The only thing I didn't like about THE LAST NEWSPAPERMAN is
that it's not true. Even though it says A Novel by Mark Di
Ionno right there on the cover, it reads like true story. I
even did a search for Frederick G. Haines Di Ionno'ss
fictitious journalist to see if maybe he called it a novel
but was inspired by a real person.
Ah, well, THE LAST NEWSPAPERMAN still has plenty of truth in
it.
The premise is that in 1999, the author was working on an
end-of-the-century piece for a local newspaper, and he went
to a retirement home to interview people who lived through
most of the century. He hit the jackpot with Fred Haines, a
retired journalist who covered some of the biggest stories
of the 20th century, including the Lindbergh kidnapping and
the Hindenburg disaster. He shares his clippings and his
unpublished memoirs, then reveals the parts of the story he
never wrote down like how he helped get the photos of the
Lindbergh baby's mutilated corpse and regretted it for the
rest of his life.
Since the real author, the fictitious interviewer, and Fred
Haines are all newspaper writers, they have strong,
descriptive voices. From the noisy, smoky New York bars
where journalists traded stories to the chaos of the
Lindbergh home during the first frantic hours after the
crime, Di Ionno's words paint vivid pictures of life, death,
and ethics in the 1930s.
Mark Di Ionno is an award-winning reporter and professor of
journalism, and while Fred'sn stories have a strong basis in
fact, the truth of the novel goes much deeper than that.
It's an examination of journalistic integrity. In the 1930s,
the country was recovering from the Great Depression, and
newspapers were fighting to survive against an onslaught of
new media. Getting the scoop and making it sensational meant
sales and survival. Sound familiar? Back then, the new
media were radio and newsreels, but the battles to beat the
competition and the debates over entertainment versus
information are still being fought in newsrooms across the
country. I know; when I'm not reading, I'm producing
broadcast news on a local TV station.
THE LAST NEWSPAPERMAN is a fascinating, fast-paced,
insightful look at the wonderful and terrible world of
breaking news, where the truth depends on who's telling the
story and the push for scoops and exclusives sometimes
trumps morality.
Jersey in the '30s was Fred Haines s beat, though it was hardly worthy of the reporter who d scooped the Ruth Snyder story back in '27. "The most famous Daily News cover ever," Haines bragged. His photo showed Snyder strapped to the electric chair. "Respectable" papers denounced it as vulgar, but it sold millions of copies and cemented Haines s reputation as the go-to "tabloid guy" just as celebrity worship was becoming an American obsession. But that was before Haines had the bad sense to publicly insult an even faster-rising media star named Walter Winchell. Haines wound up on the graveyard shift at the Daily Mirror, covering the most trivial stories his editor could dredge up. And Jersey. "Strictly Sticksville," he said, remembering a cold March night in 1932. That was the night he drove down to rural Hopewell, near Trenton, oblivious that the story of the century was about to break under his byline. The infant son of Charles Lindbergh had been kidnapped, and Haines was about to become part of a media frenzy unlike anything anyone had ever seen.
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