Press telegram11/11/2023 And now, more than a quarter of a century later, it appears that I may yet live to offer a similar toast to the P-T. Bottles came out of drawers as everyone from the managing editor to copy boys offered a toast to the passing of an institution. I was still a reporter at the morning paper in the early 1980s when its afternoon counterpart, the Long Beach Independent, printed its final edition. Among others, the P-T produced such future Times veterans as the late media critic David Shaw, former Sacramento reporter Mark Gladstone and columnist Jill Stewart, now L.A. The P-T’s newsroom was straight out of Ben Hecht’s “Front Page”: a raucous, rowdy, nicotine-stained bullpen of hungry cubs and grizzled veterans all working to get the news out every day. The Press-Telegram was one of several “farm teams” - the Santa Monica Outlook and Pasadena Star-News were two others - on the fringes of the expanding Los Angeles Times empire in the 1970s and 1980s. But the journalism postgraduate school I attended for four years on the second floor of the Press-Telegram building in downtown Long Beach was the best education I ever got, and it still resonates with me every time I sit down at the computer. As it turned out, the “over-verified” version prompted a reexamination of an unofficial county policy of simply ignoring unqualified applicants in hopes that they would simply get the message and go away.įrom the old P-T, I went on to work at the Los Angeles Times, followed by stints at CNN and TV Guide and the publication of several biographies. But there was a story, one about a mentally challenged ward of the state who had neither the right nor the resources to adopt a dog, let alone a child. Instead, I re-reported it and found my original to be full of holes and one-sided. I did not file the homeless-man-adopts-son story. That Leppard offered the ironic advice with a straight face gave me pause - and, perhaps, saved my fledgling career as a reporter at the Long Beach Press-Telegram. “Of course, you should never over-verify a good story.” “Hard to believe, but it does read terrific,” Stan said to me, smiling slyly. He delivered it shortly before I was about to file a not-very-credible story about a homeless man who lived on the streets of downtown Long Beach and planned to adopt a son. Thirty years ago, Stan Leppard, a rewrite man on the city desk with phlegm in his larynx and a terminal addiction to unfiltered cigarettes, gave me the best professional advice I ever received.
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