Alex Beam on the Press Corps of a Generation Ago

Alex Beam:

When being a journalist-on-the-rise was a glass half-filled job: My first job in journalism was at the now-foundering Newsweek.... Newsweek in 1977 and 1978 was fat, plush, almost 100 pages long, and choked with advertising.... I was an editorial assistant/fact-checker, with duties analogous to those of an 18th-century cabin boy in the Royal Navy. My favorite person... Richard Steele, assured me of a bright future, because I knew when to refresh his bottomless vodka glass......