A couple of weeks ago, I was knocking around London’s Fleet Street, where newspapers once spored like mushrooms. Now, there’s barely a handful left.
The ghosts of presses past linger in the architecture, in the brass plaques of shuttered newsrooms, in the romance copy of area pubs. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub that proudly announces it was “rebuilt in 1667,” still pours pints for pilgrims of the printed word. Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once drank there, perhaps to toast a good review or drown a bad one. I raised a glass to them both.
Fleet Street is a shrine to a vanished world, a sort of fossil record of journalism’s evolution—and its devolution—as an industry that once held up the mirror to society now holds up a phone.
Side-eye aside, the media has long been my refuge. When I slinked back up the coast from Hollywood years ago, I knew I was never more than an email away from a freelance assignment that would sustain me for a week. Albeit, this was post-dot-com but pre-social media, before the Cambrian explosion of “content creators” all vying to put the “me” in media. Were I to start now, I doubt I’d make it.
A story I sometimes tell is that “I was a paperboy who grew into a newspaperman,” but in truth, I’m not a journo so much as a writer who needs a day job. For that matter, I never had the right smarts for academia, nor the stomach for its politics. And my creative output has always fallen somewhere between art and entertainment—like coins and crumbs in a seat crack (the going rate). So, this is it, my friends; you’re stuck with me for now.
On Fleet Street, there’s a mural designed by Piers Nicholson that namechecks a few extinct newspapers—Pall Mall Gazette, The Morning Post, etc.—arrayed around as a sundial. As hours pass, the shadow creeps over their names, a quiet reminder that time eventually sets on every masthead.
This isn’t a sob story or a complaint. It’s just the way of the world. The medium changes, the message mutates, but the impulse to make sense of it all remains. Sure, the presses may be gone, but the need to bear witness—to spin the world into story—still rings true. Somehow, there’s always another deadline.
Editor Daedalus Howell is at dhowell.com.
