My Netflix queue is a jumble, and so I had a hard time remembering why I wanted to add The Sweet Smell of Success to my viewing list. Still, after a few weeks on the shelf, we watched it last weekend. I knew it was a “classic,” but black and white?!
Anyway, the theme that I found relevant to my skewed worldview was the power of the gossip columnist, J.J. Hunsecker. The pen wields incredible clout in this 1957 film. Competing gossip columnists lift up or (more often) destroy careers, businesses, and lives.
Most of Sweet Smell follows scheming between the columnist Hunsecker and the press agent, Sidney Falco. The career of Falco depends on his access to Hunsecker, and the columnist makes him pay dearly for a few scattered words in favor of Falco’s clients. Still, in the circulation wars that are endemic to a city of multiple newspapers (remember this is NYC in the 1950s), the columnist needs his parasitic remora for an edge up on the competition. We witness Falco working three different gossip columnists in this film, playing one against the other. Hard to imagine in this day and age, where newspapers usually have a monopoly in daliy print delivery in most American cities but that monopoly means less and less every day with a declining audience.
Will blogs like Wonkette or other gossip columns attain that influence? Will the rise of blogs restart the competition for audience in the world of gossip, opinion, and innuendo (read: columnists)? Or has cable television and talk radio already stolen that place in the media ecosystem and newspapers and bloggers alike are just sniffing at the crumbs either way?
My take is that the media reads blogs more than anybody else, so the echochamber reaches across the ecosystem already. And I still don’t believe local/regional newspapers have a long-term future.