My grandfather was an old-fashioned newspaper man who worked for the Associated Press during the Great Depression and World War II and then inherited from my great-grandfather a stable of small town Iowa newspapers to run and edit. One afternoon, when I was twelve, as the mammoth printing press roared in the basement, he lit his pipe and answered my questions about why he had spent his life as a journalist. He squinted at me through the smoke knowing I loved to hang out in his messy, rushed, and ink-scented world and perhaps thinking I had inherited my mother's love for newspaper work. "Journalism," he said, "is writing history on the fly." I do not think this was his quote, but it efficiently sums up the work of the journalist as important-writing history-yet provisional-quickly, without time for reflection or for what might follow. Then he continued, "Sometimes that is what we get to do-and that is what really makes this job worth it. But most of the time we are reporters." Throughout my work as a writer about architecture, I have often thought of my grandfather drawing a line between reporting and journalism. And as certain colleagues have insisted that they are "critics" rather than (merely?) journalists, I have wondered how "criticism" fits into his construct of writing in periodical publications.
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