Thirty years ago, the average reporter was more likely to be found guzzling beer at the corner bar than sipping white wine with the political operatives. Many of them never finished college. Hamill was a sheet-metal worker as a teenager. Now, even Royko has moved to the exclusive suburb of Winnetka, Illinois. It's helped separate us from the readership.
Editors tend to be more part of a managerial class now.
Most of them live in the suburbs. Hamill acknowledged that he was speaking from his country house in Ulster County, New York, where he was working on a movie script. But he hastened to add that he does all his newspaper writing at his Greenwich Village apartment. The newsroom has become a heavily credentialed place, and the new journalistic beverage of choice is cappuccino. This is a vast improvement in some ways, for it better enables journalists to cover such highly specialized beats as constitutional law and military procurement and corporate finance.