Publisher's Notebook

In honor of National Newspaper Week, I want to share a story from the backrooms of the newspaper business.

There are reporters with byline fever. There are editors who crusade. There are photographers who freeze moments of history. And then there are people who make sure the newspaper goes out every day or every week. This one’s for them.

My grandfather, Paul Edwin Fletcher (he went by Edwin), spent his entire working life at the Middlesboro Daily News in Middlesboro, Ky. He started there as a boy of 15 in 1929, and he retired 53 years later, in 1982.

Granddad was “a make-up man” – that’s a job title you don’t hear any more, except maybe on a movie set. He worked with lead type, making up the pages of the paper and preparing them for the press.

I got my first view of the newspaper world when I was about five. On a family trip into Middlesboro, my dad (Paul Edwin Fletcher Jr. – he went by Paul) took me to see Granddad at work.

Mostly I remember a lot of noise. The presses were loud and clanging. And I recall Granddad working at a table, putting in type that looked funny – the little letters were backward. He put them into a big metal frame as they became words, sentences, paragraphs, then a page. Granddad’s hands were covered in black, gloppy ink; it stayed under his fingernails no matter how much Lava soap he used.

Granddad was on the small side – I don’t think he ever topped 5’9” – but he had muscular shoulders and thick brawny forearms, the result of a daily workout of lifting those heavy frames of type and carrying them to pre-press.

He wasn’t a man who talked a lot. He didn’t discuss work at home, although my dad told me how once Granddad had to work late, then rushed home excited with the special edition carrying a one-word headline: “WAR!”
But from five, I remember his quiet kindness. He gave my sister, my brother and me each a special gift that trip – our names, spelled out in backwards lead-type. It showed us what he did, and who he was. I still have mine, a small lump of metal that says Paul in 48-point type.

When I was a kid, my family kept moving farther away from Middlesboro – from North Carolina to Atlanta to South Florida. Visits to Kentucky became less frequent. But with each trip I was getting older and better able to understand Granddad’s world.

Middlesboro is just past the Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky met and dipped their mountains to provide passage for pioneers headed west. Some people kept going, seeking a better life in Indiana, Missouri and other western states. Some made it just past the gap and decided to stay. The city proudly supports the nearby coal mines, and many miners live in the area.

The east end of Middlesboro, where my grandfather lived, was not tony; many of the frame houses were small. Here or there, you might find a rusted car gradually disappearing into weeds. At most of the homes, though, people tried.

The second time I visited Granddad at work, in 1974, I was a high school senior getting ready for a year as editor of the student paper. By then the make-up process had changed. Granddad still laid out the pages, but he would run printed columns of type with the day’s stories through a waxer, then position them on the pages. The pre-press team then burned a plate that went on the press.

I spent an entire day at the Daily News, helping him lay out the paper. With sure hands and a practiced eye, Granddad methodically measured and sized the columns of type and laid them on the page so straight that you wouldn’t need a level to tell you how true they were. He positioned the headlines, photos and ads. And with his typical quiet kindness, he patiently showed me where my pages were crooked and how to fix them.

Granddad became the first Daily News employee to log 50 years with the paper in 1979; he retired a few years later. He had seen newspaper production go through generations of changes. He missed the next innovation: Computerized layout, just around the corner, put all that valuable make-up work inside a box and on a screen.

Years of working near the noisy presses did some damage. Granddad was nearly deaf, and he refused to get a hearing aid. In later visits, this sometimes made conversation difficult. Usually we would sit on the high porch of his house overlooking the town, communing in a warm silence. I know he was happy when I joined Virginia Lawyers Weekly. He liked the idea of another newspaperman in the family.

I last saw him in 2000, in a grim nursing home – he had fallen and shattered a knee, putting him in a wheelchair. At 86, his body was failing, his mind was mostly gone and his speech was slurred. My sister and I tried to connect with the man we knew. I reached into the darkness, if just for a moment, when I showed him a picture of my son. His face brightened and he said clearly, “I’ve got one of those at home.” He died three months later.

Granddad was a lifelong newspaperman who liked what he did. He knew his role and he played it well for 53 years. Thanks to him, the Daily News went out every day. The people in and around Middlesboro got their paper and the news they needed. He never got a lot of glory, but he served his paper and his community well. He never got a byline.

Actually, that’s not true. He gets one every time I sign my name to an article I’ve written.

— Paul Fletcher

Take a look at the ad at the bottom of this post, a relic unearthed from our archives.

Who’s that dashing young chap in the picture?

Well, that would be me, circa 1990.

Back then, the home office in Boston strongly “encouraged” all the publishers at Lawyers Weekly Publications Inc. (there were only a handful of us) to create personality promo ads about ourselves and to provide an editorial statement of purpose for our newspapers.

I remember thinking the “Silent Partner” riff worked pretty well (i.e., like your law partner, only working in the background). At the time, though, I was only five years out of law school. Frankly, not too many law firms would have made me a partner.

My “perspective” from 1990, laid out in the ad, is still accurate: “Having a subscription to Lawyers Weekly is like having a research attorney on staff who scours the advance sheets and cases for 50 or 60 extra hours a week.”

A quick historical note is in order. Attorneys who were in practice back in the 1980s will remember the “advance sheets.” They were compilations of court decisions bound into a paperback in advance of the next Virginia Reports volume. Until Virginia Lawyers Weekly came along, it was the best way to stay on top of the latest cases.

More from 1990 Me: A subscription to our paper is “the most efficient, most cost effective tool an attorney in the commonwealth can have. I’ve had many, many lawyers tell me, ‘I don’t know what we did until Lawyers Weekly came along.”

That last part wasn’t just puffing – we heard that statement at bar shows and other meetings for years, until lawyers realized we were here to stay and part of the legal landscape.

I’d like to think we’d do a much better job now on a comparable promo ad – this one is awfully gray and text-heavy. But that was 1990.

I found this ad as I was going through our archives and photo files in preparation for this week’s 25th Anniversary feature – a retrospective of the Virginia State Bar Annual Meeting. Check out the photo spread on the home page for a trip in the Wayback Machine.

And, as it turns out, this week’s issue – the paper of June 13, 2011 – is our 25th birthday edition. The born-on date for Virginia Lawyers Weekly was June 9, 1986 – the second Monday in June, 25 years ago.

I’ve been here for most of that 25 years. I joined the paper in May 1988 directly from law practice. I’ve been here since Day Two; my colleague, Executive Editor Deborah Elkins, has been here since Day One.

We have had many changes to our business. Virginia Lawyers Weekly has remained our flagship product, but we’ve published books, directories and other special publications as well.

Our company was on the Internet very early, with the launch of our website, www.valawyersweekly.com, in 1996. With that development, a subscription to Virginia Lawyers Weekly became twice as valuable. You got a two-fer – the weekly print product, plus 24-7 access to the website, the searchable Archives and the site’s many other benefits.

We began publishing the popular Daily Alert in 2000, giving you a morning dollop of the latest caselaw and legal headlines from our paper and other news outlets across Virginia.

We were acquired by Dolan Media Company (now The Dolan Company) in 2004, and became part of a bigger, stronger operation. We added business-to-business events to our repertoire in 2006, with our first company awards program, Leaders in the Law; we added a second program, Influential Women of Virginia, in 2009. We began our Business and Law Breakfast event series this past April.

Law practice has had many changes as well. Recall the “laptop” computer that came in a small suitcase or the cell phone that looked like a shoe in a bag. Think of the room in the office that was once full of books…you’ll likely now find that same information on the firm’s server or off in a cloud. And dealing with the guy or gal on the other side of a case – it’s likely most of your dealings today are handled over email. Short, choppy and direct. For better or worse, that’s the current interaction of choice.

Two snapshots I found in the VLW photo archives give you an idea of how much has changed.

From 1992, there is a picture of our booth at the VSB confab, announcing the debut of a grand innovation at the time, our auto-fax system (“Opinions by Fax INSTANTLY”).

Juxtapose that image with a picture from 2010: Web Editor Sarah Rodriguez, live-tweeting the proceedings at the annual meeting.

Our mission for 25 years, regardless of the means of delivery, has remained the same: To bring you the vital information that helps you practice law better, more efficiently and more profitably. Providing you that service has been a privilege. So I say “Thank you” for letting us continue to work as your silent partners.

Thank you for subscribing (and renewing).

Thank you for advertising.

Thank you for the many cases, Verdicts & Settlements and story tips you’ve sent in.

Thank you for your support and encouragement.

1990 Me had a big goal: “I want Lawyers Weekly to be the newspaper for every lawyer in the state from the attorney in the big firms in Richmond, Northern Virginia, Tidewater and Roanoke to the solo practitioner in Grundy, Emporia or Front Royal. I won’t be satisfied until we reach every practicing lawyer in the state.”

That’s still true, after all these years.

Here is a photo item – a picture taken by Karen Elshout, a photographer with our St. Louis-based sister operation, Missouri Lawyers Media. Karen traveled to Joplin, site of a killer tornado earlier this week. Using a GPS, she located the office of a lawyer named Brad Barton, or what was left of it:

It’s almost graduation time at Virginia’s eight law schools. They will turn out students who have been trained as lawyers (they’re not yet attorneys – you get that title once you pass a bar exam).

You have to wonder what will happen in Charlottesville.

Will there be a protest at the University of Virginia law commencement to build on last month’s law-placement rhubarb? In March at the U.Va. law school, there was a student protest effort. A group of law students was unhappy that they spent three years of their lives and a lot of money and now they don’t have jobs waiting for them. During the weekend when admitted prospective students were visiting, the protesters walked around wearing T-shirts that said, “Virginia Law – $40,000 a year and NO JOB.” They blamed the administration, apparently, for overselling their employment prospects.

These are students who started law school in the fall of 2008, just when the economy began cratering. Three years at a safe haven are better than three years in the unemployment line, which is where some of their college colleagues probably have been.

Watch to see if there is some grand gesture at the U.Va. festivities, or whether the speaker, U.S Attorney General Eric Holder, says anything about the flap.

Up at the University of Michigan law school, officials likely are holding their collective breath until graduation comes and goes. Their scheduled speaker for “Senior Day,” their equivalent of commencement, is an alumnus, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio and UM Law Class of ’84. However, the invitation to Portman sparked a student protest petition, asking Dean Evan Caminker to disinvite the senator. The protesters object to Portman’s views on gay rights (he has consistently voted against measures to enhance them). The dean recently reiterated his support for the invitation, saying the school does not want to be associated with “ideological censorship.”

Caminker, in settling the Portman invitation matter, said that UM’s Senior Day should be “a day of celebration and not controversy…I am deeply distressed that the celebratory mood will be dampened.”

Caminker is right – graduation is, and should be, a happy and optimistic time. Even if the economy and job market aren’t where we all want them to be. Memo to any potential protesters at U.Va.: Many of your classmates, not to mention their families who paid that $40K a year, will be looking to mark a grand accomplishment, not to listen to petulance.

All the speakers at the state’s law commencements (see item in the VLW Blog) no doubt will offer well-earned congratulations and urge the new grads to go off and do good works. That’s standard fare and appropriate. The mission for all graduation speakers everywhere is to check the bromides at the door and to say something new and even memorable.

At my graduation in 1979 from the College of Knowledge down in Williamsburg, the featured speaker was Jeff MacNelly, the Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist and creator of “Shoe,” possibly the best comic strip ever.

MacNelly had three bits of advice:
1. Find a job you like.
2. Work like hell.
3. Keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.

Words to heed from Grundy to Charlottesville to Fairfax to Virginia Beach and all points in between.

John Charles Thomas recently retired from the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Wait a minute. Thomas hasn’t been on the court since 1989, you say.

That’s true. In 1983, at age 32, Thomas became the first African-American to sit on the court. He resigned in 1989 due to a brain tumor, and after receiving treatment, rejoined Hunton & Williams, where he is a senior partner.

But apparently one can’t formally retire from the court until the age of 60, which Thomas reached in September. He said that now he actually could be recalled, as a retired justice, to sit on a panel.

In the meantime, he’ll stay busy with his work at Hunton – and at Juridical Solutions. He recently signed on as a senior professional with that mediation company.

The General Assembly won’t return to Richmond until January, but the annual exercise in minting new specialty license plates is in gear already.

Virginia must have more specialty/vanity tags than just about any other state in the country. And for members of the General Assembly, specialty plates must be a constituent service bonanza, or an annoyance. Or both.

Here’s how it works: A well-meaning group with an interest, cause or passion wants a specialty license plate to share that enthusiasm with the world. A friendly legislator introduces a bill to authorize that plate. The measure has to pass the Assembly, and once it’s actually approved, 350 people have to submit a prepaid application before it will be produced. If all that happens, you’ll be seeing the new plate on cars not long thereafter.

A lot of plates never make it. A lot do. For example, you can get a Jimmy Buffett parrothead plate, plates for a variety of Washington-area sports teams or tags for a number of colleges.

If you like politics on your car’s tag, you can “Choose Life” or “Trust Women/Respect Choice.” You can get a Confederate heritage license plate. Or “Tobacco Heritage,” which is much more genteel than a bumper sticker that reads, “I smoke and I vote.”

There are a few license tag bills already in the hopper for the 2011 Assembly, carried over from this year. These include plates for backers of Relay for Life and Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Del. Richard P. Bell, R-Staunton, with House Bill 1408, is trying again to get the national motto, “In God We Trust,” on a license plate.

Here’s something new.

Del. John O’Bannon, R-Henrico, has introduced House Bill 1418, which would create a plate with a recreation of the famous “Don’t Tread on Me” flag from revolutionary times. The bill doesn’t say it, but this plate is a nod to the Tea Party movement, which has been using the snake flag, also known as the Gadsden flag, as one of its rallying symbols.

While the Virginia snake-flag plate effort appears to be the first, Tea Party conservatives aren’t stopping in Virginia. The Dallas News reported that Texas is also mulling a “Don’t Tread on Me” tag.

Once Virginia and Texas started the movement, a legislator in Nevada jumped on board the bandwagon, according to the Las Vegas Sun. That leaves 47 states to be heard from.

Considering that specialty plates require payment of an additional fee, more than one left-leaning blogger has noted there’s a small irony at work here: Tea Party members never have seemed so willing to write the government a check.

Richmond lawyer Andy Reinhardt was in Miami last week.

But it was hardly for a vacation. Reinhardt (right) is the new president of the Workers’ Injury Law and Advocacy Group, known as WILG (pronounced will-ig). The group held its national conference in South Florida Nov. 12-13.

WILG is a national bar group for workers’ compensation attorneys. Founded in 1995, it now has about 800 members in all 50 states.

Its mission, Reinhardt said, is simple: To help injured workers and to advocate on their behalf.

Although workers’ comp tends to be a state-oriented system across the country, WILG leaders have found themselves appearing before Congress recently, he said, seeking to educate legislators about their mission.

Reinhardt said he expects to be on the road to DC during his one-year term, and to appear before state legislatures to argue and lobby for and against legislation. Other travel will take him to meet with WILG members and groups across the country. He said he already has his first flight booked, heading to Denver for a meeting of trial-lawyer association presidents later this month.

The group also hosts CLE for its members and maintains a listserv. Reinhardt said that WILG members often are active in the workers’ comp section of the American Association for Justice, the national plaintiffs’ bar, and in state groups such as the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association.

But the leaders in comp work opted to start their own group 15 years ago, and WILG is, he said, “an organization whose time has come.”

Reinhardt said that he had heard that it takes about 10 years for a group like this to take off, and WILG now “has crossed that threshold.”

The group hired a new executive director, Jennifer Comer, in January and started a new website this year (www.WILG.org).

Coming from a small firm and knowing what it will take to lead an up-and-coming group this year, Reinhardt hailed the strong support of his law partner, Stephen Harper, and his “patient and loving” wife of 24 years, Monet.

“If you print that kind of thing, I’d like to thank them,” he said. Sometimes we do.

What’s worse than a pair of high-testosterone lawyers trash-talking at each other over minutiae at a deposition?

That’s bad, for sure. A pair of college professors sniping at each other at a department meeting? (Someone once said the politics in academia were so nasty because the stakes were so low).

That’s bad, too. How about one newspaper’s response when it gets to write smack about another newspaper, especially the other paper’s editors?

Just as bad. It happened this week. Guy who is the local news editor of the Brockton (Mass.) Enterprise was pulled over by cops last Saturday with a blood alcohol content of 0.3 percent, and charged with his third DUI. A bad situation, made worse over the fact that the cops say they found an open bottle of vodka in a bag in the car. Oh, and the guy’s son, age 6, was in the back seat.

All of this was reported on the Web site of a sister paper, The Patriot Ledger, rather matter-of-factly on Monday. They identified the guy’s employer in the third paragraph. The headline: “Police: Man driving with child in car was drunk.”

The Enterprise posted the Patriot Ledger’s story on its own Web site Tuesday.

Enter the rival. The Boston Herald gets hold of the story (I’m guessing they have someone who scans the sites of competitor papers) and in a piece published Tuesday, blares the headline, “Brockton editor bagged with booze, kid in car.”

The Herald probably had their best wordsmiths working on this lead:

“With his 6-year-old son munching a burger in the back seat and a half-empty liter of cheap vodka riding shotgun up front, a Brockton Enterprise editor allegedly wasted behind the wheel didn’t even know what town he was in, police said.”

They should have used purple ink. The image of a bottle of vodka (note it was “cheap”) “riding shotgun” is pretty evocative. And I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen “allegedly wasted” used in a news story before.

One wonders what the Brockton Enterprise will do when/if it gets the chance to return the favor to the Herald.

Philip Morris USA, the tobacco giant owned by Richmond-based Altria Group Inc., is on the warpath against counterfeiters, according to the Associated Press.

Marlboro cigarette counterfeiters, that is. Kind of gives a whole new meaning to the old phrase, “Smokin’ O.P.s” (as in other people’s).

Philip Morris just filed federal lawsuits against eight New York and New Jersey retailers that allegedly sold counterfeit Marlboros. That brings the total of lawsuits the company has filed over fake smokes in that region to 35.

Why would cigarette smugglers look to the Big Apple?

Well, New York is potentially Fake Marlboro Country because of the high federal, state and local taxes on tobacco products.

A pack of cigarettes in New York City can cost more than 10 bucks. Might to cheaper and easier to quit…

The College of Knowledge is looking for a new mascot, as I reported earlier this week.

But Judge Lou Campbell from Botetourt County kicked me a note, reminding me that a few years ago, Prof. George Grayson of the William & Mary government department issued a modest proposal that would have resolved the controversy of the day: What to do with the two feathers on the W&M “Tribe” logo.

A quick recap: The NCAA was leaning on any member school with a logo or nickname that was deemed offensive to Native Americans. Years ago, the W&M teams were known as “the Indians.” The name was chosen to honor the early link between the college and the nearby tribes. The Brafferton Building, one of the original structures in the W&M front campus, was built as an Indian school in 1723. Sometime later, the school adopted “The Tribe” as its team name.

The University of North Dakota and Florida State University successfully cited history and local tribe support to the NCAA to keep their names, the “Fighting Sioux” and the “Seminoles,” respectively.

Down in Williamsburg, W&M tucked it tail feathers between its legs, thanks to then-President Gene Nichol, and plucked the green and gold feathers from the logo. W&M adopted a logo that looks a lot like the one you’ll see on garbage trucks owned by a local waste management company, but that’s another story.

Back to Grayson: One of the five proposed mascots up for consideration is a wren. In his op-ed piece, as a way to resolve the feather controversy, Grayson proposed that the school change its team name to the William and Mary Wrens.

The wren was considered “the king of birds” in medieval Europe, Grayson wrote. He added, “These bold and resourceful creatures with their perky tail-feathers are avid insectivores. This would enable W&M to devour the mushy Spiders of the University of Richmond.” Hear, hear.

The historic Wren Building? Grayson said that it “logically would become the new nesting place for the Athletic Department” once the Wrens ruled the roost on campus.

Here’s guessing we can count on the good professor for at least one vote for the wren as mascot.