A "reality TV" documentary about the New York Daily News starts Monday under the title Tabloid Wars. Sample dialogue, from one of the reviews linked below:
Editor: "What have you got that's joyful and wonderful and uplifting?"
Section editor: "The acid story is as uplifting as a battery acid attack story can be."
The other tabloid implied in the title is the New York Post, but the News is the focus of the TV series. Coincidentally, I just saw Rupert Murdoch on PBS telling Charlie Rose that his Post will pull ahead of the News in circulation one of these days. That, and this series title, remind me of the days when New York had three tabloids, and one went crazy. The Daily News was the first, Hearst's Mirror was second. My favorite, the Evening Graphic (the crazy one), was third.
Alas, feeling unprepared to face a hundred channels of distraction, I've never signed up for cable, but maybe there's a bar near the local newspaper office that will tune to the Bravo channel Monday night...
Newsroom Nostalgia Digression: The bar next door to The Hartford Courant was even called The Press Box, until they ripped it down to expand the paper's parking lot... and the copydesk switched its dinner meetings to Kenney's on Capitol Avenue, as I was reminded recently by one of my long-suffering editors. I've forgotten the name of the pub across from the backdoor of the Irish Times, but I had a pint with a reporter there once. And I remember hearing of a New London Day editor saving a brick from that crew's favorite bar after the wrecking ball came. (Creating a newsroom game of "steal the brick.")
Anyhow, I'd probably be out of luck looking for a smoke-free newspaper bar. But maybe I can find a journalism prof with a Tivo. Even if we can't watch the thing, we can already read all about it... Newspaper folks love to write about newspaper folks, good or bad. Google collected these previews and more:
First, an online gossip site's preview, then on to the newspapers:
Here's a Philly Inquirer preview by a News alumnus, complete with an earthquake-coverage anecdote and a great closing line. Washington Post: Bravo Dishes The Dirt on The Daily News Cooke returns shots in new Bravo series by a Chicago Tribune columnist, recounting the Chicago Sun Times roots of the Daily News editor in the documentary, who's already back in Chicago.
They've got to get that scoop! - Los Angeles Times New York Magazine: Extra, Extra! "A reality show colonizes the Daily News,
where[~]surprise[~]hard reporting,
not gossip, makes for the best TV." Hmm. No wonder I want to watch the show. That last preview is by John Leonard, who was my favorite New York Times columnist a couple of professional lifetimes ago. He still knows how to turn a phrase, digress creatively and save a great line for the end. He says Tabloid Wars is "part peep show, part mosaic, part jazz." If he liked the show, I bet I will. Even if I have to wait for the DVD.
Update: In the first draft of this item, I mentioned that The New York Times had a peculiar comment on the show last week in an article about the cable network's other offerings. It used the series as an example that "not all Bravo material has a gay subtext." "Tabloid Wars," the Times said, is "mostly a showcase for rumpled, out-of-shape reporters who speak with Queens and Boston accents." But the full review by the same writer followed on Monday, calling the reality series an "unusually sympathetic close-up" for the genre. The review ends with, "'Tabloid Wars' does for The Daily News what the paper does for New York
City: it provides a hyped, colorful but nonetheless fair and accurate
portrait of how it all works. It's a celebration, not an expose."
7:34:21 PM 
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