On alt-weeklies, literature, hammers and hires

On Tuesday a journalism instructor friend of mine asked me to address a class of graduate students in the magazine program at Medill. This was funny, actually, because while I knew he wanted me to say a few words to the group at some point, I didn't know until I arrived at the office fresh off a Blue Line trip from O'Hare that he expected me to speak, uh, right then. With enough prep time to print out a few stories (on a South Florida one-time gambling wheeler-dealer, on a dark documentarian of the club-kid thug life, and on a self-immolating father of a slain Marine) from which to quote, I managed to fill about an hour of their time.
Boston Library: shot June 24, 2010The topic was the fate of alt-weeklies at a time when weeklies and dailies alike are shrinking, fading and getting gutted. Chicago has seen this like few other cities: The third-largest city in the United States now has two daily papers that you could finish reading between the “ah” and the “choo” in your average sneeze. The students are charged with re-imagining the Reader, a free weekly that 10 years ago was a four-section broadsheet, chockablock with listings and classifieds, thick enough any given week to choke a camel; these days, it's a slender tabloid hoping just to keep its tiny head above water.

To summarize my ramblings from Tuesday, I believe I said now would be a great time to be a journalist, especially a quote-unquote alternative reporter (which is really nothing less than a locally focused magazine writer), if we didn't have bills to pay. So anemic now are the dailies that they can't help but default on their Fourth Estate duties; I was told Tuesday that the Chicago Tribune, the World's Greatest Newspaper of WGN fame, does not have a full-time reporter covering Chicago public schools. That's a district of 400,000 students and a $5.3 billion budget, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Niger. There simply are not enough hands on deck. Anyone aspiring to find a great story could do worse than stake out a department in your average major metropolitan or state government and simply go spelunking. You're bound to find something.

Another point: The writing in a weekly shouldn't sound like a daily. A daily that fashions itself a “family paper” will necessarily write to adults as though they are children. This analogy came to mind: Be the HBO to their ABC or CBS. Begin with astonishing reportage, then write it as though writing is an ongoing experiment (which it is, blessedly). Undertake in your writing the mission of literature, which poet Donald Hall described this way:

When we read great literature, something changes in us that stays changed. … If literature is nebulous or inexact; if it is impossible to determine, with scientific precision, the value or the meaning of a work of art, this inexactness is the price literature pays for representing humanity. Human beings themselves, in their feelings and thoughts, in the wanderings of their short lives, are ambiguous, ambivalent, shifting mixtures of permanence and change, direction and disorder. Because literature is true to the complexities of human feeling, different people will read the same work with different responses. Literary art will sometimes affirm that opposite things are true because they are. (Emphasis the author's.)

That said, now, don't be afraid to bring the fuckin' hammer down, unambiguously, when a story warrants.

Everyone's concerned, and rightly, that jobs will be hard to come by. (The anxiety of a journalism student these days mirrors that of your average 14-year-old virgin, who can see his peers caught up in this strange yet consuming activity (earning money, to uphold the journo's side of this metaphor) and yet can easily imagine himself dying poor, overeducated and thoroughly unlaid.) My advice was to follow a topic of consuming passion, write about it until everyone knows the territory you've staked out, and then get paid to cover it. That, and get paid. Get paid. Get paid. If someone else is making a dollar off your written word, then they ought to give you a couple of dimes. Get paid. Get paid to stay solvent, and to keep from depressing any further this already-depressed writers' and photographers' market. Get paid. When one writer gets paid, we all get paid. When one works for free, we all do.

As for getting jobs, my suggestion was to get in front of the hiring editor. Like, physically get in front of them. Send your stuff, know the job you're applying for, and make it incredibly easy for the editor to hire you. I've never hired anyone, but I've been close to the process a couple of times, and I've been hired myself. My experience, for what it's worth, is that editors hate hiring. They'd rather do just about anything else. They don't want to compare people's clips, or their resumes, or take time to show someone the ropes. It's just not an activity built into most editors' schedules; they'd rather run the publication. Do what you can to make an editor's life easy in the hiring process, and I'd wager that your odds shoot way, way up.