How  long until it goes all-digital? The lat­est paper to announce all-digital plans is the Ann Arbor Daily News (see video below).

Actu­ally I won’t miss newsprint and the old ways—I always was a bit klutzy around paste pots and copy spikes, and I hated to smudge up my hands when I read off the pulped wood. Nor, inci­den­tally, would I enjoy the prospect of whal­ing return­ing as a major indus­try, given the cru­elty inflicted on the hunted. What should be and will be missed, in the case of news­pa­pers, is the old-time adver­tis­ing revenue.

Related: News­pa­pers and the think­ing the unthink­able, by Clay Shirky. Ship photo credit: CC-licensed image from ronnie44052.

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