A Letter From the Publisher

By John A. Meyers

The image of journalists as a hard-drinking tribe is almost wearisomely familiar. It has been reinforced in books and movies by characters from Jake Barnes, the hard-boiled news correspondent of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, to Lew Marsh, the boozing reporter that James Cagney plays in the 1951 film Come Fill the Cup. Even TV's Lou Grant & Co. regularly restored their spirits with spirits at the local hangout.

As veteran journalists know, the image was grounded in some truth. Recalls Assistant Managing Editor John Elson, who supervised this week's cover stories: "When I started out, in what was then a male-dominated profession, part of the macho image was the ability to hold your liquor. Many of the rituals centered on alcohol: the weekly two-hour lunch with colleagues, the long hours of closing nights in an editor's office."

But like the rest of the business world, journalism is moderating its ways. Notes Associate Editor J.D. Reed, who wrote the story on America's changing drinking habits: "The situation has reversed. People see alcohol not as part of their career but as something that could conceivably mess it up." San Francisco Reporter Jane Ferguson realized how much journalism had changed when she and two colleagues raised their glasses at lunch to toast another writer. Says she: "What was in our glasses? Bottled mineral water. Not a drop of alcohol for any of us." Washington Reporter Susan Schindehette also finds abstemiousness among her sources. "It is the rare interviewee these days who asks for a couple of Scotches over lunch," she says. Reporter-Researcher Elizabeth Rudulph tested several exotic new nonalcoholic tipples like Boncontent, a concoction of kiwi fruit and mineral water, and orange-flavored Perrier, as well as countless bottles of water. Concludes Rudulph: "Still water is the best thirst quencher, and flavored water is better for you than soft drinks."

Boston Correspondent Timothy Loughran was amazed by the radical shift in attitude toward alcohol when he returned to the U.S. last year after four years in Central America. "The newspapers were filled with articles on tougher drunken-driving legislation," he says. "Roadblocks that I equated with military searches for antigovernment guerrillas were being used by U.S. police to catch violators. And everyone was drinking wine, mineral water and fruit juices."

Does all this mean that journalism has turned into a profession for teetotalers? Said Managing Editor Ray Cave, nursing a modest Scotch: "Nope." We'll drink to that.