Journalists with Literary Ambitions No Less Satisfied with Their Jobs

When Ernest Hemingway left the Toronto Star, he did it on the bitterest of terms. Hemingway felt that he had been badly treated by his managing editor, Henry who assigned the star young reporter stories about concerts, nature walks and one-alarm fires. Hemingway-who had just returned to Toronto after a stint as the Star's roving European correspondent-grumbled that he planned to write a novel with Hindmarsh as the villain, which he never did, and later sent money to a union organizing campaign in the Star newsroom in order to beat Hindmarsh, as Hemingway put it.1As perhaps the most celebrated ex-journalist to go on to great fame as a novelist, Hemingway has become an oft-quoted commentator on the benefits and the drawbacks of fiction writing aspirants who get their start in daily journalism:Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.2Newspaper work is the antithesis of writing and it keeps writers pooped out so they can't write.3I never considered journalism as of any permanent value or in any way connected with my serious writing except as an apprenticeship.4Hemingway is only one of a number of well-known journalists-turned-novelists and writers of literature who have spoken disparagingly about the impact of a journalism job on the development of a serious writer-to-be. The lore of the frustrated novelist in the newsroom might lead one to surmise that today's daily journalists with literary aspirations would register low levels of job satisfaction in their journalism employment. If journalism is simply a way to make a living until one can realize higher literary ambitions, then it would make sense that modern journalists who aspire to writing literature would express a high level of dissatisfaction in their present professional circumstances.BackgroundHistorical research-such as that by Ted Curtis Smythe-indicates that the newsroom of the late 19th century was a place where journalists were made miserable by pay-by-the-column inch systems, pressures to get exclusive and sensational stories, low pay and exploitative editing systems and ethically dubious reporting standards.5 Many of the best-known of the American literary journalists-including Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Richard Harcling Davis, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Willa Gather, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, James Branch Cabell, King Lardner, Sinclair Lewis and Edna Ferber-worked in journalism around the period when the conditions described by Smythe were in force, and a number complained about the mistreatment of newsroom employees and the perpetuation of news gathering formulas that kept journalists from telling the truth about what was going on in the world. At the same time, critics have noted that many of the literary works that use journalists as characters-including the novels of some of the literary journalists-have resorted to stereotypes and exaggerations by portraying the prototypical malcontent newspaperman, cursing a thankless calling and cleaving to it, as Howard Good put it in his examination of the image of American journalists in fiction from 1890 to 1930.In fact, there is considerable evidence that journalism has professionalized greatly since the days when many of these famous literary journalists worked in the journalism business.7 Part of this change has included a greater emphasis upon writing by news organizations, with some of the impetus coming from the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s that put a premium upon high quality literary writing by journalists.8 The stress that modern newspapers put upon quality of writing varies, of course, but there has been a trend in recent years for newspapers to encourage reporters to incorporate literary writing techniques into their work and newspaper training organizations, most notably the Poynter Institute, have developed writing workshops designed to raise journalists' consciousness about good writing. …

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