Six mornings a week in a big bright room high above Buckingham Fountain, a few score citizens take up their X-Acto knives and settle down behind particle-board tables for a quiet day of newspaper reading. They work for a national clipping service. Hired by PR firms, individuals, associations, in fact anybody who expects publicity to come along, systematically or otherwise, a clipping service goes through more newspapers in a day than all the fish-and-chip shops and puppy pounds in the universe, and uses up more workers than Karl Marx would have cared to unite.
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The kinds of things the readers are on the lookout for include names of people, found by chance (from Tinker, Grant to Evers, Charles); consumer products and trademarks (garden rakes and Marshmallow Fluff); things that only the Department of Defense buys (napalm, songs about the glamorous life of people who jump out of airplanes); descriptions of incredibly specific phenomena (photosynthesis in Ohio, accidents involving cheese); and tons of other things–names of shoe stores, hazardous chemicals, businesses that compete with shoe stores and makers of hazardous chemicals. And there are events to watch for: balloon races, takeover bids, beauty contests, scheduled executions.
For those who read at a clipping service, the newspaper unfolds as a grid of press releases and disasters, with only the names and circumstances reshuffled on a daily basis. There’s nothing new under the sun. Every day brings one more paper (actually, a pile of them) and with it wire-service reports of another nine-year-old attempting to fly solo over the Pole, or a corporate bad citizen grinding an ax before the public, or some other nonevent or short-lived gimmick. And these days, in case you haven’t noticed, two-thirds of any American daily newspaper is excerpts from the next issue of People.
The readers sit with their backs to the Lake Michigan view at row after row of tables amid their stacks of newspapers. Four dusty weeks’ worth of last month’s papers from the Pacific Northwest form a newsprint castle around one particular reader from whom dry sneezes issue smartly at atomically timed intervals. It’s two hours of reading, break, two hours, lunch, two more hours, break, two hours and home. Sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, sneeze. Finding ten good clippings an hour from among the decapitations and stock-car races is the production minimum.
It should be a fun job. You learn things. You read the features. You find out, for example, after Harold Washington died that some editorial writers downstate and beyond didn’t hate him. You learn that the wire-service filler used in the “Style” section of the Tribune is almost invariably weeks or months old, stuff that the readers of the Topeka Capital-Journal have already forgotten about. You collect new recipes from food sections (or, as in the case of “Cora Murray’s Cherry Coke Salad,” attempt to suppress them). You find out about the new diseases, and then the next morning you call in sick with them. And stay home in bed, reading the newspaper.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
