From time to time, I've idly wondered who wrote the screenplay -- too idly to look it up. Have you any idea? I assume it was somebody who once worked at the New York Post.

My favorite scene comes in that exchange when Spaulding Gray, playing an editor at what's clearly meant to be the New York Times, tells Michael Keating he's just blown his chance to cover the world. Keating screams back that he doesn't care, because he doesn't live in the world, he lives in New York City.

I would guess the non-screen-writing Koepp learned all he needed about newspapers from the Waukesha Freeman. One of the depressing things about newspapering is how little changes going from a fifth-rate rag in a one-horse town to the New York Times. You get some smarter people in the newsroom, and a lot more of them, at a big-city daily. Generally, management is a bit less miserly about things like travel. So the product improves. But the day-to-day grind of being a reporter or working editor looks and feels much the same, I think.

You're right, the one really significant difference between big dailies and small ones, besides the money, is that big ones are in big towns and small ones are in small towns, and things happen in big towns that don't happen in small ones, despite what thousands of novels and movies have had to say about ``ripping the veil off the quiet complacency of a small town to reveal the passions and scandal gurgling underneath.'' Or words to that effect.

But there's a disadvantage to that, if you're working at a big-city daily. The news-hole at the New York Times is not vastly larger than it is at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, or for that matter the (Portland) Oregonian. The guys at the Times have got a lot more to stuff into it, though. So you can have a pretty good story, one that would get a real splash back in Lake Woebegone, and it gets turned into a brief or lost altogether at the Times.

And I expect that gets held against you. I've never worked at the Times or the Post, but I've got some friends who have, and they say you run a risk there of getting a bad reputation through sheer bad luck. If you're on the Brooklyn cop beat and a few big crime stories happen to break in Manhattan over a couple of months, the boss editors start looking at you with a jaundiced eye, wondering why you're not ``producing.''

You are producing, course. It's the local bad guys who aren't producing, or at any rate not producing the kind of eye-catching atrocity that makes for a nice headline and a snappy lede. Boss editors at that point always forget that they were the ones who sent you to Brooklyn when all the bad guys were romping through Manhattan. It's not their lack of judgment but your lack of industry that comes in for discussion.