“Java Coffee has been successfully grown near Milton, N.C. It was produced by a shrub only two years old, which sprouted from a grain of coffee planted on the north side of a house.”
— From The New York Times, Nov. 1, 1851
(The Times didn’t limit itself to “All the News That’s Fit to Print” until 1896.)
I’ve often wondered how the editorial board at the New York Times determines what news is “fit.” I once asked a TV news director-friend that question. His answer: They could and should change it to “All the News that Fits the Page.” He obviously wasn’t a big Times fan.
My favorite NYT phrase was the 1960s tag line to a series of ads for the huge Sunday edition that simply said: “You Don’t Have To Read It All, But It’s Nice To Know It’s All There.” And that brings to mind a mid-1950s NBC-TV show called “Big Town,” the story of two newspaper reporters…one an intrepid crime reporter and the other a society page writer and their attempts to find headline-making and newspaper-selling stories for their paper “The Illustrated Press.” As actor Mark Stevens, who played reporter Steve Wilson use to say on the opening, “our masthead reads Primo Veritas, Truth First.”
It’s ironic, Lew, that we are having this discussion today… the day after a significant anniversary in Times history. Forty years ago yesterday, on June 13, 1971, the Times published the first in a series of articles from a US government study called “United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense”…the study would later become known as the Pentagon Papers. The Times became as much of a story as the contents of the government study.
Then there is the TV station that adopted the catchy slogan, “If It Happened Today, It’s News To Us.”
Thanks, Jack. Sorry I missed “Big Town” — sounds like a Tracy-Hepburn knockoff, doesn’t it?