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.

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. 

Writer Profile: Barry Yeoman

I met Barry Yeoman when we were both reporters in North Carolina. I was running the Winston-Salem Journal’s one-woman bureau office in Boone and he was writing for a local weekly, Mountain Times, and freelancing for the Charlotte Observer and The Independent. The big news that year was whether the city of Boone would allow alcohol sales. Despite being a college town (home of Appalachian State University), it was dry—forcing college students to make a perilous, winding journey to Blowing Rock to get “likkered-up.” It was such a big deal that TV reporters from Charlotte and Winston-Salem joined local reporters at what had been sparsely attended council meetings. Eventually the referendum came to a vote and passed, students got drunk to celebrate, and nothing really changed except that you could buy a beer with your pizza in downtown restaurants.

Barry and I both left Boone after a year—I ran away from my too-solitary office to go to graduate school at UNC, and he went to work for The Independent in Durham. We didn’t communicate with each other again, though I kept up with his career by reading the articles he filed at The Independent, and later for Mother Jones and other national publications.

I renewed contact with him this summer when a friend of mine wanted to write about his medical mission to Iraq and I suggested he query Mother Jones since “I knew someone there.” A bold and somewhat false statement, for sure, since I hadn’t seen Barry for 20 years, but the urgency of the story lent itself to such chutzpah. Happily, Barry remembered me, which led to this interview.

The thing I have learned from Barry, even from afar, is that any writing job, no matter how small and humble, can lead to bigger publications and wider audiences as long as you keep putting yourself out there, and keep looking for a story and for a market. Of course, it helps in his case that he is a wordsmith as well as a terrific investigative reporter.

Barry's work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; The New York Times; AARP The Magazine; Mother Jones; Audubon; Rolling Stone; Reader's Digest; Psychology Today; Glamour; salon.com; The Boston Globe; Ladies' Home Journal and many other publications. He is currently a contributing editor for AARP The Magazine and US Airways Magazine, and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. His work has been reprinted in several books, including The Best American Science Writing 2007, The Best Business Stories of the Year and The World's Best Sex Writing 2005. In addition to his writing, during the summer, he teaches at Duke Young Writers' Camp in Durham. For more information, see http://www.barryyeoman.com.


WH: Why are you a writer?

It’s definitely in my blood. I was creating a neighborhood newspaper when I was 11. I’m not sure where the impulse initially came from. It’s something I always knew I wanted. I was editor of my junior high and high school newspaper. And when I started to think about college, many of the adults around me were trying to talk me out of journalism. One, because it was a bastard profession and, two, because they didn’t think that it was ideally suited for a kid with a stutter. But I was only in college for three days before I went to a journalism department orientation at NYU and I was so excited that I changed my major from psychology.

I think why I write now is different than why I wrote even 10 years ago. As I’ve made my way first through alternative weeklies and now to national magazines, my original impulse was about changing the world. I primarily saw journalism as a way of educating people, so that they could make a difference in addressing social injustice and economic maldistribution and stupidity in politics. That is certainly still one of my missions, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that a great deal of my pleasure comes in two other places. First, the opportunity to pull up a front-row seat to people’s lives, especially people whom I wouldn’t ordinarily cross paths with. And, second, to my great surprise, the craft.

Craft came second to me. I came of age in the inverted-pyramid style of journalism. I wrote so that you could lop it off the bottom. Now I write narrative. I’m writing stories, consciously focusing on narrative structure and character development and the weaving of big-picture issues with very fine, narrative detail. You can no longer cut a story of mine by lopping it from the bottom because every piece of the story is carefully interwoven with every other piece. Many people call this kind of journalism narrative nonfiction, and I think that’s right, because we are telling stories, which happen to be true, and we are using all the techniques of literature in the creation of story.

WH: Do you do any other kinds of writing, for fun or elsewhere?

Not very much. I keep journals when I travel. (But) I tend to write so prolifically professionally that at the end of the day what I’d rather do is read, or cook, or walk, or travel. Most days when I’m done creating words I want to kick back with my friends and have a good meal and hear some music, drink some beer and zone out the mind so it’s fresh the next day.

WH: What prompts a story for you?

With most of the magazines I work for, we have a give and take. About half of the stories I write, they’ve come up with the idea, and half of them, I’ve come up with the idea. A lot of my work includes developing and maintaining relationships with editors so that when I write or call with a story idea they know who I am and they know that they can trust me. And, likewise, when they have an idea, that they think of me.

I hear ideas when I’m reporting other stories. I read a lot. I keep my eyes open as I move around the world and I move through the world a lot. Even in my hometown, I try to move through a big world and have a relationship with people who are different from me, and always have my ears open whether I’m in Bolivia, South America or Bolivia, North Carolina.

WH: What are some of the more memorable pieces or some of the favorite stories you’ve written?

The first thing I think of is a two-part series where I spent ten months at a Hispanic Baptist mission in Siler City, N.C., as a way of understanding the huge wave of Latinos that had immigrated to North Carolina. It was such an amazing experience to be able to see this community of immigrants and believers up close, for so long, to be welcomed into their church, and into their homes, and into their secrets. They trusted me and shared a lot with me. I attended Saturday-night services, Baptisms, birthday parties and weddings. It became a 17,000-word series for The Independent, and the inspiration for an article in Mother Jones.

Many of my favorite stories have let me penetrate cultures that were unfamiliar to me, or have conversations with people having interesting lives. Writing for Mother Jones about Christian missionaries that had gone undercover in the Muslim world; writing about scientists who were under attack for sex research; writing a profile of Jack Abramoff, and having the opportunity to interview him for 12 hours; and, likewise, having tremendous access to Elizabeth Edwards, for a profile I wrote about her for O Magazine.

WH: Have you managed to make a living solely as a writer, or have supplemented your income in other ways?

I teach writing to high school kids (at the Duke Young Writers Camp) in the summer. My teaching is something I do for fun. It actually pays less than my journalism. I make a living full-time as a writer. I’ve been a full-time writer since I graduated from college in 1982 and I’ve been full-time freelancing for the last nine years. Before that, it was half-time freelancing and half-time newspaper work. Freelance writing has been very good to me. Once you reach a certain tier in the magazine world, the pay scale is sufficient—not to get wealthy—but to make a reasonable, middle-class living.

WH: By the way, why did you move to North Carolina in the first place?

Around 1984 I was working for a mainstream alternative weekly in Lafayette, La.—they were leagues above the daily paper in quality, but didn’t really live on the cutting edge. My publisher went to a conference of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and she came back and said, “We met the founders of a new alternative newspaper in Durham, N.C. (The Independent) whom you would love. They are such idealists. But they’ll never make it.” That was 25 years ago.

I left Louisiana when the oil-industry bottom fell out and I found myself unemployed. I moved to Watauga County because I had a friend who had a house in the woods 18 miles out of Boone. And I started freelancing there. A year later, I was offered a job at The Independent and I moved to Durham and fell in love with the place. I’ve lived in Durham since.

WH: Before this interview, you said you were going into isolation for a week, to write. Do you do this for every article you write, or only when it’s a major assignment or an accumulation of work? And, how do you manage it?

When I’m writing, I turn off the phone, I try not to check email. I make sure I have food in the house and plenty of coffee, and really do quarantine myself for eight to 12 hours a day. Because I need to concentrate, and it’s so easy in this modern world to succumb to a lot of distractions. And that means also not doing other work-related things. I don’t write queries or handle administrative stuff. But, since I live in the real world, I will respond if an editor needs to contact me. Every so often I need a change of scenery and I’ll take my laptop to a coffeeshop, but that’s very rare. I’m much more focused when I’m in my house with coffee on the stove and food in the fridge and the phone turned off.

WH: Is there a subject area you’re most comfortable with, or do you consider yourself to have expertise in any particular subjects?

I do pride myself on being a generalist, in that I can come into a subject I know very little about and totally immerse myself in the issue and come away as a miniature expert. I don’t claim expertise in any one issue, but, rather, I think of myself as an expert in Topic A this month, and Topic B three months from now.

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.