WSJ reporter Newman is a life-long skeptic

Matthew Kassel of the New York Observer profiles former Wall Street Journal reporter Barry Newman, who wrote more than 400 A-hed feature stories for the paper’s front page and has a new book out about feature writing called “News to Me.”

Kassel writes, “He went to the Journal in 1970 and started out on the metals and mining beat but quickly proved to be an adept generalist. His disposition fit well with the Journal, which has never really been defined by geography—and therefore hasn’t historically required exhaustive coverage of breaking news—which gives its features writers a lot of latitude.

“Mr. Newman told me of his fascination with the A-hed, the Journal‘s own term for its quirky page-one features, invented by the late editor Barney Kilgore, who is credited with shaping the modern Journal. ‘It was delightful to read stories that had a voice, that were winking at the reader,’ said Mr. Newman, who edited a recent collection of A-heds called Dogfight at the Pentagon. He wrote his first page-one feature at the age of 23. It was about coffee.

“‘I remember it vividly,’ Mr. Newman recalled. He’d gone up to General Mills in White Plains, where the company was touting a new dark-brown instant coffee. Is it better? Mr. Newman asked the executive showing him around. No, the executive told him. No difference at all. They’d just changed the color. What’s more, they sealed in a blast of coffee aroma before they sealed the contained to make it more appealing to consumers. ‘It made me a life-long skeptic,’ Mr. Newman said.