Newspaperin', and ... not

 What you can say today about Pat Fitzgerald getting the boot from his alma mater is that Northwestern University has a hell of a journalism department, and the kids just taught all of us why newspaperin' done right still matters.

What you can say about the New York Times is it could learn a thing or two from those kids, and at this rate you might as well make a paper hat out of it and float it down the Hudson.

Two newspaper parables. Two very different lessons.

The first is Thou Shalt Not Underestimate The Power Of Local News, because the kids at the Daily Northwestern did what good local journalism  is supposed to do: Inform and enlighten its community, and in doing so make it a better and safer place.

This is not to celebrate the firing of Fitzgerald, mind you, or to suggest his ouster makes Northwestern a better place. But it does suggest the school's freshmen football players might breathe easier now.

The widespread sexualized hazing unveiled by the Daily Northwestern, after all, exposed a sick culture that was both pervasive and too deeply rooted for Fitzgerald or his supporters to credibly deny they knew about it. The former player who talked to the Daily Northwestern said he believed Fitzgerald even participated in it.

It was concerning enough that Northwestern had already opened a six-month investigation into allegations made late in 2022, long before the Daily Northwestern story broke. That happened Saturday; two days later, Fitzgerald was gone.

And speaking of gone ...

So is the New York Times sports department.

The Times, America's alleged "paper of record," decided that record didn't need a department anymore that had won it two Pulitzer Prizes. So, with little warning, it announced it's dissolving sports and reassigning its sportswriters to other beats,

This likely came as a profound shock to those writers, for whom the sports department of the New York Times was the sort of newspaper mecca that rarely exists anymore. Hey, son, guess what? You're not gonna be the next Red Smith after all. You're gonna be covering next week's sewer board meeting.

I don't know what Red's saying about that in the Great Watering Hole In The Sky. But for all his worldly sophistication, I bet it ain't printable.

They were ink-stained wretches and kings of New York back in the day, and everybody knew their names. Red and Arthur Daley and Dave Anderson and George Vecsey and, more recently, William C. Rhoden and Selena Roberts and Pete Thamel. They were the backbone of what was sometimes derisively called the Toy Department in newsrooms, which was never accurate but always carried the aroma of jealousy.

After all, the so-called Toy Department sold the paper. And -- at the Times level, anyway -- generally contained far fewer hacks by volume.

Smith, the erudite son of Notre Dame, could have written intelligently about virtually anything. George Vecsey could have and did, having served a stint as a national and religion reporter who interviewed everyone from Tony Blair to Billy Graham to the Dalai Lama. He also wrote Coal Miner's Daughter with Loretta Lynn, whose film version won Sissy Spacek an Oscar in the title role.

Now all of that is gone, shuffled off to the Times online side hustle The Athletic. You want boxscores and game stories — but no longer the kind of beat writer access that produces the big stories — you have to go there. 

Or you can just pick up the Daily Northwestern.