The Wayward Press Critic

Several years ago, I saw No Country for Old Men with my parents and one of my sisters. I’m predisposed to like Coen brothers movies, but I came out engaging my parents in a discussion about how Javier Bardem’s character (the one with the bowl cut and the hydraulic cattle bolt) represents the inevitability of death and the inability to eradicate fear from the world. I must have sounded like the priggish Columbia professor Woody Allen dresses down in Annie Hall. My sister was rolling her eyes though. For her, there are only two judgments one can make about a movie:

1. I liked it.
2. I didn’t like it.

That’s it. What’s for dinner?

But sometimes, your reaction to a cultural product can be so much more complicated.

I have a lot to say about journalistic criticism. I’ve enjoyed doing it since I was an undergrad, and I’m writing my dissertation about a journalism review. So this is not a definitive statement or anything. But…

…I watched Tiny Furniture tonight on Netflix. I felt I had to because everyone’s raving about Girls, and they were both written by and star Lena Dunham, so it was one of those cultural artifacts I felt I had to be aware of.

And I didn’t like it very much. So if I have to play by my sister’s rules, I choose #2. I though it was sort of boring and pretentious and self-conscious. I even briefly dozed off right before the (spoiler alert!) sex scene inside some kind of air conditioning duct.

But I wanted to see what critics had said about it, so I poked around and found Manohla Dargis’s New York Times review. It didn’t really make me like the movie any better. It’s hard to tell if Dargis liked it any more than I did. She said the movie is “at times more pleasurable to think about than it is to watch.” But in a way, it is Dargis’s criticism that made watching this movie valuable to me. Not the movie itself, but the fact that it made Dargis think, and that Dargis’s thinking made me think about the movie.

Dargis made a connection that I, as a doctoral student in a department that has “media studies” in its name, should also have made. That the main character’s name is quite possibly a reference to a Walter Benjamin essay about the nature of art and reproduction. About representation. The movie didn’t do much for me, but the critic forced me to think. I know, however, that not everyone enjoys that kind of intellectual bullying.

I’m talking to you, Beth.

When I teach an introductory reporting and writing course, I devote roughly the first half of the semester to exercises and drills that let students sharpen their news writing skills before they have to go out and interview real people in the real world. The culmination of that is the “news drill,” which I didn’t invent, but borrowed from Michael Shapiro, one of my professors at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The way these work is that the professor makes up a news story, and the students, acting as reporters, interview him, in character as various sources for the story. In Shapiro’s class, we followed the increasingly baroque exploits of the fictional Mayor Anzovino (I think I’m spelling that right—getting the names right is important, but it’s been almost 13 years). Prostitutes, car wrecks, and something involving the Harlem Italian restaurant Rao’s (I’m thinking it had to be Mafia ties)—things went downhill all semester for Anzovino. And we got a chance to write on deadline in an atmosphere where Shapiro knew all of the “facts” of the story we were writing. It was good pedagogy.

When I started teaching journalism I adopted news drills as part of my own teaching repertoire, and I’ve had students do them in every introductory reporting course I’ve ever taught. I’ve made up a bunch of them. There’s a shooting in a pastry shop (attempted robbery, the cops suspect). Sometimes I’ll call a press conference to bring an inexplicably lavish new building to campus.

And then there’s my smallpox story…

In this one, a large jetliner (it’s always a Qantas plane, since Qantas is hard to spell) is headed for New York City when a passenger on board with some medical training notices that her seat mate (who happens to be of Middle Eastern extraction) has passed out, with a high fever and suspicious raised sores on his face. She notifies a flight attendant, who notifies the captain, who asks for an emergency landing (when I taught in Queens, the plane landed at JFK; when I was in South Orange, N.J., it went to Newark; now that I teach in Poughkeepsie, they get diverted to Stewart, a tiny commercial airport with a long landing strip for the Air National Guard). The FBI and CDC are called out. Could it be smallpox? Might this be a bioterrorist threat?

This is when the student reporters are called to the “scene.” They interview officials and get the story as it’s in progress. Then, just before the class period ends, the CDC official comes back to tell the reporters that it was a false alarm. The man was only suffering from shingles. No worries.

The point of the exercise, besides the interviewing and writing practice, is to make sure that students don’t bury the lead. There’s a real tendency among student writers to want to tell that story chronologically, saving the big reveal—just shingles, folks!—for the kicker. But I tell them that if they’re writing a news report, they have to get that fact into the lead. Otherwise, their readers will be clogging the highways and heading for California.

I noticed early on that I had an eerie ability to make tangentially related real news happen because of these. There would be an armed robbery attempt nearby, and a student would tell me. Or when I had a subway car derail once, a couple week later there was a train emergency in a Penn Station tunnel. I joked to my students about this, since the whole point of the news drill was to give them “breaking news” to report on without the ability to cause breaking news.

I ran the smallpox news drill in February. Shortly thereafter, one of my students noticed an airplane emergency and tweeted about it:

And of course I jokingly replied. But then it happened much closer to my storyline, and it happened tonight. Passengers coming from Uganda, not Pakistan. A misinterpreted illness (bed bugs, not monkeypox in this case; instead of my shingles for smallpox). A happy ending. And of course use of the word “pustule” (which a student once memorably misspelled “puss jewel”).

So next semester, all of my news drills will be about junior journalism faculty and graduate students winning the lottery or getting book contracts.

The young Lincoln Steffens: Journalism student?

In the section of Journalism 2 that I’m teaching at Marist College this semester, I turned today into a Lincoln-Steffens-at-the-Commercial-Advertiser-esque experiment in group reporting. When my students got to class, I sent them off across campus to capture a snapshot (both in words and literally) of what was happening over the course of about a half-hour span today. Here are their results:

• Luis Alicea on Graduate and Adult Enrollment
• Alyssa Pallotti and Lindsey Klein on the front desk at the School of Communication and the Arts
• Michael Kurtz on proselytizing for Public Praxis
• Brian Creagh on an impromptu study group
• Pat Pagano on an unexpected cold snap
• Caitlin Goettler visits the print shop
• Dan Scofield and Ana Jean Healy on just what goes on inside that little building on the front lawn
• Janae Myers on the IT department’s lunch break
• Katherine Wetzler on senior capstone projects winding down

Sometime in late 1970 or early 1971, J. Anthony Lukas took his friend Richard Pollak out for dinner and told him about his experiences covering the “Chicago Seven” conspiracy trial. Lukas had been frustrated by the editors of the New York Times, who wouldn’t let him quote the word “bullshit,” among other limitations on his reporting, resulting in Lukas’s 1970 book The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities.

While in Chicago though, Tony Lukas had met Ron Dorfman and the other editors of the Chicago Journalism Review, and Lukas was impressed with their efforts to document how the press had become too complacent and too cozy with the establishment. At his dinner with Dick Pollak, Lukas said that the two of them needed to start another journalism review, one based in and focused on New York City, the press capital of America (though it would also have some national aspirations). Pollak, Lukas said, should edit it.

The magazine that resulted from this meal was [MORE], a journalism review that lasted from 1971 to 1978 (though Pollak, Lukas, and a third partner, William “Woody” Woodward, III, sold it in 1976).

Before the magazine could get off the ground however, Pollak and Lukas held a meeting at the Harvard Club in New York City. According to Pollak, the turnout at this meeting included frustrated, stifled or disaffected journalists from all over New York City—a much larger group than either of them had imagined existing, let alone attending.

Now, more than 40 years later, I am writing the history of [MORE] for my dissertation at Rutgers University, and I want to talk to anyone who attended that Harvard Club meeting. Were you there? If so, send me an email at kevinmlerner [at] gmail.com. If you have more general memories of [MORE], either in the early days, or throughout its existence, I’d love to hear from you too. My priority right now though is reconstructing as much of this foundational meeting as I can.

Please get in touch if you see this post, and please share this post as widely as you can on social media. Thank you.

If John McCormally is to be believed, then his serving as a Pulitzer Prize judge in 1971 wasn’t eye-opening so much as hunch-confirming. When he won his own Pulitzer in 1965, he wrote, he had suspicions that maybe the award wasn’t all that special (Perhaps he wouldn’t want to accept any award that would have him as a recipient, as Groucho might have said). And that maybe even Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, the institution that guarded them (and still guards them today, when the 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were announced), didn’t think that much of them:

And if the Mother House on Morningside Heights has a ho-hum attitude about what is supposed to be journalism’s most prestigious award, is it surprising that the working press is little impressed, the general public couldn’t care less, and many young would-be journalists don’t even know what we’re talking about?

McCormally was writing in [MORE], the journalism review that had launched in the summer of 1971. His piece for the May, 1972 issue of [MORE] is a tell-all about the experience of being a Pulitzer judge, and the cursory once-over that the Pulitzer committee expected him to give each piece before bestowing the honor on “a good journeyman job by a veteran reporter” rather than on something exciting, groundbreaking, up-to-date and well-written. The Pulitzers, he wrote, did manage to dole out prizes to Sy Hersh or David Halberstam when they did truly outstanding work, but for the most part they looked for solid middle-of-the-road journalism that was uncontroversial, and that ran in the same few mainstream newspapers.

Mostly, McCormally seemed to be bothered by the exclusion of women (though there was one black man serving as a judge); by the expectation that judges would spend very little time with the work (his committee was give 12 hours over two days to judge 134 nominations of up to ten articles each); and by the bland and predictable choices that the process turned up.

While the World Room at Columbia University may not have changed in 40 years (the stained glass from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World office still looms over the dais), the prizes seem to have changed for the better. I count at least three women among the winners in the journalism categories today (let alone among the judges), and the awards to the Huffington Post and Politico show that journalism isn’t limited to one medium, as others have noted. But to be honest, most of the prizes still aren’t for particularly memorable journalism, which isn’t a change from what John McCormally noted 40 years ago:

Deans Ed Bassett at Kansas and Malcolm Maclean at Iowa helped me poll students in their journalism schools to test my suspicion that the labors of my fellow jurors and I last year went largely unnoticed by the young people we editors should be most concerned about. The survey, early in 1972, included 86 journalism undergraduates at Kansas, 42 at Iowa. Instructors passed out the three-part questionnaire in class, allowing no opportunity for research. the first question listed the 10 categories for which journalism prizes were awarded in May, 1971, and asked the students to name as many of the winners as possible. Not a single respondent at either school could name a single winner, except that at Iowa, for “spot news photography” one student wrote—correctly—”the Kent State girl photo.”

How different, I ask you, is that from today’s awards? The fact of the matter is, that HuffPulitzer aside, the Pulitzer Prizes just aren’t very important to anyone who isn’t looking to put on his or her mantle and resume. The Associated Press told me that the Associated Press won a Pulitzer. Yawn. I’m with McCormally in wishing that the Pulitzers could actually become “a real instrument for improving the quality of writing and reporting in American”—here he writes “newspapers,” but I’ll go with “news organizations.” It would be infinitely better than what the Pulitzers, and almost all awards bestowed by a profession upon themselves are: “professional masturbation… meant only for the self-gratification of a tiny clique of givers and receivers, and… neither the public nor the profession at large is supposed to be bothered.”

I, for one, am not bothered.

Thirteen years ago this week, during the lazy spring of my senior year of college, I published a piece called “Valentine’s Gay” in the irreverent college magazine I used to edit. The story was about how gay and lesbian students at the University of Pennsylvania (which Newsweek later named the best school in the country for gay and lesbian students) were planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day. But the article wasn’t just journalism. For me, it was also a sort of public coming out. I had been pretty closeted for my first three years at Penn, so the article was both an exploration of a culture for its own sake, and also an exploration of what was supposed to be my culture, and I had actively excluded myself from it. When I was heading off to an interview at the LGBT community center, my roommate at the time, Daniel Fienberg, asked me if this was like the first time he had gone to the campus Hillel. The week that story was published, I flew home and came out to my parents, who have been nothing but supportive of me from the moment I told them.

Today though, I spent a chunk of my morning co-writing a story about the impending trial of Dharun Ravi, who is accused of invading the privacy of Tyler Clementi, the gay Rutgers freshman who died after jumping from the George Washington Bridge a year and a half ago. Tyler was my second cousin. His mother and my mother are first cousins. I didn’t know him well. I probably met him fewer than a half dozen times, and he was a good 15 years or so younger than I was anyway. But since he died, I’ve felt connected to him in that his sexuality has been made into his defining characteristic (and I know enough about him to know that it was not), and for me, it’s been a non-issue. I don’t hide it. If people ask, I tell them. If they don’t ask, they tend to assume for some reason that I’m married.

But the fact that it’s a non-issue for me is exactly the point. I have much more to say about this later, but I wanted to take advantage of Valentine’s Day today to address this. I’m celebrating Valentine’s Day with my boyfriend tonight  in New York City, and there’s nothing out of the ordinary about that, but just across the Hudson, Tyler may have been persecuted for being attracted to someone of the same sex. It’s just not right.

For more impassioned and moving thoughts on Tyler than mine today, I direct you to a series of letters written by his brother Jimmy; and to a plea for marriage equality from his first cousin, Jen Ehrentraut-Segro.

UPDATED 6:41 p.m., with link to Slate article.

I find that most journalism students (and probably working journalists, too) favor one of the two main skill sets of journalism and fear the other. I know journalists who will talk to sources until their editors force them to sit down and meet a deadline, but who have nightmares about blank screens with blinking cursors. I’m the opposite: I find the storytelling part natural, and even fun. I love the writing. But I have to force myself to pick up the telephone when it comes time to do the reporting. I’m good at it, don’t get me wrong, but I find asking strangers uncomfortable questions to be an unnatural act.

In 2002, I interviewed the minimalist composer Philip Glass, (cousin of Ira!), who turns 75 today, about a work he had been commissioned to write in celebration of opening of the Milwaukee Art Museum, designed by starchitect Santiago Calatrava. Glass was probably the most famous person I had interviewed at length at that point (not counting a few college press junkets), and I was nervous. I prepped like mad, and came up with what I thought were some pretty intellectual questions about the relationship between architecture and music, structure and movement (the Calatrava building flaps its bony, birdlike brise-soleil wings), rhythm and repetition. But it turned out that none of that prep work mattered, for two reasons.

First, Glass had never seen so much as a drawing or a photograph of the building. He admitted as much, but his composition was just a composition. He had been asked. He gave them something. He knew the conductor. There really wasn’t a special relationship between the piece and the building.

And second—this being the point of this post—Philip Glass was the easiest interview I have ever done. Still, to this day. I always tell my journalism students that once you ask the first question, things get easier; people like to talk about themselves most of the time. But Philip Glass needed barely any prompting. This isn’t to say that he was self-absorbed. Far from it. He was thoughtful and articulate. And the man spoke in complete sentences that needed no cleaning up at all. That’s already a rare feat for someone speaking extemporaneously, as anyone who has transcribed a long interview will tell you. But even more impressively, he seemed to be speaking in complete paragraphs. There were topic sentences!

He made it so easy I didn’t even have to write anything. We ran the interview as a Q&A. And so here, on Philip Glass’s 75th birthday, I link to my 2002 interview with Philip Glass, the most articulate person I’ve ever interviewed (no matter what you think of his music).