1. Rachel McAthy’s recent roundup of eight long-form digital projects included sites you probably already know about, like The Atavist, Byliner and Longreads, but also Matter, which recently met its Kickstarter funding goal and plans to publish one in-depth science and technology narrative per week. Learn more via Matter’s Kickstarter page:
Narratively, meanwhile, is trying to raise $50,000, also via Kickstarter, by Sept. 10, in order to launch a project devoted to New York City stories, and with a build-out plan for other cities. Backers had pledged $23,754 from 353 backers as of this morning:
2. Speaking of Kickstarter, Matt Thompson, an editorial product manager at NPR, and Center for Public Integrity board member, wrote about how the Internet is giving the “quest narrative” new journalistic relevance:
I’ve long made the case that to understand Internet time, you can’t just look at what happens every minute, with new information zooming around chaotically. You have to look at the full picture of how narratives unfold — and that can take place over months, or longer.
Kickstarter, for example, is one of the new darlings of the Internet, yet campaigns on Kickstarter take eons in our conventional understanding of Internet time. Each campaign is a quest distilled to its simplest form — a clear protagonist (the project creator) with a straightforward quest object (the amount to be funded).
The long-form journalistic quest also has its online analogue in the gradually unfolding investigation. Talking Points Memo pioneered the format online with its Polk-Award-winning U.S. attorney scandal coverage. More recently, TPM alum Paul Kiel, now at ProPublica, applied the strategy toward investigating the foreclosure crisis in the U.S. housing market. It was a classic long-form quest unfolding in real-time.
3. A nice read: Jordan Conn’s Grantland piece on Mo Isom, the former LSU goalie who’s trying to become the football team’s placekicker. A taste:
Today, she wears a baggy purple-and-gold T-shirt with knee-length Nike leggings, her hair piled atop her head. “This place is like a sanctuary for these guys,” she says. “There’s no way I’m walking in here in short shorts and a sports bra.” When she nestles the ball under the tee, she stands up straight, her back arched and her shoulders wide. You can see why she says, with no reservation, “I’m a big girl.” Right now, she says, she’s a little too big. A summer in the weight room has left her with too much muscle and too little flexibility. For 22 years, she has inhabited this body, and at almost every step of the way, someone has found it to be too something. She’s been called too fat and too skinny, too weak and too strong, too pretty and too ugly, too provocative and too chaste. She says, however, that none of that matters with this team. To them, she insists, it doesn’t even matter that she’s a woman. Just put it through the uprights, and biology will be forgotten.
4. In one of the saddest stories about the recession, Jeff Tietz wrote about a whole population of Californians living in their cars, in a parking lot. His piece ran in Rolling Stone and featured a 56-year-old woman named Janis Adkins, who kept her “previous-life belongings” in a Yakima SpaceBooster on top of her van, which she parked in a back corner, near some avocado trees, so she could “pick their fallen fruit.” A scene where Adkins goes out begging:
Adkins couldn’t bring herself to look dirty. Then she remembered that after the stock market imploded, guys in business suits had walked through New York’s financial district wearing sandwich boards with their résumés on them. “People read them because it’s so ridiculous, it’s effective,” she says. So she picked a strategic thoroughfare in Santa Barbara, dressed for a job interview, and spent her last money making copies of her résumé, laminating one so that drivers could handle it without getting it dirty. She found a four-foot-tall piece of cardboard at a grocery store and wrote on it:
I’D RATHER BE WORKING HIRE ME IF YOU HAVE A JOB
Then she stood alongside the road and held up the sign. The day was so windy it was hard to hold on to. “I was like, ‘Please hire me,’ and everybody’s flying by, trying to ignore you, but this one guy drives up, looks at my résumé, looks at me and goes, ‘Very effective. I’ll take one of those.’ I said, ‘Thank you, I really appreciate that,’ but I never heard from him. And then a homeless guy came up to me and goes, ‘Wow. That ain’t gonna work.’ I didn’t want to talk to him about it. I just wanted to stick my sign out there – I didn’t have any more cardboard. And about halfway into it, I just started crying and I couldn’t stop. I was so embarrassed. It was incredibly humiliating. You know how a lot of women hold their hand over their mouth when they cry? I started doing that, and that’s when I raked in the money. I was sort of scared because there were so many cars that I was boxed in, and I was holding this gigantic sign and I was saying, ‘I’d rather work, I’d rather you take my résumé, please help,’ and I’m crying and the dollars just started coming out of the windows.” But finally she cried herself out, and people stopped giving. She made $12 in three hours, all of it drawn by tears.
5. If you hate the concept of storytelling curation, why? It’s like orchestrating a great dinner party: chemistry + content, with the possibility of drama. If you’re not already sick of the topic, we recommend Mother Jones’ list of Ayn Rand-centric must-reads. As talk of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s reading history continues to metastasize, Mother Jones’ Dave Gilson has culled pieces by Amy Benfer (Mother Jones), Whitaker Chambers (The National Review), Andrew Corsello (GQ), John Hodgman (New York Times magazine), Thomas Mallon (The New Yorker) and Cathy Young (Reason).
Reading Rand’s philosophy can be an exhilarating, head-turning experience; it was for me when I first picked up her nonfiction manifesto For the New Intellectual at the age of 19, two years after coming to the United States from the Soviet Union. (Rand herself was an American immigrant from the Soviet Union, leaving her family behind to move here in 1926.) Rand’s rejection of the moral code that condemns selfishness as the ultimate evil and holds up self-sacrifice as the ultimate good is a radical challenge to received wisdom, an invitation to a startlingly new way to see the world. While Rand was hardly the first philosopher to advocate an ethos of individualism, reason, and self-interest, no one formulated it as accessibly or persuasively as she did — or as passionately. In Rand’s hands, the “virtue of selfishness” was not a dry, abstract rationalist construct with a bloodless “economic man” at its center. It became a bold, ardent vision of defiance, struggle, creative achievement, joy, and romantic love. That vibrancy, more than anything else, accounts for her extraordinary appeal.
Goddamn, the experience of being 19 years old and reading Ayn Rand! The crystal-shivering-at-the-breaking-pitch intensity of it! Not just for that 19-year-old, but for everybody unfortunate enough to be caught in his psychic blast radius. Is “experience” even the right word for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged? Ayn Rand’s idolization of Mickey Spillane and cigarettes and capitalism—an experience? Her tentacular contempt for Shakespeare and Beethoven and Karl Marx and facial hair and government and “subnormal” children and the poor and the Baby Jesus and the U.N. and homosexuals and “simpering” social workers and French Impressionism and a thousand other things the flesh is heir to: experience?
We wondered what’s on college reading lists these days and asked some distinguished writer/professors of narrative what stories or books they assign — but also why. Stand by for Jacqui Banaszynski, Mark Bowden, Madeleine Blais, Rob Boynton, Jeff Sharlet and Rebecca Skloot.
Jacqui Banaszynski, University of Missouri
The course is Intermediate Writing. I have students in my writing class pick most of what we read and discuss. That allows them to explore and discover what they respond to, which gives them more ownership of the techniques at work in effective writing and keeps the class varied and fresh. Their choices range from narrative to investigative pieces to sports columns. Along the way, I have a handful of standards (some book chapters and magazine pieces, but mostly newspaper stories) that I pull out to emphasize the components of the craft:
Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. This has become my irreverent bible. It offers an array of solid lessons on writing, but mostly makes struggling writers feel a little less alone and a lot less crazy. It lets them in on two necessary secrets: Writing is damn hard work, and all writers feel like fakes.
The Things They Carried, a novel, by Tim O’Brien. I start my in-depth writing class with the first chapter. That means I reread it twice a year, and it always reveals something new and fairly astonishing. It is a masterpiece of foreshadowing, building tension, revelatory detail, character development, pacing, wordplay, metaphor and layered meaning. Students then write personal essays built around a similar prompt: The things I carried, wore, ate, lost, etc.
Hiroshima, by John Hersey. I have found nothing that better demonstrates the reporting that is both required and possible for powerful literary nonfiction. We analyze what Hersey would have had to notice and ask to reconstruct such precise, vivid and credible scenes. As for the writing, it is a study in simplicity. Hersey uses verbs that are strong but seldom flashy, sentences that are tight and direct, and a minimum of embellishment to let the raw drama of the narrative come through.
“A Boy of Unusual Vision,” by Alice Steinbach (Baltimore Sun). A great example of a rich story told entirely through a series of tight, focused scenes. Also demonstrates the kind of reporting evident in Hiroshima. Steinbach is fearless and compassionate in talking to Calvin about his blindness.
“From ordinary girl to international icon” (Terry Schiavo’s obituary), by Kelley Benham (St. Petersburg Times, now Tampa Bay Times). The first paragraph is a study in the use of parallel construction and pacing. Benham controls both throughout the piece, showing how structure itself can carry readers along. She also demonstrates the power of selection – choosing just the details that reveal the core of the story being told.
“The Girl in the Mirror,” by Julia Sommerfeld (Seattle Times). A long, complex story made readable through tight, focused and purposeful scenes. Strong example of immersion reporting, rather than reconstruction; Sommerfeld witnessed much of the action. Great use of analogy to help readers see and understand the inaccessible (facial deformation and surgery).
“Richard Nixon’s Long Journey Ends,” by David Von Drehle (Washington Post). I use this to demonstrate a writer’s voice and authority. It dares to have a strong point of view. It’s also a study in word selection and in essay-like structure.
“Digging JFK Grave Was His Honor,” by Jimmy Breslin (New York Herald Tribune). Another study in point of view, but this one demonstrates that classic lesson of “zig, don’t zag.” Breslin goes where no one else thought to, and finds a story all can relate to.
“What a Day!” by Ken Fuson (Des Moines Register). This shows how a mundane assignment can be turned into art in the hands of a creative and bold writer. The single long, breathless sentence echoes the feeling of the day itself.
“Old ladies ‘do what we can,’ ” by Alex Tizon (Seattle Times). This is one of 14 short dispatches that were part of “Crossing America,” filed on the road from Seattle to New York City immediately after the 9/11 attacks. All are great examples of “place profiles,” but this one stands out as a study in character development.
Jacqui Banaszynski (@jacquib) is the Knight Chair in Editing professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, senior collaborations editor for the Public Insight Network of American Public Media and a faculty fellow at the Poynter Institute. She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for “AIDS in the Heartland,” a series about a gay farm couple facing AIDS.
Madeleine Blais, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
For a class entitled Diaries, Memoirs and Journals, I require a shifting list of full-length books as well as articles and essays. This fall’s assigned books include:
This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff. I find this book a pitch-perfect evocation of the powerlessness of being a child — and of the power that ensues when an adult retaliates with his version of events. This memoir is widely considered one of the finest exemplars of the genre.
Father’s Day, by Buzz Bissinger. This new work by the author of the acclaimed nonfiction narrative Friday Night Lights and other books uses the journey motif to move back and forth in time, and possesses a candor that becomes its own armor in the service of revealing some of life’s less appealing truths about oneself.
Name All the Animals, by Alison Smith. Alison Smith experienced the loss of her idolized teenaged brother while still a child, and her memoir is both healing and devastating.
Brother, I Am Dying, by Edwidge Danticat. The author’s elderly uncle from Haiti enters several circles of hell when he is detained at the infamous Krome Avenue Detention Center in Miami while trying to enter the United States legally. A sad story ennobled by the quiet grace with which it is told.
Madeleine Blais won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing while at the Miami Herald. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has written for newspapers including the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe. She is the author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in nonfiction and named one of the Top 100 sports books of the 20th Century by ESPN; The Heart Is an Instrument; Portraits in Journalism; and Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a Family, which won a Massachusetts Book Award.
Mark Bowden, University of Delaware
The course is called Masterpieces of Nonfiction.
“The American Male at Age Ten,” a short piece by Susan Orlean which she undertook after being approached to write a profile of Macauley Culkin, then the most famous 10-year-old in the world. Orlean wasn’t that interested in the actor, but was interested in studying a typical 10-year-old boy in hopes of better understanding men. She fails, but succeeds brilliantly in an essay that is sweet, funny and memorable. I love to assign this story because it shows that writing great nonfiction does not require dramatic subject matter, foreign travel or even huge amounts of time.
Hiroshima, by John Hersey, because of its historical importance in the genre of literary nonfiction, because of its relative simplicity as a piece of reporting and writing, and because it is a powerful and compelling read. Hersey illustrates the importance of asking, “Who and what, at the most basic level, is this story about?” In the case of the atom bomb, it was the one piece of the story that had not been reported — and which was the most important.
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, because every time I assign it my students love it. I enjoy pointing out Capote’s careful attention to craft. It also prompts interesting conversations about choosing subject matter, immersion in reporting and how the values and experiences of the writer shape the best nonfiction in the same way they shape fiction. There are also four films it has inspired – I usually choose one – so it’s fun to see how story is translated to the screen.
The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, because it is such a joy to read, and it illustrates how a great reporter and writer can make something entirely new out of material that has supposedly been reported to death. The book is essentially an extended essay, or argument, as nearly all of Wolfe’s stories are. It is also useful to get students thinking about the importance of voice.
The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer. I consider it to be one of the classics of American literature, and Mailer’s best work. The book is really two for the price of one, not just because of its length (I give my students plenty of time to read it), but because Mailer shifts gears so dramatically in the middle, first telling the story of Gary Gilmore as he imagines it really was, and then adopting a completely different style, telling how the same story was transformed by TV and the press into a bizarre media event.
The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger, because it is a wonderful example of how a skillful writer can conjure a “true” story by cleverly reporting around the edges of that which he cannot know. Junger could not, of course, interview the doomed fishermen aboard the Andrea Gale, but that doesn’t stop him from writing a thrilling account of their final moments in the storm. I love going through the book chapter by chapter, and showing how he does it.
The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, because it lets me introduce the memoir and because Didion was so ruthlessly honest in writing about herself. It demonstrates how rigorous self-examination must be to rise above self-indulgence, a threshold very few memoirs achieve.
“Urban Cowboy,” by Aaron Latham, both the original article and the movie. The article cleverly ridicules the faux cowboys of modern Houston, who work on oilrigs and dress up in boots, buckles, and 10-gallon hats to go dancing with the gals. Turns out the gals ride the mechanical bulls better than they do, which leads to heartbreak. The movie (which Latham co-wrote) dispenses with the wit entirely, and turns these wannabe cowpokes into romantic heroes.
“The String Theory,” David Foster Wallace‘s amazing essay about what it takes to be the best in the world at anything, in this case, tennis. He examines the question not by studying the best tennis player in the world – he does that in a later, more famous piece called “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” – but by profiling Michael Joyce, an unknown second-tier tennis pro who, as talented and hard-working as he is, will never reach the topmost ranks of the game. Why? The story illustrates how a writer can elevate something as mundane as a sports story into something truly memorable by asking the right questions — not of the subject alone but of himself.
I also throw in some of my own work – this semester Black Hawk Down and a few shorter ones – to give students a chance to pick my brain about how they were reported and written.
Mark Bowdenis a best-selling author and journalist. His book Black Hawk Down, a finalist for the National Book Award, was the basis of the film of the same name. His book Killing Pablo won the Overseas Press Club’s 2001 Cornelius Ryan Award as the book of the year. His book Guests of the Ayatollah, an account of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, was listed by Newsweek as one of the 50 “books of our times.” His most recent books are The Best Game Ever, the story of the 1958 NFL championship game; Worm, which tells the story of the Conficker computer worm; and The Finish, an account of the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, to be published in October. Bowden is a Vanity Fair contributing editor and a national correspondent for The Atlantic.
Rob Boynton, New York University
Boynton’s excerpted reading list for his Literary Reportage class at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, sans liner notes:
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, by Joan Didion
Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell
Fame and Obscurity, by Gay Talese
Iphigenia in Forest Hills, by Janet Malcolm
“Introduction,” by John Carey, The Faber Book of Reportage
Robert S. Boynton is the author of The New New Journalism and director of the magazine journalism program at New York University.
Jeff Sharlet, Dartmouth
The course is called Whose Story Is It?, borrowed from Jane Kramer’s great little book Whose Art Is It?
“In the Current,” from Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard. A portrait of the artist-to-be as a bored little girl, grasping metaphor for the first time. We read this to think about how we start to become writers.
“The Cross and the Color Line,” from Blood Done Sign My Name, by Timothy B. Tyson. Tyson remembers what he understood of the murder of MLK when he was a boy. We read this to think about the intersection between the personal and the public.
“Mic Checked,” by Rachel Signer, from KillingTheBuddha.com. I thought this was the best piece I read on the experience of the Occupy movement. I like it because it’s more or less topical, by a writer breaking radically from her usual style, and because it’s in the second person. I normally forbid the second person for the duration of the term, but I start with this piece to remind students to break my rules when they need to.
“Artists in Uniform,” by Mary McCarthy. One of my favorite descriptions of a conversation, between McCarthy and an anti-Semitic colonel she meets (and despite herself, flirts with) on a train. It’s good early in the term because it invites close reading and because the setup is so simple: a conversation, unplanned. There’s a companion piece by McCarthy, about writing it, called “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” and a much later scholarly analysis of that essay called “Unsettling the Colonel’s Hash,” that I don’t assign but make available.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion.I assign it for the same reason most people assign it: because it’s one of the books that made me want to be a writer. That may have been generational, though. My students like it, but they don’t love it. None come to class wearing oversized sunglasses.
“Professor Seagull,” by Joseph Mitchell. I have them buy Up in the Old Hotel, but all we read at the beginning is “Seagull,” set up for a slow reveal. Meantime, the lesson is about voices.
“Animal Show,” by Rosemary Mahoney, from Whoredom in Kimmage. “Writer walks into a bar” is an old story. Mahoney makes it fresh by finding the right voices and giving them to us true.
Specimen Daysexcerpts, by Walt Whitman. I use Whitman to talk about the term “literary journalism.” It’s not a term he used, but exemplified the paradox inherent in the term through his love of literature past – piety – and fundamentally democratic impulse of journalism.
“Breathing In,” from Dispatches, by Michael Herr. An immersion in deep subjectivity. Also, a reminder that prose should move.
Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco.I taught Sacco’s Footnotes from Gaza to a big class last term, and it was one of the best teaching experiences I’ve had. I taught this earlier book of comics journalism, from Bosnia, to grad students at NYU years ago, and while they loved it, they couldn’t connect it to their own work. Turns out undergrads are more agile about moving between image and text.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo. This replaces Melissa Faye Green‘s great Praying for Sheetrockas my excursion into the full potential of third person.
“Down at the Cross,” by James Baldwin. This one’s been on and off my syllabus, but it’s going back on here because Baldwin moves between memoir and reportage and essay. I don’t want students to think they must choose.
“Slaughterhouse,” from The Forbidden Zone, by Michael Lesy. By this point in the term, I want students to be venturing further off campus. “Slaughterhouse,” a minor masterpiece, is great because it gives them license to just write down what happened. Everything that happened.
“Needle and Thread,” in Number Our Days, by Barbara Myerhoff. To help students be aware of their role in an interview. They’re part of the story whether they want to be or not.
The Convert, by Deborah Baker. I can’t explain, without giving away the ending, why I assign this innovative book. It’s a very fine book and a great exposure to a different kind of immersion, that of the archive. It’s also ideal for the kind of debates students are ready for by the end of the term.
“Joe Gould’s Secret,” by Joseph Mitchell. Another one I can’t explain without a spoiler. After its companion piece, “Professor Seagull,” early in the term, “Joe Gould’s Secret” breaks the smart students’ hearts. It makes them decide to become writers or to never write again. Both honorable paths.
Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) is the nationally bestselling author of The Family, C Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die. He’s coauthor, with Peter Manseau, of Killing the Buddha, and co-editor, with Manseau, of Believer, Beware, both derived from KillingTheBuddha.com, the online literary magazine they founded in 2000. Sharlet is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Harper’s, and the Mellon Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Rebecca Skloot, most recently of the University of Memphis
As a text, I’m a big fan of Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (and I’m not just saying that because it’s a Nieman Foundation book and I’m doing this for a Nieman Foundation blog). It’s a wonderful collection of great writers talking about the essentials of nonfiction writing.
Structure: As for specific stories, structure is one of the most essential tools for writers to understand, so I absolutely harp on it in the classroom. We read and discuss a wide range of structures to really tease apart what structure is, how it’s held together, how it impacts the reading of a story. I always start teaching structure with something very basic, but still creative. One example: “How to Get Out of a Locked Trunk,” by Philip Weiss, which has a straightforward chronological structure (guy goes on a quest to figure out how to get out of a locked trunk). But of course the essay isn’t about getting out of a locked trunk – it’s about marriage, commitment, fear. Pieces like that are a good starting place to lay the groundwork and vocabulary for talking about more complicated structures. As a next step, “Travels in Georgia,” by John McPhee, is one of my essential go-to pieces for teaching structure because it’s brilliantly built. I talked a bit about that piece and why I use it here. Once we’ve covered that, I like to use a wide range of pieces with unusual or surprising structures, like Dinty Moore’s wonderful “Son of Mr. Green Jeans,” which uses the alphabet to organize short vignette-like paragraphs that collectively tell a story of fatherhood. Also Randy Shilts’ “Talking AIDS to Death,” and Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s “The Gangster We Are All Looking For.” (As an aside, I just finished reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which would be a fun one to teach structure-wise. I find that reading fiction for structure can be very helpful for nonfiction writers, to help get them thinking about story, narrative drive, etc.)
Voice: I find that students often have a hard time pinpointing exactly what voice is, which is an essential first step toward helping them develop their own. I like to use collections of pieces by particularly voicey writers. Two of my favorite authors to do this with are Jeanne Marie Laskas and Susan Orlean. With Jeanne Marie, I start with “Enlightened Man,” her wonderful profile of Korey Stringer, the Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman who died of heat stroke during practice when he was 27. Jeanne Marie often does what she calls a “chameleon voice” –she spends a lot of time with the people she’s writing about, listening to their voices, so she can essentially channel their voices onto paper. In the Stringer profile, she is writing as Jeanne Marie but adopting Korey’s voice. For contrast, to illustrate how she changes her voice at will, I assign that profile alongside several other pieces of her writing: A few of her short personal “Significant Others” columns about living on a farm (one of my favorites was about planting a tree), plus some excerpts from her first book, The Balloon Lady And Other People I Know, which was (at least in part) written as her MFA thesis when she was a grad student. Some of those pieces have chameleon-type voices; others have Jeanne Marie’s very personal voice. So we look at all of those together, in chronological order starting from her earliest work to her latest, to look at what stays the same in her voice, what changes, what is “her voice” vs. the voices of those she’s writing about. After establishing what voice is, and how writers can alter their voice depending on what they’re writing, I like to look at how writers develop a personal and recognizable voice. Anyone who’s read a lot of Susan Orlean knows you can read a paragraph of her stuff without looking at the byline and know it’s Susan. But what does that mean? How does she do this? I assign students a big chunk of her stuff, starting back during her early days at an alternative weekly news paper, plus excerpts from her first book, Red Sox and Bluefish and Other Things That Make New England New England, her second book, Saturday Night, several of her New Yorker pieces, and The Orchid Thief. We discuss them generally as pieces of writing (structure, reporting, etc.), but the main goal is to specifically look at her voice throughout. In her early writing it changed a bit over time, becoming more honed, more Susan, but it’s still always distinctly Susan.
Rebecca Skloot (@RebeccaSkloot) is an award-winning science writer and the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is being translated into more than 25 languages, adapted into a young-reader edition and made into an HBO movie produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. She has taught in the MFA and journalism programs at the University of Memphis, New York University and the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned her MFA. She is at work on a new book, about the human-animal bond.
Forget South by Southwest. The real happening place to be Monday, at least if you’re a narrative nerd, was Columbia, Missouri, where you could have heard a full day’s worth of conversations between some top long-form writers and their editors as part of an event sponsored by the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism.
Called “Writers and Editors: The Most Dynamic Relationship in Journalism,” the conference featured some familiar bylines, among them Esquire’sChris Jones, GQ’sJeff Sharlet and and Los Angeles magazine’s Amy Wallace, as well as Atavist founder Evan Ratliff and Women’s Health editor-in-chief Amy Keller Laird. Mizzou’s student-run magazine, Vox, has detailed coverage of the day’s sessions. And here’s a handful of our favorite tidbits of wisdom, humor and advice, culled from Twitter and Instagram posts:
You’re standing in the middle of an eerily empty two-lane road. Cookie-cutter apartment complexes surround you. Broad-leaved trees line the street. It looks like an average American suburb, but something’s not right.
You look left, then right. Yellow police tape blocks off the street, and red and blue lights flash in the distance. You move forward a bit and notice the white outline of a body on the asphalt, sprawled with its left hand above its head. Glowing arrows beckon away from it. Following them, you end up at the passenger-side window of a police cruiser. You enter a flickering cylinder. It brightens, and a comic strip appears showing an illustration of a man wearing a baseball cap, looking down the road you just walked along.
This is a 3D rendering of Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014. Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson, who was with Brown when he died and is the man in the baseball cap featured in the illustration, is just one character you meet in this virtual world, created by graphic journalist Dan Archer with the help of photographs, satellite imagery, and video game software.
Archer, through a fellowship at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and a partnership with Fusion, where “The Michael Brown Shooting Visualized: Eyewitness Accounts” was published last December, reconstructed eight eyewitness accounts for users to explore, guided by arrows that lead to the locations where each person observed the event. He notes that users spend on average over 10 minutes with his Ferguson piece, “practically unheard of in the ADD [attention deficit disorder] world of online news,” he says. Those are promising stats at a time when media outlets are fiercely competing for users’ attention. Immersive journalistic experiences like this one could become a way to keep audiences engaged while offering reporters innovative new ways to tell stories.
The goal of journalism has always been to be immersive, to bring audiences as close to unfolding events as possible. New Journalism icons like Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese practiced their own form of low-tech immersive journalism by inserting themselves into their stories in imaginative ways. The qualities that lend virtual reality its “wow” factor are the same ones inherent in any well-crafted tale, fiction or non. Though his digitally rendered version of Ferguson is far from seamless—the graphics are pixelated, and the mouse controls don’t always work the way you want them to—Archer believes immersive storytelling is the best model for presenting “complexities, ambiguities and all-out contradictions inherent in larger, longer-running stories.” Someday, he hopes, this interactive model could give the old-fashioned feature a run for its money.
Immersive journalism is picking up now in part because the necessary technology has gotten better, cheaper, and more portable. The smartphone’s ability to stream high-definition video as well as its increasing popularity—58% of Americans had one as of January 2014, according to Pew Research—have further accelerated adoption. Add to that the more widespread use of interactive data visualizations and advances in wearable computing and the stage may be set for a more robust adoption of virtual reality. “It’s not just the media coming to you,” says Dan Pacheco, professor of journalism innovation at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. “You move into the media.”
Immersive journalism is picking up now in part because the necessary technology has gotten better, cheaper, and more portable
Immersive storytelling was on prominent display at the Tribeca Film Festival last spring in the form of “Use of Force” by former Newsweek correspondent Nonny de la Peña. When you strap on the headgear to experience the piece, the first thing you hear is crickets, then screaming. Two uniformed agents drag a man dressed in white to the ground and start kicking him. A dozen other officers stand quietly by as he screams. Other bystanders watch in horror. A man asks, “Why are you guys using excessive force?” A woman shouts, “He’s not resisting! He’s not resisting!”
This incident occurred in May of 2010 at the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego. The death of Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas, the man in white, was ruled a homicide by the San Diego coroner’s office. Border agents maintain force was necessary because Hernandez-Rojas, who had methamphetamine in his system, was combative. It is a very disturbing few minutes to re-live. Though the computer-game feel of the graphics creates some cognitive distance between you and the action, you are confronted with the stark brutality of the beating in a way that feels more intimate than the documentary footage on which the virtual rendering is based. In the immersive version, you feel powerless to stop a violent act that feels like it’s happening before your very eyes.
De la peña also presented an immersive piece at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Project Syria.” It transports you to a lively intersection in Aleppo, Syria. You hear a girl sing in Arabic. Suddenly, a bomb explodes. People flee in every direction, and through the thick cloud of debris you see several bodies lying on the ground. A screeching fills your ears. When it stops, a narrator’s voice breaks in, “A third of all Syrians have been displaced by the war.” A child runs by as the narrator continues, “Reports indicate children have been specifically targeted in the violence.” The chaotic sounds crescendo and then cease as the scene fades to black.
You are then transported to a desert, with trailers and tents visible in the distance. Translucent white figures stand before you. More and more figures and more and more tents appear as the narrator continues, “There are now over a million refugee children.” For de la Peña, the virtue of virtual reality is that it puts “people inside the story so they can experience the action as it unfolds. [It] allows you to experience stories in a visceral way.”
Just a few years ago, head-mounted displays that simulate 3D environments cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were rarely found outside military research labs. Then, in 2012, inventor Palmer Luckey raised $2.4 million through a Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift virtual reality system. He offered development kits to early adopters who wanted to make games for it. Facebook bought the company for $2 billion. Though the Oculus Rift has yet to reach the general public, anyone who wants to try it out can order a prototype. Other competitors have also launched consumer-grade devices.
Video game technology has attracted journalists looking to experiment with storytelling forms, including David Dufresne, who is a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Open Documentary Laboratory. Dufresne is convinced journalists can deepen users’ experiences by borrowing narrative and nonlinear techniques from filmmakers and gamers. “The video game industry has revolutionized the narrative,” he says, particularly by encouraging audiences to participate in the story.
In “Fort McMoney,” Dufresne put the fate of a real Canadian town in Alberta, Fort McMurray, into users’ hands. Fort McMurray sits atop a large oil sands reserve, and you get to decide its future in a Web-based documentary game. The experience opens cinematically. Driving down a snowy highway, you pass an overturned car. A woman’s voice narrates, “You have reached the end of the road, at the world’s edge.” You’re eventually left to explore the photorealistic setting.
There’s a woman facing you from the passenger seat of a Ford F250, door ajar. When you hover the mouse over her, everything around her blurs. When you click, titles appear on the screen identifying Marquesa Shore, a waitress and car saleswoman. She arrived in Fort McMurray two months ago and earns about $10,000 a month. “It’s good,” she says. “It’s good to be a woman here.”
Users are then offered two choices: Get Into Her Pickup Truck or Speak To Her Later. If you choose the latter, you can explore other characters. If you choose the former, you take a ride in her truck as she tells you about life in Fort McMurray. A few minutes later, she offers to drop you off at City Hall, where you can meet the mayor. Throughout the game, users refer to a dashboard that tracks their progress. For Dufresne, this kind of gamification can attract users to stories they might otherwise ignore. “Nobody wants to read a news report or watch a movie about environmental issues,” he observes. “What we saw with ‘Fort McMoney’ is a lot of people who came for the game stayed for the topic.”
MIT’s David Dufresne aims to create a template for interactive documentaries
One of the biggest challenges in constructing a story with so many different possible outcomes is thinking non-linearly. Rather than watching a documentary that unfolds scene by scene, the audience explores the people and places of Fort McMurray based on their preferences. If you don’t want to meet the mayor and hear her perspective on things, you can click away. If you’re interested in the real issues behind the game, you can debate them with other players. As part of his fellowship at MIT, Dufresne is building a tool that he hopes will make it easier for journalists to create interactive projects of their own, a kind of Microsoft Word or Final Draft for interactive documentaries. “We lose a lot of time explaining to each other what we are doing,” he says, and he hopes his software template will enable editorial teams to collaborate more efficiently.
There are potential downsides to immersive experiences. For starters, virtual reality technology can make some people feel sick. Simulators make you think you’re moving when you’re not, and some experience motion sickness. “You don’t always get a good match between what the sensors in the system are reporting compared to what the inner ear is experiencing,” says Douglas Maxwell, a project manager for the U.S. Army who has been studying virtual environments since the late 1990s. The Oculus Rift developers have tried to address the problem of motion sickness by reducing the lag that can occur between a user’s actions and the reaction of the program.
Simulations that supposedly portray real-world events also raise psychological questions, such as: Are you “you” when you enter these worlds or one of the individuals depicted? How do you distinguish your own views from whomever’s perspective is being displayed? And where does the journalist exist in these spaces? Karim Ben Khelifa provocatively plays with questions like this in “The Enemy,” an audio-video installation that puts users directly between two soldiers on opposing sides of a conflict.
Khelifa is collaborating with D. Fox Harrell, founder of MIT’s Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory, to tailor the action to each individual visitor. “Your virtual representation shifts depending on how you interact with the soldiers,” Harrell explains. Are you looking the character in the eye, shifting to the side, or spending more time with one person than the other? The answers alter the narrative. That sort of advanced interaction creates a sense of intimate presence, says Harrell. You’re not just telling people a story; they’re participating in the creation of it.
“There are a lot of ethical questions, but it’s not unique to digital media or virtual reality,” says Harrell. “Even media that seem to be very direct are actually very subjective.” Harrell points out that a unique advantage of stories with game-like qualities is that people see different perspectives with each exposure to the story and can come to their own conclusions.
As virtual reality enters newsrooms, journalists will need to develop standards for working in the new form. One of the first to test them is The Des Moines Register with an immersive experience called “Harvest of Change.” It brings readers into the simulated world of the Dammanns, who have run their farm for the past century, to illustrate how climate change, new technologies, and cultural shifts are affecting agriculture. It combines a computer-generated world with 360-degree video to depict the nuances of farm life. In the video scenes, you feel like a voyeur, witnessing intimate moments like a father-son outing on a tractor.
The 360-degree video Dan Edge is shooting in Africa will give Frontline viewers a new perspective
Courtesy of Frontline
A team at Frontline, in collaboration with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and the Canadian company Secret Location, is taking users into the Ebola crisis. Director Dan Edge is filming 360-degree video in West Africa for the project, which includes a standard 2D, linear documentary as well as digital interaction. The project will present the Guinea village of Meliandou, where scientists have pinpointed what they believe is the first case of Ebola. In one planned scene, you can explore the inside of a towering, hollowed out tree, home to a colony of bats that scientists are studying to determine if they were the source of the outbreak.
While “Harvest of Change,” Dan Archer’s Ferguson piece, and the pioneering work by Nonny de la Peña rely heavily on computer graphics, the Ebola project replaces 3D modeling with 3D film footage. Raney Aronson, deputy executive producer at Frontline, envisions layering multimedia data visualizations into this 3D environment. “The dream would be that you could go inside the tree and then explore everything we know about it”—from inside, she says.
There are many questions to address as the team completes the project in the coming months. A big one, says Taylor Owen, research director at Tow Center, is: Where do you situate the journalist? What does narrative look like when cuts are no longer needed because the camera captures an entire room at once? In documentary interview scenes, for example, the subject is often the only person on screen. With 360-video, both interviewer and interviewee are captured and the viewer can look back and forth between them, just like they would in real life.
Though the technology is new, the ethical challenges facing journalists are not. “Any time you’re creating a computational world or self, you’re abstracting from the real world, taking some elements from the real world, leaving some out,” says MIT’s Harrell. “There are changes.” The imperative of remaining true to the reported facts is the same, regardless of whether the story is intended for the evening paper or the Oculus Rift.
Editor’s Note: Last weekend, Boston University hosted its annual conference on narrative journalism. In the first of two dispatches from the conference, Nieman Fellow Gabe Bullard writes about a panel discussion featuring “Serial’s” Sarah Koenig, among other accomplished journalists, on gaining access to sources.
What do you do if the subject of your story is in jail, in hiding, or otherwise unwilling or unable to talk to you? You keep trying.
That was the message of five journalists who have written stories with seemingly impossible insight and access to their subjects: Fernanda Santos of The New York Times; Masha Gessen, who has written about Vladimir Putin, Pussy Riot, and Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the Tsarnaev brothers; author and journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis; Beth Schwartzapfel with the Marshall Project; and Sarah Koenig of “Serial.” The five sat on a panel on access in journalism at the “Power of Narrative” conference at Boston University.
When Gessen was looking for ways to write about the Tsarnaev brothers, she went to the region where their ancestors lived. She also spent time in Boston, at one point checking into an AirBnB on the street of a person she hoped to talk to. “There’s nothing like being there. Just be there physically,” she said.
Santos, the Phoenix bureau chief for the Times, also said her experience on the scene helped build contacts for her reporting on the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a firefighting group who lost 19 members in a fire in 2013. Santos, who is writing a book on the group, had a relationship with some families of firefighters, and her presence helped her to meet more families and understand the culture of the team and why they would go into danger the way they did, she said.
But being present doesn’t necessarily mean anyone will talk to you. Santos said the firefighters’ families appreciated that she wasn’t busting down their doors, demanding to talk in a time of tragedy. A calmer approach, through letters and mutual contacts, worked better.
The others agreed. Gessen once offered to help a reluctant source shovel snow. (The source declined, but later talked.)
“The nice ask can get you really far,” said Schwartzapfel. Schwartzapfel writes frequently about people who are in prison, which means she often communicates with her subjects through letters. One letter recipient, a prisoner who was denied parole, called Schwartzapfel “an angel” for simply reaching out, she said.
And it has to be genuine. “They don’t give a shit about your scoop,” Schwartzapfel said, adding that compassion and empathy are key, and kindness shouldn’t be employed to use subjects as means to an end in reporting. She then asked if anyone had read Janet Malcolm’s treatise on ethics and honesty, ‘The Journalist and the Murderer,’ a few crowd members raised their hands, and so did Koenig.
“I’m a big proponent of a super nice, super respectful approach,” said Koenig. “I wasn’t an asshole,” she said of her approach while reporting “Serial.” Koenig added that aside from being kind, the technique had advantages. It made it easier for her to circle back to people who initially didn’t want to talk. Half the time, people would speak to her on the third or fourth approach, since no bridges had been burnt earlier. (Koenig’s technique in approaching subjects was on public display in a series of articles last year, in which The Intercept published excerpts of emails she sent one of Serial’s main characters, Jay.)
Koenig’s access to “Serial’s” central voice, Adnan Syed, came only through the phone. He called her from prison, where he is serving a sentence for the murder of his former girlfriend. This was a workaround. Koenig wasn’t allowed to record Syed in person, so she visited in person, then worked to build a relationship that led to him calling her. (The prison put a stop to this in the last week of recording, she said).
Syed had limited time to talk to Koenig. Others weren’t willing to talk at all. But a number of sources had talked in court, and Koenig had access to recordings of Syed’s trial. But those recordings almost didn’t made it on the show. Koenig explained how Baltimore officials had warned her and the other producers that they weren’t allowed to broadcast the audio from the videotapes of court proceedings. But they pushed back, and realized the rule officials cited referred mainly to broadcasting the actual video, not just the audio, and that, according to the lawyers they consulted, legal action would be unlikely.
“If you push at this stuff, even a little bit, it works,” Koenig said.
Sometimes it helps to step back. Denizet-Lewis described how he got access for his story, “Double Lives on the Down Low,” about a sex subculture in which nonwhite men who identify as straight have sex with other men. Denizet-Lewis went online and found Down Low groups on AOL. There he found people who became what he called “ambassadors,” and helped him gather trust and contacts. But, he said, it’s important to not constantly be around asking questions. “Know when to go away,” he said. Subjects can get tired of being watched.
In addition to offering a reminder to follow the basic ethics of never deceiving someone into thinking you’re not a journalist or that you’re not on the record during conversations, the panelists pushed the importance of being honest about who you are as a person.
“Use the thing in your personality that people like,” said Koenig. Whether shyness, humor, or charm, these traits endear journalists to friends off duty, and they can work on duty, too. Denizet-Lewis said the nature of reporting a narrative piece involves spending a lot of time with people, and you share your personality with the subject. The fact that the sources’ words are the story must never be blurred or forgotten, he said, but openness is inevitable, to a degree.
This can also lead to a better outcome, said Schwartzapfel. She said sources feel that “you’ll do right by them” if you’re honest the whole time you’re dealing with them.
Editor’s note: In his second and final installment from last weekend’s “Power of Narrative” conference at Boston University, current Nieman Fellow Gabe Bullard explores strategies for storytelling as outlined by author Joshua Wolf Shenk during his session at the event. In his first dispatch, Bullard covered a panel discussion featuring “Serial” producer Sarah Koenig and New York Times reporter Fernanda Santos, among others, discussing how to get access to difficult sources.
Here is one way to tell a story:
Notice how the life-or-death stakes are established in the first 30 seconds. Then the story is filled in, with a nice mirroring between emotional and physical peril. It’s effective and powerful. But it’s just one strategy.
This video was the first example author and journalist Joshua Wolf Shenk used in his session last weekend at the “Power of Narrative” conference at Boston University. Called “Plotting the Course: Narrative strategies for long-form non-fiction,” it focused on three techniques for managing true stories.
While explaining this first technique—setting stakes and following an arc—Shenk reminded the crowd that “it’s not enough to move through time.” A story that progresses this way needs an arc. Sometimes, that arc can be seen as an actual arc – a shape, as illustrated in Shenk’s second example, a videotaped talk by Kurt Vonnegut.
But the story doesn’t have to be entirely linear. Shenk highlighted E.B. White’s essay “Death of a Pig” and Katherine Boo’s book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which both reveal major plot details early on (spoiler: White’s pig dies in the first paragraph).
The second technique was what Shenk called the “Frank Gehry approach to nonfiction.” Find the shape a story takes, then build it with your facts. The most extreme example is Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker piece “Forty-One False Starts,” which takes the form of its title—41 abandoned ledes that coalesce into a story about artist David Salle.
Shenk’s other examples of Frank Gehry narratives also came from The New Yorker. Ian Frazier’s “Canal Street” follows the shape of the street and the pace of its traffic, slowing at the section about the Holland Tunnel. The most meta — and most recent — example of the structure was John McPhee’s “Structure.”
The final story form is not quite as direct as the first, nor as abstract as the second. It’s the method of building a story with voice and example, going, as Shenk described “around rather than through” the topic, as Joan Didion does with the Haight-Ashbury lifestyle in “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” It’s attitude up front, followed by scenes. “Manifestations of chaos,” according to Shenk, in his description of Didion’s piece, which opens with a summary, but concludes with a sort of second nutgraf, all filtered through her critical style.
“The primary image a reader will see in your piece is you,” Shenk said, citing David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” another narrative piece that follows the author’s voice through a series of scenes, resulting in a conclusion suggested in the lede.
These three forms aren’t just ways to write the stories, and they aren’t only meant to be considered once you’re at your desk, sorting through notes, Shenk said. They can shape a piece much earlier, and Shenk described an instance of the form changing his approach. While reporting his 2002 Atlantic piece on Lincoln presenters, people who dress as the 16th President, Shenk realized the story was truly about “how to be a Lincoln presenter.” This guided the rest of his reporting (some of it conducted in costume) and writing. “Pursue [your form] to the end of the earth,” Shenk said, “and see where it leads.”
Want some smart, provocative, moving stories for your weekend inspiration? Here are Storyboard’s picks of some notable recent work, ranging from poetry about race to essays on journalistic misdeeds and a tale about a forgotten child star from the 1970s.
Claudia Rankine’s fifth volume of poetry, “Citizen: An American Lyric” won this year’s National Book Critics Circle poetry award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It’s a remarkable book, weaving together prose poems, essays and visual images in a sharp, haunting exploration of racism. And, in a week that featured the release of a horrific video showing a South Carolina police officer repeatedly shooting an unarmed, fleeing man in the back, her voice takes on even more resonance. Here, in a poem that explicitly addresses the issue of black men being pulled over by police, she writes:
“Then flashes, a siren, a stretched-out roar– and you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.”
This YouTube video, depicting 1970s child star Mason Reese breaking down into tears on “The Mike Douglas Show,” prompted Jonathan Goldstein, host of the CBC radio progam “WireTap,” to investigate why clips of the precocious television and film actor had suddenly begun showing up on the video-sharing service 40 years after his heyday.
In a co-production with the podcast “Reply All,” Goldstein tracks down Reese to find out what became of him. The story is a beautifully structured hourglass, seamlessly leading you from general musings about late-night nostalgia to the claustrophobia of a memento-filled two-room apartment in New York and back out again. And, like the best of this kind of work, it takes you through a narrative that is far more complex and nuanced than you might expect.
In the chorus of reaction to the release this week of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s report on the discredited Rolling Stone article about campus rape, two pieces stood out. The first is the Columbia Journalism ReviewQ-and-A with the report’s lead authors, journalism school dean Steve Coll and Sheila Coronel, dean of academic affairs. The interview offers valuable insights into what the two discovered during the investigation and believe should be its lessons. Coll, in particular, emphasizes one interesting point that did not get as much attention elsewhere:
“If anyone thinks there was a golden age of excellent reporting practice, that’s probably wrong. But certainly now, there are a lot of new entrants and a lot of young self-educating reporters who need a way to talk about these practices at a level of real ethical detail and seriousness. Because if you get it wrong that can not only have consequences that are serious for others but you can end your career, real quickly.”
And in The New Yorker, George Packer implicates the “tyranny of narrative” in the debacle, citing various points where the reporter and editors made decisions that favored story over truth:
“One can imagine the impulses competing in the feature editor’s mind—carefulness and transparency on the one hand, the stylistic pleasure of an uninterrupted flow of narrative on the other. It’s a question that comes up in every piece of literary journalism worth the name.”
If you heard a story last week on NPR’s “Here and Now” about a new kind of nuclear reactor or perhaps remember a recent piece on PRI’s “The World” about the death of the word “uh,” you’ve encountered the work of Ari Daniel Shapiro, a scientist turned science storyteller.
Ari Daniel Shapiro
Shapiro, who goes by Ari Daniel professionally to avoid confusion with the other Ari Shapiro on public radio, earned a Ph.D in biological oceanography from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution but realized he didn’t want to continue doing research. Instead, he now works as a science journalist for public radio and NOVA and also hosts and produces the Boston branch of Story Collider, a live event and podcast where people present personal stories about science.
After a talk on the Harvard campus, he stopped by the Nieman Foundation to chat about the world of science narrative. An edited conversation follows:
You’ve spoken about the need to tell stories that include a thread of hope, especially in science journalism. Can you elaborate on that?
I feel very strongly that one of my roles as a science journalist is to achieve science literacy, is to help educate the public about science. I think that sometimes people have a kind of automatic response to science or to math where when they know that’s the topic coming, they shut down for a variety of reasons.
I think it’s important that I come up with strategies to help circumvent that shutting down. I speak specifically around the notion of stories around the environment or climate change. I think one reason why people would shut down is if they think that they’ve heard the story before, or that by listening to the story, nothing’s really going to get better.
I’m not saying that you delete the reality, but I think it’s about how you contextualize it. I think that it’s so important to show stories that have hopeful threads in them… It’s not like all the stories have that, but that’s one thought for how to create an entry point.
I think it’s just who I am. I try to find ways of adding positive sparks to narrative, to life.
What are some of the other challenges of doing science narrative and how do you address them?
I feel like one role I have when I’m doing my job is to empower my interviewee to participate in the story… During an interview, if someone gives me an answer that I know is not usable, I work really hard during the course of the interview to get — I want them to be a participant in the story. If we’ve taken the time to set this up and I’m spending all this time, I want them to be on tape in the story.
I think it creates a better radio piece when I can find this other angle in. Sometimes I’ll know we’ll have the science done, but there’s no story yet. Then I go around poking a bit.
I did an interview just last week about a new startup that’s experimenting with a different kind of nuclear reactor, and they’re hoping to make clean, safe, and very efficient nuclear energy, environmentally friendly at that. One of the scientists I interviewed was speaking in incredibly dense language.
That’s a big challenge. Because scientists can feel safe around vocabulary and sentence constructions that they write and that they express their technical ideas in, which don’t work on the radio. As he’s talking, I know it’s not going to work… I forget what I said, but it was something like, “I don’t understand that. That’s way too technical.” Basically, “What’s happening here? What in general?”
Then he gave it. He was like, “I want to help make clean, safe, energy.” Then, the young woman who started, co-founded the company said, “And save the world.”
That’s a good thing that I can use. They’ll both be in the piece.
How do you deal with story fatigue, especially when it’s regarding an important issue that should be talked about and reported on?
I try to be a bit of a proxy for the audience. Because I sometimes feel fatigue with this subject. The question is how do I take a story and make it feel different?
One of my editors asked me recently to find stories about climate change that were positive. I find climate change really tough. It’s the sort of thing where I have to find the right in. Someone had suggested a story that was taking place out in Arizona, in Tempe. Even going into it, I wasn’t feeling thrilled about it.
It’s about a team of people that are there who are working on carbon capture, coming up with a material that will pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that they can then use to sequester somewhere else.
With this one, during the interview I found myself feeling really hopeful. Like, buoyant by the possibility of what they were suggesting… I felt the fatigue drift away. That’s an example.
I think part of it is I spend a lot of time just looking for the stories that are not going to feel fatiguing. If they do, then trying to find a different angle or a different topic or a way to address it. Ultimately I think I try to shed that. I try to make sure I don’t feel fatigued by it, and if I feel excited, then hopefully I can convey that excitement in the piece.
You’re the Boston producer of Story Collider, a live show and podcast that presents stories about science. What role do you think live events now play in narrative and storytelling? How is it similar or different from your other work?
They’re all variations on a theme. What’s different is that it’s live and you can rehearse…The other producer on the show and I work with the storytellers in advance to get them ready for the big night. In some ways, it’s a bit like working through drafts of a radio piece.
The live storytelling has this wild element to it, which I think makes it a kind of — what’s the right word? It makes the experience, brings it alive and makes it electric.
… The sense of it feeling real and visceral and raw — I think there are ways of doing that with radio. Each provides its own magic. The story, the live storytelling is, it’s a real thrill. To be up there and to have such a positive vibe in the room, people have come out to hear people talk about science. It’s like a social night out. It’s really gratifying.
What else would you want to include or emphasize in a discussion of storytelling, particularly science storytelling?
I think that ultimately what drives many, many scientists is this curiosity that remained active from when they were kids. Many kids are scientists just naturally. They don’t take things for granted and they’re asking why and how about everything. Scientists just pull that forward.
Science can be accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds. Because I think that questioning and curiosity is inherent to the human condition. People can tap into that. As a reporter, you can tap into that to hopefully reawaken that sense of questioning.
That’s why I don’t like to think about dumbing something down. I think people can handle complexity. Because I think people are curious beings somewhere inside.
The Pulitzer Prizes are revealed in one fell swoop, winners and finalists alike, 21 separate categories that cover everything from music to history to local news reporting. And many of the winning stories consist of multiple parts. So, if you’re like most of us, yesterday’s announcement of the 2015 prizes suddenly dumped a lot more reading on your nightstand.
Where to start? We’ll try to help with the suggestion of three prize-winning entries that stand out for their storytelling. A caveat, though: don’t let your exploration of this year’s best in journalism stop here. These are just a few highlights among many excellent pieces of work.
The New York Times won the international reporting award for its coverage of the Ebola crisis in West Africa, with a team who, as the newspaper’s nominating letter notes, included a Pulitzer-prize winning physician, a videographer so familiar with the area that he speaks a local tribal dialect and a staff reporter who is Liberian-American and returned to her homeland to write about the outbreak. The entire package is well worth your time but begin with the two videos by Ben Solomon. These taut, stark stories — one about ambulance drivers, the other about patients dying at the hospital door — illustrate the power that sophisticated visual journalism can bring to a complex issue.
Many narrative journalists, of course, turn first to the feature writing prize. This year’s contest was of particular interest because, for the first time, the Pulitzer board allowed the submission of entries from online and print magazines here and in the investigative reporting category. While The New Yorker fielded a finalist in Jennifer Gonnerman’s article about the three-year imprisonment of a teenager at Rikers Island, the winner was Diana Marcum’s intimate, detailed portraits of people affected by the drought in California for The Los Angeles Times. These are quiet stories in the best sense of the word, offering subtle but striking moments like this one, when a struggling store owner is asked for credit by a man buying two packages of hot dog buns and a roll of paper towels:
“Hey, Kenny, OK if I pay for these after Friday?” he asked, lowering his voice.
Alrihimi nodded. But his stomach dropped. This was a man who had never asked for credit before.
The store owner had 29 receipts that constituted the week’s IOUs. On the backs of two torn-up cigarette cartons, he wrote the running accounts: the ones where they owed $34, paid $12, then charged $8.
“It’s too sad to say no. I think of their kids,” said Alrihimi, a father of five. “They don’t have any money. I don’t have any money. We’re all trying to get through, little-by-little-bit.”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography for its coverage of the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., but the images are anything but fleeting. Some, like the photograph of a young man tossing back a tear gas canister, have already etched themselves into our collective memory of the events; none shy away from the raw emotions and uncomfortable aspects of this story, including one photo that portrays a gun-toting looter. It’s clear from the depth and range of the work that, as the newspaper’s director of photography toldThe New York Times photo blog, “The staff are experts at St. Louis.”
Again, this is just an introduction to a collection of remarkable journalism, both winners and finalists. So when you’ve finished these, move on to the Post and Courier’sstunning series on deaths from domestic violence in South Carolina, which won the medal for public service, and keep going from there.
Diana Marcum is the first to acknowledge that her path to a Pulitzer Prize may be an unexpected one.
“My parents died when I was young. I didn’t get through college. I didn’t have any of the right credentials,” she says. “But I could write. People seemed to think I could write.”
That certainly was the judgment of the Pulitzer Prize Board, which last week awarded her the 2015 prize for feature writing for her series of stories in the Los Angeles Times about the impact of the drought on people living in California’s Central Valley.
Diana Marcum
Marcum, 52, had freelanced for the Los Angeles Times on and off for years before being hired as a staff writer in 2011. She covers the 900-square-mile Central Valley for the newspaper and pursued the drought stories in between chasing fires and the other news a beat reporter has to manage. And while she and photographer Michael Robinson Chavez knew from the beginning that they wanted to explore the impact of the drought in a serious and sustained way, the series never carried the self-important imprint of a capital-P “Project.” The pair just went out, looked for stories and found them.
She wrote the pieces late at night at her dining-room table, fueled by Diet Coke and a copy of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” a gift from her editor that she set out to remind herself of the stakes of doing her subject justice.
We talked by phone as Marcum sat on her front porch in Fresno, where our conversation was momentarily interrupted by the arrival of a congratulatory bouquet of flowers and Marcum’s friendly chat with her mail carrier, whom she knows by name. What follows is an edited and condensed transcript.
How did the drought stories come about?
I cover the Central Valley. I live here, and where the drought was hitting wasn’t the city. It was out in the little towns and the farms, way far off the road. You can’t just go around and knock on doors. It’s pretty hard to just find the doors. This was an area where life is hard and people are incredibly resilient and there’s just these stories of just trying to make your way in the world. Little stories that fascinate me. I mean they’re not little stories, but they’re little-told stories.
I had already been driving around and going to all these little places because we were thinking about doing a series of stories on people who were hungry in the middle of the bread basket. And then we started seeing the drought hit. And remember, these stories were written about a year before anybody was paying attention to the drought. So that was how it started. We just started talking to people and seeing where the drought was hitting and it was in pockets. Like you could even go to a town, and you could talk to the first people you saw and they’d say, “Oh we’ve been fine, we all found jobs, we’re still farming.” But it’s because of California’s weird water rights, right? You could go three blocks away and there was a whole neighborhood of people out of work. So you had to really, really look.
You and the photographer, Michael Robinson Chavez, had envisioned from the beginning that it would be a series. Did you think of it in any more specific terms than that?
We started with the most vulnerable. We started with the farm workers who didn’t have papers. We did that story. And then, oh my goodness, you know, this is so much worse than we realized. And then we just kind of worked our way up. We started with the farm worker, then we did the small farmer. By then, a whole entire town was out of water. So we went there and then the land was sinking, so we found a small town where the land was sinking. It was always just kind of following the journalism gods.
These people are in really difficult circumstances but they opened up to you. How did you gain their trust?
We just go out and make friends. It takes a little bit of time. We hang out, we just sort of invite ourselves in, and we eat samosas with the Singh family, and say, “Oh, can we look at your almond tree?” And we do a lot of listening, maybe to things that would never end up in the story. People really want to talk, you know. I mean we all do. You know when you find someone that will really listen to you, most people appreciate that opportunity. I know I do.
This image of farm worker Hector Ramirez ran with the first story in the series. Photo by Michael Robinson Chavez/ Los Angeles Times.
Talk a little bit more about your relationship with your photographer. It sounds like you were together on this from the get-go.
Oh yeah, very much so. He’s very well-traveled, and he loves food, and he’s just charming. So he’s very good at talking to people, striking up a conversation. You know, if they’re from Yemen, he covered a story in their hometown. He always seems to have some touchstone with people, which is really handy. And I think he’s the more driven one of us. He’s the more, “Oh this is a national news story, this is gonna be a series.” And I’m more the writer, just kind of feeling it out as I go and thinking about exactly what’s in front of me in that moment. I think we make a good team.
I think that the other thing that’s kind of interesting about us working together is that our stuff doesn’t match. We work together in that we’re finding the people and figuring out the stories, but we’re not the kind of team where we’re telling the same story. There’s always some quirky side element to his photographs. I mean, you’ll see the certain farmer leaning on the fence and the dry landscapes, but there’ll always be a kid in the corner playing the trumpet or something. Which is I think pretty much how I write. So it’s interesting when I finally see his pictures and he finally sees my stories, and we saw such different things, but we saw the same overall story.
Walk me through the reporting process. How long were you out in the field? How long did the stories take to write? What were some of the challenges putting it together?
I think that where most of the time gets used is walking around and just talking to people. It’s interesting because I don’t know when I’m talking to people a lot of the time that that’s going to be part of the story. I find that what’s in my notebook is not what goes in the story. There’s like some back part of my brain that’s videotaping everything we do and later on, those are the things that I suddenly realize are key when you start putting it together in your mind.
How long did it typically take you to write a story?
Central Valley is my beat, and we were keeping it to ourselves that we had some grander vision. So we had not a lot of time to work on them. I would say a couple of weeks maybe.
So it’s not as though someone was saying to you, an editor was saying, “Go off for six months, Diana, and tell the story of the drought.”
No, not at all. I was covering fires and everything else. We still had our regular work to do. Which I kind of like, you know? I mean it’s so exciting winning the Pulitzer… I just wasn’t sure how a newspaper reporter who covers 900 square miles on top of trying to do this would ever compete with magazine writers that have a whole year to work on a story. So secretly I’m kind of jazzed.
The stories are very highly focused, without a lot of outside experts or data, etc. Did you have to fight for that approach?
Well, these stories ran in Column One. And Column One is this tradition at the Los Angeles Times. I’ve been reading it since I was a child. So there’s always been a place on the front page of the Los Angeles Times for stories that were quirky or sad or just full of humanity, just full of life. Just stories that were interesting to read. I think that we’ve not even ever defined it any more narrowly than that because we want them to run the gamut, right? I mean, they just have to be interesting. They have to be special. They have to be different. And that’s it. Just have at it, you know?
The LA Times has this umbrella that allows storytelling. I mean real storytelling, where you take somebody into a world and keep them there from the beginning to the end, and the main thing is about the characters and the feelings. And now it’s not like you’re going to be telling a story and then interrupt yourself and say, “Oh, and let me explain the history of almonds in California.” It breaks things up. That’s why it doesn’t work if too many fingers get in the pie. And I’m not talking about the paper I’m at now. I think that any feature writer has been through that thing where they start deciding they need two graphs of this and three graphs of that. And the story gets lost.
What was the editing process like?
It’s a dream. It’s just a dream, a dream come true. When you finally, finally meet somebody who’s like-minded. Kari Howard is the Column One editor. I’m a state reporter so it goes through the regular editing process with Steve Clow. He’s the state editor. He’s more hard-news minded. So he’s looking for facts, kicking the tires, which is great. And then it goes to Kari. And we’re reading the lines out loud, and we’re weighing connotations… We’re having a very back-and-forth conversation. It’s not that kind of editing where, “Oh, here’s my changes. Take a look and see what you think.” It’s like, “Well, I think you’re missing a beat here… Oh I see what you’re saying. Why don’t we move this line here? Oh yeah, we did that, but do you think we have too much of this?”
It’s very back and forth. We’re almost like those chipmunks from the Disney cartoons, you know? It’s very respectful and very warm, and we’ve developed a friendship from working together on so many stories. So we can almost complete each other’s sentences at this point. And sometimes if something isn’t working, we’ll say, “Let’s take a pass at this and see what you have.” And we’ll come back the next day and find out we changed the exact same things.
What did change in the stories and what didn’t, from start to finish?
Well, the leads and the ends hardly changed. I mean if you have your beginning and your end, sometimes, things move around in the middle in service of those two things. But as long as you know for sure this is where we have to start and this is where we have to end, then you’re home.
Do you start with the beginning or do you start with the end or do you start somewhere in between?
Ugh, it’s really my weak point. But I start at the beginning and I go to the end. Certainly, when I was a younger reporter, and editors are trying to hurry you up, and they always say, “If you don’t have your lead, just go write something else.” No.
You know, I have to have the blank page, and I can’t do anything until I have my lead. I have to really believe in the lead to at least get everything else on paper. Even if it changes later, you know? I’m not suggesting it for other writers, but for me personally, I’m a top-to-bottom kind of person.
One of the things I thought was really striking about these stories was the use of detail and imagery. For example, there’s a line in one story, about two girls, “a tangle of giggles.” I would love to hear about your process. Do you just see those things and put them in your notebook? Do you have to work at it?
I’m a night owl. So I’m usually writing at two o’clock in the morning with a Diet Coke, you know, getting a little punchy. And I’m usually playing the scenes in my mind. I’m seeing things. I’m kind of replaying. I’m watching what happened in my head. And a lot of times what ends up in the story is not what ended up in my notebook. I think it comes more from those mental images. And I was thinking about Francisco’s daughters, and I just typed “a tangle of giggles.” I just typed it. And I remember it just came out of nowhere. I remember feeling delighted. You know that feeling like, “Oh! I like that.”
There are some light moments in these stories, too.
Always.
Why do you feel it was important to include those?
I think my overall purpose was to introduce people to each other, to let them get to know one another. And I think how we bond with each other is through laughter. Like, the people we like to be with are the people whose sense of humor we share. I mean that’s how you make friends with people, like when you’re traveling. If you can share a little laugh with someone, that’s what breaks the ice and makes you feel a little comfortable.
There’s a saying. I don’t remember who said it, but my dad used to say it a lot: “Angels can fly if they take themselves lightly.” I think that’s true for a story, too. When you’re talking about something that’s very wrenching and has a lot of pathos, if it’s just all the grit and despair, it’s not servicing telling the reality because the kind of people that I’m writing about are very resilient, and they have humor. And there’s something to be admired there. And it usually comes through in the lighter moments. And you don’t care as much about the dark unless there’s at least a little pinpoint of light.
Pistachio farmer Fred Lujan struggled to keep his trees alive. Photo by Michael Robinson Chavez/Los Angeles Times
I described the stories as quiet because they feel understated. There are moments, like when Fred Lujan starts crying, that other writers might have been tempted to really blow out or overdramatize. But you didn’t feel the need to gussy it up.
Oh, God no. Well, extraneous things never add power. Power comes from essence, right?
What was the moment like when you heard you had won the Pulitzer Prize?
When they said my name, I just did that thing you do when you’re a kid. I closed my eyes to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Because when you’re a kid and you want to check if something’s real, you know how you just close your eyes for a minute? And then it was a whirl and I was happy and there were speeches and there was champagne.
Why do you think these particular stories resonated both with the Pulitzer Board and readers?
I’m of a divided mind on that. Because I always worry that no one’s going to be interested in reading them. You could argue that nothing happens. I mean my editor Davan [Los Angeles Times editor-in-chief Davan Maharaj] — his favorite story in the series is the one with the farmer who gives the water to his neighbors. And he says it’s his favorite story where nothing happens. So I guess there’s a part of me that always expects, and always does get some of those letters saying, “What’s this doing on the front page?” And then they’ll run down the list of news that day that they find far more important. I don’t know why it resonated, but I feel that it’s such a validation of this writing that it did. It just makes me so happy to think that there are stories whose main purpose is just to introduce people and make them understand a certain way of life or make them feel like they know this person.
That’s narrative, right? That’s what narrative does.
Right, exactly. That’s what narrative does. So at least this kind of narrative. Even though they’re very sad stories and very tragic circumstances, people will write me and say, “You know, I was having such a bad day, and then I read about this guy. And it made me want to do something kind for someone.” I get these “Thank you for the story” notes. And I am really the wrong person to be thanking; I’m just telling the story. But you get the privilege of being the go-between, of saying, “Hey, this is part of the world too.” If we only write about the bad, that’s not a complete picture.There is a lot of perseverance and faith and friendship and humor. There’s everything. It’s a big, complex world of good and bad. And the good counts.
In 2001, while interning at the Associated Press bureau in Rome, Samantha Gross started working as a guide, giving walking tours of the Vatican, meandering through St. Peter’s Basilica with visitors, telling them stories about the artworks around them. Over the next 10 years, Gross bounced among AP postings from Tallahassee to New York City, covering courts, city hall, politics, crime, and more. But she never lost her taste for tours.
“Probably my favorite part of the [AP] job was getting to enter into the lives of so many people whom I wouldn’t have met otherwise and hear them tell their stories,” says Gross. That piece of her job, though, was the part that her readers never really got to experience. “I never felt that I was able to fully convey that to the people who would then read the stories. They were always missing out on some piece of that experience. Why couldn’t we share the best of our jobs with them?”
So last year, Gross founded StoryTour, a live, experiential magazine comprised of guided stories that take place in New York City. In one recent story, “The Land of the Slow Food Startups,” the tour guide took the audience to an old Pfizer building deep in South Williamsburg to meet the entrepreneurs behind the burgeoning slow food businesses there. “Our nonfiction story tours are like an equivalent of walking into the pages of a narrative feature in a magazine,” Gross explains. Whereas in a feature, the journalist might describe the row of tall silver machines lining the walls of the Kelvin Natural Slush Co. or the building’s bricked-up windows, in a StoryTour the audience sees all that for themselves. Once inside, they watch as the journalist interviews the staff of Dinner Lab, a pop-up dinner club, and they eat pasta made by Sfoglini, an artisanal pasta company.
The piece is more than a walking tour, according to Gross; it’s journalism that uses many of the same narrative techniques any magazine feature might. “The StoryTour begins with a narrative focusing on the seismic shifts many work-obsessed New Yorkers have faced in the wake of the economic downturn, and the ways that many people began re-examining their priorities and finding the motivation to start something new,” Gross says. Zack Silverman, founder of Kelvin Natural Slush, left behind a promising legal career to start his business. The audience hears him speak about the ups and downs of leaving a stable job to start something new and risky. They can even ask questions. “It’s not just seeing a list of places or hearing interesting facts or tasting interesting food,” Gross says. “It’s really an experience that’s guided by narrative and story.”
Instead of having people read about a business, StoryTour brings them inside it
Gross fondly recalls her experience as a tour guide in Rome. “It was thrilling to look directly into the eyes of my audience and see them react as I told them stories,” she says. “Having experienced that allowed me to envision how StoryTour could work, and how exciting it could be.”
Gross is just one of an increasing number of reporters looking to take their work beyond the paper or the screen or the speaker in the form of “live journalism.” The format is flexible, and the boundary between journalism and journalism-adjacent forms—first-person storytelling, theater, lecture—is blurry, but live storytelling events like The Moth and ideas festivals like TED could provide news organizations with viable models for moving stories from page to stage.
Outlets like The Texas Tribune and The Atlantic now put on events that bring together experts and journalists to talk about everything from higher education to national security. Pop-Up Magazine, a live show that started in San Francisco, sells out in minutes. It has also extended its brand through a partnership with TED, putting on a mini-magazine at last March’s conference. “Radiolab” has done a number of popular events; its most recent, “Apocalyptical,” ran 29 times in 21 cities and featured an original score, dinosaur puppets, and a team of multimedia projection artists. “The Heart,” a podcast about love and sex, hosts live listening events nestled in dark, pillow-padded rooms. “This American Life” also puts on live variety shows, with performances by comedians and musical acts.
And people are coming. Pop-Up Magazine’s early shows filled a 360-seat theater; today, it sells out a 2,600-person venue. “Radiolab” and “This American Life” fill theaters across the country. (“This American Life” has streamed its variety show into movie theaters.) And start-ups like StoryTour can exist on ticket sales alone. Journalism outlets are experimenting with all kinds of new formats and technologies to enhance storytelling and engage audiences. Now is a good time for the art of live storytelling.
During “Truth and Dare,” for which Pop-Up Magazine teamed up with TED, Dawn Landes performed a song from her musical called "Row"
Bret Hartman/TED
In the early 1990s, Anna Deavere Smith, whose background is in theater, explored complex political topics on stage, interviewing people involved in a series of controversial events, like Brooklyn’s Crown Heights riot in 1991 and the Los Angeles riots in 1992. She interviewed people on all sides of each conflict then edited the transcripts into monologues, playing each character herself.
In “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities,” the performance that recounted the Crown Heights riot, a three-day span in which the neighborhood’s black and Jewish communities clashed, Deavere Smith played 26 different people, from Rabbi Joseph Spielman, a spokesperson for the Lubavitch community, to an anonymous young black man who lived in the neighborhood. The televised version integrates black-and-white images of the neighborhood and a soundtrack with a mix of hip-hop and traditional Jewish chants. “You could describe Anna Deavere Smith as a documentary filmmaker who has simply decided to dispense with the camera,” wrote David Richards in a 1992 review for The New York Times.
By that definition, Pop-Up is a magazine that has simply decided to dispense with the paper. Over the past six years, Pop-Up has built a loyal (not to say, fanatical) following and has sold out shows in minutes. Its founder, magazine writer Douglas McGray, realized that he had never met the photographers who shot images for his pieces. McGray launched Pop-Up Magazine to bring together all the creative people who make a magazine and have them show their work on stage, and then go out for drinks with the audience afterward. (McGray also recently launched a print/digital publication, The California Sunday Magazine, which is inserted once a month in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Sacramento Bee.)
Most Pop-Up events are not recorded in any way, and that’s a big part of the appeal. “The audience is very committed,” says Pat Walters, a Pop-Up senior editor. “They buy in: ‘I’m just going to be here.’” Stories happen in the moment. As soon as they’re done, they’re gone.
In 2011, Walters produced something that highlighted what a Pop-Up experience can be. During a show produced in partnership with ESPN the Magazine, Walters made a “weird little short story, half animation, half radio story, half playful moment” about a time when record-breaking free diver Tanya Streeter nearly died.
Before beginning, Walters asked the audience to take a deep breath and hold it. They then heard from Walters that Streeter packs enough air into her lungs to fill four basketballs, and then from a scientist who studies free divers about how one’s heart rate slows down to as few as 10 beats per minute during a dive. They heard from Streeter herself about how the pressure of a deep dive bends her eardrums in. The piece also discusses how on one dive, Tanya may have suffered from nitrogen narcosis, a condition that induces disorientation and potential loss of consciousness from the effects of breathing nitrogen under pressure. During the dive she became confused and nearly didn’t make it back up to the surface.
As the audience listened, they saw a projection screen filled with Caribbean blue slowly darken, paralleling Streeter’s descent, until at the bottom, where Streeter almost died, the room went black. As Streeter recovered and rose, the blue returned. When the story ended, about four minutes later, roughly the duration of one of Streeter’s dives, Walters invited anyone still holding their breath to exhale.
In a more recent Pop-Up event, the audience enjoyed a dinner in which the elements of the meal connected to the stories they were being told. Water glasses were filled to a line that illustrated how low Lake Shasta had dipped during the drought. The napkins had word art describing “topics of conversation” for the diners. The plates were made of clay pulled up from an oil well. The dessert was made of fruits bred by a rare fruit collector. With live journalism, “the possibilities are virtually unlimited,” Walters says. “You can do everything you could do in radio, on TV, on the stage, and the people are there. You’re talking to them.”
Live shows give “Radiolab” more opportunity to improvise than when in the studio
The creative possibilities are what bring many journalists to live events. When “Radiolab” put on “Apocalyptical,” staff combined the music of Noveller with comedians like Reggie Watts and Ophira Eisenberg, and puppetry. As hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich started a segment about the long history of scientific debate over what, exactly, took down the dinosaurs, a large dino puppet crept out onstage. “It would be so much easier, for the scientists, and for you and I right now, frankly, if we could just ask somebody who was there, an eyewitness,” Abumrad said during the show, unaware that the dinosaur is on stage, cocking its head at the audience in a distinctly bird-like way. Abumrad and Krulwich, with the help of a “dinosaur translator,” then asked the beast what exactly happened to its friends.
“What we’re trying to do is something that’s creative-feeling,” says “Radiolab” executive producer Ellen Horne. “We try to create a system where there’s a lot of reporting and facts and storytelling but there’s also this opportunity to rehearse and play.” She also says live shows allow producers and performers to improvise, something that’s much harder to do in a studio: “With ‘Apocalyptical,’ we wrote maybe 20 endings for that show. Every night we’d go out and try something new.”
“Rabiolab” co-host Jad Abumrad explores the science of extinction during his show’s “Apocalyptical” tour stop in Oakland
Jared Kelly
Kaitlin Prest, host and creative director of “The Heart,” came to live events looking for ways to have her work live on beyond the one-time broadcast. “How can you appreciate something culturally that is only listened to in transit?” she wonders. At one event for “The Heart,” in partnership with an experiential travel organization, seven couples travelled to an abandoned honeymooners resort in the Poconos full of heart-shaped bathtubs and round beds below mirrored ceilings. They were told to call the front desk when they arrived. When they picked up the receivers of the old phones on the bedside tables, they heard a special audio piece by “The Heart.” Other “Heart” events have included a kissing booth and the blindfolding of participants to create a new sensory experience.
“My secret goal is that every radio piece I make will live in the real world,” says Prest. She and the other producers are considering how to take their work from earbuds and speakers, listened to while closed off from the rest of the world, and make people interact with those same stories in person, together with other listeners.
The desire to bridge the gap between isolated listeners and shared space is one of the driving forces behind a new series produced by WBUR, one of Boston’s public radio stations, called “Listen Up,” which pulls together radio pieces around a theme and plays them for an audience gathered at the Institute of Contemporary Art. With the lights down, audience members hear radio stories without any visual component. They can close their eyes or look out onto the Boston Harbor through the theater’s vast windows, but there is nothing specifically designed for them to see.
The audience at the first “Listen Up” event heard the story of a woman whose family communicated with her kidnapped father in Colombia through a radio program that was broadcast into the jungle. They listened to the viral “bad haircut” story, where a reporter interviews his daughters about the terrible makeover one gave to the other. They heard Abumrad and Krulwich of “Radiolab” discuss the story behind the Golden Record sent floating out into space on the Voyager spacecraft.
The stories are all powerful celebrations of the human voice, but Lisa Tobin, senior producer of innovation at WBUR, wasn’t sure the format would work. “Asking people to focus on audio as a lone sensory experience was one of the most exciting things about it, and also the thing that terrified me,” she says. “Are they going to be bored out of their minds?” They weren’t. Tobin says audience reaction was positive enough to do another listening event, this time pegged to Valentine’s Day.
And advocacy groups are embracing the power of live events as well. In September, the California Institute for Rural Studies (CIRS), a social justice organization, will take about 100 people on a train along the Capitol Corridor Amtrak line, from Oakland to Sacramento. Along the way, riders will hear three live stories about the history of California agriculture. “We picked this neat and vibrant swath of the state,” says Ildi Carlisle-Cummins, the project director at Cal Ag Roots, a new set of programs from CIRS. “About two million people ride that route a year, and its past is full of all kinds of stories.”
One story riders will hear is of the invention of the mechanical tomato harvester, a long-running collaboration between scientists at University of California, Davis. “They were the laughing stock of UC Davis, because they had so many prototypes that failed,” Carlisle-Cummins says. But when they finally designed a machine that could pick the tomatoes, and a strain of tomatoes that were hardy enough to survive picking, they completely changed the tomato farming industry. Tens of thousands of farmers were out of work, and the university system was sued.
“I am wading into this world of putting on this storytelling project and then recording these stories because I have listened to so many episodes of The Moth and ‘Radiolab’ and ‘This American Life,’” Carlisle-Cummins says. “I just find listening to things, first-person perspectives to be really powerful and just an interesting way to go through the world.”
Live events have potential financial as well as storytelling benefits. In some cases, the events themselves make money. Pop-Up tickets generally go for $25 to $55 a pop. StoryTour’s ticket sales pay Gross’s salary, and her storytellers get paid based on a profit-sharing model. “Radiolab” breaks even on its live events. Other publications have managed to turn their events into moneymakers. According to a recent study, The Wall Street Journal’s series of live events—in which journalists interview invited guests on stage—earns over $10 million a year.
Listeners are invited to interact in real life with stories they hear on the radio
Even if the events themselves don’t make money, they can still be a net gain for the outlet. According to “Radiolab” ’s Horne, live shows are a crucial way to grow audience and foster community, which can then be monetized, if necessary. “A lot of people are brought to a ‘Radiolab’ show by a ‘Radiolab’ fan,” Horne says. “It seems to be a way that fans are able to introduce ‘Radiolab’ to people who aren’t listening to podcasts.”
The community aspect is also one of the reasons live events are so popular. “There’s been this incredible rise in all of our lives of virtual experience and virtual community,” Horne says. “One of the things that interests us in doing these live events is that it satisfies a need for the ‘Radiolab’ creative staff and the audience to have a real physical experience together. It’s almost palpable this hunger for these real experiences.”
StoryTour’s Gross agrees. When she was doing market research for her venture, she went to Moth events and asked audience members why they were there. “What almost every single one said to me was some variant on, ‘I care about these stories because I recognize a piece of myself in them.’ Which is, as writers, the reason we all think stories are important.”
Ultimately, doing a good live show is hard. Journalists often excel in their chosen medium, whether that’s print or online or radio or television, but live theater is a whole new set of skills. Reporters aren’t necessarily used to blocking things out onstage, thinking about lighting and live pacing and the set, figuring out the motions of their storytellers, the facial expressions, or working with audio and visuals and music. The arc of a print story might hinge on a quote or a phrase or a description, where the narrative of a stage show might pivot on a turned back or some other movement. Turning a story from a print or radio piece into a stage performance means learning all those skills. If done well, though, live events can bring a whole new level of interest and impact to narrative nonfiction.
“Journalism can be really effective when it actually entertains people,” says Pop-Up’s Walters, “and they don’t feel like it’s something they should be paying attention to but it’s something they want to pay attention to.”
If you’re read the most recent Storyboard feature for the Nieman Reports magazine — and, if you haven’t, here it is — you may know that narrative is increasingly taking to the stage and streets as journalism goes live to connect in new ways with its audiences. Storyboard just joined that phenomenon ourselves when, last weekend, we presented our first live version of the popular Annotation Tuesday feature from our website.
The annotation was part of the program for a conference in Chicago on covering the 2016 presidential campaign, co-hosted by the Nieman Foundation and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. If you weren’t at the event in Chicago or couldn’t watch the live feed on Periscope, we’ve got good news: the video version of the annotation is here.
In keeping with the conference theme, we went in search of a political story with strong narrative elements and quickly chose the landmark profile of former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley by Evan Osnos of The New Yorker. Osnos won the 2014 National Book Award in non-fiction for his book about the modernization of China, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, and, yes, he reported the Daley profile from his former base in Beijing (he now writes for the magazine from Washington, D.C.). We selected this article in part because, aside from its sophisticated storytelling, it poses a dilemma faced by reporters in every genre: how do you write about someone that everyone thinks they already know?
To answer that question and many others, Osnos joined Nieman Fellow Dawn Turner Trice, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, for a discussion that touched upon everything from The New Yorker’s famed penchant for detail to what he regrets he didn’t include in the story. To read the profile before you watch the annotation, click here.
It’s easy to forget, amid all the cookouts and trips to the beach, that Memorial Day was created to remember the men and women who have died in military service. In honor of the holiday, we’ve gathered a few outstanding stories about wars and the soldiers who fight them:
“The Other Walter Reed,” Dana Priest and Anne Hull, Washington Post. 2007. A searing investigation into the treatment of veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, this project prompted public outcry, spurred federal reforms and received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
“Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“Black Hawk Down,” Mark Bowden, Philadelphia Inquirer, 1997. Before there was the Ridley Scott film or the best-selling book, there was the 29-part newspaper series documenting an attempt by American forces to capture the lieutenants of a Somali militia leader which, instead, erupted into the biggest firefight involving American soldiers since Vietnam.
“STAFF SGT. Matt Eversmann’s lanky frame was fully extended on the rope for what seemed too long on the way down. Hanging from a hovering Blackhawk helicopter, Eversmann was a full 70 feet above the streets of Mogadishu. His goggles had broken, so his eyes chafed in the thick cloud of dust stirred up by the bird’s rotors.
It was such a long descent that the thick nylon rope burned right through the palms of his leather gloves. The rest of his Chalk, his squad, had already roped in. Nearing the street, through the swirling dust below his feet, Eversmann saw one of his men stretched out on his back at the bottom of the rope.
He felt a stab of despair. Somebody’s been shot already! He gripped the rope hard to keep from landing on top of the guy. It was Pvt. Todd Blackburn, at 18 the youngest Ranger in his Chalk, a kid just months out of a Florida high school. He was unconscious and bleeding from the nose and ears.
The raid was barely under way, and already something had gone wrong. It was just the first in a series of worsening mishaps that would endanger this daring mission. For Eversmann, a five-year veteran from Natural Bridge, Va., leading men into combat for the first time, it was the beginning of the longest day of his life.”
“Generation Kill,” Evan Wright, Rolling Stone, 2004. Wright spent two months embedded with U.S. Marines during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. His three-part series, which won a National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, was later adapted into a book and an HBO miniseries.
“Culturally, these Marines would be virtually unrecognizable to their forebears in the “Greatest Generation.” They are kids raised on hip-hop, Marilyn Manson and Jerry Springer. For them, “motherfucker” is a term of endearment. For some, slain rapper Tupac is an American patriot whose writings are better known than the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. There are tough guys among them who pray to Buddha and quote Eastern philosophies and New Age precepts gleaned from watching Oprah and old kung fu movies. There are former gangbangers, a sprinkling of born-again Christians and quite a few guys who before entering the Corps were daily dope smokers; many of them dream of the day when they get out and are once again united with their beloved bud.
These young men represent what is more or less America’s first generation of disposable children. More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents. Before the “War on Terrorism” began, not a whole lot was expected of this generation other than the hope that those in it would squeak through high school without pulling too many more mass shootings in the manner of Columbine.”
There are many other excellent examples of writing about war and its aftermath, some of which we’ve previously highlighted on Storyboard. Esquire writer Chris Jones discussed “The Things That Carried Him,” his 2008 story about the return of one soldier’s body from Iraq, during a visit to Lippmann House in 2011. And Washington Post national enterprise editor David Finkel spoke to the most recent class of Nieman Fellows in October about his two books documenting the experiences of an infantry battalion in Iraq and upon their return home.
What stories would you add to our list? Tweet to @niemanstory.
If there’s anywhere that crime pays, it might be at this year’s National City and Regional Magazine Awards, where a majority of the winning stories, announced last night at the annual CRMA conference in Dallas, document murder, mayhem and bad policing.
Texas Monthly dominated the CRMA contest, winning seven prizes, including four writing categories. Executive editor and Storyboard regular Pamela Colloff won the feature writing award for her profile of Michelle Lyons, a former spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice who had witnessed 278 executions.
“She cracked her window, grateful for the cool air on her face. Mornings, when her commute offered time to think back on everything she had seen at the Walls, were the hardest. She was flooded with memories from her time inside the Death House: of the conversations she had shared with particular inmates in the hours before they were strapped to the gurney; of the mothers, dressed in their Sunday best, who had turned out to attend their sons’ executions; of the victims’ families, their faces hardened with grief; of the sudden stillness that came over the prisoners soon after the lethal drugs entered their bloodstreams. She could still see some of these men—their chests expanding, their chins stiffening as they took their last breaths.”
The writer of the year honor went to Colloff’s colleague Michael Hall, who was cited for telling “illuminating stories with a voice that resonates.” Among those stories was this extensive investigation into the murder of three teenagers at a lake in Waco in 1982, told from the perspectives of five people involved in the case, including a patrol sergeant who arrived at the crime scene that day.
“Simons, walking among the bodies as he searched for clues, was shaken. Who would do something like this? And why? On instinct, he kept returning to Jill, who he sensed had been the main target. Standing over her, he felt overwhelmed by the evil that had befallen her.
Simons crouched down next to her lifeless body. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to you,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘but I promise you one thing. Whoever did it won’t just go to jail—he is going to pay for this. I promise you that this won’t be another unsolved murder case in Waco, Texas.’”
Also, Texas Monthly’s Sterry Butcher took the column-writing prize and the magazine was recognized for excellence in writing for its September 2014 issue.
“He’s hunched at the shoulders; his face is drawn. His soft brown eyes belie his usual street confidence. He’s wearing his ball cap, a solid black T-shirt, and baggy black jeans he’d recently purchased for $10 at Walmart. He apologizes for his appearance, says he’s been living out of hotels since his release from jail, that the pressures have weighed heavily on him. He’s worried about paying his bills, about a potential prison sentence, about his four children, about the bangers from his old ’hood who would love to even the score from behind the barrel of a semiautomatic. ‘In a week’s time—in a second’s time—I became jobless, homeless, and I’m on the run,” he tells me. ‘I can’t go back to my community.’”
Los Angeles magazine won four awards, including the reporting prize for Celeste Fremon’s examination of the LA Sheriff’s Department in “The Downfall of Sheriff Baca.” The civic journalism honor went to David Bernstein and Noah Isackson of Chicago magazine for their ongoing investigation into the Chicago Police Department’s manipulation of violent crime statistics. And Boston magazine, recognized for general excellence, also took the essays and commentary category for a piece by Jennifer Roberts about growing up black in the Irish, mob-ridden Boston neighborhood known as Southie.
“What was clear to me, even as a little girl, was that my mother wanted no part of our shared racial heritage. The bubble of denial she created for herself was solid Teflon. Everything rolled right off of her and onto me. At home, I was Irish. On the street, I was something different: “jigaboo,” “nigger,” “Oreo,” “Jenny the spook.” These names were spoken to me almost as if they were endearments, nicknames. Nearly everyone in Southie had a nickname.
I was from Southie; I was one of them. I was their black girl.”
When Jeanne Marie Laskas set out to write about guns for GQ magazine in 2012, she knew it would be difficult but she didn’t expect it would become the story that, as she puts it, “nearly ate me alive.” She quickly found herself navigating a minefield of preconceptions and prejudices on both sides of the issue. Her ability to gracefully and candidly negotiate this tricky path is an important element of the story’s success, as is her hands-on approach, as she puts herself behind the counter at an Arizona gun shop.
Jeanne Marie Laskas/Photo by Scott Goldsmith
Laskas is a correspondent for GQ and the author of six books. Her work has been included in a number of anthologies, including “Best American Magazine Writing” and “Best American Sports Writing.” She is also the director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.
Laskas and I talked over the phone. My questions are in
red;
her responses in
blue.
To read the story without annotations first, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button to the right. Let’s start with some questions:
There are so many ways to tell the story of guns in America and they are all fraught with peril—why this story?
It wasn’t a topic I had been stewing on, any more than a regular person might be. It was born of the event of the Tucson shooting, and that moment that I write about, the Walmart clerk who turned back [shooter Jared] Loughner, who apparently said, “I won’t sell you any ammunition.” And I just never realized, I never thought of the human transaction that was involved in all of this. It might have been born of a conversation of that moment: who is that guy and who makes these decisions? And it might have been one of my GQ editors who said, “You should go work in a gun shop and find out.”
Something else that strikes me about this story is that you focus on a very ground-level issue in this debate: the exchange between customer and clerk. Most stories on this topic look at legislation or judicial rulings or other broad-based, complex aspects of this debate. You picked the simplest, most direct point: the moment when someone buys a gun. How did you settle on this approach?
Itwas definitely the most interesting piece of it. I was working on this book called “Hidden America,” where I was doing that kind of view of America over and over again, so when I wrote about immigration, I didn’t start broad. I started tiny with someone picking blueberries in a field. Those little tiny moments– we rarely start from them. We start broad and then go small. I wanted to start small and go broad. That was just in general my way of thinking about any issue. The issue is not as interesting as the people and the transaction.
Can you talk about the early discussions with your editors and how you settled on exactly what you would do?
The one thing that really came through clear to me when we talked about guns, they thought it was really hilarious for someone like me to go work in a gun store, or someone like them, someone from the world I inhabit. That was their assumption. There are these two distinct sides of America, and they thought it would be funny almost to send someone in, who came from a non-gun world, into a gun world. It would be shocking. The thing that struck me is that shouldn’t be that weird. That shouldn’t be shocking. You guys are presuming so much about who I am. Maybe I like guns. Maybe it will be fun. They thought that was hilarious.
You told me earlier that this story nearly ate you alive. How so?
It was really hard to not do the expected joke, the one I was just talking about. I really wanted to understand the other side. I really and truly did. I didn’t want to get into a debate about gun rights. It was a cultural question: what is your mindset that you really truly believe in what you believe? It was really hard to find a way of doing that that wasn’t judgmental, that wasn’t silly. It was really hard for me to even talk about. Everyone I was writing back to, texting pictures of my guns that I bought, that I was really interested in, they all thought that was so funny. It is crazy that you can walk in and buy something like that, but these people [gun owners] really have a point.
Guns ‘R Us By Jeanne Marie Laskas GQ Magazine
September 2012
Out-of-state residents can purchase firearms in Arizona read the sign behind the counter at Sprague’s Sports in Yuma. ASK US HOW. I asked a clerk named Ron for details.
Right off the bat, you are in the story. Why?
I hate doing it. I didn’t want to do it. I thought it made me a character, but I had to, the story needed a vehicle. I was keenly aware of my audience. My audience is not going to be reading this story unless I was starting where they were starting. I am a character in that story. That’s not me. I am writing for this audience of people who do not understand why America needs guns. I need to know how to be one of them. The story needed that tour guide.
Did you know, going to Arizona, that you were going to use first person, or was that something that came up in the writing process?
That came later. I never know. I just go. It was like, let’s find a gun store that will let me come in and hang out and let me work behind the counter as much as I could. They were great.
He was short, packed solid as a ham, with a crew cut and a genial demeanor. He pointed to the cavalcade of hunting rifles lined up on the long wall behind him. “Any of these you can get today—or these over here,” he said, leading me to a corner of the store where two young men in ball caps and a woman with a sparkly purse were admiring a selection of AK-47′s.
When did you identify yourself as a reporter during your conversations with the store owners and customers?
I would have done that all up front. I wasn’t in a spy mission or investigating. It would have been talking to the store owner first, “Here is what I want to do, here is what I am, here is where I come from, I want to write a story that bridges the two cultures.” I wanted to be a bridge between the two cultures. That was my ambition. And it genuinely was. I feel like it was impossible to become that. There is no bridge. I tried to find it, and I failed. I ended up just going and shooting zombies. That is literally what happened.
How did people typically react when you told them you were a reporter?
They were fine. They were happy. They were like, “That is so nice that you’re interested in guns.” It felt like you could be at any sporting good store. “Oh, you like volleyball too? You’re here to learn about volleyball? I love volleyball!” I had that part in the story where I say to Richard, he asked me what is the most surprising thing, and I said how normal it is.
“You have to admit this is pretty badass,” the one man was saying. He had a carbine shorty
I’m guessing you didn’t know this lingo right away. How did you find out what he was holding and when?
In that case, I had to ask. I am not reporting on the asking. You don’t get to see that. I would have had to say, what kind of gun is that?
The lingo is important, so I was curious how long you let it go, if you let it play out.
I would let it play out a while, then say, “What is it you have there?” I wouldn’t disrupt the scene.
perched on his hip, Stallone-style.
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “To me, it looks mean.”
“It’s supposed to look mean.”
“They should make it in pink,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be cute?”
“You’re shitting me.”
Why did you decide to lead with this bit of dialogue?
It is just a glimpse of a moment. I’m writing about a shopping experience, and here is a glimpse of the shopper. Probably 15 of them happened, but here is a funny one. The idea would be to provide a quick moment. It’s not loaded, to use a pun here, but I don’t have a point. This is not a polemic. Almost trying to show that.
“They should make it in Hello Kitty!” she said. “I would totally buy it if it was Hello Kitty.”
“Sweet holy crap,” the other man said. “That would be the worst possible death. Can you imagine? Shot dead by a Hello Kitty semiauto.”
It was difficult to tell if Ron was listening in on any of this; both of us had our lips pulled back in pretend smiles. “Now, what can I show you?” he asked me while the one guy went on faking his bad death and the woman continued her torture with something about rainbow-colored bullets.
I didn’t really want to buy an assault rifle, or even a handgun, but I was curious to know what buying one felt like, how the purchase worked, what-all was involved. Nobody in my circle back east
There’s a distinct voice you’re establishing here: ‘what-all’ ‘back east.’ It’s a little country, almost. Is this you? Is it a character you’re creating for this story?
You know, I have no idea. I guess maybe it’s a tone I’m trying to establish there, this character that I am is friendly and not snobby. Probably folksy. I’m creating a folksy character you would want to hang out with. I don’t think it’s me, though.
had guns, nobody wanted them, and if anybody talked about them, it was in cartoon terms: Guns are bad things owned by bad people who want to do bad things. About the only time the people where I come from thought about guns was when something terrible happened. A lunatic sprays into a crowd and we have the same conversation we always have: those damn guns and those damn people who insist on having them.
This is such an important paragraph because it lays out your views going in. Was there ever discussion as to where this paragraph should be, or how detailed it should be? Did you worry that anyone who didn’t agree with you would stop reading right here, give up?
It’s such an important moment, and it has to happen right there. It has to happen early up because you have to establish a starting point and be honest with the starting point. It needs to have a definitive point of view. This is something like an experiment, and I feel like I need to be really clear about that, even though it’s exaggerated, even if it’s the point of view of my editors. I have a more nuanced view personally because I live in Pennsylvania, where deer hunting happens in my backyard. But I’m starting where my audience is.
I had come to Arizona, the most gun-friendly state,
How did you determine what is the most gun-friendly state? Were there other states you considered?
I think Utah and Arizona are the top, because of just how easy it is to get a gun, and the carry laws. But Arizona was a natural fit because Tucson shooting had just happened. It was kind of like a ground zero for that kind of thing anyway. What I didn’t understand until I was there is that since it borders California, people come from California to buy guns. There was a lot of talk about that, how weird (Californians) were, and so that was nice too, to have that influence. They were getting people who were desperate because they couldn’t get guns in California.
to listen to the conversation the rest of America was apparently having. One in three Americans owns a gun. About 59 million handguns, 46 million rifles, and 28 million shotguns—nearly 135 million new firearms for sale in the U.S. since 1986. We are the most heavily armed society in the world. If an armed citizenry is a piece of our national identity, how is it that I’d never even met it?
In Arizona, anyone over 18 can buy an assault rifle, at 21 you can get a pistol, and you can carry your gun, loaded or unloaded, concealed or openly, just about anywhere. The IHOP was said to be the only restaurant in Yuma that prohibited you from bringing your gun in. “Needless to say, most of us won’t eat there,” Ron said. On the rack behind him, assault rifles stood stupid as pool cues, black and blocky, with long magazines protruding erotically this way and that.
What were your thoughts the first time you walked into the store?
I was really surprised by the assault rifle section. That was startling. But the rest just seemed like a pretty good store, like going into Dick’s Sporting Goods except everything was guns. But the assault rifle section was really, wow, and it literally did happen that way. I walked right back, and said, “I can just buy one of these?” And I knew nothing. They were like, “Just pick one, okay that one.” That is how simple it is. That to me was startling.
Also, you’re using language here in a very provocative way—‘stupid as pool cues,’ the reference to the magazines being phallic and a substitute for masculinity. This must be deliberate. Why did you make this choice?
Truthfully, I was just having fun there. I think it’s more to take the pressure off instead of being like I’m about to get into an argument.
“I’m kind of surprised you carry assault rifles,” I said to Ron.
“There’s no such thing as an assault rifle,” he said. “These are ‘military-style rifles’ or ‘modern sporting rifles.’ ”
“But they’re assault rifles,” I noted. I knew that much from TV.
“Assault is one of the worst things the media has ever done to us,” he said. “Have any of these rifles ever assaulted anyone?”
I’m curious here… We know you were up front with everyone you talked to, so Ron knows you’re a reporter. Still, how did you set everything up with the store?
I think it was just a real honest approach. It helped that I came from Pennsylvania and I have hunters in my background. They were so proud of the store, so it wasn’t hard to get them to agree. The only time they had any publicity was the stuff from running guns into Mexico, and I dug into that and realized they really did get a raw deal. That was a trumped-up charge, it really was. That seemed to be unfair, and that was the publicity. They were attacked and it was unfair, and so I think I was just really straightforward. I want to learn about this culture that I don’t understand and just come and hang out and work behind the counter.
He went on to say I could buy as many of them as I wanted and walk out with my arsenal today. “These guns have helped our industry tremendously,” he said. “They’ve attracted a whole new generation…. Is there one you want to try?” He brought down a Colt AR15-A3 tactical carbine, slammed in an empty magazine, and handed it to me. It felt disappointingly fake, an awesome water pistol, perhaps, or a Halloween prop.
Was this the first time you had held a gun?
A gun like that. I had held revolver types.
What was it like?
Enticing. It was easy to get into the toy thoughts of it all, the gadgetry. It was fun. I got it. The lethal part doesn’t enter your mind in that moment. But then it wasn’t as heavy as I thought it would be, and I was kind of disappointed. I thought, “This is kind of cheap.”
I asked if I would need to tell him why I wanted to buy a gun like that or what I intended to do with it. He squinted and smiled and appeared politely speechless. “Would you have to do what, now?” he asked.
It was difficult for us to find a comfortable, common starting place, but the reach was certainly genuine. Among the things I wanted to talk to Ron and the people at Sprague’s about were killing sprees. America has had a bad run of large-scale gun violence, including the theater shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and, closer to home, Arizona’s infamous 2011 Tucson massacre. I wondered when would be an appropriate time to bring up the subject; a massacre is, well, a massacre, and I feared it would dampen the mood.
As I read this story, I kept thinking about all the massacres that have occurred since it ran, including most notably, Sandy Hook. Do you think about that?
All the time.
Do you think the story had any impact on the issue at all? Was that even a goal?
I don’t think my goal would have been to change minds. My goal was to try and be a translator between the two cultures. Both sides think the other side is crazy. I did not understand that. At the end of the story, I talk about the crazy neighbor, and that metaphor is exactly it. It’s almost like it takes great courage to go down to that crazy neighbor’s house and you’re prepared to forgive and have this moment of reckoning only to find out that they think you’re the crazy one. I was blown away by that notion.
A few reported details from the Tucson incident always stuck with me. Before Jared Loughner shot Gabby Giffords, he ran some errands first. He stopped at the Circle K on Ina Road to get something to eat. He went down to the Walgreens to pick up some photos he’d gotten developed. Then he went to the Walmart Supercenter at the Foothills Mall to buy some ammo for his Glock. Something happened there. A snag in the plan. The clerk at the register, who was never identified and whom Walmart officials refused to talk about, said no. He, or she, denied the sale to Loughner, who left and went to a different Walmart six miles away, where he bought enough ammunition to fill two fifteen-round magazines and the thirty-three-round extended magazine he would unload a few hours later into the crowd over at Safeway, killing six and injuring another thirteen, including Giffords.
Why do you think these details have stuck with you for so long? Is this what made you want to tackle this story?
That one was fresh in my mind because it was the most recent. I get angry at this issue. Get rid of guns! Just get rid of guns! What is going on? Look what happens in Canada. Nothing like this! But I really felt that people in the store would be embarrassed or have some kind of moment of “Oooh boy, that was a terrible thing that happened, those people are right.” But I didn’t find that at all.
Why did the first Walmart clerk refuse the sale, and how?
Did you try to find this clerk, and if so, when did you give up?
We did, and Walmart would not cooperate. I did go to that Walmart, and just kind of walked around there and their ammo section. I would have loved to have found that person, even just a clerk who is ringing someone up. Oh, there’s bananas, shirts, there’s some bullets.
What did that person see in Loughner, and where does a private citizen get the authority, or the gumption, to refuse to sell ammo to someone? These questions were never answered, if they were even asked by media providing day and night coverage in the bloody aftermath. The mysterious clerk at the Foothills Mall Walmart dropped out of the headlines almost as soon as he, or she, appeared. What may have lingered then for some, or at least it did for me, was a nagging sense of unfinished business. So these are the people who stand at the front lines, guarding America against its lunatic mass murderers? Clerks at Walmart. Clerks at sporting-goods stores. Minimum-wage cashiers busily scanning soccer balls, fishing tackle, and boxes of Tide.
This ends the first section of the story. Can you talk about why you wanted to end here, with these anonymous cashiers?
I always like ending a section with something you’ll think about. It’s a great place to plant whatever the lingering thoughts are that you’re having, almost like the echo that you’re looking for in a story.
···
Ron grew up in Yuma and had worked at Sprague’s for twenty-seven years; several of his co-workers had put in at least twenty.
That’s an amazing longevity for retail. Were you surprised at that?
Yes. That went with the whole general notion that they were all so proud of that place that they created. They will not leave!
When you found that out, did it change any preconceived thoughts about who these people are?
Definitely. It made me like them.
Was that a bad thing?
It was confusing; it was a really freaking confusing story.
Why was it hard?
It’s all of these things you’re talking about. I like Ron, who is working there all these years with his name on his shirt, but he’s telling you to buy horrible things that you can go kill people with. It’s really confusing.
All the clerks milling about the store were clean-cut, dressed in crisp button-down shirts with their names embroidered on the pockets, and the respect they showed the merchandise reminded me of department-store shoe salesmen in the old days who wore suits and used shoehorns.
This is a really interesting comparison.
That popped into my head while I was there. It was one of the phrases I used when I called my editors. While I’m reporting this thing, I went there for a week twice, and while I was there, I was calling back, and we would have these conversations. Here is what is going well. I’m really confused. It’s like a shoe store, but it’s guns! They thought I was so crazy that this is what was bothering me.
The store was brightly lit and impeccably clean—no dust or cobwebs on the hundreds of bobcat, coyote, elk, and other taxidermy mounted on high. Stray scraps of paper were instantly swept up, Disneyland-style. The merchandise was arranged in boutique fashion: colorful boxes of ammo stacked like candy by the register, a library of gun books and magazines near the restrooms. There was a holster department, a gun-safe department, and an optical-equipment department—OVER 75 MODELS of Binoculars in stock. OVER 100 MODELS of Rifle Scopes in stock. The guns were in the back of the store, and this is where most of the customers hung out.
How much time did you ultimately spend in the store?
Two trips of approximately a week each. It wouldn’t be a full week because I would get sick of it before that. But a long time. I would spend a long time at these things.
“I have six handguns—bought five of them here,” an old man said to me. I was waiting for Ron, who’d gone to the back room to find a gun he thought I might like. “I have five rifles, got all of them here,” the man said. “I spend most of my time reloading shells. All my friends are dead.”
I don’t think there are any customer names in this piece. Did you go into the reporting knowing you would probably not use some people’s names?
I don’t think I needed them. I just tell the story. I needed the names of the clerks. That one guy telling me his whole violent fantasies while he is buying his new gun, I knew I would have to blur his identification, but I probably got his name in my notebook. I’m usually pretty frank.
In some ways, I think it works because these people could be stand-ins for any gun owner.
I think once you make it specific and you get, “Here is Charlie Smith, 53, who lives in a town you’ve never heard of,” it’s distracting to a story like this. You want your characters to stand for something.
He had thin white hair and a long, sagging face dotted with age spots. “Do you know what the biggest problem with divorce is? It’s the bedroom. And a lot of it’s the man’s fault. Like a damn rabbit, on and off.”
Why do you include this last quote, given that it doesn’t really have anything to do with guns?
Because my larger point there is I am trying to demonstrate this general store feel and that is how it felt. That conversation lasted probably 20 minutes. That is what you do. You start talking about guns but then you’re talking about marriage and wife, the old bag. I was just showing that.
It felt like we should have had rocking chairs, perhaps a set of checkers between us. This was one of the things I liked most about Sprague’s: the general-store feel. Groups would form, strangers becoming neighbors, sharing stories. “I lost my wife in November,” the man said. “Sixty years. Now my kids keep trying to get me to go live with them in California. My doctor said, ‘What’s your lifestyle?’ I told him guns. He said, ‘Stay in Yuma.’ “
There are moments of humor throughout the story. Why did you want some humor in here, and how did you go about setting it up?
I think this kind of story needs humor. There is so much at stake, really, but I’m not presenting an argument. It’s a cultural study, almost anthropological. If it’s all of us, we need to laugh at ourselves. We’re not laughing at our neighbors, but we’re laughing all together that our neighbors are pretty wacky. And you know that is just where we come from. That is our culture looking at that culture. You need humor in that kind of story, if it is not at the expense of somebody.
Ron came back carrying two assault rifles. “Hey there,” he said, greeting the old man. “What brings you in today?”
“Same as yesterday.”
Gently, Ron placed the rifles on the counter. He told me one was a Smith & Wesson M&P15 and the other a Heckler & Koch 416. They looked every bit as formidable as the first one I held, but these were .22s, and Ron said they’d be easier to shoot.
“So more like beginner assault rifles?” I asked.
Was it a conscious effort on your part to keep referring to them as assault rifles?
Oh yeah, because I let him make his point, and that is actually truly his point and he gets so mad at me for not accepting it, and I’m not going to accept it. But I am going to remind the reader that he is still making his point. For me to accept his terminology without making fun of my own refusal to accept it would be missing a whole little spin.
“There-is-no-such-thing-as-an-assault-rifle,” Ron said.
The Smith M&P15 sold for $425 and had a snazzy bright orange cardboard wrapper on its fat barrel that read “Kick Brass.” “I’ll go with this one,” I said.
How did you choose?
That orange label on it was very exciting. I wanted it to look rough and mean but to be easy to learn on. But that is how confusing this story is, because when I found out that that guy bought it for his six-year-old, I was both horrified and embarrassed by my choice. I had both of those reactions. That is how confusing this story is.
Did you go out knowing that you would buy a gun, or is that something that evolved while you were there?
Most definitely that evolved. It was all the better for it. I didn’t want to write that story; here I am a character, naïve East Coast girl going to buy a gun, but that is what turned out to happen. But it happened because of being there and actually wanting one. I wanted one. I wanted to see what it was like.
You called your editors and said, “I’m going to buy a gun?”
Yes. I told them I’m buying this Glock, and is it okay if Conde Nast buys me a Glock? I just really need one. They’re like, “What’s happening to you, what’s happening?”
And you asked if the magazine would pay for it?
It’s expensive! I’m like, “I’m going to have to expense this. What do you think they’ll say?” They said, “I don’t know, just put it through.”
Did it go through?
I think it did.
“Okay, you’ll need to fill this out.” He handed me a six-page government-issued form, told me not to make any mistakes or else I’d have to start all over. “No cross-outs,” he said.
Anyone in America who wants to buy a gun has to fill out ATF Form 4473, with thirty-six questions in all, and hand it in to the dealer selling the gun. [
How much of this stuff did you already know going in? How much research did you do before heading to Arizona?
I knew that there is something called a background check, and that this is our safeguard. I wanted to walk deliberately through that. I had never read one of those forms before, but once I’m in the store I have every reason to. I wanted to be like, slow down everybody, this is what actually happens. I am pretty much learning that live. I’m learning what the process is, and that it’s a kind of a bogus situation.
The clerk takes the form and contacts NICS, the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (open every day of the year except Christmas), where an examiner runs your answers through a series of databases to make sure you haven’t lied and, within minutes, tells the clerk what to do: proceed with the sale, deny it, or delay it for three days while NICS does some deeper digging and decides later.
PLEASE PRINT.
Are you a fugitive from justice?
Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective?
Are you subject to a court order restraining you from harassing, stalking, or threatening your child or an intimate partner or child of such partner?
How did you decide which questions to include in the piece? I imagine there were so many to choose from.
I chose the most ridiculous sounding ones. Some of them were boring. Are you a citizen of the United States? I think at that point, just in general in America, it was all about the mental health issues and how someone could get hold of a gun if you’ve got problems, so I probably focused on those types of questions.
I stood there puzzling through the form when a guy walked up, replacing the old man beside me, and he, too, struck up a conversation. He was a man of some heft in a red T-shirt and sunglasses wrapped behind his neck, as was the fashion in Yuma. “You say you’re just starting out?” he said. “You picked a good one. With the HK, you would have just been paying for extra steel you don’t need.”
“That’s sort of what I thought,” I lied.
“I just got that same Smith for my kid,” he said.
I looked at him. He appeared far too young to have a grown son.
“Wait, how old is your kid?” I asked.
“Six,” he said.
Were you taking notes at the time or did you reconstruct later?
I do notes while I’m there. I tape record a lot and I take notes at the same time. I’ve got things pretty well documented. I depend on my notes more than my tape but I have it there in case I need it.
···
Richard Sprague, the owner of Sprague’s Sports, is a slender man in his fifties with a tapered face, coarse graying hair, and an easy smile. Other Arizona gun stores would not even entertain my request to visit and ask questions about selling guns and ammunition, but Richard without hesitation invited me to spend as much time as I wanted at Sprague’s—behind the counter, in the back room, at the shooting range, anywhere I wished.
How many stores did you approach?
Maybe two or three. We wanted big ones, legitimate ones. There are lots of shady places and we were turned down by a few.
Why place this information here, fairly far down in the story?
It’s a way of helping you know Richard a bit, knowing he is the kind of guy who would say yes.
I thought it a somewhat courageous offer, especially given that a 2010 Washington Post investigation spectacularly put Sprague’s eleventh on a list of top U.S. stores that sold guns traced to crime scenes in Mexico. Attempts to stem the flow of arms south of the border began intensifying during the last Bush administration and have continued with the ATF’s infamous Fast and Furious operation.
In response to the hoopla about his store, Richard said that he and his employees were always on the lookout for straw purchasers: a person buying a gun for someone who hadn’t passed the background check. “Unfortunately,” he said, “some people do break the law once they leave our store.” The Mexican border was just eight miles away, and so proximity, rather than reckless selling, was the truer though far less titillating explanation of the ranking. And the number-crunching behind the headline was misleading: The actual number traced to Sprague’s was just fifty-five out of a spectacular 60,000 guns smuggled to Mexico.
Again, I’m curious. Did you know this information before you went to Sprague’s, or is this something you found out while there?
I knew that that stuff was reported but I don’t think I learned the reasons why it was unfair as I illustrate in the story until I got there.
How did it change your perspective on the store?
A lot. It was like, “Wait a minute.” It made me think about how quick we are to attack on our side and to find it was really an unfair claim, and an easy brushstroke, making this guy sound like he was some bad guy. And you get there and he is some shoe salesman, and it’s like how can that shoe salesman have been a bad guy and you dig a bit further and you go, “Oh, he really is just a shoe salesman who sells guns.”
Richard was a busy man, with quick eyes, and he spoke of “firearms” and “the industry” in the dry, responsible way a man might discuss flood insurance. Still, he talked more about his family than he did guns. He spoke proudly of the long line of Spragues (his father opened the store in 1956), and the raw weirdness of being the last of his generation left. He toured me around Yuma, a cozy town of 93,000 with parks stretching along the river where families picnicked under the ironwood trees. He took me to the Yuma county fair. He was proud of Yuma and wanted me to like it, and I told him I did.
How much time did you spend with Richard?
Quite a bit. I liked him. I went to his house and met his wife. We went to the fair together. He very, very accommodating, and they love Yuma so much, I would go on a tour with them. I loved his wife. She was great, and we went shooting together. I think that got cut.
He was proud of the firearms industry and wanted me to like that, too, and I was working on it.
This is one of the places where you are attempting to signal your open-mindedness on this issue (the implied critique of the Post piece above is another, I think.) I would love to know your thinking on this and why you made it an element of the story.
I wish I made that more of an element of the story, frankly. I wouldn’t get to know this world if I stayed an outsider looking in and judging. It was almost a conceit that I had for the world for my audience. I don’t think they would have been with me if I didn’t enter with that cynical way, but I feel like I did change and I needed the reader to watch me change, if ever so slightly. It’s not a big change. I’m not going to be a gun owner, but it definitely changed. Maybe that is the arc of the story.
“What’s the most surprising thing about your trip so far?” Richard asked me one morning. We were driving back from a daybreak session at the outdoor range where he had given me some lessons on my new M&P15. Learning to shoot it wasn’t hard. Virtually no recoil, just as Ron had promised, and while in that way I was satisfied with my purchase, I found that I could not let go of a feeling of disappointment, of some kind of tangled shame that had nothing to do with shooting guns, or gun ownership, but that somehow I had wimped out and bought an assault rifle a 6-year-old could use.
Are you indicating here that you’re starting, at least a tiny bit, to adopt the mindset of the people you’re writing about?
One thing that got cut, but it’s in the book version, is a whole sequence where I go toddling off with my guns to the airport, driving around with it in the car, to the airport. I confront the US Air people and say I have a gun. It’s about what that experience was like, and how I feel judged and how I’m just a regular person and it’s not fair. I’m trying on what it’s like for [gun owners].
Was that cut for space?
Yeah. And also it was too much me. My character was starting to take over.
“The most surprising thing?” I said to Richard. He was backlit against a morning sky exploding with red and pink and orange. “That’s going to be hard to summarize.”
“There must be something,” he said.
“I guess the most surprising thing is that everyone thinks guns are so normal,” I said. I told him it wasn’t like that where I come from, not like that at all.
He nodded in consideration, and I wondered if he understood. I offered him a piece of gum, and he took it, and for a while we just chewed and admired the passing mesquite. “Think of just the hunters,” he said. “Thirteen million in this country. That’s 13 million Americans trained with firearms—the equivalent of the largest army in the world.” He flipped his visor down to cut the sky. “Anyone thinking of invading this country has to take that into consideration.”
Well, wow. Hunters? Hunters rising up? It took me a moment to conjure the image. I wondered whom Richard imagined an army of guys dressed in orange rising up against. Al Qaeda? The Chinese?
I asked him who. Who?
He shrugged, said it could be anyone, another country, anyone. He said the whole point of guns was personal responsibility: taking care of yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your country. The more people there are with guns, the safer the society. “That’s part of what has made this country great,” he said. “That we have the freedom to make sure we’re safe, that we have the means to protect ourselves, to be ready for the occasional wackos out there.”
Given that this piece starts with your curiosity about Jared Loughner, it strikes me that Richard is saying the guns keep us safe because they protect us from occasional wackos. But aren’t the occasional wackos people like Loughner and James Holmes and even Adam Lanza, who attacked Sandy Hook just four months after this story ran? Did you push Richard on that?
I tried. I tried to push all of them, not push, but question that perspective, and didn’t get anywhere with it. You get a lot of the same argument that you hear all of the time, if we had been here with our guns, that wouldn’t have happened. To them, they can use that as an argument for more guns.
I hadn’t come here to discuss the Second Amendment, but it kept coming up, as pervasive as the constant hot sunshine. People wanted to talk about it, explain it.
Is this something that really changed the way you reported and ultimately wrote the story?
I’m glad you bring that up, because that was a masterstroke by my editor, that line, “I didn’t come there to talk about the Second Amendment,” because that was another problem with the piece. I kept getting sidetracked by digging through the Second Amendment and arguing that in the story. This story was a gazillion pages long and I couldn’t stop myself. It got me going. And I had to figure out where I landed until my editor [said], “You‘re not writing about that and that’s not your point; you have to get rid of it.” I thought, “How can I get rid of it, how can I avoid it?” And she said, “That is not why you went. Just say it.” We got rid of five pages of my rant with that single stroke. It was the right choice, totally.
“The largest army in the world,” Richard said again. “Bigger than China’s. And if you think Afghanistan and their populace is well armed, wait till they try to come into this country. It should give you some cause for comfort.”
He looked at me. I had my head jutted forward, my thumbnail between my teeth.
“That’s just how I look at it,” he said, and continued driving. The heat on the horizon was already visible in wobbles and waves.
How much did the story change in the editing process?
Oh my God, I’m telling you, it was really unusual how much it changed and how many versions we ran through. Probably a dozen actual final drafts of that thing before we were satisfied, and that’s a lot. I do drafts. I’ve had a dozen unfinished drafts to get to it, but that’s not what I’m talking about. A dozen finished drafts, where we think we have it and then no.
What was the thing that kept pushing it into another direction?
The distraction of the Second Amendment definitely, and the fact that I changed, so that if I am starting the story as an already changed person, I can’t get my audience, so I had to unpack, wind back time. I had to be two people in the story. You had to walk through my change. That’s a good question about the ‘why me’ in the story. Because my character has to undergo a kind of reckoning. And that, that is really hard for me to mentally get. I kept getting really defensive about the fact that I got a gun and it’s okay, and I’m trying to justify that and everybody back at the office is laughing at me, like something is wrong with me now.
···
Nearly all the shoppers I met at Sprague’s came in asking for something for self-protection. They wanted guns for their nightstands, guns for their purses, guns for their pickups, guns for holsters on waistbands, ankles, and bras.
“The people I hang out with back east don’t talk about shooting bad guys as much as you folks do,” I said one day to a gathering of customers and clerks.
“You depend on the government to protect you,” said a middle-aged woman dry-firing a Ruger. She was admiring the smooth trigger action and regretting her clunkier Glock. “We depend on ourselves.”
“It’s an entirely different mind-set back east,” said Kevin, a slim clerk with thinning black hair who had sold me a ticket for the Yuma Catholic High School 125 Gun Raffle.
This is amazing, a school raffling off guns (of course, the Fraternal Order of Police in my town raffles off an assault rifle every year to raise money). What’s interesting to me here and at several other points in the story is how you drop this detail in without comment, without blowing it out and making a big deal of it. Why did you handle it this way?
I’m laying detail down, peppering it with detail. It’s a cumulative effect of those observations.
”You can get a permit in New York City to own a gun,” he said. “That’s the thing. They’ll permit you. In Arizona we don’t care. Our government doesn’t allow us; our government stays out of our ability to protect ourselves.”
But—from what? I’d never been attacked by anyone; I hardly know anyone who has been attacked. I follow the news, of course, and I see violence enacted all the time on TV. But I didn’t walk around in fear of getting mugged or worse. Was this simply naive? The people shopping at Sprague’s were saying yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Anyone without a gun was inviting disaster.
At this point, how much time had you spent in the store? Did you find that you had the same conversations every day? Did it get tiring?
Eventually. That is when you know you’re done, when everything starts repeating. When I can predict what people are going to say, then I’m done.
Did it happen faster or slower than you would have expected?
Slower in that one. It starts repeating but my reaction changes, so it’s repeating but I’m hearing it differently.
Standing at the counter with Kevin, I asked him to show me something small, for my purse. It is difficult for me to say what exactly was prompting me, or what kind of corner I was turning. Perhaps buying an assault rifle—even as a joke or an experiment—puts you over some sort of threshold. Or it could be something about anyone’s capacity to get caught up in a shopping frenzy: Hang around people buying stuff long enough and pretty soon you want to buy the stuff, too. I do know the gadgetry of guns appealed to me. The clicking and the clacking, the feel of steel so expertly shaped to fit a human grip.
Did you ever find yourself thinking that maybe you had been missing something in your life, with regards to guns, after these discussions?
In that moment when I’m trying to buy a .22, and he’s telling me to get something stronger, more powerful, and he’s saying, “The guy’s on meth, the guy’s on meth, and your kids are sleeping, and you’re going to be poking holes,” at that moment, I was like, “Holy crap he’s right. I’m really going to die. I have to save my children.” Those kind of moments, when the fear was really revved up.
“Women always come in saying they want something small,” he said. “Then they find out how much harder a small gun is to shoot. Save yourself the time and get something big.”
He unfolded a felt pad and put it on top of the glass case, then brought out a Glock nine-millimeter semiauto. It felt solid and serious. I asked to see an alloy Smith & Wesson on the top shelf of the case. It was wearing a little tag about being featherlight. Kevin said it was too small for me and the caliber was worthless.
“You’re not going to stop anybody with a .22. It’s going to poke little holes in the guy.”
I’m curious… Did you ever start to feel the paranoia that so many of the people buying those guns felt, that not having a gun meant you were in mortal danger?
I got it. Here is also how you get it: It’s really a rural-urban split. Where I live, 911 doesn’t mean much. It’s going to be a long time before anyone gets there. And when you’re driving through Arizona with an assault rifle in the back seat, there is nobody, no cars, nothing but desert. You can pull over on the side of road and load that thing and aim at some brush and you realize it’s just no big deal. It really would hurt no one. It couldn’t possibly hurt anyone. But you know, you can’t have that thought if you’re driving through suburban anywhere. It’s just a different conversation.
“He’ll run off after that,” I said. “Anybody would.”
“He’s on meth,” Kevin said. “He’s got your kid by the throat. It’s the middle of the night, and he’s going to take your whole family out. He’s coming after you. He’s dragging your kid. He’s on meth! He’s not feeling your little .22s hitting him, I promise you. Those bullets are going right through him, and the ones that miss are going through the drywall right into the baby’s room—”
This seems like a sales pitch to me. Was it? A story created to generate fear in the customer so they will buy the more powerful (and probably more expensive) gun?
It was. Oh, it was. It got at it. It got me. Fear is a great motivator. I don’t think it was cynically for him. I think he believed it. It was completely honest. I don’t think it was just to make any money. They needed to help me. In their minds.
I put the Smith down on the counter and shifted my weight in consideration. If anything like that happened to me or my kid, I definitely would want something capable of blowing a guy’s face off.
I paid $450 for the Glock, a used one—a bargain. Normally a gun like that would go for $100 more. Kevin said he would ship it to a licensed dealer near my home in Pennsylvania, in accordance with federal law, and that I could pick it up there. I could then go to my local sheriff’s office, and in the time it would take to snap my picture, print it out, and laminate it, I would be able to get a license to carry my new Glock concealed.
Why did you feel like you needed to buy a second gun?
That just sounds so preposterous. Well, it was clear to me that the assault rifle wasn’t practical. I didn’t know what I was going to gain from that. I decided to get what they said I needed for protection.
Did you keep the guns?
For a while. But then I really truly didn’t know what to do with them. There’s another whole section, I think I cut it from the story, about living with a Glock. I wanted to then go experience that. What would I feel like with a Glock in my purse. And going to the pool with my children and your purse has a gun in it. It really affects how you go about your life. There’s a whole sequence in there that I did end up cutting, but I did use in the book version. They’re in my brother’s gun cabinet. I didn’t know what to do with them. I’ve just sort of ignored it to this point.
All of it was so easy, and that really was the only confusing part about buying guns. So easy. And yet why should it be difficult? I wasn’t a criminal. I wasn’t going to commit a heinous act—not unless I had to defend myself or my family. Defending yourself and your family is what good people do. Getting a gun should be easy for good people and impossible for bad people. The only trick is telling the difference.
This harkens back to that unknown Walmart clerk and all the other clerks who stand in the way between the good and the bad, who have to be able to tell the difference, which seems an impossible task.
I agree. I love that Sergio the gun clerk was able to speak to that: “I don’t wear a badge. I don’t have any authority. And yet I’m making these decisions.” These are some of the practical matters as to having a society where you’re allowed to buy guns.
···
Working in a gun store is hard on your feet and your back. There was a stool behind the counter at Sprague’s, and I was trying not to hog it. I sat and watched customer after customer feel and fondle and dry-fire guns, and I thought about the burden on the clerks whose job it was to dole out firepower.
Why did you want to work in the store?
I just wanted to get as close as I could to the action of the transaction. It’s just a matter of perspective, which side of the counter you’re on, and I didn’t want to be a customer the whole time. I wanted to see what that experience is like, just as close as I could get to that experience, even though it’s a made-up experiment, really. I don’t work at a gun store, but you get as close as you can.
I saw customers get turned down, most commonly teenagers getting carded when they tried to buy bullets. You have to be at least 18 to buy rifle or shotgun ammo, 21 to buy rounds for a handgun. “Sorry, man,” the cashier would say.
Had you ever worked retail before?
I worked at a drug store.
When you were much younger?
Yes. First Drugs. Loved it. But it’s not the same.
How did it compare with working in a gun store?
Well, you still had to deal with the public, but nothing like this.
Sergio, one of the clerks, had some thoughts about what it felt like to work behind the counter and size up people like Jared Loughner. Sergio was quiet, small, with a broad swarthy face and a big, rugged nose. He’d been in the business for twenty-five years, and he often sat on the stool.
“You get suspicious,” he said. “A woman yesterday. She was with a guy holding a baby. She said she wanted three guns, but he did all the talking. He kept saying ‘me’ and ‘mine’ and ‘my money.’ They were just bad actors. I don’t mean bad people. I mean they couldn’t act. I said to the guy, ‘I think you’re trying to get her to buy guns for you,’ and he said, ‘Oh, er, ehhh,’ and he shoved the baby back at her and flew out the door.”
Looking out for Loughners and other lunatics was part of the job, he said, and he didn’t like that part of the job. “I remember years ago going to an ATF seminar. The agent was talking to us, the counter people, and he said, ‘I need you as a front line of defense. To watch out for criminals.’ And I remember thinking he was out of his mind. How can I tell who’s a criminal? And I don’t have any rights as far as enforcing anything, I don’t have a badge, you know, what can I do?”
He could refuse a sale. That’s what he’s supposed to do, according to the ATF agents I spoke to, and according to the YouTube “ATF Channel,” where you can watch informational skits featuring clerks doing the right thing. If a clerk feels iffy about selling a gun to someone, he or she should simply say, “No.”
You write that you only saw a clerk reject customers when they were underage. Did that surprise you?
Not given what I saw except for that one guy that truly struck me as someone who may not be thoroughly stable, but that is only because he was standing there telling me about his life and his rage and his hospitalization. That is just not on a questionnaire. We were just chatting.
The ATF has little else to say on the matter, because the ATF is busy. A network of twenty-five ATF field divisions, essentially one for every two states, oversees America’s 57,500 licensed dealers. About 650 inspectors monitor how the large-scale gun stores, like Sprague’s and Walmart, conduct business. Inspectors are supposed to go into each store once every three years but are lucky if they make the rounds in six or seven, given the paltry manpower (thanks at least in part to gun lobbyists, who have worked hard to keep the ATF small).
I like how you take short sections like this and work in factual details. How did you decide where to sprinkle information like this?
Sprinkle is a really good word. I don’t tend to do long fact-heavy sections. You only need them when you need them. You need the knowledge when you need the knowledge. If you get it too soon, you forget it. If you get it too late, it’s irrelevant. It’s a whole timing thing. Yet you need it. I didn’t know anything about the ATF until I started this story, but once I got it, I really got it. It’s important for the reader to have that background.
Meanwhile, NICS, the FBI’s background check, is designed to weed out the criminals and the wackos.
I wonder if “wackos” was used on purpose, to echo what Richard said earlier in the story?
I think I’m echoing and being colloquial so we’re all in this, almost like code, you know what I’m talking about.so the clerks don’t have to.
In 2010, NICS did not flag Jared Loughner’s application to buy a gun: He’d never been legally declared mentally ill, and so there was no official record of his lunacy. Nor did NICS object to the paperwork submitted by Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter. He had been ordered by a court to receive involuntary outpatient treatment in 2005, and yet there was not an official record of his lunacy, either. The Commonwealth of Virginia didn’t report it to NICS because, at the time, Virginia only flagged inpatient treatment, and anyway, nobody really has to report anything to anybody, because NICS is a voluntary system.
The system is only as good as its databases. And critics say the databases suck.
Did you ever try and talk to the NRA for this story?
Not for this story. I had thought maybe I would, but frankly being in the store talking to all these people was the NRA. I didn’t need [NRA executive vice president and CEO] Wayne LaPierre to offer thoughts on top of what these people were saying. They represented the NRA thoroughly.
Similarly, you don’t include any voices from the gun regulation/control movement either. Why?
I wasn’t even tempted to have that voice in there. It wasn’t my point. It was not a story that was going to further an argument. I didn’t want to debate. I had to keep pulling out the Second Amendment bit. It was crowding the … experiment of doing a cultural study.
Beyond NICS, and discounting an impotent ATF, refusing a sale was typically an in-house matter, according to Richard: “It’s not unheard-of for a salesperson to come upstairs and talk to management. We’ll take a look at it, and we can refuse the sale—and we do. I don’t know if it happens more than a few times a year, but it does happen.”
I asked him if there was any specific training regimen for his clerks, teaching them how to spot people with bad intentions. What would the threatening person look like? Was there some manual or something somewhere with pictures?
“We deal with a lot of people who would scare you,” Richard said. “They’re tatted up, they wear their hair different than you do, they dress different than you. It’s quite a responsibility to see through that. Because you know, they could be good people.”
I spent the better part of the day with Sergio, offering him the stool, him giving it back, both of us sharing sore-feet stories. I saw a guy checking out an AK-47 who had a tattoo that said there is only one god and his name is death, and I wondered if I should say something.
Did you feel like you stood out, like you didn’t belong behind the counter and customers could tell?
Internally, I did, but everybody treated me like I was one of them. I felt like a stranger in a strange land. Most definitely, to me, but I don’t know that anyone understood that.
Could customers tell that you were not a normal salesperson?
They could tell that I was obviously naïve, but they would see that as someone in training. And it wasn’t that I was trying to pretend. And to the clerks themselves, I was trying to get their point of view. It wasn’t to fool customers. They knew who I was and they were training me.
Later, when I got up to stretch my legs, a guy walked up to me. He had a military haircut and a wrestler’s build, and he showed me the SIG Sauer P226 nine-millimeter, a tactical semiauto he was buying. “Finally,” he said. “Do you know how long I’ve been wanting a good practice gun?” He brought the gun up to one eye and aimed it at the wall behind me.
Did you find that people wanted to come up and talk to you? Did they ask you any questions you couldn’t answer?
Oh, sure. I couldn’t answer most of the stuff, because it was very technical stuff about guns. But I would have my buddy with me. Everybody wanted to talk. It wasn’t like most people were there to buy. It was really a general store feel, like they were visitors. Kinda browsing and wanting to talk about what was going on in town.
“I don’t know if you ever heard of the term pressure cooker?” he asked. “I’m one of those people. I help everyone else. Never help myself. I don’t know why I do that, because then I get mad at everyone.” He put the gun down and went on to recall a time when he got handcuffed in a hospital after hurling a nurse who had tried to sedate him.
He told that story in a gun store?
I know. And it was not with any apologies, let me tell you. And I’m only giving you a sliver of it.
How long did he go on?
Oh, gosh. He had me, at least a half-hour. He was one of those people where you’re thinking, Okay, I’m going to have a hard time getting away from this conversation. That was the one creepy moment.
“But the SIG is just for practice,” he said. “I have a .380 auto at home. That’s a sexy gun. I wanted a body stopper, so I got a Smith & Wesson 1911 .45-caliber. I’m a pretty good shot. I can empty an entire clip into six inches. Consecutively. Head, throat, heart, gut. If you’re within fifty feet of me, I’m going to take you out.”
How do you even respond to a conversation like this?
There is the one time when you feel like you’re not being honest, because what I really want to say is wait a second, you shouldn’t be having a gun, but that is a really judgmental thing to say, and it’s not my place and I don’t want to insert myself in the story, as a reporter. I don’t want to nudge the story along or interrupt.
And did you find it gave you any insight into how difficult it might be for a clerk to say no—could you have said no to this man? Is that your purpose here—to show how impossible it is to make that call and if you do, to actually refuse a purchase?
Yes. It gave me insight into that. I don’t know if I pull that off in the section or not. But most definitely, it gave me insight. It feels rude (to say he can’t have a gun). But I’m seeing it everywhere. I’m seeing red flags everywhere. The tattoos I mention. Stuff like that. These guys, though, they’re eh, not red flags really. It’s me being a scaredy cat, coming from another land that doesn’t know this culture.
He gave me a little salute, and then he went up to the front register to pay for his new SIG, and he was out the door.
···
One day I got into a productive discussion with some clerks and customers about shooting sprees. We were gathered on a quiet Thursday, chatting beneath the $4,500 Barrett Model 99 “Big Shot” sniper rifle.
It was the most powerful gun in the store, capable of firing .50-caliber armor-piercing rounds—gigantic bullets as long as a human hand. The gun was perched on a display stand so you could walk all the way around and admire it, like any work of art.
“So how about the Tucson shootings?” I asked our little group, two clerks and four shoppers, all male. “I imagine that was a difficult day around here.” I thought it an obvious statement that translated roughly to: Surely Loughner’s killing spree must have given you pause and forced you to face the dark side of an America that allows its citizens to own guns. But that’s not what anybody heard.
Can you talk a little bit about your reporting approach for this story? It seems like it would be very difficult to talk about this topic without it turning ugly fast. What tactics did you use throughout the reporting?
I waited until people really knew me and I really knew them. That was the thing I’m walking in with, how am I going to break this to everybody, be a Debbie Downer in this happy land of guns. I really thought it was going to be a very difficult moment, so I waited and I watched and I broached it very carefully, which was just completely naïve. They would love to talk about it, it’s just that they had a completely different perspective on it. It was nothing like what I thought. Nothing. That totally surprised me.
“The lines were out the door.”
“Well, not out the door, but I remember this place was packed.”
“Not as bad as the day after the election.”
“Oh God, no!”
“Ha, ha, ha!”
“Ha, ha, ha!”
In fact, one-day sales of handguns in Arizona jumped 60 percent on the day after the Tucson shootings. It was not a time to reevaluate a blithe attitude toward anything, but rather a time to hurry and stock up in case the government made its next move to take privately owned firearms away, leaving law-abiding citizens defenseless against the criminals and the lunatics.
“Mostly it was people wanting Glocks. The 19, like Loughner had, but really all the Glocks.”
“A story like that just gives the liberals more fuel.”
“The problem is, liberals are more feel than think. They don’t understand logic, and so what the hell can you even do with that?”
Do they see you as a stupid, scary liberal?
Yes, if I brought my own thoughts into it, and to the degree that I did, yes. They would talk about people like me.
“It’s so ridiculous. It’s sad, really.”
“It’s so scary.”
This is an interesting bit of dialogue, in that it starts to get to the point I mentioned earlier, about how you can’t even really talk about this. You can’t change minds.
Definitely. And nor would I even at that point begin to even try. What really got me, as soon as I got home, I happened to have people who were more anti-gun than I was over, and I was trying to explain that perspective to them and it was even harder. They were mean. They were angry. They were yelling at me, whereas the other side wasn’t like that. I’m left with that kind of frustration in the story. There are these two conversations and I couldn’t be the bridge.
Everyone in the group agreed on the stupid, scary liberals in the most casual and obvious way, like people at a grocery store railing about the rising price of beef. I asked them about a more recent event, right there in Yuma, when Carey Dyess, 73, drove his silver Mazda to the home of his ex-wife’s best friend and shot her in the face. Then he killed his ex-wife at her home. Then he drove over to some other houses and shot three more of her friends. Then he drove into downtown Yuma, where he walked into his ex-wife’s attorney’s office, shot him dead. Then he drove off to the desert and killed himself.
“Oh man, that guy was running around and I didn’t even have a gun in my shop!” someone said. “I got so scared I went home and got my Judge. A .410 pistol. It was all so unexpected. He didn’t announce himself. Walked in, shot people, walked out. He must have had tiny bullets—did you see her neck?”
Did you ever feel like you were able to understand the people you were hanging out with when they start talking about stuff like this?
I had heard enough of that version that it was almost expected of me. It’s almost like when you’re writing a character, you know your character so well, you know what they’re going to think, and it’s not that I sympathized with it. The thing I really couldn’t sympathize with was when Richard went off on people attacking America and we’re all going to be armed. That stuff really surprised me. I never understood that.
Were you surprised by what you were able to relate to?
Yes. And I think that was part of the trouble I had coming back to my regular life. My editors were making fun of me. They were like, “She’ll get over that.”
“Had to be a .380.”
Nobody talked about the shooting victims, and the only mention of the neighbors shot by Dyess was the size of the bullet holes in a woman’s neck. If there were any victims at all to be singled out in the discussion, it was these people here, threatened by tighter gun laws and a government determined to impose them.
This is a tough sentence. Did you get flack for it afterward?
Not specifically related to that sentence. It’s an observation. In the moment, do you point that out? What about these people’s lives?
“Everywhere now, it’s all an anti-gun maneuver. These liberals think, ‘Well, if we get all the guns away, there will be no crime, no one will get shot, everybody will live in harmony.’ That’s how stupid they are.”
“It’s so scary.”
I was surprised to hear them use the word scary to describe those who, back home, tend to describe them as “scary.”
This is a really interesting observation. Did you point this out to the people you were talking to?
I would say by that point we were all getting to know each other well enough, I would be like, “Oh my gosh, you think we’re scary, well I think you’re scary.” That way. But in a kind of aliens and earthlings finally got a chance to speak the same language and they’re laughing almost. Like wow, we really don’t understand each other. But that is as far as it goes. That’s right, we don’t, let’s agree to disagree and move on.
It doesn’t go that one extra step, to let’s try to figure out how to not see each other as scary.
I guess that’s the next round on this kind of story. I don’t know how you get there.
The conversation was interrupted when a young guy in Bermuda shorts walked up and said he was interested in the Barrett.
“The Barrett!” one of the clerks said, while the rest fell silent as if to take in the words, and we all looked up at the magnificent black sniper rifle.
···
In the end, I went over to the indoor range to blow off some steam and to release my mind from the endless loop of stupid-scary.
I see so many people who say shooting at a range helps them blow off steam. Was that the case for you? Why do you think it helps release stress?
Oh yeah. I really liked it. And that was good too, to experience that. I kind of got to see the fun part. It’s fun. I get why if I were a regular, if I grew up with guns and enjoyed target shooting and stuff like that, and someone was saying, “You can’t do that, it’s against the law,” I would be like, “What are you talking about? This is fun. I’m not hurting anybody. I’m responsible. I’m normal.” Or they would say to me, “You can have guns, but you can’t have a clip with more than 12 rounds.” I get it. I remember saying something to Richard, I wish I could just have a giant clip so I could do this at night in front of the TV and it would be done. I just have to keep stopping and loading the clip and that was annoying. That would be a moment when he would say, “Yes, exactly.” We should be able to sit in front of the TV and load our clips as much as we want because we’re not bad people out there hurting anybody. That is the point. That is one of those moments when I got it.
The range was sort of like a bowling alley, only instead of renting shoes you rented a gun. You had to have a friend with you. This was a precaution against suicide, the thinking being a friend would talk you out of it. You could also bring your own gun, no friend required. Whole families came to shoot, Friday night was ladies’ night, and people had birthday parties here.
A young guy came out of the lanes, carrying the target he had just shot up. “Ahhh, that feels better,” he said, taking off his ear-and-eye protection. “Whew! Re-lax-ing!” He had sweat on his brow, and he grinned up at the zombie targets hanging on the wall that I was quietly admiring. You could buy one of those targets to shoot at instead of the same old boring concentric circles or classic bad-guy silhouettes.
Was there any one person who really stood out to you in this entire reporting trip? One person who you still think about?
I would say I have them blurred, a combination of Ron and Sergio and the guys that are there day after day after day doing what they believe is a good job, solid citizens, no one could dispute it. I really liked them. I had a fondness for them, which surprised me.
“Oh God, aren’t those awesome?” the guy said. “Me and my boys came and shot the hell out of the Paris Hilton zombie.” Paris was wearing big pink sunglasses and a pink miniskirt and was carrying a zombie Chihuahua. “We just have fun with it. Shoot out her earrings. Take out her dog. Me and my boys having a good time.”
“Boys?” I said. “You have boys?” He did not look old enough to have any sons at all, and I was not prepared to handle the image of one more armed 6-year-old.
“My boys!” he said. “My friends.”
“Oh, okay,” I said.
Why include this little bit of dialogue with this guy?
The point of that whole scene was me enjoying a gun. And those guys to me are in the background, the people I’m with in the moment.
I kept thinking about neighbors. You have this crazy family living next door. One day you go over with a pie, figuring if you just confronted the crazy, you’d understand it and find acceptance. Then you discover that all this time they think you’re the crazy family. The more you try to explain yourself, the crazier you sound, and if you stay long enough, you probably will be.
This is such a great way to describe the discussion over guns. How long did it take you to come up with this analogy?
That was one of those ones that was percolating during the research, maybe not articulating that way but percolating. I still remember it, that moment of thinking that way. It was articulated in the writing. As I’m writing, I’m wondering, how do I get at that? I need a metaphor. I need an analogy. I need an image to connote that weird feeling.
These were burdensome thoughts, and I wanted to get rid of them. I rented an Uzi, fully automatic.
Why the Uzi?
It was the star performer for everybody. It was an automatic as opposed to a semi-automatic which is a big deal, It was the most powerful, dramatic thing there. It seemed famous to me, like a movie. If you were going to do the most famous gun thing you could do, it would be shoot an Uzi.
I chose the male zombie. I think he was supposed to be a lawyer. He had a briefcase. I aimed for his left eyeball and pulled the trigger. The patter of thirty-two bullets lasted maybe three seconds, and then the eyeball was gone. The release felt like one gorgeous, fantastic sneeze, and the satisfaction reminded me of cold beer.
This is a really interesting ending, given at the beginning of the piece, you are a complete novice when it comes to guns. Why end here, with you shooting an Uzi?
Well, it’s a really honest ending. It’s my surrender. Where I am not going to figure this out. I am not going to solve this. And I am really frustrated by that fact, and I need to just let it go. I don’t think I’ve ever done that kind of ending before. Where I am just saying, if you unpack that, it’s saying, “Sorry reader, I know I set you up for this thing I’m going to figure out. Well, guess what? I can’t. It’s not figure-outable. And I gotta go.” I don’t know that I’ve ever ended a story like that.
It’s a good ending because it’s the end of your transition. You go from being someone who knows very little about guns to somebody who goes to a shooting range and shoots an Uzi.
And who genuinely enjoys it. I am doing that because in that moment, I need that like I need a beer.
What kind of feedback did you receive on this story?
I found all these links, people on the other side talking about me. There’s one where they really made fun of me, “Oh wow, places in Arizona where anybody could buy a gun, imagine that!” I think it was a good reaction in that it was surprising to my audience, the audience who would read GQ. The response was that it was thought-provoking. That to me would be a success.
Did you hear from Ron or Richard or anyone at the store?
They were thankful. I think they thought it was edgier than they wanted, but people always do. They want you to basically tell the story they want you to tell, but it was pretty good.
What did your friends back east think about the piece?
A lot of them just didn’t believe me. Really. That is the hardest group I had. What happened to you? That was partly why the writing was so difficult and important. I felt like I really needed to explain myself. But I’m not done. That’s one of those stories where you leave and you’re not done.
Do you think you’ll write something else on this topic?
I wanted to as soon as I was done. I thought, I’m going to stick with this topic because it is so rich. I thought of different ways of doing a book. I just haven’t cracked it. It doesn’t mean I won’t.
Editor’s Note: Anyone who writes about politics and politicians knows how difficult it is to bring fresh insight to familiar issues and personalities. That challenge is even greater if your subject is the most well-known woman in the United States, First Lady Michelle Obama. In this installment of “Writing the Book,” an occasional Storyboard feature in which journalists turned authors discuss their work, former Washington Post reporter Peter Slevin examines how he looked beyond the two-dimensional narrative to find meaningful material for his biography, “Michelle Obama: A Life.” The book was just named one of the year’s 10 best biographies by Booklist and you can read recent reviews here and here.
As I set out five years ago to write a biography of one of the most recognizable women on the planet, the first question was why do it. The second was how. Neither answer came easily.
Peter Slevin/Photo by Andrew Johnston.
I had written often about Michelle Obama as the Chicago correspondent for The Washington Post. During the 2008 campaign, I trailed her to Iowa, New York, Texas and a handful of other states. I interviewed her friends on the South Side and tracked her path through Princeton and Harvard and back to the neighborhoods of her youth, where she worked to unstack the deck for working class African Americans.
On the campaign trail, she spoke sharply and stirringly about inequality, not just in terms of race and gender, but class. She painted a winning portrait of the future president, of course, but she also discussed the world she inhabited as a black woman, as a mother, as a professional trying to keep all the balls in the air. Her message ran deeper than electoral politics.
Ever-expanding crowds swooned, but reaction to Michelle was often binary. Adore.Abhor. Respect. Reject. Warm, wise and embracing. Haughty, petty and disdainful. Her most fevered critics held up funhouse mirrors and called her angry, mean and unpatriotic. Mrs. Grievance declared one headline. Barack’s Bitter Half smirked another.Rush Limbaugh barely waited until she had reached the White House to mock her physical appearance. He labeled her Moochelle, or Mooch for short, a term that suggested a fat cow, perhaps, or a leech, and encompassed big government, the welfare state, big-spending Democrats, and black people living on the dole.
By the time Michelle took up residence in Washington in January 2009, the existing narratives – variously superficial and contradictory – seemed ubiquitous. Clearly, there was more to tell, but a full-length biography? She was the first African American woman to serve as first lady, yet she had no constitutional duties nor armies to command. She was not the one who had been elected president. As Laura Bush once said, it only takes the vote of one man to make a first lady. What I came to recognize, however, was that Michelle, occupied the spotlight in a way that none of her recent predecessors did. Methodically and purposefully, she turned to issues of fairness and equity that had always animated her.
As I watched, I also realized that no writer had put the pieces together, nor had anyone told Michelle Obama’s story against the complex history she was living as a member of the first generation to come of age after the civil rights era. I sometimes wonder if the outlines of Michelle’s story emerged more clearly because I was watching from Chicago, far removed from bluster and scorekeeping that so often defines Washington politics and its chroniclers. It surely helped that I had no beat to cover. By late 2010, the Post had closed the last of its national bureaus and I was teaching at Northwestern University.
But where to start, on a project that would take nearly five years from concept to publication? My goal was to write a thoughtful and thorough book – and an enduring one. I wanted it to be rich with the voices of the people who knew Michelle, with my own voice most definitely quieter than the rest. With a formal assurance from the East Wing of the White House that I would have access to Michelle’s lieutenants, I did a round or two of interviews in Washington, then started in Chicago, where the book is anchored.
For guidance, I first looked to Michelle’s own words about where she drew her lessons. She said her role models were people she knew and she often spoke of her late father, “the voice in my head that keeps me whole and keeps me grounded.” So, who was Fraser C. Robinson III? I rang the bell at the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in search of one of his cousins, Rabbi Capers C. Funnye Jr. After hearing me out, Funnye shared stories and led me to one of Fraser’s brothers, Nomenee Robinson, a Harvard Business School graduate working in the Chicago office of the Peace Corps. Robinson, in due course, told me where I could find one of his younger brothers on a Saturday morning.
I found a DuSable High alum who pointed me to one of Fraser’s classmates. The classmate had a 1953 yearbook with a full-page photograph showing Fraser working on a sculpture. Although he would spend his professional life tending boilers at a Chicago plant, I learned that he had attended classes at the Art Institute of Chicago as a boy. He studied there at roughly the same time as Richard Hunt, who became a noted sculptor. I visited Hunt at his gloriously cluttered studio to learn what it meant to be an African-American youngster traveling across town to art classes.
As my work progressed, a DuSable contact called to invite me to a school reception and reported that two of Michelle’s relatives were expected. At a senior living facility, I located the minister who presided over Fraser’s funeral, and I found a Chicago phone number for Barack Obama’s great uncle. At the Harvard law library, an archivist handed me a mimeographed 1988 student newsletter with a long, revealing essay by Michelle Robinson about the need to reduce racism and sexism at the law school. By tracking comment boards about Michelle’s basketball-coach brother, I found Dan Maxime, a water plant colleague and friend of Fraser’s who had retired to Las Vegas. And as my deadline approached, I drove to a barber shop on Chicago’s South Side, where Krsna Golden, a former mentee of Michelle’s, was cutting hair.
This was the satisfying and familiar work of street reporting that I had loved for 30-odd years as a newsman. Finding people who had something to say and searching for common ground. It was like writing a newspaper profile, except about 130,000 words longer. In asking individuals to trust me, I described my purposes and ambitions and offered to answer questions. I promised transparency but not anonymity. (In the finished book, there are more than 1,200 endnotes and no blind quotes.) The outreach to prospective sources seemed endless, and it did not always bear fruit, but it forced me to crystallize my thinking. What was it again that I was hoping to accomplish? Where, exactly, did this person fit into the narrative? What was the most valuable question I could ask?
Any project this ambitious encounters unexpected obstacles great and small. When I was well underway, East Wing chief of staff Tina Tchen reneged on her predecessor’s pledge of access, making it more difficult to interview people who knew the first lady, including sources otherwise happy to share an anecdote or detail about a woman they admired. Some honored Tchen’s dictum, others did not.
It was a setback, but by the time I pressed the button for the last time, I had interviewed scores of people, from all corners of Michelle’s life – friends, relatives, professors, mentors, colleagues, aides and campaign strategists. I drew on my own pre-White House interviews with the Obamas and studied hundreds of thousands of words that Michelle has spoken in public. It also helped that generous colleagues shared unpublished interviews with Michelle and her mother, Marian Robinson.
I often did not know exactly what I had or what I needed until I sat down to write a particular passage. Perhaps congenitally, I could not stop reporting. Two months before the book came out in April 2015, I was still adding details. (Thank you, Knopf.) Just as with shorter-form writing, individual figures and the surrounding landscape gradually came together, sometimes in ways I could not have foreseen.
Two things were at work, it seems to me. One was the sparkling stash of details that emerged from the digging, the reading and the interviews. The other was the accumulated time to make sense of what I had. The time, in other words, to think.
One question led to another, one interview to another, one bit of reasoning to a deeper bit of reasoning and, slowly, some conclusions. The happiest stroke of fortune, and perhaps the least predictable, was happening upon a puzzle with enough great characters and enough complexity that I never grew tired of trying to solve it.
Peter Slevin spent a decade on the national staff of The Washington Post before joining Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he is an associate professor. He has written extensively about Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as political campaigns and policy debates from one end of the country to the other. Slevin graduated from Princeton and Oxford. He lives with his family in Evanston, Illinois.
When I arrived at the Chicago Tribune in 1985 to work in the features department, the features editor sat me down and asked me how I envisioned my newspaper future.
“I’d like to write a column,” I chirped.
She snorted.
“Yeah,” she said, “you and everybody else.”
And that was the end of that dream.
Honestly? I wasn’t even sure what I meant when I said I wanted to write a column. What exactly is a columnist?
I didn’t want to be a columnist like the guys on the op-ed pages, who orated on national politics from the top of Mount Pundit. I didn’t envision myself writing the kind of column that romanticized hanging out with cops in bars. I didn’t want to be Dear Abby. I think I meant that I wanted to be able to reflect on what I care about—the big, messy sweep of life, from politics to the weather—and do it in language that felt natural to me.
The only columnist I knew who wrote the way I’d like to—the only one I felt spoke for me and to me—was Ellen Goodman. But at the time, she was a rare breed of columnist—a woman, a columnist who blended the public and the personal—and my editor had made it clear that columnist wasn’t in my near future, so I went about my business. Wrote features for a while. Spent five years covering the South as a national correspondent for the Tribune. Forgot that I wanted to be a columnist, whatever that was.
Then one night in Atlanta, my phone rang. Did I want to come back to Chicago and write a column on the Tribune’s Metro page?
Wow. A column. In Chicago. One of the great newspaper towns. Easy answer, right? I said I’d have to think about it.
I hesitated because columnists were supposed to be highly opinionated people. Kickass. When I was younger, I might have qualified. At 38, less so.
Covering news made me see how slippery and fragmented the truth could be. I’d go cover a big story and then read an opinion column by someone who hadn’t been there and I’d think, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Being a reporter made me wary of columnists. It taught me how much I didn’t know, couldn’t know.
So two days after I got the call, I called back and did what I had to do: I said yes. Because, really, who could say no to a column in the city of Chicago?
But I made a vow. Five years and I’d move on. No one could write a good column for longer than five years. That was in 1992. And more than ever today—23 years later, three columns most weeks—I ask myself: What is a newspaper columnist?
It can mean a Metro columnist. An op-ed columnist. A food columnist. A few years ago, the Pulitzer for criticism went to the L.A. Times car columnist. “Columnist” has always been a big tent of a word, but the definition seems even broader now. Blogs. Facebook. Online comment boards. Anybody with an Internet connection can be a columnist of sorts. In this new world, traditional columnists have to adapt.
It makes me happy that my column runs on page 3 of the printed Chicago Tribune. But these days I worry more about where it runs on our website, how often it’s tweeted or posted on Facebook. There’s more pressure than ever to write off the trending news, and not just of the day but of the hour. To peg your opinions to celebrities or national political figures. To be purely personal or outrageously partisan. None of this is new, but in a click-driven world, it is amplified and accelerated. It gets harder to be a generalist, to speak quietly, to think before you shout.
Every now and then I run into someone who says that the old-style Metro columnist—a person who sometimes offered opinions, who sometimes told stories, who used “I” but not all the time, who was there to reflect the life of a place—is almost extinct. Extinct or not, that’s the model I’ve followed, even as I try to figure out its place in the new order.
And I like to think that in these 23 years, I’ve learned a few things that apply to column writing of many kinds, in any age.
One thing I’ve learned? Making a list is a lazy way to write.
Another thing I’ve learned? People love lists.
So here are 23 things I’ve learned about column writing in the past 23 years.
1. You can only be who you are—I was never going to be Mike Royko and never tried—but you can sharpen who you are. John Carroll, the late, great L.A. Times and Baltimore Sun editor, once said that reporters tend to be explainers or indicters and that the best investigative teams pair the two. A lot of columnists are indicters. Some of us lean more toward the explainer type. Whichever one you are, it’s smart to push yourself to be a little more of the other.
2. Be analytical, practical, emotional.
When I took the column job, my first newspaper editor called me up and told me to keep that formula in mind: APE. It’s a good guideline, though he also, and less usefully, told me I should get a column photo of myself in a big hat.
3. Write what you glimpse out of the corner of your mind.
I could exhort you to speak your mind. So consider yourself exhorted. But what is really in your mind? That’s the hard part. Some of the best columns come when you can catch your fleeting reactions, can capture your subtle ideas and questions. It can help to ask yourself out loud: What I am REALLY thinking? And then listen.
4. No matter what you write, there will be people who love it and people who hate it. Only the ratio changes.
5. What readers love will often surprise you.
A while back, on a deadline day when my mind was blank—you know the feeling?—I wrote about seeing my first black squirrel. This column embarrassed me. It was so small. Well. It was a big hit online. I got hundreds of emails. To this day, people write me to say, “Are you that squirrel lady?” and to tell me their own black squirrel story.
6. When people hate on you, don’t take it personally.
You will take it personally. Your work and your name are personal. So you need coping techniques. Some columnists fight back by making videos or writing columns about their hate mail. My Tribune colleague Eric Zorn sometimes replies with an email that says, “Welcome to the Eric Zorn fan club.” One colleague once suggested that the best response was: “You may be right.” I hit the “Delete” button a lot.
7. Work to understand the world before you try to change it.
A lot of people go into journalism hoping to change the world. I think our first duty—as journalists, as columnists—is to try to understand the world and help others understand it.
8. (A corollary to 7.) Be a reporter.
A new reporter at the Tribune once asked me, “Were you ever a reporter?” I bristled. I still think of myself as a reporter, meaning I try to find stuff out. The first reason to write is to learn.
9. Be personal. But not too personal. And not too often.
Even political columnists are served by writing the occasional personal column. Write occasionally about your mother or the squirrels, and people will connect better with your more intellectual musings. But you know that friend who talks about herself all the time? Don’t be her.
10. When in doubt, go out.
How many times have you sat staring at your computer, unsure what to write? Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, as if the muse could be found on Facebook? Stand up. Go outside. Go cover something. Or just take a walk. You’ll think better afterward.
Stand up. Go outside. Go cover something. Or just take a walk. You’ll think better afterward.
11. Try not to repeat yourself. You will repeat yourself.
Some days you’re writing and you have a shadowy thought: Have I written this before? If you think you did, you probably did. Check.
12. Remember that you’re in a long-term relationship with your readers.
Being outrageous and outraging may be part of who you are and why your readers love you. Insults may be important to your brand. But even then, be careful not to pointlessly—I emphasize pointlessly—alienate the people who care about what you write. You want them to come back.
13. Deadlines are a columnist’s best friend.
Without deadlines, some of us would never write. I remind myself of this painful truth with these two self-invented mantras: Panic is my muse. Deadlines crowd out doubt.
14. Stand for something, not just against.
It’s easy to rail against things. But are you prepared to offer a solution? To give voice to someone who is doing something to solve the problem?
15. You can’t have an opinion about everything.
Well, you can. You can’t have an informed, useful opinion about everything. It’s OK to shut up on some topics.
16. Find a niche.
Early in my career, a bigwig reporter told me, “Make yourself an expert in something.” Frankly, I never did, but I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom. Unless you’re, say, a brilliant satirist like Andy Borowitz, knowing a lot about one topic will serve you.
17. Use social media.
Self-promotion is a tricky art. To do it well, you need to be generous. Share other people’s work—selectively. Post photos. Be someone that other people want to be around.
18. Drinking while writing will not make your column better.
19. Prizes are like alcohol.
What columnist—what writer—doesn’t like a prize? Prizes can make you feel good for a little while, but the buzz doesn’t last.
20. Insecurity comes with the job.
You’ll always worry that you should be doing it differently, could be doing it better. That someone else is doing it better. Always.
21. Respect your readers.
Even when they make you mad—how could they misread your prose so thoroughly?—they are the reason you exist as a columnist.
22. If the phrase, “I have to write a column today” ever crosses your mind—and it will—change it to “I get to write a column today.”
Writing a column is a privilege, even when it hurts.
23. I am not a columnist.
You are not a columnist. No one IS a columnist. We write columns. It’s a function of who we are. It is not who we are. When the day comes that you’re not a columnist anymore, you’ll realize you never were. You were just a person who got to type out some thoughts on some things you cared about, who had the great privilege of some readers who cared enough to read them. Aren’t you lucky?
The Riveter's second issue was published in summer 2014, and its third issue is set to publish this fall.
Photo courtesy of The Riveter
The two journalism students didn’t let their awe at meeting Esquire writer Mike Sager silence their frustration: Why weren’t there more women in his collection of the “next generation” of literary journalists?
Sager’s response, in essence: You tell me.
Two years on from that exchange, Kaylen Ralph and Joanna Demkiewicz find themselves running a small but gutsy magazine by, about and for women: The Riveter. Their venture is fueled by crowdfunding and income from day jobs, and stoked by the question: Is there a future for women in longform journalism? It also is an act of defiance at a time when larger industry trends that say longform journalism is a luxury of the past, print is dying, and women’s magazines are defined more by fluff and fashion than serious storytelling.
When The Riveter launched in 2013, its motto was “longform journalism by women for everyone,” says Demkiewicz, one of the magazine’s founders. It has since shed that ambiguous stance to embrace a target audience of women, ages 23-40, and a mantra of “unapologetically feminine.” “In the beginning, we didn’t call ourselves a women’s magazine because we were afraid, honestly,” Demkiewicz says. “I’ll openly read Esquire, but a man doesn’t usually pull out Marie Claire on the subway. Now, we want to be very unapologetic about what it means to be a woman, and our content reflects that.”
The Riveter has beaten the early odds against start-ups, and its founders are now focusing on a way to sustain those efforts. This past March they raised $35,815 in a Kickstarter campaign designed to build a subscription base. With that funding, the magazine will print about 1,000 copies of its third issue this September and will publish quarterly next year, giving The Riveter team time to build a strategy to survive beyond that.
In the second print issue of The Riveter, ESPN cricket correspondent Firdose Moonda offers a historical narrative about the Africanization of Johannesburg’s inner city.
Theresa Berens
But before The Riveter was making waves, Ralph and Demkiewicz were students at the University of Missouri School of Journalism attending a highly publicized panel, sponsored by one of their magazine professors, that featured writers whose work was included in a new anthology, “Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.” The anthology was the collaboration of award-winning longform journalists Walt Harrington and Mike Sager. Harrington had worked for The Washington Post Magazine, authored several books and now taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sager had worked at The Washington Post with Harrington years earlier before becoming a writer-at-large for Esquire magazine. He had authored several books and then founded his own publishing house, The Sager Group.
As Ralph and Demkiewicz listened to their tales of stories and career, they realized two things: All of the writers on the panel were men. Only three of the 19 writers featured in “Next Wave” were women.
That’s when Ralph and Demkiewicz experienced their own next wave of frustration. Apparently they weren’t alone. Demkiewicz says another female student in the crowd challenged Sager to explain why there were only three women in the anthology. As she remembers it, the room “got tense.” “It was like everyone in that room was thinking, ‘We’re just students; can we challenge something like this?’” Demkiewicz says.
Ralph and Demkiewicz texted each other from across the room with the same sentence: “We’re doing it.” By “it,” they meant creating a magazine that would carry the kind of stories they themselves aspired to write – longform narratives from a female perspective. After the panel, they approached Sager to express their frustration, and to declare their plans to create their own magazine. Ralph and Demkiewicz then walked down the street to a coffee shop and purchased the domain for their new WordPress site.
Sager remembers the encounter well – an encounter that would lead to its own surprising collaboration. “They said they were unhappy,” he says. “So I said do something, and they said that they would. And they actually did, as remarkable as that is.”
If The Riveter continues to succeed, it will be in the face of stubborn odds. Consider the VIDA Count, a research-driven organization that strives to increase critical attention to women’s writing and to build transparency around gender equality issues in literature, according to its website. According to the 2014 report, Harper’s reported more than double the bylines for men than women; The New Yorker recorded 457 bylines for men and 193 for women. The 2013 and 2012 reports mirrored the same trend.
Demkiewicz remembers looking around in one of her classes at the University of Missouri, where she and Ralph became friends. About 70 percent of her classmates were female, yet the 2012 American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine Awards had just been announced, and no women had even been nominated in several high profile categories. “Maybe it’s dramatic or clichéd, but it’s kind of like every woman’s life flashed before my eyes, and I didn’t like what it looked like,” Demkiewicz says. “Why work so hard in an academic setting only to ‘disappear’ in a professional setting? I think there was a flash of despair and then an immediate refusal to continue to allow women to get so easily buried or pigeonholed. I was like, fuck this, I am not spending money on journalism school just to be faced with such archaic social and professional obstacles.”
The result of that refusal is The Riveter, which fills the space where “female is the norm,” while also breaking the mold of a traditional women’s magazine, Demkiewicz says.
Ralph and Demkiewicz’s quest comes with considerable sacrifice, the kind that required deferring their own individual goals. “As college seniors, we wanted to be writing for great publications,” Demkiewicz says. “We set that aside because we were so worried about women having to fit in a space in the industry that was so constricting.”
Byline disparities aside, The Riveter founders are also confronting their original question: Where do all the female journalists go? According to a September 2014 cover story in Nieman Reports, women held only 37.2 percent of journalism jobs in broadcast, print and online news medias in 2013. That’s less than a .5 percent increase since 1998, when women held 36.9 percent of jobs in journalism.
The gap The Riveter founders see in the profession they’ve chosen, however, was absent from their own childhoods. Ralph and Demkiewicz say they grew up with strong female role models and never questioned their right to follow their talent or their dreams.
Demkiewicz — executive editor of The Riveter — grew up in small-town Manchester, Iowa. As a child, she obsessed over her grandmother’s ‘power suits’ and, when her grandmother joined The World Food Prize, an international organization focused on world hunger, she imagined working within the capacity to help change the world for the better. Very early on, she imagined doing so through storytelling, in which she learned the value from her mother, an English teacher, and her father, a former radio DJ in Warsaw, Poland.
Ralph —the magazine’s editor-in-chief — grew up in Rockford, Illinois. Her father, a commercial real estate developer, and her mother, a teacher and project manager, raised their three daughters to take initiative, confront challenges and be leaders. Ralph was launching media outlets as far back as fifth-grade, when she started The Blue Pencil newspaper at her elementary school. For all her own accomplishments, Ralph, the eldest, says her two younger sisters “exude an unwavering confidence that I’m constantly in awe of.”
“It just never occurred to me growing up that it was exceptional for me to be in leadership roles because I was a girl,” Ralph says. “Nowadays there are initiatives to ‘ban bossy,’ etc., in order to encourage confidence in young girls, but I feel really lucky to have grown up in a ‘girls rule’ household where my goals and passions were taken in stride and celebrated as ‘the norm.’”
The Riveter's front women (left to right) Kaylen Ralph, Natalie Chang and Joanna Demkiewicz have beaten the early odds against start-ups, and are now focusing on a way to sustain those efforts.
Photo by Victoria Campbell
The women behind The Riveter will need that confidence and more as they go forward. Launching a print publication in today’s journalism climate is about as ambitious as you can get, says John Fennell, who teaches magazine journalism at Missouri and is one of Ralph’s former professors. “It is so costly and risky to implement a print product, so a lot of entrepreneurs start online to see if they can develop an audience,” Fennell says. “The Riveter has become a strong publication this way and have hit a niche market for young to middle-aged women.”
Fennell cites Ms. Magazine’s history of financial instability and advertiser resistance, and the failed Jane Magazine, which was designed for women 18-34 as an alternative to the typical women’s magazines and printed its last issue in August 2007. But in the unpredictable world of digital publishing, there are signs of hope. According to a December 2014 Storyboard piece first published in Nieman Reports, niche publications have been popping up over a wide array of topics and many are highlighting longform narrative as a key selling point.
The question is whether The Riveter will thrive as a niche publication for women readers or rise to the name recognition and circulation sizes of the Cosmos, Glamours and Marie Claires of the world, he says. “Every year I teach a magazine publishing class, women ask why isn’t there an Esquire-type publication for women,” Fennell says. “One doesn’t exist now, because in the large magazine circulation categories, there hasn’t been amarket. That’s why we’re seeing smaller efforts bloom in the form of niche publications.”
It’s tempting to draw a parallel to feminist magazines that have come before, such as Bitch, Bustle or Ms. Bitch magazine launched in 1996 and now operates as a nonprofit. It’s been known for its controversial cover pages and has the goal of pointing out the “insidious, everyday sexism of popular culture,” according to its website. Bustle is a venture-capital backed online magazine that launched in 2013, and broke 11 million monthly unique visitors last July. When founder Bryan Goldberg announced he was creating Bustle, he asked, “Isn’t it time for a women’s publication that puts world news and politics alongside beauty tips?” Bustle magazine interviewed The Riveter founders in 2013, when Ralph pointed out though the magazines are different; people draw similarities because they are both easily grouped together as “women’s magazines.”
The godmother of the genre is Ms. Magazine, founded in 1972 by, among others, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, as the first national magazine with the goal to make feminist voices audible. Mary Kay Blakely, one of Ms. Magazine’s original contributing writers and one of Demkiewicz’s former professors at Missouri, warns against lumping The Riveter with earlier or other feminist magazines. “It’s going to make an original mark on its generation,” she says, due to its “unique content.”
“When I first started writing for Ms. more than 30 years ago, it was thrilling to have a place where you can publish what you can’t publish anywhere else,” Blakely says of that time, when most women’s magazines were limited to advice about marriages, babies or cosmetics. “The Riveter is doing a very similar thing now, but they are defining feminism for their generation in a new way. The kind of work they’re publishing reflects that.”
Ralph says The Riveter isn’t trying to push a feminist message, but is creating a space where female writers can publish diverse, unique and substantive work. Take this first-person perspective on the Taiwanese Sunflower Movement — which narrates how Taiwanese students are challenging corrupt politics — and this shorter but unique piece about the history of eyebrows as indication of social status.
And if this 21st century version of a women’s magazine is attempting to defy the either/or corners of content, so too does it reject the either/or restrictions of form and platform.
The magazine started as a WordPress site, but has since scrambled to find funding to establish its online and print presence. A growing network of contributors keep the online version updated daily. The magazine’s first two print issues included pieces long in content and also deep in analysis and research, Ralph says. Longform journalism doesn’t have to be long, she adds, but it does have to be complex and original in its reporting. “We don’t define longform as just word count. It’s also about level of research and depth,” Ralph says. “Though we started with a WordPress site, print has been our focus from the beginning. We believe longform is best enjoyed when you can touch and feel it on paper.”
Two years, two print issues and one successful Kickstarter campaign later, The Riveter is gaining traction.
After graduating from Missouri in 2013, Ralph and Demkiewicz launched the magazine using an Indigogo crowdfunding campaign to print (and sell out of) their first two issues. Through the campaign, they reached their goal of raising $2,000 by June 1, 2013. The following September, Ralph and Demkiewicz decided to move The Riveter, and themselves, to Minneapolis. “We knew we wanted The Riveter to be based in a city, and Minneapolis is an amazing place to be a women in a creative field,” says Ralph, who cited a study that lists Minneapolis as the fourth-best U.S. city for women entrepreneurs. “Women run the show in Minneapolis,” she says. “What a perfect setting for what we’re doing.”
Natalie Cheng, who graduated from the University of Missouri in May 2014 with both business and journalism degrees, had seen the initial Indiegogo campaign and was impressed by The Riveter’s online content. But she knew the magazine would soon need to develop a strong business side, so she reached out to the founders. She joined Ralph and Demkiewicz in Minneapolis that fall.
As chief executive officer, Cheng’s goal is to establish The Riveter as a multiplatform brand and a print quarterly. “We had put out two issues, but we’d been publishing when we had the time and the money,” Cheng says. “I felt it was time to make it a regular schedule and time to for us to say that The Riveter has really arrived.”
She quickly rejected the more traditional route of seeking venture capital funding: “With a traditional investment model, we would have to give up equity, which we didn’t want to yet as a small start up.” And instead of using the recent Kickstarter campaign as a one-time fundraiser, The Riveter team decided to use it as a combination fundraiser and subscription drive. “We weren’t saying, put faith in us so we can start something,” Cheng says. “We already had a product and we needed to maintain subscriptions to become a quarterly. The fact we did it was really validating.” The Kickstarter funds will be earmarked solely for printing costs and to pay contributors. Before Kickstarter, The Riveter paid only $75 to $100 for a longform print piece. It plans to up that to $300 to $500 per piece.
The three Riveter leaders draw no salaries at this point, but support their venture with day jobs: Cheng works by remote, managing social media and marketing for CopterShop, a consumer drone company based in Seattle; Ralph is a receptionist at a boutique salon in the Twin Cities; Demkiewicz handles publicity for a Minneapolis theatre/bowling alley/restaurant/bar, the Bryant-Lake Bowl. “I wake up, work on The Riveter, go to work, come home, work on The Riveter and go to bed,” Demkiewicz says. “We’re 100 percent ok with doing this as a labor of love for now, because we want to be sure we are always paying our writers and that we are getting our print issues out there and established.”
Despite the digital revolution, Ralph says readers are still drawn to The Riveter as a print product, whether they first discovered the magazine online or not. During the Kickstarter subscription campaign, 70 backers signed up for a digital product, while 482 backers requested variations of the print product for their support.
As is true for most publications, future revenue models are uncertain. The Riveter crew is developing a more interactive online product. For the print product, Cheng says, they hope to avoid “littering the publication with ads and distracting the reader,” and instead fund the magazine through a combination of corporate partnerships and subscriptions. “For now, we sustain The Riveter through sales of single copies and subscriptions,” Cheng says. “That won’t always be the case. Moving forward, we’re putting a lot of effort into monetizing our digital presence.”
For now, The Riveter women have plenty of passion and little expectation of big profits. But 10 years from now, Ralph says, the dream is for The Riveter to be a household name. “We’ve come a long way from drinking cider together and talking about The Riveter, and so has the magazine,” Ralph says. “We don’t see ourselves as a niche publication. We want to be on the same stands as big-name women’s magazines.”
Fennell, who was a newspaper and magazine writer and award-winning magazine editor before he joined the faculty at Missouri, says the work The Riveter women are doing is needed in the journalism industry. “With more women graduating college than men, isn’t it time for a magazine like this?” Fennell says.
Meanwhile, if you ask Ralph and Demkiewicz if they are still mad about the state of journalism for female writers, they say, “Hell, yes.” Then they point to The Riveter, and say with confidence that they believe in women journalists, they believe in each other, and they believe the industry is changing. And that they will be among the ones changing it.
In addition to their labor of love on the The Riveter, Demkiewicz and Ralph helped to write an anthology of female longform journalists titled, “Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front Page Journalism,” which was recently published by The Sager Group, courtesy of Mike Sager, the Esquire writer who set them off so many months ago. Sager has announced plans to publish two additional anthologies of work by women journalists. “We’ve definitely struck a chord,” Ralph says. “People are really starting to be in tune now to the gender disparity in every industry. Longform journalism is no exception. We believe that we can change that. We believe in what we’re building and where we came from and where we’re going.”
In a room full of writers, Caleb Hannan was remarkably honest and candid about his mistakes.
At the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, Hannan discussed his 2014 Grantland story that sparked national controversy and discussion about transgender portrayal in the media. In a session about mistakes ranging from Stephen Glass to Rolling Stone, Hannan’s story dominated the conversation.
Other panelists were S.I. Rosenbaum, senior editor at Boston Magazine and one of the most vocal critics of Hannan’s story, and Slate’s Hanna Rosin, who worked alongside Glass at The New Republic and interviewed the writer of a recently discredited story in Rolling Stone about a gang rape.
Reporting for Grantland, Hannan researched the creator of a supposedly scientifically superior putter — a woman who went by Dr. V. In the eight months of reporting, he found out that she had lied about her academic resume and was transgender.
In October 2013, Dr. V took her own life. The story ran the next January.
“Did you have a sense she was unstable?” Rosenbaum asked Hannan on Saturday.
“Yes,” he said.
Hannan said he and his wife had multiple conversations about V’s instability. They had a friend of the family who took their own life earlier that year, yet at every chance to drop the story, Hannan felt — at the time — justified in his reporting.
“My wife brought it up whenever she could,” he said. “There’s a momentum to a story that’s hard to stop.”
He also said he regretted that he and Grantland editors didn’t take the time to restructure the story after Dr. V’s suicide. He filed his first draft months before, and never altered the basic outline.
There were many times when Hannan had concerns, he said. When a freelance fact-checker was worried Dr. V may hurt herself, Hannan said he was “scared shitless,” but that he and his editors were “lulled into a sense of, this is a con-artist first and a transgender woman second.”
“The bones of that draft barely changed. That narrative draft barely changed,” Hannan said. “Everybody in this room has had the feeling of just, ‘get this out,’ which is the last feeling you should have.”
Rosenbaum re-edited the story after the controversy started, a version which avoided the fact that Dr. V was transgender. Rosenbaum said it was partially the fault of editors who didn’t have the right kind of experience to properly address trans issues.
“I felt sick. I felt my stomach turn over,” Rosenbaum said. “It felt like a horror novel.”
At the time, Hannan felt like his aggressiveness was simply doing his job, but now questions if Grantland was the best place for the story – and if it should have existed in the first place.
“Are they the people equipped to deal with this emotionally? Am I?” Hannan said. “There’s a momentum to a story that’s hard to stop.”
Dan Barry said a 90-word wire report from rural Iowa was the spark of what became his 2014 story “The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse.’”
Thirty men with intellectual disabilities in a schoolhouse on a hilltop being paid $65 each month to kill turkeys for 35 years.
“That series of images jumped out at me,” Barry said. “I think in terms of cinema. I think in terms of scenery.”
The Pulitzer-winning writer of the This Land column in The New York Times spoke Saturday at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference with fellow Times staffer Kassie Bracken. Bracken is a videographer who has collaborated with Barry on many of his reports.
The two presented a series of case studies and video examples about how visual journalism – specifically video – can help improve narrative writing.
“I learned long ago not to say, ‘This is my photographer,’” Barry said. “The way to do it is respect the discipline … but respect the power of those disciplines to dramatically raise the game.”
When on assignment, Barry and Bracken will many times negotiate with each other how to structure interviews and reporting days. If they split up during the day, Barry said they meet in the evenings and debrief each other, so both reporters stay on top of a story as it develops.
“I’m looking for different things than Dan is,” Bracken said. “As a video person you’re not a gatherer, you’re a hunter.”
Barry and Bracken said they both approach sources without notebook or camera when beginning their reporting. They’ll visit a source many times to earn trust and make sure the subject is comfortable with the scrutiny of a reporter.
Bracken said she specifically makes sure that sources know what they’re getting into before they begin shooting. She’ll tell a potential subject what she plans to shoot, how much time it will take and why she wants to get the shots she works for.
“You gain trust by just being there. Not imposing yourself, but being available. You have to spend the time,” Barry said. “Then the notebook comes out and the stories come to you.”
Other panelists were S.I. Rosenbaum, senior editor at Boston Magazine and one of the most vocal critics of Hannan’s story, and Slate’s Hanna Rosin, who worked alongside Glass at The New Republic and interviewed the writer of a recently discredited story in Rolling Stone about a gang rape.
