Supplied to Anderson?
Some of you might be wondering what inspired my blog’s name. It’s an homage to my days as a wire service reporter at City News Bureau of Chicago. We didn’t get bylines back then, and anyway we did things old-school. For instance, instead of having a staff full of reporter-writers, we had a staff of reporters and a separate staff of writers — known in industry parlance as “rewrites.”
Anyway, when you started out at City News you got a police reporter’s beat. What this really meant was you were a general assignment reporter shagged all over town to wherever you were needed. On any given day that could be the Chicago mayor’s news conference, some triple murder or a three-alarm fire. Or on a slow news day it could mean sitting in a police station doing “beat checks,” calling up grumpy desk sergeants trying to ask them if anything was happening before they slammed the phone down on you. Or, worse, it could mean fetching dreaded man-on-the-street quotes about the bus fare hikes. Reporters would phone in their quotes and other information to a rewrite who would absolutely run you through the wringer and then the rewrite would hack out the story. So the byline would read Anderson to Cuneo, for example.
When you graduated to the rewrite desk you got the right to torture reporters — like veterans hazing rookies in about any sport you can imagine. Of course it’s great fun. Anyway, the ebb and flow of news at a wire is maddeningly inconsistent. I can remember nights getting in a lot of work on portraits (I’m an artist) and other nights I frantically juggled dozens of stories. One night I recall getting to work for the night shift at 5 p.m. and about 10 minutes later a tornado wiped out an exurban Chicago town. 29 dead. I was put in charge of the rewrite desk — meaning I had to take all of the pieces of stories we generated that night and gather them together for coherent takes. Seemed like 5 minutes later when I looked up at the clock at it was 15 hours later. I was the last one out the door from my shift that night.
But what to do on those slow nights? Well, if you were horsing around a bit too loudly sometimes an editor would throw a news release at you and tell you to rewrite it. The worst of these came from the Journal of American Medical Assn. No offense, it’s a great organization, of course, but rewriting a “JAMA” release on the latest scientific discovery on ingrown toe nails was great punishment indeed. So what was the byline for such a dull chore? Why, Supplied to Anderson, of course. But then you saw that punch line coming from a mile away, didn’t you?
