Newspapers and coffee shops

 In a former life, I once told my boss, the newspaper’s new publisher, that I often spent the first hour of my working day at the coffee shop. I told him I thought all editors should do that.

The lifeblood of a newspaper is not what the president or the mayor is saying or doing. It’s not what movie stars, athletes and pop singers are doing. It’s what the ordinary readers are doing and talking about. And one way to learn what the readers are up to than is to go the coffee shop and listen.

I usually had an appointment for an interview. But I’d arrive early. In those days, people in small towns and even fairly large cities knew who the editor of the newspaper was. And so people would stop and talk until my guest would arrive and the official business would begin.

I’d find out about a work slowdown at the wharf and new research at the medical school. I’d be told how a beloved custodian at the school had been fired to open up a job for someone’s brother-in-law. I’d learn that the cranky retiree who everyone thought was half daft had received a patent for a mysterious invention in his garage.

My boss, at first dubious that I was actually working, became a convert. If the paper began to sound self-absorbed, he’d ask if I’d been to the coffee shop lately.

Morning coffee, like a church sermon, can easily get out of hand. So like the parishioners who liked the new vicar’s enthusiasm but found they needed to put a timer on him, I put myself on the clock. I’d be at the office within an hour, usually with three or four ideas for the kind of stories that readers would read, rather than scan.

I’d walk into the newsroom and take inventory. Reporters who were working on interesting ideas were left alone. Reporters who were still looking for ideas got assignments. I remember one exasperated cub reporter saying, too loudly, “Where does he get all those ideas?”

The ideas did not come out of my head. They didn’t come from a committee at the newspaper that decided what people in the community should be talking about.

The ideas came from the coffee shop, from the community itself.