The Albany Democrat-Herald of the early 1980s led the league in banter. But the thing is that you had to be there, of course, and now you can’t. That era of journalism is defunct, as they say.
ERIC MORTENSON Feb 14 || SUBSTACK ABOUT HALF SHOT
PHOTO COURTESY OF GRAHAM KISLINGBURY — That’s some of the D-H gang from the early ‘80s. Editor Hasso Hering, in the back center, was the best journalist I ever worked with. Graham Kislingbury, back left, Jan Lafeman, front center, plus Lance Robertson, Sarah Abegglen Robertson, Tony Overman and many others, not pictured, can (cough) verify everything I say here. John Baur, seated front left, remains a quipster of the highest order. Beloved City Editor Dave “Gil” Gilbert is in front of Hasso, wearing the white turtleneck. I’m third from right in the back.
For one thing, we often talked in headlines as we bustled about, keeping on top of the news and banging up against deadline. “Man sharpens pencil, none hurt,” we might say, or, “Ringing phone annoys woman.” That sort of thing.
The one-liners, rejoinders and non sequiturs flew so thick that we eventually began collecting them in what we called the Quote File, which was cunningly labeled “North Albany Sewers” in the computer system to avoid detection by management types who might find it frivolous.
Luckily, when they did find the Quote File, they thought it was funny, too.
Many of us still have printouts, somewhere, of the wisecracks and witticisms that bounced through the newsroom.
Such as when even-keeled City Editor Dave Gilbert looked up from his Visual Display Terminal (VDTs!) while editing someone’s story and muttered, “THIS is excellent. It’s all bullshit, but it’s excellent bullshit.”
Gil’s deadpan declarations were sometimes baffling, even when you knew what he meant.
“What’s time to a hog or a dead man?” he might say. Or, “Sometimes it’s better to ride a mule than a Maserati.”
Another time he was editing a complicated story on deadline while the nervous reporter stood by. “I think I’ll leave it the way you’ve got it,” Gil said, turning to look at the reporter. “It’s pretty clear. How old is the monkey and how long is the rope?”
Gil was taken aback when we questioned him. “You don’t know about the monkey and the rope?”
We didn’t, and I didn’t learn until yesterday that it’s a question from an old mathematical riddle.
Anyway.
When I started writing this story I thought I’d include a series of gems from the Quote File, because we sure were funny. But you truly had to be there, and hear the voices and know the personalities of the newsroom. The things that were hilarious to us might warrant a shrug with everybody else. Plus it was 40 years ago.
I still laugh, though, when I remember John Baur reading aloud an Associated Press story about an early heart transplant procedure that used a baboon heart. He asked me if I’d take one and I snarled back, “Only if I get to murder the baboon.”
John, by the way, later co-founded International Talk Like a Pirate Day and was written up by columnist Dave Barry of the Miami Herald. So he made good.
Nostalgia is a haggard hack, I’m pretty sure Shakespeare said, and I’m wary of being one of those “back in my day” old guys moaning and groaning about the state of journalism today.
We were serious minded, though, and worked hard, as you can see from this photographic proof of me and Chris “The Idaho” Pietsch, one of the fabled Eugene Register-Guard photographers. We were on the road to the 1995 Rose Bowl, Ducks vs Penn State.
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You can see the sweat pouring off our brows. I don’t remember who took the photo, or I’d give them credit.
Today’s reporters often work remotely and I’m guessing they don’t get as much of that in-person newsroom camaraderie as we did. And their work isn’t done when they’ve written a story or filed a photo. They may have to produce a video, jump on a podcast, monitor comments and peck away with on-line updates. I couldn’t hack it today, I don’t think. I tip my hat to today’s journalists, especially the young ones, and I wish them well.
But newsrooms are so thinned out now, and at the very time there’s a giant hole in America that needs to be filled with factual, balanced, nuanced news coverage. Instead, the gap is filled with the smoke rings and knife jabs of malevolent, grasping gasbags who see Democracy as kind of quaint, at best, and definitely in their way. President Musk, you squirming weirdo, say hello to America. Somebody help Emperor Trump up so he can say hello as well.
When I worked for Oregon newspapers we figured it was our job to learn what the news was and to summarize it accurately for a lay audience.
The Albany Democrat-Herald was a small but peppy afternoon daily newspaper in Western Oregon, the type of local newspaper you could find pretty much throughout the country at that time. A lot of them, like the D-H, were quite good. The papers I worked for hustled hard to report the news. We covered city councils, school boards, county commissions, the courts, the cops and government agencies that managed and regulated forests, farms, fish, traffic, urban development and everything else. We paid attention to what the business boys were whining about down at the Chamber of Commerce. We covered high school and local college sports, which had fevered readers. Or, as one of the sports guys sighed after he hung up from a complaint about his game coverage, “Parents’ brains turn to shit when their kids get into sports.”
Oregon had a bunch of solid papers. The big three in Portland, Eugene and Salem, of course, but many of the small and mid-sized towns had papers, too. Places such as Albany, Ashland, Astoria, Newport, Corvallis, Medford, Klamath Falls, Bend, Baker City, Pendleton and La Grande had good papers, full newsroom staffs and kept a lookout on their communities.
Most are gone or thinned out to the point they look like skeletons, and they sprinkle their local news stories online along with a bunch of nonsense “content” from elsewhere.
The Medill Center for Journalism at Northwestern University reported in October 2024 that the country has lost more than one-third of its newspapers since 2005. The Medill report said 3,300 newspapers have blinked out since then.
That’s left what Medill and other experts call “news deserts,” defined as counties without locally based news sources. According to Medill, more than half the nation’s 3,143 counties — almost 55 million people — have little or no access to local news.
You know how many school board meetings and county commissioner hearings the average reporter sat through in a career? Probably 55 million. Much of the news we produced was of the “Board sets levy vote” variety, or “Downtown merchants oppose special district designation.”
At the Albany Demagogue-Herald, as we sometimes called it, we published six days a week, Monday through Saturday. We left Sundays to the Oregonian in Portland, with its color comics and its big sports sections and Parade magazine and its national and international news. The O was big but kind of sluggish and harrumphish in those days. It became much better, as people in Oregon will tell you still. It’s survived a couple of wall crashes since then and I’m glad they have, because reading The Oregonian was how I first learned about the world, growing up in Hood River.
Albany, meanwhile, was the Linn County seat and the county courthouse was a quick two-block walk from the newspaper office. Linn County occupied the center of Oregon’s Willamette Valley and called itself the “Grass seed capital of the world.” It probably was, too, with grass seed being literally what it sounds like, in case you’re not familiar with it. Farmers planted acres and acres of grass, let it grow tall all summer until it went to seed, then cut it down, let it dry in windrows and then ran over it low and slow with a combine to harvest the seed. From the county it went around the world to be planted in parks, lawns, pastures, ball fields and so on. Still does.
Culturally, Albany was one of Oregon’s conservative strongholds, stuck between big shot Portland to the north, and Eugene, the hedonistic university town to the south. The county was home to various wood products mills and to Teledyne Wah Chang, a mysterious rare metals factory that produced ropes and monkeys, as far as we knew.
The D-H was a busy place, a newsy place, I learned a ton and I laughed a lot. I had to be there.
Eric Mortenson. Pacific Northwest writer who worked 37 wondrous years as a reporter at Oregon newspapers. I write about Oregon, family, journalism, politics, pets, bad golf, gardening, cooking and running.
