Stop Press

By Donald Morrison

I SHOULDN'T BE TELLING YOU THIS by Mary Breasted

Harper & Row; 361 pages; $15.95

BYLINES by Bernard Weinraub

Doubleday; 590 pages; $17.95

DEADLINES by Desmond Ryan

Norton; 285 pages; $15.50

Deep in the desk of every hardbitten, wisecracking, deadline-haunted reporter, alongside the bourbon and the Maalox, is an unfinished novel. Typically, the manuscript is not about great events but about what is truly important to the journalistic fraternity: sex, office politics, money, fame and lunch. That, at least, is the message of these three novels by and about newspaper reporters.

The most entertaining of the trio, I Shouldn 't Be Telling You This, is former New York Times Reporter Mary Breasted's fondly cynical story of a young Radcliffe graduate named Sarah Makepeace. She moves from freelancing for the Evil Eye, a leftist Greenwich Village weekly that resembles the Village Voice (where Breasted once labored), to a coveted staff job on the Newspaper, a dignified daily that is unmistakably the New York Times. Sarah's boss is City Editor Ron Millstein, an endearingly manic liar who does not resemble Times Editors Arthur Gelb and A.M. Rosenthal. After spending weeks trying to find city hall by subway, committing Pulitzer-worthy sex with an undercover policeman and discovering the delights of midtown restaurants, she stumbles upon the Big Story: how a presidential candidate tried to have his homosexual lover bumped off.

The struggle for that scoop is only a minor episode in a far more epic battle: the one between Millstein and the national editor for the job of editor in chief. Indeed, to the Newspaper's scribblers, nearly every event in the newsroom, and in the world at large, is important only in terms of office intrigue. "When the copy editors crossed your commas out, people made an interpretation of your standing vis-a-vis Ron and of Ron's standing vis-a-vis [the national editor] and of both their standings in the eyes of [the editor in chief] and of the publisher in the great beyond," Makepeace learns. Will she learn anything else, like how to write a good lead or tell the difference between comptroller and controller? More important, will she ever get her Big Story into print? In the end, she begins to grasp the cynic's first rule of journalism: the most important byline is the one on the paycheck.

Compared with that spoof, Bylines is almost as sober and magisterial as the Times. Bernard Weinraub still reports for the Times from Washington, or at least he did before this book came out. His story opens with an endearingly manic-depressive editor who leaps naked from an eleventh-floor window before it can be determined whether the man resembles either A.M. Rosenthal or Arthur Gelb. The event touches off a torrid competition for the newly vacant editorship among a B-movie cast of newsroom characters: the likable but alcoholic deputy managing editor, the sober but inexperienced female national editor, the experienced but unpolished Jewish city editor, the polished but unassertive Wasp foreign editor, the assertive but black Washington bureau chief. Why do they want a job that helped drive the incumbent to suicide? Not so much to promote truth, justice and the American way as to bully subordinates. The editor, writes Weinraub perceptively, "promoted and crippled, he punished and forgave, he weeded out incompetents and . . . controlled the salaries, careers, even marriages of his staff."

Improbably, all the candidates conclude that the way to win the editorship is to come up with the Big Story. Despite so much interoffice sex that it is a wonder the paper ever comes out, Weinraub's tale sprints to its end as smoothly as a web offset press. Bylines is too gussied up with made-for-television passion and greed to resemble life at a big-city newspaper. The unlikely competition for the naked and dead editor's job does, however, neatly bear out the second rule of journalism: you're only as good as your last story.

For veracity, try Deadlines, written by Philadelphia Inquirer Film Critic Desmond Ryan and crammed with enough lore and craft about U.S. newspapers to qualify the reader for a diploma from the Annenberg School of Communication at Penn. Around a wheezing plot about a young investigative reporter trying to get the Big Story (a U.S. Congressman turns out to be--gasp!--corrupt), Ryan writes knowledgeably about libel law, newsroom computerization, labor disputes, inheritance taxes and galleys of other forces threatening to turn American newspapers into bland copies of one another.

Unfortunately, Ryan's characters talk like relics from The Front Page ("You want to hang a Congressman by the balls, you need more than a piece of thread. And how many times do I have to tell you not to smoke in my office?"). Otherwise, Deadlines is honest, unpretentious and informative. Breasted and Weinraub should have taught Ryan the third rule of journalism: don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. --By Donald Morrison This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.