(Editor’s note: The author retired from Bloomberg News after 34 years with the organization. Del Giudice was a reporter for Bloomberg Radio. Prior to joining the Radio team, he covered the U.S. Treasury beat from 1990 to 2012.)
Immediately following my departure last year from Bloomberg — at age 67 ½ – I panicked, wept and grieved. I started my career in journalism as a stringer for United Press International at age 19 and craved for more. I am what they call a lifer. My only other paid job was as a hospital orderly as a kid – a bedpan jockey. Fitting, I guess.
I started on the police beat in Springfield, Ohio, in 1977 (yes, our president’s beloved Springfield) and by miracle landed a full-time job at UPI’s local desk in Washington, D.C. — a job that encompassed covering the cops too.
Today, I have returned to the fold – this time in Denver – and created the online “Daily Sketch – Colorado’s Tabloid” published Monday-Thursday. As an AARP member I deserve a three-day weekend.
So long implicit price deflator. Hello five-alarm fire! My property loses about $100/month and I take no salary. Hence, I am doing better than Murdoch.
Here’s how I describe my little baby, which uses the Blogger.com format:
“Welcome to ‘Tabloidia.’ We say: ‘Give the people what they want!’ Our lean and mean staff makes a valiant effort covering Colorado. … We avoid sleaze (unable to afford libel lawyer) and partisan politics. Our spotlight is on the police, fires and human interest. Daily Sketch is compiled by real people. No AI. Locally owned. Quoting the motto of a storied tabloid in New Jersey: ‘Love us. Hate us. Read us.’ We emulate the Boston Herald, New York Daily News and Toronto Sun.”
This task I take seriously and purchased, read and studied 18 vintage books on the tabloid businesses from the New York Daily Graphic (AKA the “porno-Graphic”) of the roaring 1920s to the London Daily Mirror and Generoso Pope’s National Enquirer, once known for mob ties, and the fabled Trentonian of Trenton, New Jersey.
There are no scantily clad Charleston dancers in my Daily Sketch, though I have taken a page out of the New York Graphic. The Graphic was too small to effectively compete with the Big Boys, so it carved its own path. Ditto the Daily Sketch.
Yes, I cover breaking Colorado news — but I also write about kittens and puppies – lost and found and those rescued by burly firefighters.
Everyone loves kittens, puppies and burly firefighters.
The formula works! The Daily Sketch – named for a historic Fleet Street tabloid — has garnered more than 1.5 million visits since last year. Not too shabby.
Police and fire departments in Colorado and Wyoming post press releases and photos on Twitter and Facebook in real time.
The web address in dailysketchdenver.com. Daily Sketch is also available on social media.
A bit more on the history and heritage of Tabloidia for you kiddies:
The New York Graphic developed a fabricating photo technique known as the “composograph.” As an example, the Graphic’s front page once featured a “photograph” of silent movie star Rudolph Valentino’s spirit being greeted at the gates of heaven by opera virtuoso Enrico Caruso. Momma mia.
The public – readers of all socio-economic stripes – loved it. Said the magazine Time: “Not all readers of that gum-chewers’ sheetlet, the New York Graphic, are gum-chewers. Some of them smuggle the pink-faced tabloid into Park Avenue homes, there to read it in polite seclusion.”
Alas, advertisers did not like the Graphic – as I noted it was oft referred to as the “porno-Graphic” – and its life was short, 1924-1932.
The granddaddy of America’s tabloids started as a Sunday evening broadsheet called New York Enquirer, published on Sunday evenings. (You read that right.) Under Generoso Pope’s ownership, the rag was re-named National Enquirer and went tabloid with a reputation for exceedingly graphic crime scene photos – for which there was a market.
Later, of course, the National Enquirer moved toward celebrity news as a “Supermarket Tabloid” available for sale at the grocery store checkout line as it still is today.
