Where Old News Goes to Die

In a shadowed corner of the lobby at the National Press Club, someone set up a relic for display. Cast iron, with its maker's mark riveted to the front, the ancient Teletype machine looks ready to do battle once again after little more than a nap, spitting out headlines to chain-smoking reporters, getting even the most hard-boiled excited as it prints out "Flash...!" Anyone who stops to look closer at the immovable museum piece will see another quaint reminder of a time gone by in the newspaper business: the Teletype is stamped United Press International.

In the locker room of the club, one might just run into another remnant from that same period of antiquity in the news business. Furry, flabby and foul-mouthed, a dislocated Brit turned foreign correspondent tells an intern about reporting, as he knows it. "Thay're in jayill naow, the fahks." For the old hack, possessed of a cockney so thick it sounds Australian and a mouth as foul as Sammy Sosa's late swing, the march of history is not poignant--it is a hard blow to the gut. He speaks of the former owners of United Press International, scoundrels whose skullduggery contributed to the proud organization's demise. A sadistic smile creeps across the man's face as he pictures UPI's former owners clutching steel bars. With good reason, of course; after all, he was one of nearly a thousand spun off into reporting oblivion as the company fell into its death spiral.

United Press International was a force. Begun by E.W. Scripps nearly a century ago, and later fortified in a merger with William Randolph Hearst, Class of 1886, the wire service grew to be the second largest in the world, neck-and-neck with the ubiquitous Associated Press. Its correspondents--Walter Cronkite in Brussels, for example--reported for American newspapers from bureaus around the world. When bullets rang out on the streets of Dallas, UPI was the first to report that John F. Kennedy '40 had been shot--one reporter from UPI and one from AP had been riding in the car following Kennedy's and UPI managed to hang on to the car's only telephone, even as the AP reporter wrestled him to the ground. The good old days, you might say--good especially since AP copy dominates American newspapers and the AP is the first to acknowledge that some competition might serve them well.

UPI ain't it, though. Not anymore. It's a funny thing--from Lafayette Park, one need only walk about 50 feet to find a concrete building with a brass lintel reading UPI as clearly as the label on the Teletype machine. The building is almost as useless. Once employing more than a thousand reporters around the globe, today UPI's staff is scarcely more than 100. UPI staple Helen Thomas, the senior White House correspondent, nearly 80 years old herself, gets up to be at the White House at 5:30 in the morning, to write stories no one will read for a wire service that will reach almost no American newspaper. (One UPI exec describes the company's subscription roster as "more than none.") Her readership, if one still remains for UPI, comes from Japan or Internet surfers. Fifteen years ago, more than a thousand U.S. papers subscribed to UPI, only a few hundred fewer than AP. How the mighty have fallen: Thomas says she's just happy someone picks up the phone when she calls the office.

The UPI wire is still hot--every thirty seconds or so another story runs. Only they're not real stories. At best, UPI's famous network of international correspondents has been replaced by stringers and freelancers who are able to pick up some of the slack. But that's about it. The stories average about two sentences. Unable to pretend to be a full-fledged wire service, the agency is moving to provide what might be called news fragments. A more apt name might be in order: blurb, maybe. Or blip. UPI now supplies headlines to a San Francisco paging company which displays headlines on pager screens and to a Kentucky outfit that is looking to flash headlines on LED screens in bars.

In 1980, when Scripps sold UPI after 75 years, its president promised UPI faithful that the reporting stalwart would not be abandoned. The Scripps family said especially that selling to foreign owners would be a last resort, since UPI is an American news company. Reuters and Agence France Presse might sneak across the borders, but the Scrippses felt offshore ownership would compromised the company's excellence. Today a Saudi group, including the brother-in-law of King Fahd owns UPI. But how can anyone complain? It beats the embezzlers whose hard time still makes the old Brit grin.

It happened slowly but very surely. By 1980, UPI had been losing money for 25 straight years, and Scripps had had enough. The company went up for sale and, while on the market, lost its contract with the New York Daily News, which may well have been its lifeblood. UPI's contract with the also-struggling tabloid was good for $55,000 per month. In desperate denial, UPI offered to let the Daily News hang on to its service for free for months, hoping to win back the contract. Enter the Tennesseans.

Exit the Tennesseans. Soon came the embezzlers, and in 1991, the company was forced to file for bankruptcy protection. Four years later, UPI bigwigs received federal fraud and conspiracy indictments, accused of falsifying books and lease transactions. Soon the Saudi's plunked down $3.6 million and made the UPI headache their own. And along the way, the Teletype machines, the excitement, the reporters, and the copy were discarded in what seems like a vain effort to hold together the crumbling shells of an empty egg.

There is no lesson to learn from this story. Epic as it may be, at least for nostalgic reporters, it is largely a case of mismanagement. Changing taste for news can hardly be blamed, since the company had been hemorrhaging millions for decades. At most, the demise of UPI should simply remind us of the inevitable disintegration of all things.

It's a shame, though, and especially here, in this city. Outside the Beltway--which, as I learned my first day, is not a figure of speech but an actual highway that circles the city--the media figures probably seem as big as the politicians they cover. Sam Donaldson vs. Dennis Hastert--is there any doubt who's bigger? But walking the sidewalks of this city, with its overarching civic feel--statues, columns and marble, with its shifting tectonic plates of power, it is clear that the public officials, the lawmakers and those--in crisp suits, loud shoes and big grins--who would influence them, own this city.

But there are generations of copy writers out who have also lived here, wire writers and correspondents working in nearly essential anonymity because they loved to write and tell the rest of the world how it is in this fabulous city, this creation of political philosophers and constitution writers. I think of the decidedly unromantic picture of H. L. Mencken sitting in the late night, overweight and sweating, pounding away at his keyboard in the Chesapeake heat, a fan blowing the steamy, soupy air around as he, clad only in a pair of BVDs, faces sheet after sheet of blank paper, ready to fill them with the excitement of the human narrative.

To see UPI as a human chapter in the telling of the human story is probably best. To remember the pinnacle of reporting--writing down words to describe the actions of men and women and the lives they live--is to tip one's hat to the pinnacle of civilization and politics in the twentieth century. And to discover the real life, or at least a single beat in the rhythmic pulse, of Washington, D.C.

James Y. Stern '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. He is working as a reporter for Bloomberg Business News for the summer.