Ken Rossignol, the former publisher of the weekly newspaper St. Mary's Today, is a prolific author. His books include Titanic 1912, Bank of Crooks & Criminals, and The Story of The Rag. He often speaks on cruise ships about maritime history and the Titanic.
Q: What sparked your interest in the Titanic, and was there
anything that particularly surprised you as you learned more about it?
A: I first read of the Titanic at the age of 12 when I
read Walter Lord’s great novel, A Night to Remember.
Lord interviewed 60 survivors of the ship who were still
alive in 1956 when he wrote his book and the connection he made with so many of
those who were on the ship really added the human story as well as capturing
the emotions.
Even today, I think that so many who are touched by the
tragedy wonder, what would they have done had they been on the ship, what
thoughts would they have if were in a lifeboat gently moving away as the ship
sunk, lower and lower until it was gone.
Telling the story of the Titanic in my book, Titanic 1912,
occurred to me as I read the historical newspapers of the days and weeks after
the disaster.
I caught myself making the same mistake I had always done,
of only reading the headlines. When I decided to actually read the articles, I
found those first news stories were the best accounts of the Titanic I had ever
read.
Then I looked around and in spite of there being hundreds of
books about the Titanic, none went back and did any analysis of the original
news stories. So I did. I played out the news stories for the reader and then
provided the information as to whether or not the news story was correct, if
they got it wrong or right, as it is important to know the difference.
I also tried to track down how they got the story wrong,
through embellishment or miscommunication of wireless transmissions, as it was
both.
There was one news story that proclaimed that the Titanic
was too big for any shipyard in America to repair it and the ship would have to
be brought back to Great Britain. Another story in an English paper said that
the ship was under tow to Halifax. The Washington Post noted that there were
about 800 casualties and the London Daily Mail said “all were saved”.
On the 100th anniversary of the sinking, a friend in London mailed
me the glossy color pullout of the Daily Mail showing their coverage of the
event and they didn’t have enough class to bother to include their original
mistake.
I also included some contemporary coverage with
criticisms of news organizations of today showing an inability to get the story
right, even 100 years later.
Big surprise.
I have a new book about the poems and music of the Titanic
and again, I went back into history to see how people expressed their sorrow
and hearts over the tragedy.
I included a few original poems and stories of my own.
People all over sent to newspapers their compositions in verse about the
Titanic and from schoolchildren to some noted poets of the time, they added to
the body of the knowledge of the story that we have to read today.
At one point, the editor of The New York Times wrote a pithy
editorial, pointing out that his newspaper had been receiving hundreds of poems
a day. He wrote that just because one owned a pencil and piece of paper didn’t
make one a poet, and would people just stop sending them into the newspaper.
Newspapers today may mislead their readers but they are
seldom so unfriendly, especially about the reaction of the nation to a
tremendous tragedy like the Titanic disaster.
Q: What were some of the highlights of your years in the
newspaper business, and how were you able to select what to include in your
book The Rag?
A: I founded my local newspaper in Southern Maryland after I
realized that all our local papers had been sold out to the big chains and that
no one at those papers cared about reporting the news of crime or government.
They were simply go-along, get-along puff sheets and with
the exception of one, they are all in the ashbins of history. People wanted to
know what was really going on and they wanted their public officials held
accountable for how they spent the public’s money and conducted the operations
of government. Folks were also ticked off at how drug dealers and hellhole bars
blatantly operated and were poisoning their community.
With such a permissive attitude rampant among those who should
have been holding law enforcement agencies’ feet to the fire, no one was
pointing out the racist application of drug laws. The white drug dealers skated
and the black ones went to jail.
Oddly enough, our DWI coverage and pressure on officials and
drug dealers attracted attention and Eugene L. Meyer’s front-page news story in
the Post gained us national attention on our small-town rag in 1991. Dave
Statter brought me in to the WUSA fold and for ten years I was a free-lancer
with the station in providing them first-breaking news of the Southern Maryland
region for the Channel 9 audience. Later our coverage extended to WJLA and WRC.
Our news photos by Terrance Greenhow of the infamous arson
fire at Hunters Brook in Indian Head was picked up and run by news media around
the world, and our photographer Dusty Cassidy was the first on the scene so we
could break the story of the missing former CIA Director William Colby.
I was very proud of the fact that the country-club
Republicans and the liberal Democrats all hated me equally and that it took my
newspaper to break the story of Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening having an
affair with his deputy chief of staff, a woman to whom he promoted and gave
$31,000 in raises while bedding her. He denied the story but then his wife
divorced him and he married his girlfriend in time for them to announce their
love child to the world. He also should be held responsible for killing off the
chances of his Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend on succeeding him as governor
when the state put the first Republican in the statehouse in 40 years.
I had the killer of a 13-year-old girl confess to me and it
still took a bumbling sheriff another year to not lock him up and finally I got
the Maryland State Police to take over the case and bring the man to justice.
Covering drug raids, fatal wrecks, fires and printing the real news stories of
how our volunteer institutions and governmental groups often fail to do what
they say they are going to do or are paid to do is a great way to catch flack.
I don’t miss it a bit.
With a Republican sheriff and a Republican state’s attorney
leading a posse of six deputies out the night before the 1998 election and
cleaning out newsstands of all available copies of my newspaper in order to
avoid having voters read critical articles about them prior to voting, I was
given the opportunity to embark on a six-year battle in court, which we won.
The decision, Rossignol v Voorhaar, Fourth Circuit United
States Court of Appeals, ruled that it was in violation of the 1983 Civil
Rights Act for that crew of law officers to retaliate for news coverage and to
prevent readers from deciding what to read. The three-judge panel’s published
opinion made reference to the law being enacted in response to the activities
of the Ku Klux Klan and said such conduct was consistent with a society much
more oppressive than our own.
Ben Bradlee was really supportive to me (he subscribed to my
paper and paid his invoice each year for 22 years) and helped kick the butts of
the lazy minions of his Washington Post newsroom to get them to actually
provide coverage of the original sweep of newsstands, which his paper had first
passed off as a prank.
That changed.
After the Post ran a front-page Style section story, Good
Morning America brought me to New York to be interviewed by Diane Sawyer and
Chris Wallace did a special segment on 20/20, which explained the story in
detail. Bradlee told me at the conclusion of the court action, which went all
the way to the Supreme Court, that the decision was the most important First
Amendment ruling in 40 years. The wonderful firm of Levine Sullivan Koch
& Schulz took my case, along with counsel from Alice Neff Lucan, with lead
litigators Ashley Kissinger and Seth Berlin, and the rest is now the law of the
land.
Telling the story of the newspaper was really difficult, as
explaining to people how a small regional newspaper with a weekly print edition
and 24-hour internet coverage is accomplished can never be adequately
described.
From our readers, our advertisers, our eyes and ears in the
communities we served came the lifeblood of a news operation – information.
Since most web news operations in the area now equal the
lifeless reporting of the local sheets, I am constantly asked if I will return
my newspaper to life.
I sold the paper three years ago and the new owner closed it
after losing $1 million in eight months. During that time he changed the name
and changed the focus to fluff and stuff instead of crime and government.He
says he would like to give it another try and if does, he treated me right, I
would help him but I doubt that he will.
I still have my monthly, The Chesapeake, and it includes
some news along with fish. We have two collections of short stories from The
Chesapeake since 1988 in eBook and paperback available in all venues.
I recently put three years of work into a news/book, Bank of Crooks & Criminals, in which the story of an old Marine being robbed by his
banker at the point of a pen is revealed. The crooked bankers of Southern
Maryland and the crooked lawyers, of which we seem to have a never-ending
supply, have really worked over this man but the victim’s fortitude will
hopefully prevail. This experience teaches me that the news can be still be
covered on a local basis using the forces of digital publishing.
Q: How do you conduct the research for your books?
A: I spend a lot of time in libraries. I also travel around
the world giving talks on maritime history and draw upon my thousands of photos
I take to help me be inspired and to describe what I am trying to provide to
the reader.
Q: In addition to your writing, you have a website focusing
on the dangers of driving while impaired, an issue that has had a tragic impact
on your own family. What can you tell us about the site, dwihitparade.com?
A: The website speaks for itself and Jay Korff of WJLA did a
great job on a news piece that is accessible at the top of my website. He
won an Emmy for that work.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A story of how to better choose a cruise ship and what
one should really know about the real dangers that lurk on the high seas.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Sure, Gene Meyer was kind enough to invite me to be part
of a panel that you, Deborah, moderated on June 8, 2013 at the Books Alive 2013 conference and I decided to add my remarks to a Voice of the Author forum on
Amazon. Our fellow panelist, Robert W. Walker, chastised me for being too
humble in describing the reaction of the attendees to our panel on
self-publishing and promotion of our books. Therefore, my retort to Rob, I
turned into an actual eBook, Notice My Book, which is available now on Amazon but I have provided for your
blog readers here.
A link to The Story of the Rag.
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