Jones went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times media reporter, author and host of public radio's "On the Media" (1993-97) and PBS's "Media Matters." But he started his career literally making the news: keying in "slugs" when the term meant a metal bar of type and not a short phrase summarizing an article. I thought about this a little when I shook his hand at the end of our lunch, realizing that I was going home to type my account on a nicely cushioned keyboard, in an ergonomically correct chair, where I would risk, at worst, a cramp, but not, oh, let's say, a searing geyser of magma.

"I got squirted," he tells me, cheerfully. "If one of the steel keys doesn't go down flush, then there's a gap, and the molten lead squirts through and hits the Linotype operator. It was very common."

Jones and I meet at Ocean Grill, a light, spare space with black seashell light fixtures. It's a rare good restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side -- land of a thousand brunches and nothing to eat -- which is where you probably live if you are, like Jones, a writer who moved to New York in the early '80s. "It's a lot of families with kids now," he notes. "They're not as likely to go out often."

Jones is promoting the fifth episode of "Media Matters," an hour-long PBS news program reporting on the media that's airing throughout May. "Media Matters" isn't only dry media reportage; the best segment of the current episode sends a team of editorial cartoonists to Cuba to spend time with government officials and average citizens. The piece captures several little-covered issues -- the work of cartoonists, the role of satire in the media, questions of foreign policy -- in one neat, entertaining package.

It's a heartbreakingly gorgeous spring day on the Upper West Side -- kids play in the cherry blossom petals by the natural history museum, a lunch-breaking construction worker brazenly smokes a spliff on Columbus Avenue, idle grown-ups from the neighborhood have aperitifs at the sidewalk tables. We sit inside.

I ask Jones how his family experience influences his view of the profession he now covers. Jones is from the fourth generation of a newspaper family in Greeneville, an east Tennessee mountain town where Davy Crockett was born and where Andrew Johnson returned from Washington. His father was the publisher; today, his brothers manage the company, which includes small newspapers and radio stations. "It was like another member of the family," Jones recalls. "I don't think a dinner passed that my father didn't get a phone call from somebody who was pissed off about something."

"How were you brought into the family business?" I ask.

"I basically fled it," Jones says. He didn't write for his school papers. After he graduated from Washington & Lee, during the Vietnam War, he entered the Navy and was assigned to a stultifying office job on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin. He started a small newspaper out of boredom, but didn't take the work seriously until a major story broke right in front of him: On a training maneuver, an Australian carrier rammed through an American destroyer, killing 70 people. The thrill of covering the disaster, he tells me, revived his interest in newspapering. After his tour -- and a stint of travel in Eastern Europe and Africa ("I got malaria, dysentery, all that stuff.") -- he returned to edit one of his family's papers.

So many journalism issues today are business issues, I say. For instance, the current episode of "Media Matters" covers the Chiquita scandal and Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes' recent decision to increase the business side's input into editorial decisions.

"A chain like Gannett might be motivated by money to settle with Chiquita," I venture, "but a family-owned paper might never have taken on a big business in the first place. Why's the old ownership model any better?"

Next page | The Wal-Martization of American newspapers