Tom Mangan’s home page

I just don’t feel like leaving. I should, because if there was ever a time to be updating one’s resume and exploring one’s options, this is one of them. So why am I standing pat?

I’ve been a newspaperman for the past 20 years and I’ve always faced the same issue: Most towns have one newspaper that pays a living wage. If you want to stay in the newspaper biz, you either decide the town is nice enough to make up for the paper’s failings, or the paper’s nice enough to make up for the town’s failings.

See, chasing news trains us to be finders of fault. We’re always shaking loose the shortcomings, whether it’s our cats or our corporate overlords. Glass half-empty people, that’s us.

So it’s no small consequence to find yourself believing you’ve found a nice paper in a nice town. That’s what happened to me in the summer of ‘99. I took a job at the San Jose Mercury News because it had a solid reputation and I wanted to see the tech boom up close. Since then I’ve taken a liking to both the town and the paper.

So the news comes in this morning that Knight Ridder, our parent company, is being sold to a company that plans to sell the Merc and 11 other KR papers, and a friend asks how this will affect me.

It’s like this: I have no earthly idea how it’ll shake out, and what’s more, I don’t care. I mean that: if some corporate raider buys our paper, cuts our staff, nullifies our union contract and makes our life a living hell, I’ll deal with it then. There could be a stampede for the Merc’s exits, and who’d want to get trampled? And after so many have bailed, couldn’t there be more goodies left for the rest of us?

Maybe, or maybe not. It’s the future, it can’t be seen, only experienced in the present tense.

I was fortunate to be one of those kids in journalism school who was too shy to ask pushy questions of people who didn’t want to answer them. I found a niche on the copy desk, writing headlines, editing stories, laying out pages, figuring out computer systems, making my deadlines. I never got any bylines, never got any credit for breaking big stories, but I never had to ask any mothers how it felt now that their son had just shot up a high school. A fair trade-off.

And it turns out that regardless of the woes afflicting the newspaper business, people like me are still in demand, still getting nice jobs in nice towns. So long as news exists, somebody willl have to prepare it for public consumption, so I’ll always be able to find work. If they outsource all the copy editing to India, I figure what the heck, I always wanted to see the Taj Mahal, and I’m used to being polite in the company of cattle (Thank you East Bay Regional Park District).

Though the news biz trains us to find fault, it also trains us to be flexible. What seems like the top news of the day at 4 p.m. ends up on an inside page if a plane crash intervenes.

So I’m planning to just ride it out and see what happens. If I end up in Toledo in six months, so be it. It could be a nice town with a nice paper, for all I know.

It snowed again overnight. This morning there was a fluffy two-inch coat of
it on everything.

I was up before sunrise warming up the ol’ digicam. "These are gonna look
great," I thought. But when I downloaded them into the computer they all
had this blue cast suggesting all this might be scenes from somebody’s aquarium.
Then in occurred to me why so many arty photographers go black-and-white in
the snow: it’s mostly white anyway and the non-white parts offer wonderful visual
contrast.

It works better if you know what you’re doing, of course, but my experiments
with black and white came out not too bad, if I do say so.

It was a snowy welcome indeed.

Fenceposts are such trusty bits of architecture. Especially the snow-capped
ones.

Shot this one from the front porch.

Horses don’t mind the snow, though digging through it to find grass to munch
upon is a bit of an annoyance, I suppose.

Snow on a branch says "take my picture!"

If you use the flash the snow really pops against the background.

Daffodil bent down under the weight of the snow. It’ll all be gone in a couple
hours and the flowers’ll be standing up straight again.

One more look at the neighborhood.

Snow can be a bit drab if it has no trees to decorate.

So I’m minding my own business, surfing the Web like I do every morning, and
I look out the window and lo, out the window it’s snowing to beat hell out there.

I didn’t take 5,000-plus digital photos in the past two years for naught: I
knew that this early in the morning my digicam’s automatic flash would produce
some interested effects reflecting off the falling snow. So here are this morning’s
experiments:

Large flakes become large blobs when the flash hits ‘em.

This is what they call a dusting. Somewhere in the high Sierra it looks just
like this except there’s 14 feet of snow on top of everything.

"Ice scraper? Why the hell would I need an ice scraper in California?"