Pete Hamill Reminded Reporters That: 'You're Doing God's Work'

COMMENTARY

"You're doing god's work," Pete Hamill would say. He didn't mean god in the sense of one particular religion or the other. He meant that as a reporter, we're here to look after those less fortunate, we're here to help those who need it, to look after our neighbors, to tell their stories.

Hamill, who died on August 5, had spent 60 years doing just that. Telling the stories of neighbors, whether they were in Brooklyn or Belfast, Mexico or Manhattan, Vietnam, Nicaragua or any number of places.

"It's your job to find out what's happening, to let people know that you're there to listen and help however you can," he said.

As I write this, I wear around my neck the chain on which he handed me a press pass when he hired me at the Post. I'd been working for a chain of weeklies when he called me one day.

"Breslin tells me if I don't hire you, I'm an idiot," he said, referring to Jimmy Breslin who'd taken a liking to me and my work. "Can you come down to the Post before Breslin calls again and yells at me?"

I faxed over some clips and met him early the next morning. He hired me.

"Don't forget," he said. "Not every story is going to change the world but every story has the possibility of changing the world of someone."

Pete made you want to change the world, one story at a time. He was an editor, a columnist, a reporter, and he was right out of central casting. He loved "Deadline U.S.A.", the greatest of great newspaper movies. Humphrey Bogart plays crusading newspaper editor who takes on the mob and corruption. Watch the movie and you'll find yourself looking for him in the background shots.

He so believed in newspapers and reporting, what they could do. He worked for six newspapers in New York, was the top editor at two, and outlived four of them.

“You wanna know what I think would be God’s paper?” Pete told David Remnick for a New Yorker story back in 1993 when Pete was briefly editor of the Post. "You can have classic tabloid sex and violence, but better, well written, and accurate. God’s paper would have a coalition of audiences. We’d appeal to Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Dominicans, Ecuadoreans, Haitians—the new immigrants. That’s New York’s future salvation.

"We’d try to get the kids of the immigrants, the first generation of English-speakers. Cover immigration. Have a green-card columnist. Make a feature section. Cover the streets. Even the foreign stuff would reflect the community. Cover the best murder trial in Tel Aviv. Get into the Caribbean. The paper’s got to reflect the city more accurately than by just having drug dealers and guys in handcuffs plastered across the front page.”

He believed that a newspaper doesn't have to be naive, doesn't have to be dumbed down to have wide appeal. He wanted his reporters to understand that. Pete was both realistic about how things were but also a romantic about they could be.

Pete was inspiration.

It was on display in 1993 when Abe Hirschfeld briefly took over the paper and fired Hamill. Hirschfeld, whose vision of the city was one in which landmarks were replaced by parking garages, fired Pete and then denied it.

The move set off a revolution at the paper. With Hirschfeld not really paying attention to what was going on in the newsroom, we rebelled. With Pete working in the diner downstairs and Managing Editor Marc Kalech – another person gone too soon – leading things upstairs, we reported out more than a dozen stories about Hirschfeld and the man he named to replace Hamill.

All the articles were true. None were positive. My contribution was a story about Hirschfeld's history. It ran under the headline, "Who Is This Nut?"

There were cheers when the trucks rolled away with the paper that night. When Pete returned to the newsroom a few days later, he was greeted by television cameras and reporters from around the country.

Pete made you want to fight injustice in every form. He was generous. Even when he was no longer my editor, he always took my calls, would hear me out if I was having trouble seeing a story, trouble figuring something out.

More than anything, he always made sure that you never forgot what it means to be a reporter.

"Reporters are not cheerleaders," he wrote once. "If they were, they would leave the trade, become a press agent, and make a whole lot more money. More than anyone else in the country, they have a duty to police the government. No government can function if its postures, actions and sense of purpose become enmeshed in a tissue of half-truths, distortions, and outright lies."

When I was starting out, I had my own personal holy trinity of people I looked up to, people who helped me keep my eye on the ball, reminded me to do the right thing. They were Breslin, Jack Newfield, and Pete.

With Pete's passing, all three are gone. The lessons that they taught, remain.

Colin Miner, Patch's manager of news and content partnerships, worked for Hamill and counted on his guidance.