Upbeat About Newspapers p. 17

By: TONY CASE

THE EXPLOSION IN entertainment news shows on television, and the glamour and wide exposure that are part and parcel of the tube, have lured many a print reporter to the medium.
But make no mistake about it. Veteran columnist Liz Smith is upbeat about the power of print.
Sure, Smith, whose work is distributed to about 100 dailies via the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, joins other gossip mongers every evening on the E! cable network's "The Gossip Show." But at the Newspaper Association of America convention, New York City's grande dame of dish offered up an impassioned defense of American newspapers and their arts and entertainment coverage.
Speaking on behalf of her colleagues in the celebrity press, Smith told publishers gathered in Manhattan's St. Bartholomew's Church: "All of us are desperately interested in newspaper journalism and in the survival of newspapers. They are still the bedrock foundation of all real news, and all facets of the larger media employ and need newspapers."
While many perceive entertainment reporting to be more about fluff and filth than truth and justice, Smith insisted she and her compatriots on the lifestyles page have more in common with their "serious" counterparts than critics might imagine.
"We are all alike in that we'd all like to break a big story, get it first, get it right, splash it all over the world, change history maybe, and help sell the publications or TV shows employing us," she said.
Arts and entertainment writers, like the crustiest of hard-news reporters, are "hooked on the drug of news," the columnist maintained. "We all have intensely competitive spirits, a belief in hard work, and the hamminess to enjoy our scoops and bylines and feature appearances ? and, of course, all of us feel we have always known better than our bosses what sells, what really matters and what is being neglected spacewise."
Smith pointed out that show business, now more than ever, can amount to important news. After all, motion pictures are one of our major exports, and corporate marriages involving Hollywood studios ? such as the much-hyped Disney-Cap Cities/ABC deal ? dominate today's front pages.
"Pure entertainment is having a bigger impact than ever," she said. "A single company can control a vast arrangement of communications empires."
What's more, entertainment and arts reporting reflects who we are as a nation, Smith observed. "An examination of cultural affairs, large and small, holds up a mirror to society in general," she said.
And foremost, editors ought to give entertainment news more and better play simply because the public wants it, Smith told NAA members. Readers are "desperate," she said, "to take their minds, even briefly, off the serious and terrifying stories that dominate modern life."
Smith even argued that by running stories about movie stars, museums and mega media mergers, newspapers can score one for the American way.
"I often say that gossip and soft news do not flourish in dictatorships," she said. "It takes a high-minded democracy to put up with Liz Smith and the National Enquirer. Because, should something horrible happen ? famine, pestilence, war, death, destruction, a nuclear holocaust ? you can be sure that gossip and the arts and entertainment would most likely disappear for the duration.
"Then, just like Richard Nixon, we wouldn't have gossip and the soft stuff to kick around anymore . . . and we'd be sorry."