The Press: Journalism's Woodstock

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Across town, the American Newspaper Publishers Association gathered in annual session at the Waldorf-Astoria to hear purse-warming reports of record circulation (62.2 million) and ad revenue ($6.2 billion) for 1971. But journalism's Young Turks of all ages, assembled in a crowded hall on Manhattan's West Side, weighed not profit and loss but the less tangible standards of their craft. The tumultuous two-day A.J. Liebling Counter-Convention* was timed to coincide with the publishers' gathering, and the mood of confusion and malaise generated by the Lieblingers produced the desired contrast. The nonstop critique underscored journalism's variety and energy—plus a widespread disenchantment with conventional practices. It was, in a way, journalism's Woodstock.

Sponsored by the New York journalism review [MORE] (circ. 8,000), the Counter-Convention attracted some 2,000 reporters, editors, freelancers, students, journalism professors and unaffiliated critics from all over the U.S. A few paid their own way to New York from points as distant as Hawaii to participate in the biggest forum ever involving those who write, report and broadcast the news. [MORE] Editor Richard Pollak promised all comers "a chance to bitch"; the response was collective catharsis. Panels on subjects ranging from "the new journalism" to "racism-sexism-elitism" were punctuated by scatological outbursts that went live on radio and cable television into many startled Manhattan households.

The litany of complaints was familiar: too much control by editors and publishers, too much reliance on official sources, not enough time to dig out the real story not enough blacks and women in newsrooms, not enough pay for anybody, not enough coverage of such causes as ecology and Gay Liberation. The session on the new journalism turned into a mudslinging match between The New Yorker's Renata Adler, who condemned the genre as no more than "zippy prose about inconsequential people," and New York magazine's Tom Wolfe, who claimed Boswell and Dickens as editorial ancestors. "We are doing a more complete job of reporting," Wolfe insisted, "including people's thoughts."

One of the most significant questions raised was why so many capable reporters leave the daily-newspaper field. Such Pulitzer Prize alumni as David Halberstam and J. Anthony Lukas of the New York Times talked of low pay and insufficient "time to think." Freelancer Murray Kempton, ex-New York Post columnist, cryptically cited "spiritual reasons," and advised those with families to support to quit by age 40 in order to earn an adequate income elsewhere. Most who talked about the exodus from dailies conveyed the impression that they thought their talents were shackled by conventional newspaper discipline.