George Solomon on Ben Bradlee
George Solomon is the director of the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland. He was The Post’s assistant managing editor for sports from 1975 to 2003.
The newspaper clipping would come in a brown office envelope, my name clearly written by the assistant to the executive editor of The Washington Post.
Ben Bradlee was not an Internet guy. He never figured out computers or had much appreciation for them, although he did occasionally read an e-mail. He was a newspaper guy; no bookmarks for him.
Instead, scattered on his desk every day in his glass-enclosed fifth-floor office were copies of The Post and the competition: The Washington Star (later, Washington Times), New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, USA Today (McPaper, he called it) and sometimes his hometown Boston Globe.
The clip that would come your way was a good story, or news break, from one of those competing newspapers that Bradlee, who died Oct. 21, believed should have appeared first in The Post. On the torn-out clipping, Bradlee would scrawl in red: “What’s this?”
