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Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column that remembers when daily newspapers ruled the media kingdom and larger-than-life characters roamed the newsrooms.
We were reminded of this over the weekend, when the Denver Press Club hosted its annual Hall of Fame banquet, inducting Rocky Mountain News editors Denny Dressman and the late Jack Foster, Time magazine’s regional correspondent Dick Woodbury, Denver Post assistant managing editor Joan White and former Denver Post editor Gil Spencer.
These giants have ink in their veins and a passion for getting the story — quickly, accurately and with pitch-perfect tone.
Former Post editor — and current Denver Business Journal editor — Neil Westergaard briefly summed up Spencer’s career to great laughs thusly: “He started as a copy boy and became an editor.”
Spencer, now an avuncular horse-track railbird who possesses a wonderful wit and a Pulitzer Prize in commentary, wowed the crowd of about 100 people with his delightful recollections of how he got into newspapers after returning from the Navy.
Seems his mother didn’t approve of spending his mornings in bed and his afternoons at the race track and kicked him out of the house. With no background in the field, he begged a secretary at the Philadelphia Inquirer to find him work — or a place to live — and he landed a job as a copy boy.
He found a home and took delight in the characters he encountered and the frenzied pace of the work.
His star quickly rose as he hopskotched into bigger and better assignments and newspapers, and, after winning the Pulitzer in 1974 at the Trentonian by skewering New Jersey politicians involved in a series of scandals, Spencer became editor of the Philadelphia Daily News and the New York Daily News.
After his resignation from the latter post in 1989, Spencer was approached by the publisher of El Diario, the Spanish-language newspaper based in Neuvo York.
“I had to tell them that I was flattered by the offer, but there was only one problem: I don’t speak the g- - - - - - - d language,” he said to raucous laughter.
Soon after, Post publisher Dean Singleton lured Spencer, then 63, and his wife, Isabel — a strong editor in her own right — to Denver. There, he was widely credited with reinvigorating the newsroom and inspiring the paper to reclaim the circulation lead from its archrival, the News, through a steady diet of hard-hitting, well-written stories and a take-no-prisoners attitude.
His manner was to encourage reporters to get jazzed about their work, and his enthusiasm was contagious. He also infused his dry sense of humor — and coarse language — into even the tensest situations.
“Spencer is a writer’s editor, also an editor’s editor,” one former colleague wrote. “Much of his career was spent on tabloids, and he was a genius at jumping on local news stories, covering the local sports teams, reaching out to the reader with grab-ya headlines, provocative editorials and terse chiseled prose. But unlike some tabloid editors, he never tried to pass off rumor as fact, and he liked substance and specialized in making it readable.”
When he retired for good in 1993, Spencer — who never earned a high-school diploma but did win a prestigious George A. Polk Award for career achievement in journalism — was presented an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Colorado. He claims it is his proudest honor — besides landing his first trifecta.
***
Spencer spent more than 50 years in journalism and even longer than that watching the ponies run.
Acting on a tip once, he bet heavily on a longshot filly who broke from the gate and took a commanding lead over a bunch of colts, he recounted with obvious glee.
Coming off the final turn, though, she inexplicably turned hard left through a gap in the rail and, despite her jockey’s protestations, she sprinted directly into a pond in the infield, where she drowned.
Unflappable, Spencer simply tore up his ticket and returned to poring over his dog-eared copy of The Racing Form.
He was asked by a friend recently how he had made out over all those years of betting on dark horses, broken-down nags and tired-out glue sources. “I’m down a little,” he said with classic understatement and a sheepish smile.
***
White offered her own funny account of an ongoing bet between a few reporters to get certain phrases past their editors and into the paper.
Once, the chosen passage was “creamy white thighs,” and the competition was ferocious — but so were the sharp eyes of the editors.
Ultimately, the contest was won by the paper’s cooking writer, who snuck it into a chicken recipe.
We hereby challenge our readers to come up with their favorite (clean enough for publication) phrases that they’d like to see in Summit up, and we’ll try to sneak ‘em in.
***
There was a strong sense of nostalgia and lament among the ink-stained wretches at the Press Club, itself a relic from the days when reporters took three-martini lunches and rubbed elbows with city officials over poker games in the basement clouded with cigar smoke.
Big-city newspapers are struggling mightily to regain their footing after losing much of their circulation to the more immediate sources of news like radio, television and now the web, (and the general disdain for papers by the younger generations) and much of their advertising support to the Internet.
By continually slashing staff as a result, papers are offering readers fewer and fewer reasons to pick them up, resulting in less interest from advertisers, and the cycle continues.
Spencer, a bean-pole version of Lou Grant, offered some hopeful words, professing his love for the smart, funny people who reside in newsrooms and the still-relevant need for first-hand reporting.
***
It’s Tuesday, and we’re sticking a press pass in our fedora. Tell us your favorite newspaper stories at
summitup@summitdaily.com.
We were reminded of this over the weekend, when the Denver Press Club hosted its annual Hall of Fame banquet, inducting Rocky Mountain News editors Denny Dressman and the late Jack Foster, Time magazine’s regional correspondent Dick Woodbury, Denver Post assistant managing editor Joan White and former Denver Post editor Gil Spencer.
These giants have ink in their veins and a passion for getting the story — quickly, accurately and with pitch-perfect tone.
Former Post editor — and current Denver Business Journal editor — Neil Westergaard briefly summed up Spencer’s career to great laughs thusly: “He started as a copy boy and became an editor.”
Spencer, now an avuncular horse-track railbird who possesses a wonderful wit and a Pulitzer Prize in commentary, wowed the crowd of about 100 people with his delightful recollections of how he got into newspapers after returning from the Navy.
Seems his mother didn’t approve of spending his mornings in bed and his afternoons at the race track and kicked him out of the house. With no background in the field, he begged a secretary at the Philadelphia Inquirer to find him work — or a place to live — and he landed a job as a copy boy.
He found a home and took delight in the characters he encountered and the frenzied pace of the work.
His star quickly rose as he hopskotched into bigger and better assignments and newspapers, and, after winning the Pulitzer in 1974 at the Trentonian by skewering New Jersey politicians involved in a series of scandals, Spencer became editor of the Philadelphia Daily News and the New York Daily News.
After his resignation from the latter post in 1989, Spencer was approached by the publisher of El Diario, the Spanish-language newspaper based in Neuvo York.
“I had to tell them that I was flattered by the offer, but there was only one problem: I don’t speak the g- - - - - - - d language,” he said to raucous laughter.
Soon after, Post publisher Dean Singleton lured Spencer, then 63, and his wife, Isabel — a strong editor in her own right — to Denver. There, he was widely credited with reinvigorating the newsroom and inspiring the paper to reclaim the circulation lead from its archrival, the News, through a steady diet of hard-hitting, well-written stories and a take-no-prisoners attitude.
His manner was to encourage reporters to get jazzed about their work, and his enthusiasm was contagious. He also infused his dry sense of humor — and coarse language — into even the tensest situations.
“Spencer is a writer’s editor, also an editor’s editor,” one former colleague wrote. “Much of his career was spent on tabloids, and he was a genius at jumping on local news stories, covering the local sports teams, reaching out to the reader with grab-ya headlines, provocative editorials and terse chiseled prose. But unlike some tabloid editors, he never tried to pass off rumor as fact, and he liked substance and specialized in making it readable.”
When he retired for good in 1993, Spencer — who never earned a high-school diploma but did win a prestigious George A. Polk Award for career achievement in journalism — was presented an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Colorado. He claims it is his proudest honor — besides landing his first trifecta.
***
Spencer spent more than 50 years in journalism and even longer than that watching the ponies run.
Acting on a tip once, he bet heavily on a longshot filly who broke from the gate and took a commanding lead over a bunch of colts, he recounted with obvious glee.
Coming off the final turn, though, she inexplicably turned hard left through a gap in the rail and, despite her jockey’s protestations, she sprinted directly into a pond in the infield, where she drowned.
Unflappable, Spencer simply tore up his ticket and returned to poring over his dog-eared copy of The Racing Form.
He was asked by a friend recently how he had made out over all those years of betting on dark horses, broken-down nags and tired-out glue sources. “I’m down a little,” he said with classic understatement and a sheepish smile.
***
White offered her own funny account of an ongoing bet between a few reporters to get certain phrases past their editors and into the paper.
Once, the chosen passage was “creamy white thighs,” and the competition was ferocious — but so were the sharp eyes of the editors.
Ultimately, the contest was won by the paper’s cooking writer, who snuck it into a chicken recipe.
We hereby challenge our readers to come up with their favorite (clean enough for publication) phrases that they’d like to see in Summit up, and we’ll try to sneak ‘em in.
***
There was a strong sense of nostalgia and lament among the ink-stained wretches at the Press Club, itself a relic from the days when reporters took three-martini lunches and rubbed elbows with city officials over poker games in the basement clouded with cigar smoke.
Big-city newspapers are struggling mightily to regain their footing after losing much of their circulation to the more immediate sources of news like radio, television and now the web, (and the general disdain for papers by the younger generations) and much of their advertising support to the Internet.
By continually slashing staff as a result, papers are offering readers fewer and fewer reasons to pick them up, resulting in less interest from advertisers, and the cycle continues.
Spencer, a bean-pole version of Lou Grant, offered some hopeful words, professing his love for the smart, funny people who reside in newsrooms and the still-relevant need for first-hand reporting.
***
It’s Tuesday, and we’re sticking a press pass in our fedora. Tell us your favorite newspaper stories at
summitup@summitdaily.com.
