CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCER
For nearly five years I was a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. My beat was national politics. For the last three years I appeared in the Sunday paper, the token liberal in the commentary section, there to offer some imperfect balance to a decidedly conservative shipload of pundits. In early September 2005 my column was rather unceremoniously dropped.
In the manner of all the president's men, I served at the pleasure of the editorial page editor--in the Sun-Times‚ case, Steve Huntley. Indeed, in many ways, Steve created me. There is a Dr. Frankenstein element in this sort of relationship. It was Steve who made me a weekly columnist, elevating my occasional status as an irregular contributor to a smoke and mirrors version of a permanent fixture. But any unnaturally spawned creature can readily become a monster. What else can one do at that point but destroy him? Especially when the populace is chasing him around the internet with pitchforks.
There are lessons here. First, how does one become a regular columnist for one of the largest circulation newspapers in the country? By a lot of design and some accident, a lifetime of preparation and chance encounters. My history with journalism has always been glancing, indirect. When I graduated from the Kansas City branch of the University of Missouri, journalism's reputation was still in the swamp of hackdom, a land of has-beens and wannabes. I was a novelist yet to blossom, off to a graduate writing program Columbia University was just getting underway in 1968.
That period was the golden age of reading. During the 1960s the number of young in institutions of higher learning was tripling, yet the number of writers "first novelists" was holding constant, around a hundred a year. The audience for literature was growing and the number of writers was holding steady, a wonderful situation that only lasted a few years. And novelists were coming to the rescue of journalism. They would transform it in the early stages of its modern ascendancy: Truman Capote with In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer with "himself " but also Armies of the Night, his late '60s book covering the March on the Pentagon.
This was all to become the "New Journalism." Tom Wolfe, a blocked fiction writer-- blocked until he became a rich celebrity--became the chief publicist for the "new" form and helped begin New Journalism's glamour period. But, what really capped the rise was when two young journalists--not latent or blocked fiction writers--Woodward and Bernstein, reclaimed the spotlight from their literary betters and helped topple a president and returned barely serviceable, but effective, prose to a place of honor in the newspaper world.
Capote and Mailer, and even Tom Wolfe, were always a bit too fancy for regular reporters. But had anyone told me when I left the middle west for Columbia in 1968 my first book would be nonfiction, considered by some a high form of journalism, I would have thought them crazy and insulting. Such was the thrall of becoming a novelist was for my generation.
But it came to pass: four years later, two years out of Columbia, I had published The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, a book nine months in the making--three months of trial in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, three months of writing, and a bit less than three months being manufactured. I saw an ad for the book in Publishers Weekly before I had written a word, a picture of the book's eventual cover.
Unwittingly, I had hitched a ride on the cultural wave, having become involved with a lady lawyer and her clients, a bunch of Catholic radicals and one Muslim Pakistani, resulting in a book that funded me with a $3,000 advance, enough I thought to write it, since I had been living back then on $300 a month.
Ah, youth. The book spent 6 weeks on the New York Times Book Review's New and Recommended list, and was selected as one of the notable books of the year. During the 6 weeks of my local big city notoriety, I was spending most of it in a street-side garbage bin in the South Bronx, toiling as a manual laborer at Feller's Scenery Studio. My life hadn't groomed me for success, so I didn't know how to leverage my good fortune.
It's a long story, not to be told here, but the connection to my last foray into journalism--five years as a columnist at a major city paper--shares one important similarity. I owed my access to the fashionable world of literary prominence to a single editor: in the NYC case, John Leonard, who was at the time editor of the N.Y. Times Book Review. The attention the TBR paid to anti-Vietnam war subjects and books was intense during Leonard's reign at the book review and I certainly profited from it. My first novel, The Meekness of Isaac, which followed two years later, was also prominently reviewed in the TBR, though not with the same degree of enthusiasm. And when Leonard moved from editor of the book review to a daily reviewer, he reviewed my second novel, Idle Hands, for the daily Times, a mixed assessment, but nonetheless confirming its worthiness. Subsequent regimes at the Times haven't proved as attentive --alas, just the opposite.
In many endeavors, one person can be important, pivotal, indispensable. No John Leonard, no anointing of my work by the N.Y. Times, no Steve Huntley, no weekly columns by me in the Chicago Sun-Times.
I tend to write short pieces in the fallow times between books and for a while it appeared that the fallow period was growing longer. It took a while to get my fourth novel, Notts, published. It appeared in 1996. It was set in England during the last great strike there, the NUM strike of 1984-85, a capstone victory of the Margaret Thatcher era. Death to unions! Thatcher succeeded.
I thought it strange that I hadn't written another long book of nonfiction, though I had published a collection of short miscellaneous pieces, Signs of the Literary Times, Essays, Reviews, Profiles 1970-1992, in 1993, with a university press.
I had a knack for doing different lengths: my first publications were short book reviews for the Nation when I was a graduate student at Columbia. I didn't consider my pen for hire, but there were things I could so easily--and book reviews certainly qualified. And other subjects would interest me and I would do longer pieces and then hunt for a publisher. The articles accumulated over the years, enough to make a volume.
The job I found to subsidize my writing was teaching and it seemed to prevent me from doing book-length nonfiction. Most of that writing, given my earlier experience, required one to go somewhere, spend time away researching--or so I thought. I followed Bill Clinton's election in 1992 with some interest and noted that, beyond the hyped odd couple co-authored Mary Maitland and James Carville volume, no literary sort of campaign book had been written. When Primary Colors appeared, it became the campaign book of '92 and its authorship wasn't that hard to guess. Joe Klein hadn't published a nonfiction campaign book, though he had covered the campaign. That negative evidence was sufficient proof for me, before he was unmasked, of authorship.
In any case, Klein intuited the situation: reportage of the Teddy White sort had become redundant, because the new media now covered so much of the campaign process--making stars of both consultants and reporters, celebrating the rise of hackdom, paid shills and spinners--as well as the candidates themselves.
At the time, I kept telling friends I could have written a campaign book without leaving my house. Cable television, C-Span, and other electronic media was changing news delivery big time. By '96 I decided that things had only changed for the better in that regard and I decided to put up or shut up. I found a publisher to do my Campaign America '96: The View from the Couch. I was ahead of my time about a year. The internet in '96 did not play a big role in that campaign, though it was clear it would down the road.
My book was about how the campaigns were consumed, not produced, but covering one reveals a lot of the other. A few months after my book appeared in '97, newspapers began to report with some regularity how the press covers the press. My account was a pre-blog blog, highly literate, everything I thought about the political scene and how it was unfolding, day by day.
There was not a lot of public interest, though. No book review editor or publication took it upon themselves to make me famous, though I did get a good, prominent review in the Washington Post's Sunday books section, because Washington is a company town and politics is the local business. The Chicago Tribune, where I had done a lot of book reviewing over the years, reviewed it quite favorably. But the general media passed.
My connection to the business of journalism was thin, because I have never worked for any journalistic enterprise. I was a freelancer, one of the ugliest words in the language. Since I had a full-time job teaching, I was actually a moonlighter, another off-putting label. Such a person is about as popular as the rogue male elephant, hanging around outside the tribe, blowing dust in the air, warily waiting to be driven off. No allegiances. I had once, for a few months, worked as a writing "coach" for the Columbus Dispatch, part of the duties I had as the first James Thurber Writer at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, but I wasn't paid by the paper.
No, freelance is an odd designation. But, by the start of the new century it became a synonym for a topical phenomenon, outsourcing. At the Sun-Times I was a version of a guy in Bangalore, solving problems for computer customers in Fargo, North Dakota. I was cheap labor.
But I had the best qualifications for cheap labor: I was dependable as well as cheap. I, in many ways, was a symptom of the sorry decline of newspapers, the shrinking of permanent staffs, the reduction of union labor, those with all the so-called costly benefits and annoying rights. The Sun-Times, over the years I wrote weekly, had two rounds of labor negotiations, two possible strike threats. If the writers for the paper had struck, I'd strike, too--or so I told myself. In both cases I was spared the choice.
Though I could have been in India, South Bend is treated in Chicago as a close suburb of the city, because of the presence of Notre Dame and the attraction of its football team and the legacy of Catholicism in Chicago. So, my outsider status was somewhat muted. And, as it's said about Cuba in Florida, Chicago is only 90 miles away.
I was born in Chicago and I had always wanted to be thought of as a Chicago writer. My initial contact with the Sun-Times was the usual one: toward the end of the '90s I had sent in an op-ed piece on spec. It was about Bill Clinton and his possible impeachment. I was never a fan of Clinton's--I still blame him for everything: in other words, for the George W. Bush administration, Clinton's actual legacy.
So, though I was a "liberal", in many ways my critique of Clinton was even more progressive, more left, more critical. I reacted to Hillary the same way: it was the "all lawyers have to work for banks" side of her. The Clintons and I are more or less contemporaries and they did what a lot of Yale law school graduates do: try to become rich and powerful. Bill Clinton was my president, though; I was surprised someone attached in any way to the anti-Vietnam war movement, who never served in the military, could become president--at least at the age he did. But, he went on to betray my generation, as I thought of it, the meritocracy, and hand it all back to the well-born plutocracy.
I presume my critique of Clinton had caught Steve Huntley's eye. I called for Clinton to take the Fifth before the grand jury, during the Paula Jones suit period. Huntley had left a message at my ND office and I called him; he wanted to run the piece, but what was new was his suggestion that I do more for the paper. I said sure and sent in commentary sporadically. He ran everything I sent in, what amounted to a piece or two a month, sometimes after holding them for a week or ten days. When one ran, I'd start thinking of another. When my campaign book was reviewed in the Washington Post in the fall of '97, the reviewer, James Ledbetter, had concluded it with the remark that for the 2000 campaign someone should give me a "national weekly column." I don't know if Huntley saw the review, but as we came closer to the 2000 campaign I wrote more columns and he continued to run them. But, it was still a surprise when the columns would appear, though, eventually, a pattern emerged.
I wrote enough about the 2000 campaign to get a book out of it, an ebook, a very short sequel to the '96 campaign book. I wanted to see what electronic publishing was like; a Chicago firm specializing in literary authors, PreviewPort, agreed to do it, and I found out what electronic publishing was about: it was about a lot of nothing, though the publishing house did do a small run of printed books which got around, but no one bought an actual e-edition.
But one of the columns I had written immediately after the election had caused a stir. I was incensed by the emergence of red and blue America and wrote about it: "George W.'s America is Yahoo Nation...a large, lopsided horseshoe, a twisted W, made up of primarily the deep South and the vast, lowly populated upper-far-west states that are filled with vestiges of gun-loving, Ku-Klux-Klan sponsoring, formerly lynching-happy, survivalist minded, hate-crime perpetrating, non blue-blooded, rugged individualists. Yahoo Nation, George W.'s electoral bundle--save contested Florida, the toss-up state--contains not one major city, nor one primary center of creative and intellectual density."
Huntley held onto the column for almost a week before running it on Nov. 14, 2000. The night before it ran, Paul Begala posted some similar remarks on MSNBC's website, so he "scooped" me. But the column, "Yahoo Nation," generated hundreds of emails--to me, I don't know what the paper got--and was posted all over the web.
By 2000 the web had come into its own and all sorts of journalism ran amok on it. My columns were duplicated on the web and the multiplier effect was large: they were linked and re-posted on many, many sites. And the Sun-Times ranks high on lists of popular newspaper websites. The world-wide web is word of mouth writ large. I should say it was posted by all the folk who hated the column, right wingers all. You can count on your enemies; they will make you known. If a left site reproduced "Yahoo Nation," I didn't see it. But it went out everywhere on the right-wing drum line.
I had written the '96 campaign book because I was tired of seeing the right wing monopolize savage rhetoric. During the early '90s there was the switch over, the coup by the right wing, the toppling of the "liberal" media as king of the hill. The right had taken its gloves off; I thought the left should, too.
What the left had going for it in '96 were comedians: Saturday Night Live, Jay Leno, and a bit of David Letterman. Some cable shows, the Comedy Network, the Daily Show sort of thing, were just beginning to have an impact in '96. But, there weren't that many left polemicists who weren't celebrities to begin with. My '96 campaign book didn't make much of a splash. By the start of the Bush campaign at the end of the '90s left wing authors had caught up big time: there was a flood of progressive books brimming over with heated prose. My "Yahoo Nation" 2000 column made noise, but it was by that time rather familiar noise. My email sizzled with denunciations.
Early in my writing life, after the Harrisburg 7 had appeared, Herbert Mitgang, then a member of the New York Times‚ editorial board, who was a fan of the book, had me to lunch at the Times‚ executive dining room. This was 1973. I was a babe in the woods, working intermittently at my scenery construction job in the South Bronx. Ralph Lauren wasn't into the style as yet, but I wore to the lunch what looked like lumberjack chic, an old corduroy jacket, khaki pants and a plaid flannel shirt, remnants of the Beat Generation writers I had looked up to, while sharing their low-rent lifestyle. Though, at Harrisburg during the trial I didn't stand out quite so much, since I constantly wore a foreign correspondent trench coat--it was the winter, after all. That coat was my most costly purchase ever during my lean post-graduate years. But, at the Times, I was certainly odd man out. The paper had been long known as the Gray Lady and what I found amusing was that we were served our lunch by gray ladies, old ladies in gray outfits with mostly gray hair. It was only many years later that it dawned on me that the lunch was a proto job interview.
But Mitgang asked me to send him an op-ed piece, which I did, and it ran a couple of months later. There wasn't much of a news hook, since I wrote about an incident in Provincetown that had happened a year before, the taking and replacing of benches outside the town hall. The benches were called "the meatrack," and functioned more or less as one; it was a different world in 1973.
So, more than 25 years later, I went to Chicago and had lunch with Huntley, and after lunch, he said, let's do this weekly. The column would run on Tuesday; the paper would get it Friday. Away I went.
The Sun-Times is Chicago's blue collar paper; its politics are, after a number of ownership changes, the usual pro-business Republicanism, but it is marked somewhat by its class interests.
The Chicago Tribune had the more fiery conservative past, though since it is aimed at affluent Chicago, it is more "liberal" in its social presentation. It, certainly, is the more powerful corporation, the Tribune corporation. As a sports columnist said to me at a Christmas party, the Tribune is now a fairly good paper. But the Sun-Times leads the way with its sport pages and Roger Ebert, but its ownership under Conrad Black had become the usual story of corporate malfeasance and highway robbery. The staff shrunk, took cuts, Black huffed and puffed, but then his whole house fell down, though his company Hollinger, thus far survives, though not with Black at the helm.
I certainly wasn't an insider, so I had to follow the turmoil at the executive level like any reader. One odd thing I discovered was that Huntley's predecessor as editorial page editor had been removed because of his own plagiarism problems, but not fired, and ended up in circulation, where he helped bring about the circulation scandals of 2004, one shared by a number of papers, inflating numbers of copies bought.
Everyone expected the Sun-Times to be sold and a shakeup to follow, but it hasn't been as yet. I thought that was one reason I was writing for the paper, since it was in limbo and I was dependable--and cheap, $150 dollars a column, around eight grand a year.
Having a weekly column quickly became an example of Look Out When You Get What You Wish For. I had always thought a weekly column would be a good outlet for me. I had something to say about most things and could certainly put it into words. Writing short length is a type of miniaturization. There are true oddities in the world, artists painting elaborate scenes on grains of rice, but, if one looks around, short is the leading literary form these days. It was the genesis of USA Today, a world without jumps. In the literary world short short stories came in vogue in the 1980s. Writing columns is the art of putting ships in a bottle.
It all starts with the sentence. One of the first writers I ever encountered in the flesh was Edward Dahlberg. At that point Dahlberg was a belle lettrist and he took an interest in me because, like him, I had a jejune talent for aphorism. Dahlberg had a book of his own aphorisms published called Reasons of the Heart. The first line of my 1972 Harrisburg 7 book--"In the logic of our time, it is better to have a bad experience that turns out well, than to have just a plain good one"--was an aphorism of a sort, enough of one that Dahlberg sent a mutual friend to search through his oeuvre to find which book I had stolen it from. If it had any paternity other than my own, it was closer to Camus than Dahlberg, I realized later.
If you can write aphorisms you can write columns. Form is just content under pressure and this sort of newspaper writing is unlike the old-fashioned formula news writing, where one just cuts from the end. Column writing requires an end, as well as a beginning and a middle. You're dealing with wholes, not parts. Sentences are wholes, so are paragraphs: it's prose as fractals. All parts are complete.
In any case, I wrote one each week. I appeared on Tuesdays and I sent the column in on Friday and if something happened over the weekend I sent a change in on Monday morning. This seldom happened, though once on a weekend I was able to change an earlier column between editions, concerning the Elian Gonzalez case. The Janet Reno snatch happened and I sent in a rewrite that ran after the original column ran in an earlier edition. When I settled in as a weekly columnist, I got fairly good at living four days ahead of the news cycle.
After a couple of years I was moved to Sunday. I presumed someone noticed that on Tuesday the Sun-Times ran a column by Jesse Jackson—I'm not sure who actually writes those--and that made two liberals on Tuesday. So, I was moved to Sunday, where there were no regular liberals. On Tuesdays I was replaced by Bill O'Reilly; they exchanged a real populist for a faux populist, one with slightly fascist tendencies, though self interest trumps all with O'Reilly. But he was a celebrity author. It is no longer novelists invading daily journalism, it's TV personalities invading now. O'Reilly rose high enough in the celebrity orbit that even a sex scandal couldn't bring him down.
Steve Huntley made moving to Sunday sound like a promotion, so I asked if a raise accompanied the move. No. Most everyone had taken cuts following the last round of sour union negotiations.
But, I wasn't doing this for the money. By definition I was Samuel Johnson's blockhead and that made me a fool. I still hadn't lost the young writer's need to be read, even though I was far from young.
Basically, there are three sorts of columnists: the first sort is the player, usually someone who has worked for presidential administrations, and insider who becomes an outsider, a semi-journalist. William Safire was the chief example of this sort. The second sort of columnist is a reporter who also writes commentary. Original reporting is done and made use of liberally. The N.Y. Times has a number of this sort, currently Friedman and Kristof are examples--they go places and interview people. There is a large spectrum here, since there is a little reporting to a lot of reporting. Robert Novak can fall into this category. The third is writers with opinions. I was one of them. This last, too, has variations--research is a kind of silent reporting, I.F. Stone during his newsletter days being an example of this type, where informed opinion overlaps with reporting--but it remains the most vulnerable of the three sorts, since if all you have is opinions, there isn't much underpinning there.
Nonetheless, I had George W. Bush to write about and wrote about him and his administration. Pre-9/11, Steve Huntley made a suggestion, one of a very few--he was largely hands off throughout my years at the S-T--that I might be getting a bit Johnny-one-note about Bush being stupid. I didn't think Bush was stupid, just that by being rich and privileged he only needed to know the minimum about most things, just enough to function. There doubtless is a subject or two--baseball?--that he knows a good bit about, but otherwise, he's used to help. I realize JFK got Arthur Schlesinger to write his books, but Kennedy was certainly intellectually curious.
Then came 9/11 and--as many said--that changed everything.
As a columnist and a novelist I was very conscious of what I wrote as a sequence, one short chapter after another, writing about the Bush administration. I was telling a long story, I thought, one that could be put together as a book--and I did, titling it, Bring 'Em On: The Problematical Presidency of George W. Bush, but publishers are, understandably, less interested in what appears to be a collection of columns, as in the final analysis it was, is--since I haven't been able to place it as yet.
As the columns went in via email, responses came my way via the same venue. The ratio of compliments to attacks, or favorable to unfavorable, was one to ten. The electronic age is mercilessly exact. As any writer knows, publishers now know exactly how many copies a book sells. In the good old days, numbers could be fudged. Now exactness rules. And web sites keep track of how many "hits" one receives. So, the Sun-Times knew how many times my columns were looked at. They didn't share that information with me. I don't know if they had a way to count the number of times it was posted elsewhere.
Novel writing is a bourgeois activity, insofar as it requires some regularity in one's life. So does column writing. I suppose it took about 3 hours to write a column, an hour to bang out a draft, and an hour each following day to rewrite it. For that is one reason why I never really wanted a day job in journalism: Not enough time to rewrite. When I was a writing coach at the Columbus Dispatch I was surprised by how much the writers I worked with had to write each day--I had a cross-section, from the most junior hire to their lead editorial writer--and it truly was literature in a hurry. The copy desk was supposed to be able to clean it up, anything that the editor above didn't catch.
Writers of my sort want to be their own editors, however grateful one can be to copy editors along the way. Time is the craftsman. It took 2 days to polish a column, maybe a half hour each setting, though my subconscious would think about it continuously, just the way it does with anything I write, whatever the length. I wrote on Tuesday, sent it to them Thursday. It would be printed late Friday, the Sunday edition out on the streets early Saturday morning.
So, I became very intimate with the quotidian. I was up on a lot of things. Cable "news" shows let me know what was on the chattering class's mind. I was always attempting to say what no one else was saying. I had my favorite subjects. One was Social Security, which I wrote about, since I had a family resource, a wife who was a leading expert in the field. I could test my eccentric ideas. I wouldn't have been able to function without access to LexisNexis, which became the check to my memory, the electronic library at my fingertips.
When I started in the '70s, the necessary thing was having a credit card and I didn't get one of those until after I wrote the Harrisburg book. Famous columnists have their legion of eager, paid researchers. I have an internet connection and the electronic resources of a large university.
I wasn't a complete anomaly at the Sun-Times, someone who wasn't syndicated but a regular contributor. Both Jesse Jackson and Father Andrew Greeley, the local Chicago priest and potboiler author, also had similar arrangements, though I would be surprised if the pay-scale duplicated exactly. The paper was making use of the resources of the city, giving the commentary section a local flavor.
During the last strike negotiations, Roger Ebert was siding with the underpaid staff writers and criticizing the rapacious Conrad Black for his robber baron ways and Black wrote a letter that the paper published, pointing out that Ebert with lawyerly help had negotiated a contract for a half million a year and didn't for a moment worry about unequal pay for equal work questions. It's always refreshing to have dirty salary laundry washed in public: pay disparity is always food for thought in the press room. But, Ebert's riches are not singular: throughout the corporate world pay at the top has outraced pay in the middle, much less the bottom. Even in academia, two tier pay systems are in place. "Chairs" are hired at universities at twice or three times the pay of full professors; deans and provosts now command a king's ransom to do the work that used to be done as collegial service in the old days. It's the American way, especially in the Bush era. The widening gap between top executive pay and the ordinary worker is startling, but unimpeded.
Jesse Jackson and Andrew Greeley had their own sort of enduring fame when they began to write commentary for the Sun-Times. But the Sun-Times had no self-interest in making me famous. Just the opposite. If they made a fuss about me they would only make me more important, bond me to them in ways they may well have regretted.
Because of that, the paper never nominated me for any journalism prizes, local, state, or national. A freelancer is a necessary evil. The Guild never solicited me in any way, or seemed to take notice of my existence. When the last strike threat bubbled up, I was ready to stop writing.
The state of the freelancer hasn't much improved over the centuries. We have about the same status in the profession as carpetbaggers. There's a variety of reasons for this. One that isn't spoken of as much is the one not complimentary to those who aren't freelance. They get their power from the high capital behind them. Woodward and Bernstein would have been ignored if they hadn't worked for the Washington Post. Indeed, Woodward has kept his job at the Post for all these years, despite being financially secure, to retain the clout being attached to a powerful corporate entity provides. Imagine how far Judy Miller would have gotten if she was a freelancer and not a reporter for the New York Times. We'll see how long she remains unattached, a mere freelancer. The opposite case is Sy Hersh and his My Lai work. He was almost freelance, since the operation he worked for was so small. But it wasn't Hersh's words that moved the My Lai story, it was the picture of the dead women and children and old men in the ditch.
Fashion in this culture is a high capital operation. If you're going to be fashionable, only the expensive can make you so. I had a little currency in the early 70s, since the New York Times found me interesting. When they pulled the plug (personnel changes in the book and editorial sections) I was lost in the wilderness.
Toward the end of the summer 2005, the Sun-Times redesigned its Sunday editorial package. It moved the commentary section from inside the tabloid to a new broadsheet insert named "Controversy" and created another pull-out section called "Fluff."
"Controversy" incorporated the book section, which had been in the movie/entertainment broadsheet section ("Showcase") for years. (One irony had been that my Harrisburg book had been reviewed on the front page of an earlier incarnation of the book section of the Sun-Times in 1972.) To make "Controversy" substantial enough to be a stand alone, a lot of wire copy was added, along with a main cover feature with colorful graphics and design, and a couple of pages of snippets from wire copy and the web.
The perennial newspaper statistics of how many readers actually read the editorials or the book reviews remains at the bottom of the barrel. So, this section was for the hard core readers: everything, more or less, was a think piece. So a separate section could either be ignored by the many or devoured by the few. The Sun-Times had new presses out in the 'burbs, so it is likely the costs of the change weren't that large.
But the change was unfortunate for me. That was obvious from the first. The old reliables, the usual Sunday commentators were there in the middle spread, on two pages. But in the old format I was one among equals: Robert Novak, Mark Steyn, George Will, Betsy Hart, and a couple of floaters. Many times my column would get a large colored news photo and the photo editor of the Sun-Times was good at picking them and often the paper would have its own illustrator supply a witty drawing or collage.
With the advent of "Controversy," there would be three pages of wire copy by many hands and then the two pages of familiars. In addition, Carol Marin, who had been hired last year to replace the dearly missed Steve Neal, was moved to the section. Though Marin, a former TV reporter, was hired as a city-side political observer, the change put two "liberals" on the page; she and I were now in subtle competition.
My new hole was the upper right hand column, just a straight column of print, a plain eight foot, two by four look, no photo and a hundred words shorter, 550 rather than 650. In the early years of my writing for the paper I would always write long, trying to push the envelope. Sometimes I would get away with it, but often I would get cut and they always did a good job, taking out lines from the middle of the piece that were the least important.
I was never censored, though I was shortened. For the last three years or so I finally decided to hit the mark, and not leave anything to cut. Over that period, I would only lose one sentence, and often not even that.
But now, with the new design, even I had the question: Why is that guy there? All the new wire copy gave a variety of voices to the section, bits of this and that, often from the web. It was the more or less free market, wire copy already paid for, or the sort of thing you can take off the web and have for nothing, the author grateful to be put into print.
So, the change deflated my status--visually and literally. The other regulars had their usual length, though fewer news photos. It took a couple of columns for me to get used to the new length.
But this was troubling. The token liberal was less important if a lot of the wire copy could supply bits of liberal rants. My raison d‚etre had vanished. And there was the matter of change for the sake of change.
Part of the problem was the grow-or-die issue. I had thought about getting myself syndicated over the years. I had gone so far to get the names and addresses of a few, but my initiative stopped there. From doing the column on the side, this was moving doing the column more toward the middle.
And I wondered why no syndicate had solicited me. What? They're not running to sign up a fifty-ish white male liberal?! A combination of lassitude and pride kept my ambition at bay. I just let it go.
Live by the sword, die by the sword: my life at the Sun-Times was almost entirely an email existence--though I did go to a number of the annual office Christmas parties--and I was handed my hat through an email. Huntley explained they had been "rethinking" the editorial section again and had decided to drop my column. Goodbye.
A number of my anti-fans had been calling for my head for some time. One could do a book on the rhetorical strategies of emails (doubtless someone has already) and amid the fumers and ranters and insult hurlers, there were always a few directed to the paper that had a judicious tone, more in sorrow than anger, that suggested my "contract" should not be renewed. These folk wanted to sit upon the lofty perches of management and not sound like they were down in the pit with the rabid throng. But after a month it appears that most of them don't even know they won, even if by mere coincidence.
About a week before Huntley's email I had emailed a friend, an L.A. TV writer-producer: I had written that Bush was getting too easy to bash. His administration was imploding. Hurricane Katrina had ripped down the veil in front of Bush and Rove's Wizard of Oz machinery. The administration was being exposed for all to see, its glorious incompetence, its collection of inept cronies with their hands on the levers.
Well, from your lips to God's ears: Just when I had a cornucopia of almost unbelievable missteps to chronicle and comment upon, Huntley's email came and snatched my soapbox out from under me.
I presume dumping me was a combination of money and ideology. The question, Why are we paying him to attack the president each week?, might have entered the top editors heads with some force at last. Or the roughly 8 grand a year I pocketed could look substantial on a balance sheet, when I could be replaced for a small percentage of that by wire copy and cheery-picked local submissions. The expanded section had already allowed them to dip into the pool of left critical thought.
It was probably more an economic decision, I concluded. Newspapers everywhere are still cutting staff and costs, replacing craft work with modular copy. My nine inches were filled by conservative wire copy or local PR type material, of the more-or-less free variety. Nothing like my columns, nothing at all like them.
I might have done this weekly for four years, but it is as if no one noticed. It's a cold world out there, especially in Chicago. Given my freelance status, no Chicago media writers had ever acknowledged my existence when I was writing, so it wasn't surprising they didn't take note of my absence. It is hard to overestimate the low esteem freelancing inspires in the regularly employed. It's a version of: If you're so smart, why hasn't some large corporation hired you?
My experience as a columnist was the same as my experience as a novelist and nonfiction book author. You need an editor who is willing to publish what you write. Without him or her, you're only the guy who points at himself and yells pay attention pay attention, the loon in the park dragging around a literal soap box.
It was a good gig while it lasted and now it's gone. These days I'm trying to avoid being an example of: Old Columnists Never Die, They Just Become Bloggers. But the internet siren song is singing to me. And, alas, everywhere newsrooms are losing staff. In my case, though, my disappearance isn't even a statistic.
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