WHEN I FIRST BECAME A NEWPAPERMAN， THERE WAS A CITY<br >room cliche. The reporter would come back to the office after<br >a day of chasing a story. He would sit down， go over his<br >notes， and craft his piece on deadline. A copyboy would take<br >it to the city editor， who would pass it on to the copy desk，<br >who would send it downstairs to be set in type.<br > And then the reporter would head for the bar closest to the<br >newspaper building， and his colleagues would begin to come<br >in at the end of their shifts， and they would say to him: "What<br >really happened?" And he would tell them. The story he would<br >relate in the bar often would bear little resemblance to the<br >story he had just written for the newspaper; in almost every<br >case it would be better， truer， livelier.<br > When I started writing a column， I made one resolution: I<br >would try to tell the same story in the newspaper that I would<br >want to tell my friends later on in the bar. My rule of thumb<br >was that if I succeeded in doing that， I was succeeding as a<br >reporter. That rule still seems to hold up pretty well.<br > I think of the prototypical national columnist， and I envision<br >six hundred Washington pundits sitting back in six hundred<br >easy chairs， sucking on six hundred pipes and spewing out six<br >hundred great thoughts about the MX missile debate in Con-<br >gress or the latest Supreme Court decision. It often seems that<br >if a story didn t first appear on the front page of the New York<br >Times or the Washington Post， then it just doesn t qualify as<br >news.<br ><br ><br >