For
a journalist, there are a few things to look forward to. There's the end of an
election. The closing of a trial and of course when the town's annual
rodeo/festival/art show is finally over. But after a long day of grilling
elected officials, dredging through public records, chasing ambulances and
writing 25-inch stories, journalists always have one thing to look forward to -
relaxing with a tall cold one.
The old stereotype of the curmudgeon journalist with a bottle of whiskey in his desk is alive and well today because journalists like to drink.
Between
natural disasters, covering triple homicides and reporting on fatal accidents,
journalists see some pretty horrific stuff. And since journalist pay ranks
around that of a trained circus monkey, they can’t afford any psychological
help. However, they can afford a $15 bottle of Fighting Cock bourbon.
Nothing
takes the edge off after a day of reporting on the scene of drug bust, shifting
through six years of financial papers at city hall and stressing over deadlines
like a nice shot of low-shelf whiskey or a pint.
Interns and journalists just out of school have all heard the stories of the days when journalists kept flasks in their back pockets and handles of Jim Bean in their filing cabinets. But today, newspapers and their corporate owners shun such habits. But go to any veteran journalist and he'll show you were he keeps his bourbon.
And if journalists don’t like to drink because of having to interview a widow who just lost her husband in Iraq, then there is always job security. As one journalist after another exits the newsroom with their severance check in hand, journalists flee to their safe haven – dive bars.
Drinking
is done best by journalists in shoddy bars and questionable establishments. The
kind of places where a journalist might run into the same perps he writes about
on his beat.
And while journalists can never really ever take off their journalist hats,
while drinking, there is an unspoken ceasefire among journalists. Rival
journalists, who otherwise would not share more than a glance with each other
at a press conference, share stories about griping editors and mayors who like
to call journalists sweetie or honey. Editors and journalists, who in a
newsroom walk a very palpable line of rank, talk about the cute receptionist
and how the publisher is a moron. But after shots have been taken and tabs have
been paid, journalists go back trying to scoop the competition and avoiding
social interaction with editors.
You can tell a journalist’s bar by names such as Trail Dust, Cell House 7 and Top Hat Lounge. Such dingy hole in the wall watering holes will typically have two beers on tap, PBR and Budweiser, and a well of cheap liquor.
Here journalists gather to complain about the death of their industry and how much they miss the good ol’ days. Most of the time such bars are a stone’s throw from the newsroom so weary journalists won’t have to stumble too far to wet their dry palates.
A good beer and a shot is just the medicine for any spent journalist who survived another treacherous day in the trenches reporting the truth. To report the news is to be a journalist. Same goes for drinking. Drinking is so much a part of a journalist's life that J-schools nearly made it part of the curriculum but instead choose copy editing. And journalism has suffered ever since.
Salude’
