Pete Hamill Explores Very Familiar Territory in "Tabloid City"

Pete Hamill, the venerable New York City journalist, has penned 20 books, the latest of which is a novel entitled Tabloid City. Though he stopped by to chat with Imus on the occasion of its release two weeks ago, they spent most of that time talking about Osama Bin Laden’s recent death. And so, Hamill graciously agreed to return today for a proper discussion of Tabloid City, which takes place in a world Hamill knows well, and one that is rapidly evolving.
 
Tabloid City is about a newspaper, but it’s also about so much more. “There’s a cast of characters that are not newspaper people, but are people you would encounter reading a day’s paper,” Hamill explained. “That was the feeling I wanted to give.”
 
Having worked at the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Newsday, and the Village Voice over the span of his 50-year career, Hamill is familiar with the characters that populate a city and consume its news.
 
One woman in Tabloid City, for instance, is a Mexican cleaning lady who loses her job; another is a stockbroker on the lam. “He cheated on a Bulgarian, which you should never do if you want to live,” Hamill noted. He also created for the book an amateur jihadist, whom he described as “one of these wacko kids who every once in a while gets obsessed.”
 
The paper in Tabloid City is a fictional publication owned by a young publisher. Over the course of one weekend, he decides to make the paper he inherited a web-only venture. “It happens to be a weekend where the longtime lover of the editor has been murdered at a good address,” Hamill said. “Which is always the classic tabloid delight.”
 
Even though the characters in Tabloid City don’t all work at the newspaper, Hamill insisted they’re all intertwined. “One of the roles papers have always played, in this novel and in this city, is they’re the connectors of the narrative,” he said. “As much as the subways help connect us physically, they connect us psychologically.” The same is true, Hamill added, in any city around the world.
 
The book contains, he said, “a sense of impending disaster” involving terrorism, especially toward the end. “We’re not sure who’s going to pull it off, or try to pull it off.”
 
But there’s also an impending sense of disaster looming over the newspaper field as a whole these days, as more and more content migrates to the internet. Hamill, who is about as traditional a newspaperman as there is, doesn’t believe this is necessarily a bad development.
 
“I do think online journalism is getting more professional by the day,” he said. And in the absence of being “first” on a story, print publications need to aim accuracy. “They have to be right. They have to be a verifying medium, something that says what really happened.”
 
If not, there’s always Imus, who, for better or for worse, online, in print, or on the airwaves, always kind of says what sort of happened. Or, at the very least, what he thinks about it.
 
-Julie Kanfer