Blaming Brenda Starr for newspaper woes

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Over the past few years, it has been my sad duty to help “roast” dozens of friends and colleagues who have retired - or, because in the journalism business, “retire” is a transitive verb - been retired from newspapers like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The newspaper business is going through some tough times, that’s no secret.

We lost another great one last week: Brenda Starr, the gorgeous redhead with the sparkling eyes who graced the comics pages for decades, was laid off.

Technically speaking, she didn’t work here. Technically speaking, she wasn’t really laid off; her strip merely was dropped, along with three others, from the comics pages when the newspaper got narrower.

Technically speaking, Brenda Starr wasn’t actually a real person, which is why I can refer to her as “the gorgeous redhead with the sparkling eyes” without being accused of objectifying a coworker.

But to me, Brenda Starr was real. She embodied everything good and glamorous about my career goals, which were to travel the world and engage in exotic romances without ever actually having to work very hard. Oh, from time to time, she would come home to The Flash with a big story, but you never saw her interviewing a sewer commissioner or writing an obituary or covering a city council meeting.

She dressed in high fashion, traveled by private jet. Recently she was in Paris and Kazookistan, as usual looking for her deadbeat ex-husband, Basil St. John, with whom she remains tragically smitten. In recent years, Brenda was given a promotion to editor, in which position she did even less work than she did as a reporter.

That part, at least, was true to life.

The comics pages now are filled with talking animals and badly drawn cartoon people. Dramatic comic strips like “Brenda Starr” tend to be on the wane. TV does a lot better job with this sort of thing. I’m not saying “Brenda Starr’s” plots are slow, but you could skip it for a month and pick it back up without missing much.

Still, in 2002, when the Post-Dispatch tried to dump Mark Trail, an even slower comic strip, an outpouring of pro-Trail sentiment caused the bosses to reconsider. Perhaps that will be the case with “Brenda Starr,” but she didn’t do too well in the last reader poll.

This week’s “Brenda Starr” plot (which you may have read online at gocomics.com) deals with the troubles of the newspaper industry. In Saturday’s episode, Brenda’s ascot-wearing boss, B. Babbitt Bottomline, tells her he can’t afford her anymore and puts her on unpaid furlough.

No profession enjoys gazing at its own navel more than mine (my profession, not my navel), and I’m thinking readers may be sick of hearing about it. Better Brenda should visit Mark Trail, have a torrid affair and fight a grizzly bear. That would perk things up for both of them, and maybe the bear, too.

The “Brenda Starr” strip first appeared in June 1940 in Chicago, a time and place where newspapers enjoyed their heyday. Having a girl reporter (as they were called) was then something of a novelty, even though most newsrooms had a few pioneers, mostly working on what were then quaintly called “the women’s pages.”

In the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, newsrooms were raucous places, manned mostly by men who wore white shirts and fedoras. The clatter of manual typewriters echoed like machine-gun fire through the smoky haze. Newspaper guys smoked and chewed, tossed cigar butts on the floor and spat into handy spittoons. Many of them kept a bottle in a desk drawer and needed a shave.

Brenda brought a little class to the joint. So did other comic strip heroes who flocked to the newspaper business, Clark Kent of The Daily Planet and Peter Parker of The Daily Bugle.

Newspapers were where the heroes, the Supermans and the Spidermans, wanted to be. We filled up the pages with news. Advertisers and readers flocked to us. We made tons of money.

Then, in the 1970s, women started taking over the nation’s city rooms. They covered real news, not just weddings and recipes. They made men take off their hats and shave. Then they got rid of the spittoons and bottles and pretty soon they outlawed smoking, too. We started working in cubicles, writing on computers and putting lots of color photos and drawings in the paper instead of classic columns of gray type containing what used to be called “news.”

Now we’re in trouble. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but I think the decline of the newspaper industry began with the decision to let women in the city room, to stop wearing hats and smoking and spitting. I’m not saying there weren’t other factors involved, but business was a lot better before all those Brenda Starrs showed up.

So I take back the nice things I said about her. Brenda finally got what was coming to her.