This is what a newsroom is really like

I had been eager to read John Darnton's "Black and White and Dead All Over" since reading a review a year or so ago. The Wilson County Public Library finally shelved a copy, and I eagerly picked it up. The reviews had promised an amusing take on the state of journalism in the 21st century, and Darnton certainly delivers that. Former journalists — and there are tens of thousands of us out here — will find Darnton's characters, personalities, egos, situations and attitudes familiar and dead-on. Anyone who has worked in a newsroom will recognize the reporter who is so good at dodging assignments that he never writes a story, the editor who demands an update from a busy reporter every few minutes and then chastises him for not writing fast enough, or the snippy, pedantic grammarian who can never see anything good in a story because he's so busy looking for misplaced commas. They're all there, and Darnton nails them all as he further amuses the reader with Dickensian names for these characters.

The novel would be enjoyable enough with just the descriptions of the insanity of a big-city newsroom, but Darnton throws in a murder mystery — make that three murders, all of them involving news employees of The Globe, a thinly disguised New York Times, where Darnton has been a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. The first murder, of the imperious standards editor who could never compliment anyone, only find fault, is the most effectively imagined. His body is found with an editor's spike (used during paper-and-typewriter days to "spike" or kill a story) driven into his chest. The flawed but likable protagonist is assigned to write the story of a murder within the newsroom of a man almost universally despised by anyone who has ever written a word for The Globe. Everybody is a suspect! There's even a subplot involving an unknown heir (or so it seems) of the newspaper's patriarch.

The effectiveness of the novel weakens somewhat as Darnton complicates the plot with additional murders. The painfully amusing descriptions of idiosyncratic characters give way to plot twists, and the book loses some of its comic flavor, but you'll stick around to find out whodunit and what creative ways the killer finds to send off his victims.

Anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom, whether at the New York Times or the lowliest weekly, knows that the newspaper business attracts an array of strange characters with a combination of enlarged and tender egos. In describing this culture, Darnton has a sociologist's instincts. He captures the newsroom atmosphere with its adrenaline and tension as well as its dull assignments and boring routines. He aptly describes the reporters and editors we've all known — ones determined to avoid work and those massively over-judging their own talents and abilities. Readers will recognize some of the people, including a thinly disguised Rupert Murdoch character.

Darnton seems to be coming down on the side of traditional journalistic standards, where all-knowing (or at least skilled and experienced) editors decided what stories were important enough to be in the newspaper and where celebrity gossip and warm, fuzzy features never made the grade. But the defenders of the new attention to readers' desires also get their say. I have to recommend this book to all my former colleagues and to anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper. It's way to true to life to be considered fiction — or as they used to say in the newsroom, "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."