A Piffany About Clout Chasing And Complicity

I knew the exact moment my time in tabloid journalism had expired.

You’d get partial credit if you guessed my very first day on staff at the New York Daily News. That’s when I learned that the guy I replaced already had gotten canned from whatever new magazine or media project he’d just left with another Daily News-er to help launch went belly-up instead. My new coworkers spent the day not so much welcoming me into the fold as much as they commiserated over their unlucky former colleagues, and quickly rehired the one whose desk I had not just occupied. Although I’d enjoyed success freelancing for the Daily News before my move from Boston to New York City, fitting in as a full-timer proved nearly impossible. My story ideas seemed too serious for a big-city tabloid, especially one in the middle of an all-out war in 2007 with the rival Post, which included price cuts and poaching back the features editor (Orla Healy would herself get fired in 2010, but by then I’d moved all my chips online). When I was practically the only one in the Features department without a Fashion Week assignment, I knew I was the odd man out, but I could rationalize that decision quite easily. Healy and her deputies let me start a comedy blog on the NYDN site (called “Funny Business”) and so I happily contributed there to make up for a lack of bylines in print. Then J.Lo came home.

The paper sent me up to the Bronx to cover Jennifer Lopez as she and then-husband Marc Anthony visited an elementary school Lots of joyous, screaming kids turned out to greet “Jenny from the block.” I grabbed some quotes, jotted down some additional notes of color commentary, and walked my way back to the subway and back down to Midtown to file my story. The next thing I remember is seeing my edited story on the computer screen, only without any of the words I’d written. Talk about fake news. Someone on the desk had ghostwritten an alternate reality of my reporting. Confused, flabbergasted, embarrassed, and still only three months on the job, I hesitantly stood up for myself. Hey! What’s going on? I don’t remember their words so much as their tone and overall disgust, conveying to me in no uncertain terms that I was rubbish. Sheepishly, then, I countered with this: Well, if you’re going to put my byline on it, at least let it be my rubbish underneath. So I slunk behind my computer terminal and tried to make something out of nothing. All of these years later, I had completely forgotten that the resulting piece ran just inside the front page, for all to see. On my birthday.