Mr Deeds Goes To Town

The Weekly Listicle: An Obit For Print Journalism

CALIFORNIA LITERARY REVIEW, Internet- Print journalism is dying. Well, it’s been dying for years if we’re going to be completely honest. Television news and 24-hour cable stations both contributed their portion of the 23 wounds, but it’s the Internet that might finally put an end to this branch of the Fourth Estate.

The newspaperman has had a long tradition in American culture. Whether considering Ida Tarbell’s investigations into Standard Oil in the late 1890s/early 1900s, Clark Kent joining The Daily Star in 1938 (look it up), or Hunter S. Thompson visiting the Kentucky Derby, for decades, the print journalist was held in high regard. There was a nobility and even a coolness to the role that stopped existing once reporters became glorified press agents and never really followed into the broadcast or cyber realms.

opens in limited release. The documentary, which follows a year inside the New York Times, goes into the American institution’s past and present while examining what innovations like Twitter and YouTube mean to the state of journalism today.

In honor of the profession’s last gasps, this week’s Listicle will take a look at some of fictional print journalism’s greatest figures.

BRETT’S PICKS

Citizen Kane

Orson Welles’ loose “biopic” of legendary newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst features the writer/director as Charles Foster Kane, a once idealistic newspaperman who falls into personal disgrace and ruin. In fact, the film actually centers around another journalist, William Alland’s Jerry Thompson who works for a The March of Time

As a wealthy, although somewhat eccentric, young man, Kane quickly recognizes the excitement of the news industry. Kicked out of “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Switzerland,” Kane decides to put his efforts and finances into journalism because, as he puts it, “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” As the new owner of the fledgling New York Inquirer

Despite initial hardships (though “at the rate of [losing] a million dollars a year, [he’ll] have to close this place in 60 years”), Kane eventually turns his periodical into a dominant news power by scooping up the best journalists and subscribing to yellow journalism after realizing the benefits of sex and violence in selling newspapers. As Kane grows his empire, he sells out his ethics and his friends, becoming increasingly paranoid and megalomaniacal before dying alone and isolated.