Time takes its newsroom toll: And then there were none

A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone forever; and I never met one of them again. ... Good-bye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or, tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.

— Joseph Conrad

Howard MacDougall died last week. He was a good man, a solid man, a newspaper man. He was the last of the four talented editors who in August 1981, when the news staffs of the now-defunct Charleston Evening Post and The News and Courier were combined, became my principal assistants when I was named the Charleston papers' first executive editor. Howard was the metro editor, a title we chose in lieu of city editor, because our circulation area included a number of Lowcountry cities and towns.

Executive News Editor Tom Nielson was the first of the four to die, after a tragically short retirement. Grace Kutkus, chief copy editor and everyone's go-to girl, was next. She died in an automobile accident on the old Pearman Bridge while driving to work. Evan Bussey, assistant executive editor and loyal right hand man, was third to go. He died in retirement three years ago, after a long illness.

Of the senior management at the Charleston papers when I was hired in 1974, only one name from that era still appears on the masthead — Arthur Wilcox. Former editor of The News and Courier and now secretary of the Evening Post Publishing Company, Arthur was the one I approached, after retirement from the Navy, when I considered a second career in journalism. He tried to talk me out of it. "There's no money in it," he said. I took a job as a cub reporter on his paper, anyway. Later, when I became editor of the Charleston Evening Post, we and our wives traveled the country and the world together.

As I look back on my years at the papers, I am flooded with memories of the wonderful people I worked with and for. I've written obituary columns for many of them. Tom Waring I revere as my particular mentor. "Always write what you believe to be the truth," he said, "and then you won't have to remember anything." He told me that when I began working for him on the Post's editorial page. Frank Gilbreth, Peter Manigault, Hall McGee, Ernie Cutts, Doug Donahue, Joe Smoak and many others went out of their way to smooth my not-always-easy transition from naval officer to journalist. They are all gone now, but they taught me there is a brotherhood (and sisterhood) in the newsroom as pervasive and supportive as that on any ship at sea.

Newspapers today are said to be in trouble. Great flagship papers — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe — all struggle with falling circulation, dwindling revenue and rising costs. Newsroom staffs and foreign bureaus are being cut, often to the bone. News holes are getting smaller, along with the papers themselves.

Profound change is occurring in the marketing of news. Satellite and cable communication links give television a tremendous advantage over print. If something newsworthy happens half a world away, it likely will be flashed on television screens and/or the Internet mere hours or minutes later. And, needless to say, yesterday's news is not news at all.

This is not to say that print has no advantages over the electronic media, advantages it is well equipped to exploit. There always has been and always will be a market for good writing, good analysis, good reporting in depth, and good editing to ensure that "in depth" does not become synonymous with long-winded and overblown. These are things on which good newspapers today are placing their bets.

I'm placing my bet that I will never live to see "and then there were none" written as a front-page, five-column head on the last issue of the last newspaper in America.

R.L. Schreadley is a former Post and Courier executive editor.