Tag: The Charlotte News

Write No Evil

The most productive reporter I ever saw never came up with anything embarrassing about anybody.

On run of the mill stories he was a machine. He wrote almost every day, two, three stories, sometimes, for The Charlotte News. And during his lunch hour he wrote a daily column. OK, OK, not a very good column, but a column nevertheless. Two or three stories a day and a column? That’s not easy.  A daily column all by itself it not easy. No, sir. Ask anyone who has written one.

But he never hung anybody out to dry.

I don’t know how you do that. Never? Embarrassing stuff falls in your lap sometimes –you find it without looking– and then what do you do?  Ignore it?

One day I asked a colleague who had known The Machine for years why he never dinged anybody.

“He used to,” my colleague replied, “until a guy he wrote about killed himself.”

NOTE: I was going to post the “surprise” today but I couldn’t get it written in time.  It’s coming Monday for sure.

“Oh, Copyboy?”

When I first went to work for a newspaper, more than 50 years ago, newsrooms had copyboys.

They had a lot of mundane tasks but not on deadline.  On deadline they ran copy from reporters’ desks to the City Desk, where it was edited and then rushed downstairs to composing.

Reporters treated copy boys indifferently at best and rudely sometimes.  We yelled at them, especially when we were on deadline.

“Copy! Copyboy!” we would shout when we had finished another take — a “take” is a page in newspaper lingo.

I guess part of the reason we yelled at them on deadline is because it made us feel important even if our story wasn’t.  He would rush over, grab our copy, and hustle it to the City Desk.

This is not him, but this is sort of what he looked like.
This is not him, but this is what he looked like.

And then, one fine day, The Charlotte News, where I worked in the 1960s, hired a copyboy who was weightlifter.  Remember, this was back in the day when there weren’t all that many weightlifters, when most football players didn’t even lift weights.

Anyway, this copyboy looked like copyman.  He had muscles in his eyeballs.  And, overnight, the culture in the newsroom changed.

“Copyboy?” reporters would say to him, in a normal voice. “Copyboy, if you have a moment, would you mind….”

Coming Friday: I Shoulda Made Notes