Not reading the news

Despite having been a news reporter, I rarely read the news. My biggest excuse is that I usually look at the newspaper while I'm eating, so it's easier to read items that are on one page—advice columnists, funnies, tabloid weekly sections—than news articles that start somewhere and continue elsewhere, requiring constant rearrangements of paper. While reading "Dear Amy," I can sip my tea and eat my toast without worrying about getting newspaper ink on my food, or papers scattered all over the table.

But the bigger reason is that I don't know how to respond to bad news. After reading about citizens murdered in Syria I feel sad and angry. After repeated readings, I start to feel helpless; I don't know what to do with that information.

I can't seem to keep all the daily and ongoing acts of evil in my mind at once. I'd rather read about choosing hellebores varieties for the garden (in the weekly Home section), or how two recently married people met and courted (in the Sunday Style section). I can do something positive with that  information—the couple might work its way into my fiction, the hellebores might work its way into my garden. But that picture of a stricken child, whose parent was just shot—what am I supposed to do with that? Simply file it away in my mind? My brain is not an unfeeling hard drive.

All I really need to know about evil and horror is a photograph I saw years ago of a German soldier about to shoot a mother and child. The mother is futilely trying to use her body to shield her child. The viewer knows the pair died seconds after the picture was taken. I know that such cruelty has happened since then millions of times over, in small and big ways, but there is essentially nothing worse than what happened in that moment.

I want to be an informed citizen, but if I read the news all the time I would probably reach a state of despondency. I'm not sure I would leave my bed or, at least, my house and garden. I might reach for chocolate, romance novels and Hallmark Channel movies for comfort. So I glance at the front page, on my way to other, happier sections. While I'm reading about new movies, I'm aware that those stricken faces are still there on the other pages even if I'm not looking directly at them.

The continuing joy of paper

Hurricane Irene passed through this weekend, hurling branches against our house all night into early morning. Acorns rolled madly across the roof and deck. In the morning, the yard was a chaos of oak leaves. And we were without power.

No power means no Internet for us since it comes via FIOS (fiber optic lines). But, out on our driveway to greet us the next morning was our Sunday Washington Post. God knows what conditions our newspaper delivery man had driven through--we later found out that there were two big oaks down across our road. We sat down to cold, milkless cereal and read the Post in the dim quiet of our house.

What a miracle that throughout the storm, the Post's writers and production staff had continued to labor and were able to get it out to the suburbs in a few hours. Without that paper on the table in front of me, I would have had no local news, save for what we could catch on my portable radio, between endless ads.

The next day, I tried to make calls on my cell phone to see what was open. But I had thrown away the phone book when it had arrived a few weeks ago, thinking I could look everything up on the Internet. Fortunately, I had written the number for the county library reference line on my paper Rolodex and called it for the number of the public library (wanting to check on whether it had power or not)--where I sit now, on a borrowed terminal, writing this post.

Last night I read an Alice Munro short story ("Dulse") by lantern light. If I'd had it on a Kindle only, it might not be accessible anymore, the power given out.

I could live this way for awhile, I think--we have books and flashlights and (cold) water (I have taken one-half of a cold shower so far, the hot giving out before the end). There is a sense of contentment and calm, save for the sound of the dripping freezer, letting go of its frigid interior and all the good food therein.

The disposible librarian

Unfortunately, my work experience and graduate degree are in two professions that seem to be disappearing.

Everyone knows about newspapers making their slow exit and, thus also, newspaper careers. But librarians? You'd think with such an information overload there would be more need than ever for librarians—to find and explain, weed out the unnecessary, and catalog the rest. Apparently not.

I saw the writing on the stacks, years ago, when (what was then) the U.S. General Accounting Office began to pull professional library staff out of the Technical Library where I worked. It became merely a room full of books and CD-ROM terminals, which, in retrospect, doesn't seem all that horrifying since most GAO researchers have advanced degrees and know their way around a library.

Children don't have the advantage of college training when they head to a library. It helps to have someone there who can suggest books they never would find on their own. Yet in my Maryland county right now—one of the wealthiest in the nation—public library hours have been slashed and the children's desks sit empty.

At least, I thought, school libraries are safe. But next year's school budget proposes to slash school media specialist positions to half-time. Librarians won't have time to interact with classes, they'll be there just to keep the library together. Arizona and California, among other states, have already slashed school librarian positions.

Writers, take note! These changes mean that in the future children and parents are going to be on their own when they walk into a library to select a book. The kids will probably grab the books with the flashiest covers, or whatever their friends are reading. The parents will probably grab children's books by the authors they recognize, or those with awards noted on their covers. Books that could have been transformative or comforting are going to remain on the shelves, unknown and ignored—or not ordered at all.

One of the reasons I am a writer is because I loved books so much as a child. They were always accessible to me. I could walk to the branch library on lazy summer mornings, and check out books from the school library during the school year.

That branch library closed more than 20 years ago. Now there is only one library for the entire county, to which most children must be driven. Still, I presumed, the school library offered children easy access to books, at least during the school year. Soon that safe harbor may disappear—if it hasn't already.

My fear is that when counties have more money again, the need for librarians—what it is like to have someone guide you through both stacks and cyberspace—will be forgotten.

(The photograph is the inside of my hometown library, Moravian Falls Public Library, summer of 1977, before it closed)

Paper romance

Mostly, the Washington Post offers news of the right-now, whether politics, tragedies, or entertainment. But there are stories of regular people's lives there, too: in the obituaries (as I noted before) and in its relationship sections, specifically Date Lab in the Washington Post Magazine and OnLove in its Sunday Arts and Style section.

As a former reporter, I should poo-poo this increasing trend of focusing so much news ink on tales of dates and nuptials.  But as a fiction writer, I love being able to peer into people's lives every week, to see what makes relationships click or not, to hear what men and women regard as romance or dating disasters.

To be perfectly honest, a lot of people in the D.C. region are pretty dull. They're smart and well-educated, for the most part, but from a fiction writer's perspective, many of their lives are already on a similar, manifest trajectory: graduate degree, well-paying job, marriage, house in the suburbs in a good school district, children. With so few surprises, there's not a lot of (obvious) potential for a story there. And their stories often sound alike. In OnLove, the men often pop the question to their future wives by getting on one knee in a beautiful locale; the couple then has a dream wedding and goes off to an island honeymoon. They meet because they work in the same workplace, or are introduced by friends. Yawn (and gag).

But then there are the occasional exceptions, the stories of unusual proposals, unexpected matches, or stories of people who are struggling to be together. There have been straight and gay couples who marry, despite one of them having a terminal illness (e.g., "Make sure you do today what you can't do tomorrow"); poignant and unusual stories a fiction writer would be hard-pressed to come up with*; the people who find love a second or third time around (e.g., There's Nothing Like Older, More Mature Love).

And then there are moments that are hard to categorize (from Nuptials,  Jan. 1, 2011):

Shortly before New Year's last year, Mike proposed at home in a low-key moment: After pausing the film "Pineapple Express," he offered Erika an anniversary gift - a ring from Tiffany's. 

(If I were leading a fiction writers' workshop, I would ask the class to describe the scene in further detail, or to write about this couple five years in the future....)

* I wanted to find examples of stories like this, which I've read in the past, but the washingtonpost.com search engine won't let me find them.

At least there are still jobs for journalists...

Ever since I subscribed to Groupon a few months ago, I've been receiving short, witty blurbs in my Inbox everyday, each enthusiastically describing bargains and deals for restaurants, spas, and various types of instruction.

Little did I realize that the people writing those Groupon blurbs represent a new wave of journalism, and that Groupon itself is becoming one of the biggest employers of journalists (and creative writers) in the country. An article in the Dec. 20th The Atlantic ( Forget Journalism School and Enroll in Groupon Academy - Elizabeth Weingarten - Technology - The Atlantic ) states that "Forty percent of Groupon's writers have prior journalism experience, 70 percent were creative writers and 20 percent wrote marketing or business copy." Groupon's CEO even declares in the article that the "most well-read publication now might be Groupon."

Many of the Groupon "deal" blurbs are clever and cute, but a long and steady diet of what the article calls this "hybrid journalism-advertising prose" is getting a little cloying and wearisome for me. Each blurb is, essentially, a clever lede (journalism-speak for a catchy and/or mood-setting first paragraph of a story) that leads to a mere classified ad/description. Some recent examples:

Herbert Hoover won America's hearts and votes when he promised a college-educated chicken in every pot and a kayak in every garage. Get a taste of the American dream with today's Groupon...

Eating with your hands is a joy second only to playing a woodwind instrument with your feet. Dig in with all four hands with today's Groupon: for $15, you'll get $30 worth of Ethiopian food...

Defy the whitening forces of winter and transform yourself into a bronzed god, goddess, or Gilbert Gottfried with today’s Groupon...

Photographs provide a more concrete way of recording recollections than sketching portraits in sand or dictating memoirs to an empty jam jar. Preserve precious memories with today's Groupon...

Should I really complain? It may not be poetry or even good journalism,  but at least writers are getting work (and I am, occasionally, getting organic rotisserie chicken and other such succulent delights for 50 percent off...).

Writer Profile: Nan K. Chase

I met Nan Chase more than two decades ago, shortly after I’d moved to Boone, N.C., to run one of the Winston-Salem Journal’s Northwest bureaus. Nan, who worked for the local Watauga Democrat, invited me over to her house for lunch, a short walk from my downtown office. I was amazed that she could converse freely with me while she ate and ground food in a hand-cranked gizmo and fed it to her baby, propped contentedly on one knee. She had a big, old house with a garden, and a husband and three kids—comforts I sorely lacked in my tiny rented apartment.  That hour gave me a vision of what my life could be, and perhaps initiated my eventual departure from my lonely life as a solo reporter. We kept in touch over the years, a main point of connection being a very small magazine (which I edited and Nan, for some reason, admired). Nan wrote a short piece about AVSM for the Washington Post Magazine and later started appearing on its pages under the pseudonym “Anita Menendez.”

I’ve always enjoyed reading Nan’s journalistic work, from her opinion pieces in N.C. dailies to travel pieces in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and the ease with which she has tackled a variety of subjects, from furniture to football, gardening to the Jewish Sabbath. Nan has authored two books in recent years: Asheville: A History, and Eat Your Yard! and co-authored another, Bark House Style: Sustainable Designs from Nature. For more on Nan, see her web site for Eat Your Yard! 

We spoke recently at a Chinese restaurant in Maryland, a conversation that continued via email.

Why did you decide to study journalism and/or what led you to be a writer? Did you write as a kid?

It turns out that my father's side of the family has had many writers or storytellers through the years. For instance, I have a second cousin (never met him) who is an entertainment writer at the Orange County Register, and there are several other reporters in the family. My father is a wonderful writer; he provided the "big picture" perspective for my writing, while my mother was the grammarian. Together they provided me a perfect writer's education.

I got a lot of encouragement in high school from teachers who said I was a good writer. They said, “Don't stop writing.” So I didn't. I was very shy in high school and college, but did write for the high school paper. In college I pursued a double major: economics and journalism. I was terrified of the thought of conducting an interview, and somehow got through college without doing that. Then, when I had a newspaper job in Boone, N.C., all that reticence disappeared. I am a voracious reader, and ultimately that is necessary for a writer.

Would you say you’ve experienced a creative Renaissance since your kids left your house? You have published three books since they left!

No. That’s because I really feel I did my most honest and important work very early on, when they were quite young and I was still in my 20s and 30s, with “nothing to lose” in a small Southern town yet. I’m sure it’s true for many writers that their most powerful work comes right out at the beginning (and the rest of the career is workmanship). At the same time, once my children, and my husband and I, were established in the community, I had a natural tendency to pull back into less threatening, ”lighter” topics.

Now, it is true that I have written three books (co-author of one of them) in short order. I had never, ever thought of doing a book, before about 2005. It happened that my youngest child was 20 years old and didn’t need me in any way for transportation, etc. And so I did have the long stretches of time necessary for book research and writing. I did have the time not to cook or do many household chores. Early on, while I was writing essays and articles, and the children were young, I managed to create great quality time a few minutes or hours at a time.

Now time is a pressure in another way: one can only count on so many years of productive work capacity, and it just doesn’t last forever. So I suddenly have a brain full of book ideas and have to decide where to turn next.

Why did Asheville intrigue you as a subject?

My husband, Saul, and I found that we were spending all our weekends in Asheville, having fun, enjoying the architecture, the music and theater, the restaurants, even the shopping. So we bought a small condo as a weekend home (one benefit of cutting one’s children loose economically upon college graduation). After taking a walk in the beautiful Riverside Cemetery we stopped at Malaprops bookstore, where I asked for a book that would tell me why Asheville looks so distinctive, and why the downtown was enjoying a commercial and cultural renaissance after so many years of decay. The clerk said, “There isn’t one.” Shazzam! Instant topic.

The dark bookends of my reporting career

When I started work at the Winston-Salem Journal in the summer of 1985, a dark cloud hung over me, especially as I walked to work from the public parking garage that first day of work. It was an unease that was with me until I was safely inside the building.

The previous year, on her way to work, newly hired copy editor Deborah Sykes was murdered just a few blocks from where I was walking. (Sykes had just been hired by the Journal's then-afternoon paper, The Sentinel).

Although the circumstances were slightly different—I was going into work at 9 a.m., a busier time than her early a.m. entrance—I felt her ghost with me every morning and every evening as I walked to my car, even after I got to park in the closer-by company parking lot.

A few weeks later, I moved up to Boone to work at the paper's Northwest Bureau. I relaxed there, unworried about keeping late hours since my office was on King St., the town's main drag. I could park my car right in front at night and walk to it straight from my building.

But just weeks after I left Boone for graduate school in Chapel Hill, a young female reporter at the local Watauga Democrat was found murdered near the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Her first name was Jenny. She was young, sweet, dark-haired, still fairly fresh from college. The newspaper accounts at the time said she'd been on her way to work early in the morning, probably accosted in downtown Boone and driven out to the Parkway where she was murdered.

"That could have been me"—a whispered epiphany. Since then, whenever I've left work in the dark, I've enlisted co-workers or building guards to walk out with me, especially when the streets are quiet and empty. I don't feel paranoid, but cautious—a caution composed equally of regret and sadness and fear.

Is it the price women pay when we walk alone? If not death, then the persistent threat of death, no matter how undeterred or indifferent we pretend to be. It is the price two newspaper women in one state paid in the space of two years. Since men outnumbered women at newspapers at the time, imagine the statistics.

Maybe the worst thing about these murders was that they were expected, in a horrible, subconscious way—they were out when no one else was out, they were women, they were alone. Yet in that time period, as far as I know, no male reporter in North Carolina (or anywhere in the United States, as far as I know) was murdered or assaulted.

I put on a brave face, walking out of the Winston-Salem Journal and into the dark. I was one of the guys when I was in there, typing away, drinking coffee, slinging words around. But out there, in the silence, I was different from them, vulnerable in a way they probably couldn't understand, a vulnerability I probably would have denied, even to myself.

The poetry of the dead zone

Many times in the past, I'm sure, I rolled my eyes if I saw an old person poring over the Obituaries section in the newspaper. I thought it was morbid, their trying to find a familiar face or life, perhaps also trying to see who among their elderly friends had made it through another week.

But more and more these days, my eyes are drawn to that section of the Washington Post. Maybe it's because I am getting older and I've begun to occasionally see the names of acquaintances and neighbors there. That's not the only reason, though. I've started to see beauty in the brief prose that sums up a life.

Read past the horrifyingly succinct labels in the sub-heads (e.g., "Teacher," "Jewelry Maker," "Guidance Counselor," "Church Member") and you can see a road map of a life in retrospect:

• The "Church Member" assisted amputees for the Red Cross during WWII. (How?)
• The "Jewelry Maker"'s first marriage ended in divorce. (Why?)
• The "Guidance Counselor" danced professionally when she was young; her husband died 13 years before she did. (Did she miss him? Did she miss dancing?)

Most obits in the Post are written in the same four or five-paragraph format: (First p.) the person's full name, age, cause of death, and current town; (Middle paragraphs) significant events and achievements—jobs, degrees, volunteer positions; (Final p.) survivors. Were they happy? Bitter? Anxious? Regretful? Loved? The obits never say. The story, the poetry even, is in the words not written, the broad and full life that cannot be described so formulaically.

More distinct are the "In Memoriam" boxes that people put in the paper, usually on the anniversary of their loved one's death or birthday. The most heart-wrenching "In Memoriam" ads are those to children. On the first anniversary of an 11-year-old's death, her family ran a photo of her with the dates of her life beneath, and then the text of something she must have written shortly before she died: "If I were President...I would stop war. I would also want to try to stop pollution. If I can stop it, I will."... Is there anything more tragic than what is contained in these four column inches?

I still remember an "In Memoriam" I read a couple of years ago; beneath the photo of an ordinary-looking middle-aged man who had died five years before were these words: "I would give one year of my life to spend another day with you." That's a story there that could be written a hundred different ways by a hundred different people. Even the person who placed that ad could describe her life/their life a hundred different ways—and the story would never be completely and fully told.

Catching up on a little reading...

In the early 90s, when I was working at the U.S. General Accounting Office, I sometimes brought a bag lunch from home and took it down to the dungeon-like lunchroom that had been set up for library staff. Usually there would be a woman sitting there, intently reading the Washington Post, too busy to talk to anyone else.

I admired her dedication. She started with the front section and worked her way through every page, in page order, section by section. I seem to remember her running her index finger under the type, making sure she caught everything. Then one day I realized that K. wasn't reading that day's Washington Post, but one from three months previous.

When I asked her about this, she said, "I didn't get to read it then, so I'm reading it now." Oh, I thought, she must bring papers to work that she missed reading at home. That's a good idea. No fear of losing a fresh paper in the shuffle to and from work. But the next time I saw her, she was reading another Post from almost exactly three months before from that day's date.

"I'm three months behind," she said, when I asked her why. "So I'm reading them in order." She then explained that she wouldn't read any current issue until she had finished all the previous issues. K. was still doing this when I left a couple of years later. Her news was always three months old—the weather forecast was for the wrong season, the movie listings were useless, the people in the obituaries long buried.

If I had more time or imagination, I would make K. a character in a short story. But I don't, so I'm leaving her here (though I imagine that Joyce Carol Oates, if she had read this far, would already know K.'s fictional destiny).

What brings me to write about her is that I have a similar relationship with the New Yorker. I subscribed to the New Yorker full of hope and excitement a couple of years ago (taking advantage of the unbelievable offer of $25/year). The best magazine in the United States would soon be coming to my mailbox. I eagerly started reading the first issue that arrived, but too soon the next arrived, and then the next.

I tucked a couple of issues here and there—in my beach bag, in a reading basket in the bathroom, in the car. But it was no use. It felt like I was waging a losing battle, each new arrival a fresh defeat.

I let the subscription run out. Now a pile of two-year-old New Yorkers hovers above me on a tall shelf. I can't throw them out because they're too full of good writing to just toss them into the recycling bin.

Another bargain offer to the New Yorker arrived in the mail last week; I was so tempted to check "yes" and mail it back, but that pile of unread NYers taunted me. I tell myself that I don't want to turn into K., so I let them gather dust. Yet perhaps such neglect is a fate worse than hers, for at least she tried to continue the task, no matter how desperate or impossible it grew to be.

Back in the old days...

So, I became a reporter for a daily newspaper in North Carolina in the mid-1980s, before there were cell phones, digital cameras, high-speed modems or the Internet. Lacking such technology wouldn't have been so bad if I had been in the Winston-Salem Journal's main office—reporters there had computer monitors on their desks hooked into a mainframe computer. They could send stories with a push of a button.

But I was in a bureau office in the northwest corner of the state, 90 minutes from the main office. I was given a portable Radio Shack computer to type my stories on. It wasn't a laptop exactly since it only held three medium-sized stories at a time and its screen held only a few rows of type, yet the field reporters were wowed by its portability; it was the best thing we could use at the time.

I could slowly send a story from my bureau office via a modem, but out in the field, if I needed to get a story in before I could get back to the office, I would have to pull up to a pay phone, dial the paper's toll-free number, then attach a cup to the phone receiver to transmit the story from the laptop. The story would make long chirping noises as it went over the wire, like a fax machine on valium.

I was lucky. I saw reporters for other newspapers still calling in their stories, slowly reading them out for the intern on the other end to transcribe.

If none of the paper's photographers was available, I took pictures on my cheap, automatic 35mm camera, popping out the film when I was done. If there was no rush, I mailed it back to the Winston-Salem office. But if the story was going to run the next day, I'd drive over to the bus station in Boone (actually, it was just a local motel) and put my film on the bus; someone in Winston would pick it up.

I would check in with the main office at least once a day. But without a cell phone, I wasn't immediately available to anyone. While I was in Asheville one August day to write a feature on a New Age-y organization there, a plane packed full of cocaine landed near Boone, and became one of the largest drug busts in that part of the state. My editor frantically tried to reach me, but I was out of earshot, not knowing why everyone was so upset when I called in late that afternoon. I think they went with a wire story that day, supplemented by one of our reporters in a nearby bureau. It should have been my story. Still, my story on the New Age-y people got me my only above-the-fold front page, in that Sunday's paper.

Things are faster, easier, more accessible now, yet I'm not sure they're better or that stories are better written. My old bureau office, which covered two counties (with others, occasionally, as needed), has closed, folded into another bureau to become the Northwest Bureau office. I think that reporter must cover at least four counties now. Spread thin, is how I'd describe it. I'm not sure how you'd get to know all the people in local government or be in so many places at once. Maybe the reporter makes his rounds electronically, reading local blogs for gossip, chatting up people on Facebook, emailing interview questions. It's the only way I can imagine that he or she can be in 10 places at once—unlike when I used to walk around Boone, even in the deep snow, to visit the sheriff, the mayor's office, the Registrar, hoping to catch wind of something, to hear something I wasn't supposed to hear.

(The picture at the top of this post is one of the pictures I took with my cheap camera, which ran in the paper; it was for my favorite story I ever got to write for the WSJ.)

Why I really became a reporter

I’d like to say that the reason I became a reporter at a daily newspaper in North Carolina was because I had a burning desire to investigate injustice, to promote knowledge, or even to see my name in print. But that’s not exactly true. I mostly became a reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal because I was sick of being a waitress at the Pizza Inn in North Wilkesboro, N.C.

It was the only job I could find after I moved back home in January 1985. Actually, there was first a one-day stint as a waitress at the Dodge House restaurant, where patrons blew smoke in my face all evening and hardly tipped me. It wouldn’t have been so bad except that I was only making two dollars an hour and, even worse, it turned out that the job also required me to clean the restaurant toilets once every shift. I balked at this and the manager, who was originally from India, said, “You think I didn’t have dreams, too?” I had no idea how he’d gotten from India to this deep-fried/fine dining restaurant in a nowhere corner of North Carolina, but I never got a chance to ask him. I quit at the end of my first shift.

Before the Pizza Inn, I also cleaned a movie theater for a few mornings with one of my mom’s co-workers, a secretary who came there before work for some extra income. It was taxing, disgusting work. We always spent the first few minutes trying to get hardened gum off the floor.

It turns out that a lot of people in Wilkes County worked extra jobs. Two of the waitresses I worked with at Pizza Inn came straight from the Tyson’s chicken factory. Legs tired, feet aching, they stood for another four hours. And yet, amazingly, they didn’t complain about it. They seemed to accept it as their lot. Or they were happy for the extra money because they were trying to build their savings or pay off debt. Most were young and energetic, but there was one woman whose feet swelled so much from standing all day that her doctor told her that she was going to have a stroke if she didn't get off of them. The grim reality is that she didn't have health insurance and her son had needed life-saving surgery, which she was still paying off, she said, when their house burned down.

We were paid the standard waitress minimum wage of $2.13 an hour, with the expectation that patrons would tip our way past the real minimum wage of $3.35 an hour. That hardly ever happened. The management pushed us to promote the buffet table, which was cheaper for them than individual orders, and most patrons took us up on the offer. That meant, however, that the waitresses were only serving them their drinks and handing them an empty plate to fill and most people didn’t think of that as service. In fact, they found it annoying when we came back to check on them once or twice after they had their plates and drinks. Begrudgingly, we’d get an occasional quarter or two when they left.

Unlike the other waitresses there, I had a way out. I started sending my resume to small town newspapers all over North Carolina, along with photocopies of my few precious clips from the Spokane Chronicle, pretending I knew what I was doing. I also started to study for the GRE, with the new thinking that school would not be a place to study whatever I wanted and to find myself, but instead a place where I would train for a career (surprisingly, this had never occurred to me in all my years as an undergraduate).

And so, when I got the call from the Winston-Salem Journal, I trotted out of there with hardly a day’s notice.

The Pizza Inn is gone. It’s been a Mexican restaurant for years. I bet the waitresses there are still paid the waitress minimum wage, which remains at $2.13 an hour. I just hope that people in my hometown have gotten a little more generous with their tipping. And that the lady with swollen feet finally paid off debts before the job killed her.

The incredible shrinking Washington Post

Recently, my daughter asked where the Washington Post Style section was. "It's right there," I said, referring to the thin pile of pages she had already picked up.

"No, I mean the whole section. I want to read the comics."

"That is the whole Style section," I said.

"What happened to it?" she asked.

"Well, the Washington Post is dying," I said, then trying to correct myself, "—it's shrinking."

Without saying a word, she got a piece of notebook paper and started drawing. I found the picture above a little later, after she'd gone on to something else.

Local is the new word in journalism

This is my first post that is here mostly to offer links to sources on a particular topic. (See previous post for more info).

Although I consider myself a creative writer, I have an ongoing interest in newspapers because I used to (and probably subconsciously still) think of them a backup plan: if I suddenly had to make some money, I could dust off my clips and walk them around to newspaper offices, offering to freelance. You tell me to write about something and I can usually deliver, no matter how little I know about the topic beforehand. It worked twice, in two different states in the 1980s, but I should know better than to think it will work now.

Or maybe there is still work in newspapers—just unpaid or poorly paid, compared to years past. Some recent articles I've run into have discussed the trend toward local news and local blogging.

• Maybe I'm a little behind on this trend, but the first article I saw about the local trend in a major publication (not just as a blogger's fantasy) was the article Peytonplace.com (Newsweek, Oct. 12, 2009), which discusses how citizen journalists/bloggers are stepping in to cover outburb communities abandoned by big-city newspapers. Some of the ventures have been launched by news companies themselves, like the New York Times. The article uses terms like "hyper-local journalism" and "journo-bloggers"—I'm not sure these are new terms of art, or were just made up by the writer.

• Then a few day's later, on Oct. 19th, the Washington Post rolled out a total redesign, along with a print "Redesign Owner's Manual." Two of the manual's eight pages are devoted to the Post's new Local emphasis: one page is about the Post's new "Local Living" section (which rolls in its former, separate Home and county weekly sections, saving paper and print) and the other about "A new local home page." The new Local web page can be set up to be the user's entry way into the rest of the Post, with zip code set-up for weather and a way to format the page to display headlines from your chosen area and areas of interest (e.g., The District, Maryland, Schools, Crime, Obituaries, Religion).

[The irony here is that I looked at the web page, but then had to go back to the print manual in order to figure out how to format the page. It was a lot easier to figure out using the print write-up vs. the bald site itself.]

• The next day, NPR's Diane Rehm Show discussed New Business Models for Journalism. Forty-one minutes into the show, Rehm asks Arianna Huffington what the Huffington Post is doing to "address the local issues." Huffington says that the H. Post has launched Denver, New York, Chicago sections, to offer aggregate local news by making partnerships with local newspapers (linking to their news sites), and by using local bloggers and citizen journalists. (Sounds like unpaid or low paid work to me.)

BTW, the Huffington Post has been looking at the topic of the evolution/death of newspapers for awhile, but can't seem to make up their minds what to call the trend. They offer these categories (some with only one article each):

- The Reconstruction of American Journalism

- Death of Print

- Death of Newspapers

- Newspaper Decline

...etc.

Dare I say it? The H. Post needs to hire a librarian to firm up the categories and make the site more searchable. Perhaps that is where my next I'm-really-desperate-for-money news job is.

A newsprint survivor talks about life at the Rocky Mountain News, and where print media is headed

To add to my ongoing, occasional postings on newspapers, in which I've described some of my experiences as a reporter and examined the shrinking of print newspapers, I wanted to talk to someone who had worked at a newspaper that has closed shop.

It just so happens that one of my high school buddies, Rick Henderson, worked for the recently closed Rocky Mountain News (RMN). He and I recently reconnected via Facebook, and I asked him about what it was like to work for a newspaper that was doomed, and what he thinks will happen to newspapers—and newspaper reporters—now that print media is bleeding advertisers and subscribers.

Although Rick and I are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, we have a lot in common. We both started small press ventures in North Carolina (Rick, The Deregulator, a free tabloid-style paper with a Libertarian focus, and me, a very small magazine, a tiny literary/vanity pub devoted to parody); we both grew up in Wilkes County, NC; we both went to UNC (though at different times); and we both blog.

Rick worked at RMN as an editorial writer from January 2006 until the paper closed at the end of February this year. Before that he worked for other papers including the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., and the Review-Journal in Las Vegas, as well as Investor's Business Daily and Reason magazine. Rick now works as the managing editor for Carolina Journal, where his first article for them, unsurprisingly, is on the demise of print media: The demise of traditional news outlets opens doors for high-quality alternatives. In addition, in March, Rick wrote about the closing of RMN for the National Review. 

What did you do at the RMN?

I was an editorial writer who also handled some production/pagination duties, solicited op-eds, posted content to the web site, etc. When I started in 2006 there were two other staff writers and my boss who roughly spent half their time writing editorials and the other half writing bylined columns. The two writers retired in 2007 when the paper was cutting staff. So for the final 18 months or so, I was the only full-time editorial writer at the paper, so I typically produced something for print—often the lead editorial—every day.

When did you know that it was the end at RMN? Were there prior warnings for or was it sudden?

In early December 2008, E.W. Scripps Co., the Rocky's owners, announced they were putting the paper up for sale and that if they found no buyers by mid-January they would consider "other options." At that point, I figured it was a matter of time before the paper closed. The paper had offered buyouts to about 20 percent of the newsroom around 18 months before that, and had no difficulty getting takers—a lot of reporters and editors who had been there for 30-plus years and were at or beyond retirement age anyway, so they took the buyouts.

Denver's situation was unusual in that the Rocky and the Denver Post were equal partners in a joint-operating agreement. The Post's owners, MediaNews, were in a world of hurt financially; Scripps was not. MediaNews had acquired pieces of a number of money-losing papers in recent years (in San Jose, Detroit, L.A.). But Scripps had exited several metro markets (including Albuquerque and Cincinnati), and had given every indication it wanted to concentrate on suburban or bedroom communities that might have no local TV station to siphon off ad dollars -- and where its papers were more likely to be profitable in the long term.

The group operating the Denver JOA received $100 million less in ad revenues in 2008 than it did five years earlier. And the Rocky had lost about $18 million in 2008. Scripps made no secret it wanted to cut its losses and leave Denver, even if MediaNews might be teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and might not survive had Scripps subsidized the Rocky's operations another year or so.

Morale remained remarkably high at the paper, even up to the day the paper published its final edition. To be sure there was anger at Scripps, in part because the paper would have celebrated its 150th anniversary in April, and a lot of us were hoping Scripps would keep it afloat at least that long. Plus, the Rocky and the Post had fought some brutal circulation wars over the past 30 years, and the Post won every one because (in perception, anyway), the Post was more eager to fight than Scripps. Aside from that, however, the esprit de corps was remarkable.

What are your ex-colleagues doing?

There were about 220 people in the Rocky's newsroom when the paper closed. So a lot of them are looking for work. About 10 of them were hired by the Post, mainly high-profile metro columnists and reporters. My former boss, the editorial-page editor, was hired as an opinion page columnist; he was pretty influential in the community and is a terrific writer.

Another half-dozen or so got jobs as government PIOs during the paper's final weeks, or went to work for nonprofits. Since I left the area, I'm not sure what most of them are doing now.

What is happening to the blog/web pub that former RMN reporters were trying to put together?

The InDenverTimes.com project tried to operate with 30 employees, online only. Had they signed up 50,000 people to pay $5 a month, then several Colorado investors were reportedly ready to kick in enough capital to make the web site a full-time newsroom. They got more like 3,000 instead. A few of the sparkplugs behind the Web idea are trying to come up with another proposal, but I have no idea if they'll make a go of it. The Rocky Mountain News was deeply loved by its readers, but apparently not so loved that former subscribers were willing to pay a little bit of money to keep a second daily news operation in Denver alive.

Do you think the print newspaper will survive? How do you think people will be getting their daily dose of news in five years?

The demand for the information newspapers produced may be greater now than it ever has been, thanks to the Internet. It's a case of supply creating its own demand -- from newspapers' free online content to web sites dedicated to the news (Politico, for example), blogs, and nonprofits (including my own publication or the Pro Publica outfit).

The challenge for traditional or legacy media organizations is figuring out how to get users to provide enough revenue so that publishers can pay journalists. I'm still not sure whether it was a mistake for newspapers to provide content for free online. Readers never have liked firewalls. It's also easier to just give stuff away, drive up pageviews, and hope you can figure out some way to collect from readers.

The publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, John Temple, has started a blog called Temple Talk where he throws out ideas about how media organizations will establish new business models over time. He's very thoughtful about these issues and believes the traditional newsroom is dead. To survive, he believes a "paper" that might have operated with a 200-person newsroom in 2008 might have to shrink to one-tenth that size and get a lot of its content from amateurs, free-lancers, stringers, etc. The paid staff would primarily be editors/gatekeepers who decide which stories deserve most prominent play and throw a lot of stuff out there with minimal line-by-line oversight.

I think the next few years are extremely worrisome. The media landscape is going to undergo upheaval for another five or ten years as media organizations desperately try to figure out how to attract revenues from online readers. And until then, newspapers, magazines, and even radio and TV stations will continue to reduce staffing. Newsrooms are going to shrink. The recession simply acclerated a downturn that began a few years ago when Craigslist, Yahoo, and other online outlets provided an alternative to traditional media—particularly newspaper classfieds and radio/TV ads of any kind. Even alternative weeklies are struggling because their advertising/revenue base has largely migrated to the Internet.

As a result, there will be less media oversight of large public and private institutions. There will be attempts to fill in that information void from new sources, including nonprofits like the one I work for, which has full-time investigative reporters on staff, along with freelancers. There'll be bloggers who will cover city council meetings, for example. But they won't have the same access to public officials (and whistleblowers/leakers) that newspapers enjoyed, so much more of the operations of institutions will go unreported. At least until people figure out a business model that works for sustainable, local online journalism.

Do you think Internet-based publications are a viable job option for writers/reporters? Are any of them paying well? 

A good friend and former Riverside colleague went to work for a startup political web site Scripps opened (and then closed) last year. So even major media companies with presumably deep pockets are still experimenting with ideas to create commercially viable content providers. And as I mentioned before, mainline media outlets of all varieties are shrinking.

This is a roundabout way of saying Internet publications may or may not be a stable outlet for unemployed traditional journalists. Every situation is different.

I continue to believe community weeklies should remain viable (and could indeed expand) as metro dailies shrink. If I were starting a weekly in a small town or an exurb, I'd publish tons of community-service announcements and do some butt-kicking reporting on local government. And I'd consider putting almost none of my content online. Force people to pick you up and read you; that's the best way to give value to advertisers.

Where will all the newspaper reporters go when the newspapers go away?

Apparently, it seems, to the Web, and to the blogosphere.

Recent news stories have been describing news reporters who have started their own blogs and/or web sites. The articles I’ve read so far have seemed cheerful, hopeful—perhaps the reporters who are writing these pieces want to see blogging as their own backup plan, their next career. Here are some I've read about recently:

• Geoff Dougherty, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, got in on this trend early, in 2005, when he started the Chi-Town Daily News. He left on the Tribune of own accord, before its recent bankruptcy. Dougherty sees Internet publishing as a way to keep local news coverage after (he thinks) the regional newspapers disappear and only a few national dailies will remain. He now has a paid staff as well as volunteers. But, according to a recent Washington Post story, most of the money for his venture so far is coming from foundations and donors.
  


• Former reporters from the recently defunct Rocky Mountain News have started  INDenverTimes, a beta web site that they hope to offer as a full-service news site if they can conjure enough subscribers to keep it going. The site calls itself "A Vision Based on a 150-year tradition." News on the site will continue to be free but its writers' blogs will be available only with a subscription.  According to the web site's FAQ page, subscribers will also have access to "Insight, perspective, live blogging, live chatting, commenting, interactivity with writers and other readers." An interesting model—having readers pay for the blogs, but offering the news for free. Subscriptions are $60/year or three months for $21. That's still cheaper than my print edition of the Washington Post, which is around $30/month, but I don't see how they are going to convince people to pay for something that people have grown to believe should be free.
  


• Some reporters who were let go from the Seattle Post Intelligencer are creating their own web spaces and blogs that feature their fields of expertise. For example, the former food writer and restaurant critic has a blog called Eat All About It; the former children's book reviewer has a blog called Cover to Cover Kids, which currently lists 11 followers.  At the same time, the Intelligencer, which stopped publishing a print edition in March, is Web-only and now features staff and readers' blogs, as well as a prominent column of online advertising.
  

Is there going to be any money in these new kind of online ventures? From my limited experience, no. I haven't made a cent from blogging, despite my insertions of Google ads and Amazon widgets on my other blog (I've resisted putting them here). Readers want to read, not click on ads; or, they're like a friend of mine who is afraid to click on the ads because she worries if she is downloading viruses or making herself vulnerable to future spam mail.

And, who is going to read all these blogs, anyway? (She wrote in a post on her "Writing Home" blog). I am a blogger who rarely reads other blogs myself, since I want to spend my limited free time writing, or reading books or a print newspaper. Where are the readers? Maybe they'll be too busy writing their own blogs, or posting status updates on Facebook. 

It will be interesting to see what is going to happen with print and online media in the next year or so. I can't predict anything, but I have a sinking feeling that there will be more former reporters flooding the blogosphere until we're all sick of blogs and blogging and some, if not many of them, will begin to look for work in other fields.

Nostalgic for newspapers

Are there going to be jobs for newspaper reporters in the near future? Until recently, newspapers were always one of the few reliable sources of employment for writers. If you could write, you could get hired, or at least paid per piece. I know this from experience.

I got my first newspaper job, as a staff correspondent for the Spokane Review, by walking into its Idaho bureau and offering to write about all the teenagers who cruised up and down the main drag of Coeur d’Alene on the weekends. I’m not even sure I showed them clips from my college newspaper (all I had for my portfolio) and I don’t remember meeting with an editor. I was told to go ahead and submit an article. It was accepted and got a two-page spread in the Idaho edition’s tabloid weekend section, complete with photos of the teenage cruisers.

The pay for each article was almost as much as I made working all week as assistant manager at a local bookstore. [At $4.75 an hour, I was bringing home $190/week—around $150 after the government took its cut.] For medium-length articles, the Spokane Review paid $100, and $150 for longer articles. I thought I could get rich if I could write more than one article a week. (This was in the mid-1980s, when the rent for my three-room apartment, with free heat, was $160 a month). But then the cold weather started to get to me, and a longing to return to the South, so my freelance career there ended after only a few months.

A few months later, after a miserable job as a part-time waitress in my hometown—the only job I could find there—I applied to the Winston-Salem Journal for any job they would give me. This was without having a journalism degree and with only a few clippings to show from the Spokane Review. [I didn’t know it at the time, but most reporters hired at regional/mid-range dailies usually came with experience at smaller/local newspapers and/or with graduate journalism degrees in hand.] I was called in, it turned out, only because my hometown was near the bureau office that had had a recent opening and they figured I might know the terrain.

The managing editor at the Journal was an eccentric fellow who usually pulled out a spittoon during employee interviews, to see which potential hires flinched when he spit tobacco juice into it. He also happened to have graduated from Duke with a degree in Classics, so when he saw on my written transcripts from UCSC that I had studied Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he asked if I could recite any of it in Latin—which I did, though I only remembered the first five lines. He called me later and told me that he was hiring me primarily because I knew Ovid. Perhaps I’m the only reporter in the history of newspapers to be hired in this manner. At least he felt the Latin was intimidating enough—he didn't pull out the spittoon on me.

And so I was hired at the marvelous rate of $250 a week, with health (not dental) insurance benefits, the first time I’d had insurance since college, with my salary later raised to $300/week. But eventually, after needing a root canal and a crown and having to pay the dental bill in installments, I realized that maybe $300 a week wasn’t that much after all. Even with renting the cheapest apartment in Boone that I could find—7’ x 9’, with my bed hoisted on top of my chest of drawers to have enough room to walk into it—I was still unable to save any money. So I fled to graduate school, for the comparatively better paying career of librarianship (which I’m not doing now, either).

Yet always, in the back of my mind, I've thought that I could return to writing for newspapers, if needs be. Freelancing had been my backup plan until recent months, when the newspapers that are still around started slashing their staffs and closing bureau offices. A recent article in the Irish Times (of all places) reports the grim statistics for U.S. newspapers:

• 120 newspapers have shut down in the last year
  
• a number of major regional newspapers – including the Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer - have filed for bankruptcy.
  
• 16,000 American reporters lost their jobs last year
  

The upside of this is that perhaps newspapers will be in need of more freelance material, since freelancers earn no vacation time, get no benefits. That is, if there are still any newspapers around. Recently, I've mulled the idea of writing an opinion piece about re-living through the recession, but I'm hesitate to cart it around to area newspapers—I'd hate to take space away from any of the news reporters who are still left.

Where have all the newspaper pages gone?

I went back to North Carolina for the holidays and was saddened when I picked up a copy of the Winston-Salem Journal; it has continued to shrink over the years since I worked there as a reporter but now it's downright puny.

I've looked at the paper's web site, JournalNow, in recent years, but the web site seems cushioned from the stark, skeletal reality of what is now its paper edition. The Local section? It had been merged that day into the last two or three pages of the National section, signified only by a red box at the top that says "Local." Other sections were likewise combined, like Business/Sports. I think the Style section was part of B/S, as well. 

Some of the reporters who remain there seem to be filing two articles a day. And the paper's weekly "Relish" entertainment section seemed to be written entirely by its entertainment reporter, Ed Bumgardner, with the rest of its space filled in by AP/wire stories.

The paper's managing editor, Ken Otterbourg, wrote about some of the earlier job cuts in a November 14, 2006 post on his blog. Gone, at that point, were the movie critic, the NFL sports writer, the outdoor writer, cuts he took pains to justify. (Who has gone since then? And how was it decided who remains? The youngest/cheapest? The irreplaceable/local beats?)

Yes, yes, everything is available on the Internet now; movie reviews can be had on imdb.com and Netflix as well as national newspapers; sports news can be gotten on the wire and reprinted. And who goes outdoors anymore, anyway, what with Rock Band, the Internet and all those charming reality shows to watch on TV?

Maybe it's only nostalgia on my part, but I'm already missing the idea of the local, daily newspaper as the voice of the community. It was never the whole voice, never offered the cacophony of voices that blogs and other electronic mediums have made suddenly, universally available. 

Perhaps that's what I'm missing—its non-universalness, how the community newspaper used to be anchored in one place and time, and wasn't just a compilation of wire stories filled in here and there with local stories filed by harried writers; and how reporters had the opportunity to take all that could be written about a place and filter it through their experience and expertise, so that the most important and newsworthy were sure to be documented.  

The best thing about an active, well-staffed newspaper is that most stories are not filed entirely from a solo perspective (as so much Internet writing is, including this blog), but present an educated, group perspective. Layers of editors there read through and discuss/edit the stories, adding additional perspective and content along the way, and other reporters have the time to discuss their stories and share information and contacts.

I'm not sure this is happening anymore or is going to happen for much longer. We'll have to rely upon thousands of voices of citizen reporters, preoccupied with documenting their own lives, or the few remaining reporters who have only the thinnest layer of expertise guiding them when they cover multiple beats, and write only about the most obvious or the most easily found. 

The lies (or embellishments) that writers and artists tell

When I was a freelance reporter in the Idaho panhandle, I met a lovely woman who was exhibiting her interior and landscape paintings at a local women’s conference. Upon seeing the extreme, exuberant color in her paintings, I immediately wanted to write a story about her, especially when she told me that she was new to the area and hadn’t had much press at that point. But what may have sealed the deal for me was when she told me that her work had appeared in Architectural Digest. This fact was prominently noted on the C.V.-like sheet she handed me.

A few weeks later I visited her in her home, a gorgeous house overlooking a lake, with carpets dyed the color of “Gauguin-green,” as she described them. We ate dinner and chatted, and then she pulled out the issue of Architectural Digest where her work had appeared. In an ad for an interior decorator, one of her earlier floral paintings was on the wall, in the background. Her work did not appear anywhere else in that or any other issue of Architectural Digest.

I didn’t know what to say. Obviously, I had been envisioning a spread or at least some small mention of the painting in the magazine, not something sitting quietly in an ad. But, seeing how it had been so important to her, in the second paragraph of my story, I stated that "her work has appeared in Architectural Digest."

I bring all this up now because I ready to send out submissions again, and for most magazines I must create a short biography, including a list of my publications, that I can attach to each submission. In the publications list on my personal web site, I mention that one of my satirical poems was excerpted in The Washington Post Magazine, in a story in which I was interviewed about the little magazine I was publishing at the time. 

I wasn’t sure whether I should even list it at all there, but, to be honest, I needed to give my publications list more variety and to pad it out with more non-vanity publications (beyond this blog or my self-published little magazines, which as I’ve noted in a past post, is where I’ve put too much of my work). I also list that I had a satirical poem published in the Post’s Style Invitational.

Since there won’t be space to explain that it was actually an excerpt of one of my poems that appeared in an article about me, I’m wondering if I should just say: “My work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Kalliope, Trestle Creek Review, … and the Washington Post Magazine.” Is this dishonest—or is it what writers and artists must do to gain attention?

I would have wanted to write about the Idaho artist whether or not she’d told me her work had appeared in Architectural Digest, but I might have used it as a selling point with the Spokesman Review when I pitched it to them. I can’t see that it hurt anything, seeing as how the talent was there, it just needed a bit of a lure to bring the press in and help discover it. And I didn't feel I was lying then, since I was quoting her on having appeared in the magazine. But I'm not so sure I can do it for myself.

It sucks that writers (and artists) can only get attention when they've already had attention. It causes us to grab any little bits and pieces of attention/publication we can muster, cobbling them together into some kind of  pattern of success until maybe embellishment itself becomes an art form.

Giving away the milk for free

As I entered adolescence, my mother often repeated, “Why buy the cow if the milk is free?”-- an adage that was supposed to inspire me to keep a teenage boy from taking clumsy advantage of me.

(My mother had other cow-inspired adages, perhaps because we were country people, especially, “Everybody to their own taste said the old woman who kissed the cow,” which was quoted whenever neighbors showed strange taste in clothing, spouses, etc.)

Blogging feels a little like giving away the milk. I’m putting out for free here--I don’t see anyway of making money doing this. That wouldn’t be so bad in and of itself, since the slim possibility of being seen outweighs the even lesser possibility of being paid for this stuff, and I don’t know where else to place it anyway.

What bothers me is that paid publications seem to be filling more space with what are essentially blogging posts--letters and submissions on particular topics from anyone anywhere. In the Washington Post, instead of running a columnist on page 3 of their Metro section, they now fill the space with submissions from people recalling strangers’ good deeds or cute moments with children. (Every few days, they fill that space with excerpts from a Post online discussion board.)

I often read and enjoy these letters, since it’s like voices of the sane and sincere freed from the chaos of the Beltway. What bothers me is that none of the letter writers is paid.

The Post Magazine also runs a paid reader-submitted feature called “Editors Query,” asking readers to submit a response to questions they pose, like, “Tell us about a time you made a dining faux pas,” or “Tell us about a time you had to admit your parents were right.” They pay $50 for these gems. That’s a lot less than they paid a writer friend in the early 1990s ($250) to fill essentially the same space in that magazine.

Many of the Post’s feature writers have taken on the chatty, immediate style of blogging, especially in their Sunday Source section. If this is happening in what was traditionally a staid print publication, I shudder to think what will happen elsewhere. How much chattier can People or Us get?

Worse, the Post-owned local Gazette newsweekly has cut its staff columnists due to budget constraints. They seem to be filling the space with more pictures, more ads posing as features (such as stories about local houses for sale). I assume more reader-written submissions are just around the corner.

I like the idea of blogging as an act of democracy—no opinion suppressed, everyone having access to a forum. But blogging culture—the instant and the free--is seeping into traditional print culture and I think all writers and writing will eventually suffer for it.