Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures

By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT

WASHINGTON

Can vice save journalism?

It’s an intriguing idea, especially since the profession had such a cozy relationship with vice in the old days.

Arthur Gelb, The Times’s famed former culture impresario and managing editor, begins his wonderful memoir, “City Room,” by describing the racier Times newsroom of the 1940s. He says it was a time of clandestine sex in closets, a movie-star mistress of the publisher sashaying about and two tough bookies from Hell’s Kitchen at a corner desk taking bets as “wads of bills peeked from their pockets.”

In his memoir, “Gaily, Gaily,” Ben Hecht describes his years as a cub reporter at The Chicago Daily Journal starting in 1910. It was a time when reporters were still “exotic adults,” he writes, and journalism was considered by many as “a catch basin for hooligans, bar flies and minor swindlers.”

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