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I was habitually late in delivering stories because I constantly rewrote them, believing that what I wrote would be preserved eternally on microfilm in the archives of Ochs’s enduring paper of record. We journalists, in my view, were the preeminent chroniclers of contemporary happenings, the foot soldiers for the historians.
With time, however, I begrudgingly acknowledged my older colleague’s remark. We were not writing for posterity. We journalists seemed at times to be allied with the fast-food industry, being the short-order cooks for consumers of often half-baked information and ideas.
"Gay Talese
