End of a Golden Age of Newspapering

Once there was a golden age, the story goes. A boozy, brawling time when individualism, even wackiness, flourished in America’s newsrooms. Pay was low and publishers were tyrants, but journalism was romantic--hell, it was fun. Then things changed--a generation ago, or maybe just last week. Chain ownership imposed blandness. Wall Street’s demand for quarterly profits eroded all other values. The Internet spooked everyone. Whatever the reason, the party’s over.

Most newspaper people believe this. It may even be true.

Times columnist Al Martinez adds his eloquent voice to the lament with his first novel, “The Last City Room,” which describes the death of a fictional San Francisco Bay Area daily against a background of Vietnam-era turmoil. In its prime, he says, the San Francisco Herald had “a character all its own, a mixture of waterfront muscle and Gold Rush sophistication, luring the hardest drinkers and fastest writers to its brick tower.” But it loses touch with the world it purports to cover.

There’s something Hearstian about Herald publisher Jeremy Stafford III, who sees antiwar protesters and student radicals as tools of “World Communism” and whose paranoid editorials turn off readers and advertisers. But Martinez is also drawing on his experiences at the Oakland Tribune, whose conservative owners, the Knowlands, were caught between Berkeley and the Black Panthers and comprehended neither.

Not that Martinez’s hero, William Colfax, is a flaming liberal. He’s an ex-Marine back from Vietnam with shrapnel in his leg. “War had left Colfax often detached from his surroundings, as though from a position in the corner of his own mind he could observe the goings-on without involvement.” Stafford tries to enlist him as point man for anti-radical coverage after a federal building is bombed and an FBI agent killed. Colfax falls in love with the publisher’s daughter, Ellen. But, guided by legendary city editor Gerald Burns, he remains professionally neutral.

Colfax, in other words, is an ideal reporter. He wins a Pulitzer before he’s 30. But he’s not a very interesting protagonist. He never gets into real danger, physical or moral. He’s never knocked off balance--and if you didn’t lose your balance in the ‘60s, can you be said to have experienced them at all? His view of those times--the jaundiced view of someone who has covered too many demonstrations--excludes much of the ferment, the idealism, the music.

The bomb was set by student leader Vito Minelli, a Timothy McVeigh in Mario Savio’s clothing. Minelli is another disappointment. He’s totally cynical and manipulative, unlike Stafford, who’s sincere, if a fool. Colfax tries to pin Minelli to the crime. Minelli, in turn, leads a crippling boycott of the Herald. Then Minelli vanishes. There’s evidence that rogue police may have murdered him; Colfax, impartial to the end, investigates that angle too.

But the crime-story part of “The Last City Room” peters out eventually, along with Colfax’s emotional ties--to a former girlfriend, to his crusty, widowed father, even to Ellen.

The newspaper story is the only part that seems to matter. It’s told in the sensitive, evocative prose that readers will recognize from Martinez’s columns. The Herald’s geniuses, flakes, rebels and sexpots may be caricatures, but they are drawn with knowledge and affection. On Colfax’s first day, a reporter who died at his desk is wheeled out on a gurney to the ritual clapping of his peers. Eight years later, after the Herald’s obsolete technology has faltered, circulation has plummeted and firings and illness have ravaged the staff, the paper itself is the corpse and Colfax a silent mourner.