Hamill, Pete. News Is a Verb. Ballantine, 1998.
If you believe that journalism, when it is done right, is a noble profession, then Pete Hamill, who died a few days ago, should be one of your heroes. He was amazingly prolific and eclectic. He covered Vietnam from the battlefield and was one of those who disarmed Sirhan Sirhan when he assassinated Robert Kennedy. He wrote novels and art criticism, earning an honorary Ph.D. from Pratt. For most of his career, though, Hamill worked the city desks at New York City tabloids. He covered everything and even edited for a time. News Is a Verb expresses his enduring love for newspapers, even, as he says, when they break your heart. A good newspaper, he says, is a spouse, not just a short-time lover. A good newspaper, he says, requires a delicate balance between business interests and craft, and in the late 1990s, he thought that balance was being lost. Newspapers were run be men who did not understand them. Too many editors did not know the cities they covered. Newspapers were not doing a good job of speaking to the women in their audience, who bought the products of their advertisers. Nor were they doing a good job of talking to the middle- and working-class audiences that had been their mainstays. No matter the political position of the editorial page, Hamill thought that the news stories had to be balanced and aim for the truth. He was worried that papers, strapped for cash, were not covering the news as they should. Nothing Hamill says about newspapers has ceased to be true. But we should not desert them. ( )

To me, this is a fairly forgettable small book published in 1998. As the twentieth century drew to a close, in other words. Hamill begins with his account of working as a reporter and editor for several big-city newspapers, prominently the New York Daily News. He gives his view of the decline of newspapers and his thoughts on how a resurrection might be achieved. Focus on serious news, devoting more space to serious news, and eschewing vapid celebrity and entertainment piece. Give meaningful roles to women. But all is built on newspapering in 1998, 20 years ago.

I sat up and took notice in the final chapter, when Hamill addressed "the celebrity virus." I quote:

Newspaper people have more reason than others to know that some of these big names are mere creatures of hype and self-promotion. After all, they take the calls that are soon eagerly converted into stories. One entire subgenre flows from the jowly megalomania of New York real estate operator Donald Trump. There are many real estate people of more solid achievement and greater power than Trump's, and certainly many more accom­plished businessmen. But such men and women usually prefer to live outside the spotlight; like people who really
have money or those with truly interesting sex lives, they don't brag about them. They don't invent their lives in cahoots with press agents; they live them.
  But Trump flies to the spotlight, even demands it. His motto seems to be "I'm written about, therefore I exist." He personally telephones gossip columnists and reporters to present them with stories about the wonders of himself, his great love life, his brusque divorces. In the spirit of true collaboration, the newspapers quote "sources close to Trump" as their authority, a code known to other editors and reporters but not revealed to the readers. In a way, Trump has his own brilliance. He has a genius for self-inflation, for presenting an illusion of accomplishment that often becomes the accomplishment itself. A tiny solar system now revolves around Trump's own self-created persona: his ex-wives, Ivana Trump and Marla Maples Trump, followed by his poor teenage daughter, Ivanka Trump, who as I write is being hurled into the world of fashion models under the benevo­lent gaze of Daddy. This vulgar saga threatens to go on and on.
  No offense against taste is beyond Trump and his journalistic collaborators. Months after the death of Diana Spencer in a car wreck in Paris, Trump was publishing an­other of his ghostwritten hardcover hymns to his own ge­nius. He gave an interview to the New York Daily News, which was serializing this book, even though most editors knew it was a second-rate exercise in self-promotion. Trump knew exactly what the publishers of the Daily
News wanted, and the next day's front page showed his face, his book, and a nauseating headline that screamed "I WISH I HAD DATED DI."
  When I was editing the Daily News, I tried to control the virus of which Trump was the local symbol. Trump was not banned from the newspaper, but he did have to do something to appear in its pages. The "stories" slowed to a trickle, and one result was that we were beaten by the New York Post on the story of Trump's divorce. We had a rumor; they had Trump, speaking as a "source close to Trump." It was my responsibility and I chose not to run an unverified rumor. I was glad I made that choice. After I was canned, Trump "stories" came back in a fetid rush.
  Trump is virtually a genre now. But another genre

Best passage in the book. Now you don't have to read the entire 100 pages.