Joe Paterno has known a lot of newsmen in his day, from old hacks in fedoras who know their place and their gin to timid cubs he could swear he chased off his lawn that morning. He's known 'em all, the greats and the goats. And he's here to tell ya: He sympathizes with them.
He does, because they're hard-working Joes, too, and he's heard lately about
newspapers struggling with those things, those boxy things the kids have nowadays in place of the telegraph, whatever those things are called:
I read the newspapers. I feel bad about the way things have gone with the newspaper business, with the guys, with the whatever they call it, computers, getting all that stuff on. Because it's taking away some of the guys, and I think some of the great guys I've known and who wrote well who set a standard for writing, people don't realize guys, they were all sports writers. They were all sports writers first. Grant Rice and those guys, and I don't know it's a different world. And I'm not part of that world. I'm really not.
Clearly: Grantland Rice
died in 1954, a few years into Paterno's stint as a young Penn State assistant and more than a decade before he became head coach. From this answer, it's possible Paterno wasn't even a part of the world he helped define for a half-century.
But as always, the sharpest observations on a culture tend to come from outside of it: If you continue reading JoePa's mini-speech, you'll get a fairly astute analysis of media consolidation and corporatization from a guy who (I assume) has never taught a journalism course, but who's observed the evolution of the landscape over the years into a blur of talking heads with an agenda -- that is, for Paterno, "not the kind of world that I'm comfortable with." That's probably a majority opinion, even well below Paterno's age bracket, because you never know who you can trust in the modern free-for-all.
Now William Randolph Hearst: There was a modest newspaperman who'd give it to ya straight.
