In the Newsroom, Packing Up an Era of Journalism

There are empty boxes around The Washington Post newsroom. They're those smallish cardboard boxes you get from Staples and assemble yourself: Tab A into Slot B.

People are on the move here at The Post. Some of us are moving from one floor to another as the newsroom is reorganized, the physical manifestation of an intellectual reorganization that's in the offing. Others are moving out of the newsroom forever. Their boxes contain more than coffee mugs and paperwork. They hold memories.

Some of the Posties who have taken the company's latest early retirement offer are people you know, with bylines you recognize. Many of them are people you don't know. They were part of the journalistic iceberg that's below the waterline: assignment editors who direct coverage, copy editors who polish prose and write headlines. I'll miss all my colleagues, and I wish them well in the next chapters of their lives.

Ah, Those Were the Days

People say that now is not a good time to be a journalist. But it's probably not a good time to be a lot of things: a construction worker, a telecom lawyer, a Detroit auto executive, a South Carolina governor. In other words: Boohoo for us.

Of course, the cardboard box and the regretful exit have been a part of newspapers ever since the first editor tapped a red pencil against his teeth. I'm reading a book called "Lessons From the Past: Journalists' Lives and Work, 1850-1950" by Fred Fedler. I've learned that there's never been a good time to work for a newspaper, a profession with about as much job security as a narcoleptic circus aerialist.

Fedler has an entire chapter called "Getting Fired." It begins: "The country's first reporters are sometimes portrayed as a carefree bunch, drifting happily from job to job." In fact, they were booted more often than they drifted -- and often for the flimsiest of reasons. Fedler writes about a publisher named Frank Munsey who couldn't abide the sight of fat men, believing they "spoiled the appearance of an office." After buying one newspaper, Munsey walked through the newsroom, spied a fat man seated at a desk and had him canned on the spot.

Capricious? Well, Wilbur Storey, publisher of the Chicago Times, fired an employee whose new boots squeaked.

O.K. Bovard, managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, threatened to fire a reporter who wore a cap instead of a hat. He believed that no man who wore a cap could become a good journalist. Ah, those were the days.

Charles E. Chapin of the Evening World in New York was notorious for the way he bullied his staff. Still, he had a certain sadistic flair. Once, when a reporter called to say he had failed to get the story he'd been assigned, Chapin asked: "Your name is Smith, isn't it? You work for the Evening World?" When the reporter answered yes, Chapin barked: "You're a liar. Smith got fired from the Evening World an hour ago."

Of course, back then there were enough newspapers that you could be fired in the morning and hired by the afternoon. Fedler mentions a reporter named H. Allen Smith who by the time he was 19 had worked for nine newspapers. Are there still nine newspapers in the United States?

What's the most interesting way you've been fired? Or were you the terminator, not the terminatee? If it's not too painful to talk about, e-mail me the details: kellyj@washpost.com.

Birthday Girl

If someone had told me that the raw, slimy, pointy-headed, incontinent human I saw erupt in dramatic fashion from My Lovely Wife 18 years ago would one day be a poised, polite, intelligent young woman in total control of her bodily functions, I would have said, "Thank God!"

My daughter Gwyneth turned 18 yesterday. To be honest, I miss the warmth and baby scent that used to waft off her soft, wispy-haired head and those chubby feet untainted by contact with the corrupting earth. But I like this full-grown person, too, a collection of my and my wife's quirks but, more than that, her own independent person.

To parents of newborns, a reminder: They will be grown-up in no time.

Send a Kid to Camp

Please consider supporting Camp Moss Hollow, the summer camp for at-risk kids from the Washington area. To make a tax-deductible gift, send a check or money order, payable to "Send a Kid to Camp," to P.O. Box 96237, Washington, D.C. 20090-6237. Or contribute online by going to http://washingtonpost.com/camp and clicking on the donation link. To use MasterCard or Visa by phone, call 202-334-5100 and follow the instructions on our recorded message.

No chat tomorrow in honor of Independence Day, but please visit my blog, "John Kelly's Commons," at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/commons.