The (News) Paper Trail

Facing what’s left of a career in print journalism

Kate Stone Lombardi’s print journalism newspaper and magazine clippings from her thirty-year writing career

I’m packing up the remains of a journalism career that once consumed and defined me. When I began, my life’s work took up an entire room. Now it’s down to a couple of cardboard boxes. Even those are excess. I am left trying to figure out what, if anything, the physical detritus—the actual paper—of all those published words means.

Just to date myself, when I went to journalism school, your choices for a major were print, radio, or television. Yes, this was the 1980s, pre-Internet days.

Print was my focus. With my slight lisp, there was no way I would pursue anything that involved using my voice. Besides, I’d always had the sense that I better write things down. Starting at age eight, I kept a diary. I’ve filled huge plastic cartons filled with dozens of those journals too, but that’s a different story.

I started as a “copy girl” at the New York Times, and for those too young to understand what that means, “copy” referred to actual paper—in this case a cheap, tan stock. An editor would yell “Copy!” and one of us would run to the desk, pluck the article out of his hand (it was always a “he” back then), and run it back to the reporter with the hand-edited changes. Sometimes, the editors demanded fresh, blank paper. One particularly intimidating guy near the top of the hierarchy once lectured me that when he called for “copy,” he wanted his inbox to be filled ¾ full—not halfway, nor brimming to the top.

Quaking in my pumps (sensible but work-appropriate shoes), I reminded myself that I had a master’s degree from a prestigious university, and that fetching paper for this petty tyrant was just one more step on my road to a Pulitzer Prize. Ditto for when the managing editor asked me to get his shoes shined. That’s how it was back then, and if you didn’t want to be humiliated or bullied, you could got take your career aspirations elsewhere.

Anyway, I never got close to a Pulitzer Prize and eventually spent most of my career writing for a very non-prestigious regional section of the paper. Sometimes my stories appeared in the Metro or Style or the National sections, but not often. In the end, though, I wrote more than a thousand articles for the Times.

In the early 1980s, there was still a recording room, which you would call (on a landline telephone), read your story, and a secretary would transcribe your work and get it to an editor. Next, the fax was introduced. Finally, we were filing and publishing online.

But for two decades of my career, there was just paper. The paper. Here’s how I archived my stories: my husband would painstakingly cut out each article and then lay it out and paste it on a blank page. From there, one of us would xerox 20 copies.

Some of Kate Stone Lombardi’s many reporters notebooks

My home office was lined with file cabinets filled with this stuff. I also kept printouts of all the background material for each story—transcripts of interviews, related research, and more. I even kept all my reporter’s notebooks— long, skinny spirals perfect for note taking. Holding on to this backup was professional insurance. What if someone questioned a quote? Or an editor asked for the source of a piece of information?

It wasn’t just the Times I wrote for. I published in magazines and eventually on websites. (As journalism migrated online, editors would often ask me to write for free, promising “exposure.” I didn’t need exposure, just a paycheck.) After starting my career during the print era, writing for online publications seemed ephemeral. It lacked not only the physical heft of paper, but also a sense of connection with the reader. A link may or may not be clicked, but a (literally) solid piece of writing laid out on someone’s kitchen table or bedside felt more intimate, with more of a commitment on both sides.

Anyway, now, after 35 years in our house, my husband and I are moving to a smaller place, and I’m forced to confront all of the stuff I’ve kept and accumulated. Downsizing is a cliché. Throw away the sweet, scribbled toddler drawings? (Not all of them.) Donate my old, fringed leather purse that now qualifies as vintage? (Yes.) How about the piles of crap my adult children are still storing in our basement? (No comment in the interest of family peace.) It’s difficult.

My office should have been easy, not as freighted with emotion as my other, more personal belongings. But it wasn’t. The first culling of the physical remains of my career involved tossing all the backup material for every article. Many had been written in the twentieth century, and the time for questions or corrections was long gone. Ditto the reporter’s notebooks.

Next, I accepted that I didn’t need 20 copies of every article. The truth is I didn’t need copies of anything. Every article that anyone has ever published in the Times is available online, preserved forever. There’s even an archive in the Library of Congress.

Still, I couldn’t completely let go. I kept one “hard” copy of each article, which brought the evidence of my Times career down to a couple of expanding file packets.

Two shelves of magazines I’d written for remained. Most of these magazines don’t have digitalized archives. Some are out of business. Out came the old-school scissors. I clipped each article and consolidated them into one archival photo box. The cut-outs looked pathetic, with the jump pages (i.e., “continued on page 93”) already curling at the edges.

A couple of journalism awards, all in cheap frames, went into the discard box.

One last cabinet to tackle. I’d published a book in 2012. There was a carton of the hardbacks in the basement. But there was still all the publicity material surrounding the release. (The book got a flurry of press on publication, had a short period of sales and then…crickets.) But the evidence is there—here I was on a local magazine cover, here was an excerpt in The Wall Street Journal, and here was a poster announcing that I would be speaking at a library.

What did all that work mean? Securing the interviews, figuring out how to structure the story, editors to please, deadline after deadline after deadline—nonstop stress. The slog of writing the book, the promotion, the anxiety over sales. Who was that person?

That is the question, I think, that makes dealing with the clutter so difficult.

When I was in the midst of my career, ambitious and driven, my identity was completely tied up with my name appearing in in all those newspapers. I loved the idea of the printing press, with thousands of copies of my byline coming off the machines. I’d see the blue plastic bags marked “New York Times” sitting at the bottom of driveways or on doorsteps, and think, There I am! My fragile ego was constantly stroked by people who recognized my name or who told me how much they loved this or that particular column.

My need to publish was relentless. It felt as if I didn’t exist unless I was in the physical paper. When an article appeared in print, I’d feel good for a few hours, but then feel myself fading. I’d start pitching my editor a new story immediately. Better yet, I’d already have a string of assignments lined up.

I feel a little sad for that former me. I let go of all that long ago. I’m older and I’ve been humbled multiple times. Honestly, I don’t even remember writing most of those stories. I no longer need my name in print to know who I am.

Most of all, I now realize that it’s all fleeting. Nothing is permanent. I could chisel something in stone, and eventually it will be worn down. And this, of course, isn’t really about the stuff or even writing, but mortality. We’re dust to dust—newspaper clippings and bodies alike.

In the end, I got my office contents down to three boxes.

Boxes, I suspect, that my kids will find one day when I’m gone, and they are clearing out our basement at the smaller house. I can almost picture the scene:

Daughter [picking up yellowing pages]: “Why did Mom keep this stuff?”

Son: “It meant something to her.”

Daughter: “Toss.”

Son: “I don’t know…”

Daughter: “You want to take this stuff to your place?”

Son [sighing]: “Okay. Toss.”

My thirty-year writing career doesn’t come down to its physical remnants, any more than a carton of old toys and baby clothes encompasses all that went into raising a family.

I’ve had a long career. I’m still a writer. I just don’t need the paperwork anymore to prove it.

Kate Stone Lombardi is a recovering journalist, author, and current essayist. She was a regular contributor to The New York Times, a columnist for the regional section and her work has appeared in national publications like Reader’s Digest, Time.com, Parenting and more.