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Episode 406: When to Share a WIP with Darrell Hartman
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Darrell Hartman (@dwhartman) is the author of The Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media. It is published by Viking.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Social: @creativenonfiction podcast on IG and Threads
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
Should I read this in like morning radio voice or should I just do my own voice hacey and efforts? Yeah, you know like a good beer or several and at times
00:00:09
Speaker
tasting non-alcoholic beer scratches the itch. If you visit athleticbrewing.com, use the promo code BRENDANO20 to check out. You get a nice little discount on your first order. Free Wave and Athletic Light are my favorites. I don't get any money, and they are not a sponsor of the show. I'm just an ambassador, and I like to celebrate this frothy goodness.
00:00:30
Speaker
Oh, and a new sponsor check this out. Today's podcast is also sponsored by the word anguish noun severe mental or physical pain or suffering verb be extremely distressed about something That sums it up For years along the way. It was a giant stinking mess that the author probably didn't want anyone to see unless they really trusted that person
Guest Introduction: Darrell Hartman
00:00:58
Speaker
Oh, hey, hey, it's a creative nonfiction podcast, a show where I speak primarily to badass writers about the art of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Don't, don't go. Darrell Hartman is our guest today. We recorded this back in November. I know he's the author of The Battle of Ink and Ice, a sensational story of news barons, North Pole explorers, and the making of modern media. It is published by Viking.
00:01:28
Speaker
He was born and raised in Maine and attended Yale University, where he studied literature. Big ups to Darryl for slumming with a UMass alum. Say what you will about UMass education, but we learned a thing or two about breaking and entering show notes to this episode and more at Brindo to Merit.com.
00:01:45
Speaker
where you can also sign up for my monthly rage against the algorithm newsletter. Short riff, four books, seven links, it literally goes up to 11. Writing prompt, CNF and happy hour, which I forgot to put the date in for April thing, so if you get the newsletter and you want to attend the CNF and happy hour, April 18th, 5 p.m.
Importance of Independent Platforms for Writers
00:02:07
Speaker
Pacific time. April 18th, 5 p.m. Pacific.
00:02:13
Speaker
All the shit is in the newsletter to attend. And it's 40 minutes long, because I don't pay for a premium Zoom account. Okay, call me cheap. I see you, Melissa. All you gotta do is give me your email address. First of the month, no spam, as far as I can tell. You can't beat it. Okay, but listen. Baked Into the Rager is cultivating
00:02:41
Speaker
A life in a platform independent of social media, right? I mean, this is kind of my thing.
00:02:48
Speaker
And if I know writers, and I do, we hate promotion and marketing. We just hate it. We just want to write our books and our articles and let the institutions promote it, but that's not how it works, is it? So I'm gonna try to make the focus of the newsletter a bit more concentrated on book marketing and platform-y stuff, devoid of social media. I mean, it has to be leveraged to some extent.
00:03:17
Speaker
But you don't have to hang out there like some of the more, I don't know, irritating people that are on social media. I'll leave it at that. There are several who irritate me in our circle. Guests of this podcast even. Oh yeah. Oh, that's right. Speaking from experience and whatever I might dig up in a month.
00:03:40
Speaker
newsletter will always be free but there's also a patreon.com slash CNF pod and you know what's kind of super cool is you get just an incredible discount on this depending on your tier I'm offering like one-on-one office hours
00:03:57
Speaker
It's a stupid bonkers idea. I'm making it more structured, and I'll iron out the details a bit more so it's a bit more concrete. You'll help keep the podcast lights on, but the upper tiers will get some face-to-face time to talk things out. Patrons have been digging this additive, and I think it's a little extra zhuzh. It's not just supporting podcast hosting. You're actually getting some very, very, very, very, very, very discounted FaceTime.
00:04:27
Speaker
All right, parting shot will deal with my personal hell, but first we're gonna hear from Daryl.
Discussion on Media and Storytelling
00:04:33
Speaker
He's at DW Hartman on Instagram and Twitter, one of Madsen's.
00:04:38
Speaker
X. Whatever. And you can learn more about him at Darryl Hartman dot com. Two R's, two L's. So let's hear about how the media landscape of the late 19th century kind of echoes today. Polar exploration esoterra. And when you should start sharing your work in progress with a friend.
00:05:11
Speaker
I'm getting to work in a book of my own. I just have this real hankering of, you know, to meet other writers and just talk about it because writing a book really takes over a lot of your head and it's a quite solitary pursuit in most ways. So I really just got hungry to meet other people who had done this thing before and talk to them about it. What were the conversations like as you were looking to commiserate over, you know, the process and just the labor of writing and researching a book?
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that does come up. We didn't talk, you know, someone like Reed or some of the other writers I've been meeting lately or reconnecting with, you talk about the work involved, you commiserate about it a bit. I think it's just nice to know that someone else also had to bust their butt, you know, you weren't the only one. And then you get into sort of tactics and techniques, and you want to tell a story of how you found something really cool, and then get into some of the nitty gritty of
00:06:07
Speaker
how you use the archives in addition to how you put the book together. I think in that case, it always helps. It helps to have read the other person's book. But I've started really getting into these discussions of structure. How do you put a narrative together? How do you decide what stuff you're putting in and what stuff you're leaving out? I mean, that's another thing I think authors talk about is the things they wanted to put in there or had in there during the first draft. And then they had to cut. And what was that process like?
00:06:37
Speaker
realize you really did need to cut it and it felt good. Did you, were you forced to do it by your editor and you wish you'd been able to keep it in? All these sort of, you know, subjects that have to do with construction. I love talking through that stuff and I really find you have to be speaking a lot of the times to another writer because no one else will quite, or an editor, but these are the types of people who want to have those conversations and you'll get a lot out of it.
00:06:59
Speaker
Yeah, and writing a book is, I think, at least for me, it's a pretty ugly process. There's just shit everywhere. And oftentimes you lose, because of the glut of stuff you're pulling in, sometimes you lose sight of things and lose track of things and you stumble. I try to build in redundancies because I'm just gonna keep revisiting transcripts and all sorts of things because
00:07:26
Speaker
I know I'm going to forget certain things, but as I get more and more familiar with the material and the writing and the rewriting, I'll be like, oh, I didn't put that thing in. I can possibly backfill it. And that's part of the ugliness of my process so far. And I wonder for you, because it's so ugly, how did that manifest for you?
00:07:43
Speaker
Yeah, I hear what you're saying for sure. I was definitely thinking to myself most of the time I was writing this book, I was thinking, Darryl, you've got to be more organized with your materials. Talking to other writers, I don't think I was extraordinarily disorganized by any stretch of the imagination, but you're dealing with so much stuff compared to the journalism and the magazine stories I had done before this book.
00:08:07
Speaker
just is exponentially larger and that much more to keep track of and I was always sort of criticizing myself for for anytime I had to go looking for something for like 10, 15, 20 minutes that seems hugely wasteful and I kept just telling myself I was going to improve my process next time.
00:08:24
Speaker
Like I say, I don't know if I was that much more disorganized than a lot of other people. The book got done. I didn't have any huge catastrophes in terms of losing something and never being able to find it. You really just have to hold stuff in your head. Even the best organized person has to hold a lot of thoughts and references in their head, and you do have to leave a lot of that. Just outsource it to your brain. File structure management can only do so much for you.
00:08:48
Speaker
And there's something to be said about the stuff that you're able to remember over the course of your research is the stuff that's more sticky and is the juice because it really glommed on your head and you're kind of writing from memory and then you have to go back of course and cite it. But the fact that you remember it means like, oh, that's real good stuff that is likely going to make the cut into the final drafts.
00:09:13
Speaker
Absolutely. I think you have to trust your instincts. And if your instinct says that's interesting, it probably is. Yeah, and with the sourcing, one thing I tried to do with this book and did pretty well in the end was anytime I threw a note into some messy draft document, I kept the source there. And I don't know, Brendan, what program you used to write. I used a program called Scrivener, which made that footnote a little easier in that organization, a little bit easier because I really did not want
00:09:43
Speaker
that thing to happen where you've got a fact and then you spend hours trying to remember track down where you got it from. Yeah, I have Scrivener. I've used it in the past for some essays. But as I was embarking on this current book, I just didn't want to be kind of concurrently learning a new program when it came to footnoting and sourcing. So I've just been using a giant Google Doc for my manuscript and just I cite as I write.
00:10:11
Speaker
and just everything I cited just dropped into a footnote with a Dropbox link to where I have it filed so a fact checker could hopefully easily just follow that link and they can and it should be an easy relatively easy fact-checking lift but it's a pretty bare-bones way I'm doing it but I just I didn't but I've heard a lot of good things about Scrivner when it comes to comes to this
00:10:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I feel like I'm not great at learning software these days, but I feel like I'm only using maybe 15 to 20% of Scrivener's capabilities, but even those are quite helpful. I will say, though, that Dropbox link thing is really smart. I don't do that, and maybe I will. It just takes one additional step out of the process for that fact checker for you. I mean, that's what systems are for, right? So that you can be your somewhat disorganized self and creative self, and the system will do some of that organizing work for you.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, I love that you brought up structure earlier too and it's when you were conceiving of this book, how did you initially conceive of its structure and then maybe how did that evolve as you were reporting and writing it?
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's a very germane question for this book. So as I say, so this is my first book. I'd never written a book before. I'd done a decent amount of magazine journalism, but honestly, I'd never done a very long magazine piece, even. I'd never done the type of magazine piece where you really play with structure a lot. So this was my first crack at that particular type of challenge. And I really, my first draft,
00:11:42
Speaker
I really overdid it. It was a pretty complex structure. It was quite ambitious. The book has these two narratives basically about 19th century polar explorers leading up to this 1909 debate over the North Pole, and 19th century newspapers in New York City leading up to this 1909 debate over the North Pole.
00:12:10
Speaker
And we were jumping back and forth a lot between 1909 and earlier periods.
00:12:20
Speaker
and also between polar explorers and newspapers. It was almost like there's a sort of triangular jumping back and forth. I submitted the manuscript with this sort of complex hopscotching structure in place. And my editor quite rightly said, we've got to rethink this because it's just sort of too much going on, leaving too many stories in the middle and going somewhere else and coming back and not being quite sure where we are.
00:12:45
Speaker
when we do come back. So basically I had a pretty massive revise just in terms of the structure. There's a good amount of cutting but the biggest sort of mental hurdle almost was this restructuring and we did simplify it so that the only the back and forth really was more about going back and forth between the newspaper thread and the explorer thread and we were not jumping apart for one exception we're not really jumping back and forth in time the way it was in the first
00:13:11
Speaker
the first draft. I don't know, maybe I just watched too many Christopher Nolan movies or something. I thought I could pull that off, but it's very hard. Oh my gosh. You don't want to lose the reader. At the end of the day, you're serving the reader. A screenwriter buddy of mine who read the first draft said something really perceptive, I thought, and he said,
00:13:29
Speaker
You've got to the point, this is with the first draft, you've got to the point where the structure is dictating how you tell the story. You want the drama and the emotions to dictate how you tell the story. My editor, not in so many words, agreed with that. Here I had at least two people saying the same thing in different ways. I ended up agreeing with both those comments and ultimately felt very good about this laborious change I had to do.
00:13:55
Speaker
Yeah, speaking of Christopher Nolan movies, I think the unsung hero of his teams are the people who, the editors who probably help proofread his stuff because his stuff is so structure driven and more like the structure is the main character in so many of his movies. So it's got to be the idea and the structure. So he's got to have just a titanic team of
00:14:23
Speaker
organizers and editors behind him. Yeah, I mean, I wonder what some of those scripts look like or movies look like before that team gets involved. But I think the takeaway, one big takeaway for me
00:14:38
Speaker
As this, you know, in this book writing experience, including what we're talking about now is, you know, at the end of the day, you go to the bookstore, you buy a book, you see this fairly finished product where everything fits pretty
Feedback and the Writing Process
00:14:48
Speaker
well. What you forget is for years along the way, it was a giant stinking mess that the author probably didn't want anyone to see unless they really trusted that person. And I had to get over that. I had to get over some of that self-consciousness, and I still struggle with this. It's like, you got to be able to show a work in progress that you're not proud of.
00:15:07
Speaker
to some trusted people to get their input because that's how these things get made well.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah, that can be so hard to do. And it's a very vulnerable position to be in as typically an insecure artist or writer is. And it's hard not to take feedback personally. And it's hard to just accept or to accept feedback on the work is just for the work itself. It does at times feel like a personal affront. And that's a learned skill, I think.
00:15:39
Speaker
Yeah, and the tricky thing is it's just you writing for the most part. So anything that people don't like about or think it needs work on, they can't sort of distribute the blame, so to speak. It's all on the author. You can blame the story or the sources or whatever, but it's kind of one person. Now that I think about it, I was involved in documentary filmmaking for a while, while I was also a writer.
00:16:02
Speaker
I worked with my brother on some stuff and he had a production company. And I think maybe that was helpful because with this collaborative process of filmmaking and it's so technical, right, these different steps and layers that get added, you're always showing messy works in progress. And I remember seeing all these cuts where the director would sort of, before they press the play button, the director gives you all these
00:16:25
Speaker
caveats. It's like, now, this isn't color corrected. It's not the final sound mix. It's a rough cut, this idea of the rough cut. It's just very standard to show a group of people something that is a rough cut, literally a rough cut. Getting used to that, I think, was helpful. Yes, you can still preamble it with all these caveats, but at the end of the day, you are showing something kind of embarrassed about to a group of people and opening yourself up to their constructive input.
00:16:50
Speaker
Yeah. There's a there's a fine line between sharing a work in progress or the spectrum on which you would share a work in progress. You don't want to do it too early and you certainly don't want to do it so frequently that you're you're getting in the way of the generative process. So at what point did you feel comfortable sharing the work in progress because you know you are at maybe a logical stopping point.
00:17:13
Speaker
That's a good question. I think I was sharing some of it with my wife as we were going and I think my agent was getting a look at some.
00:17:25
Speaker
I was not sharing a ton, to be honest. That is to say, before I had my manuscript, I did not share a ton. Now, as you probably know, you sell a book like this, a nonfiction book, you've outlined it pretty thoroughly, and you've submitted a chapter or two of sample writing to the publisher. So people had seen things I'd tried out, but a lot of this input and eyeballs and work came after the manuscript was submitted. So that's the same between draft one.
00:17:52
Speaker
draft 2. I think at hindsight it might have made sense to run some things by people a little earlier, but it was really between draft 1 and 2 where a bunch of that work and input happened.
00:18:06
Speaker
Yeah and given that you said that you didn't have a whole lot of like super long magazine piece experiences like likewise I had the longest piece I've ever probably written on magazine levels probably like 2,500 3,000 words so nothing of that super ambitious five-digit word count thing where you really have to consider the pacing and structure over the long haul and then you're
00:18:30
Speaker
dropped into the deep end of trying to stick the landing on a 100,000-word book or something. So for you, what were some of those growing pains as you were really stretching yourself?
00:18:41
Speaker
I think the biggest one was getting stuck in digressions. I mean, I'm in your boat. I really hadn't written any magazine stuff more than 3,000, 3,500 words. And I also hadn't done a ton of history, to be honest. And I found this research so engrossing and fascinating, and I just wanted to share what I learned.
00:19:03
Speaker
that along the way of writing, I kept veering away from the narrative to doing these sub-narratives and character profiles of people who really weren't that essential to the story. And not having worked with the structure before, I didn't realize while I was doing that how distracting that was to a reader.
00:19:23
Speaker
Well, I'm like, well, this will be interesting because it's just inherently interesting, even if it doesn't relate to this main thread of the narrative too much. And it turns out that's wrong, I think, from a storytelling perspective. So I really had to trim that stuff back and hew to the main thread of the story a lot more. I would say that was the biggest thing if I had to name one.
00:19:47
Speaker
I already was juggling two main threads. Like I said, there's this newspaper world and there's this world of explorers. You can't just be going down little alleyways within those worlds. You have to keep pretty close to them so that they can interact in a way that is more propulsive, keeps the story moving ahead to this climax that you've got in mind, which in this case was this big 1909 controversy when everything hits a boiling point.
Historical Media Analysis
00:20:14
Speaker
Yeah, and given that you grew up in Maine and New England, I grew up in southeastern Massachusetts and we're about the same age, so I have a love affair with the Boston Globe and those just giant Sunday globes and my dad peeling off giving me the comics and
00:20:33
Speaker
and whatever. I have a very big soft spot in my heart for actual newspapers. So for you, what is your relationship to newspapers in that sense?
00:20:46
Speaker
That's a great question. I grew up in a very small town in Maine. We did not have the Boston Globe. You would get it in Maine, but I did not grow up reading that paper. The Portland Press Herald was the sort of Maine newspaper. The Canabec Journal was my local paper.
00:21:04
Speaker
I remember them being around and reading them, but personally, I didn't have a huge connection, I wouldn't say, to newspapers. On the other hand, my mom wrote for newspapers. My mother was a journalist most of her life and wrote for smaller papers. I guess it's more this idea of media, right? So in the period in which this book is set, newspapers are media. That's one of the points. There's a few magazines out there, but there's no radio, there's no television, there's no internet.
00:21:30
Speaker
when you say media in the 1800s were mostly talking about newspapers. So I would say my connection to the media is much more pronounced growing up, but also as an adult. I wrote for two years for a glossy monthly magazine and then went freelance in 2007. And so for years, I've just been writing for all kinds of different
00:21:52
Speaker
media and specifically in New York City. So to me, this idea that New York City is kind of the center of this media universe is something that I've lived with for a while and it was really fun to explore the origins of that in the historical sense and look at the origin, the genesis of these newspapers and just how powerful they came to be and how essential
00:22:17
Speaker
a piece of the New York City fabric they were. This idea that New York City is the center of so many things, news as much as anything drives that point home. You have an entire nation getting a lot of its foreign news and other forms of news and entertainment from these New York City papers, including the giant Sunday papers. All that was really
00:22:41
Speaker
fun to look into in terms of my personal experience. I've never really a news reporter, a beat reporter so much, so I don't have that sort of ink stain, rich newsroom kind of background myself, but certainly it's a colorful world to research and to read about.
00:22:58
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment earlier in the book, too, where you write, as Collier has noted in a series of newspaper business 15 years later, Goddard's guiding principle was, quote, economy of attention. It worked like a charm, sending circulation of the Sunday world beyond half a million. And I dog-eared that section because so much of what we deal with today is this economy of attention just being bombarded, be it social media or whatever clickbaity type things are out there.
00:23:25
Speaker
So in a sense, what did you notice that resonated or echoed to our current day from the 1800s?
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, a lot of what concerns us about social media right now, legitimately, I think, concerned a lot of people 120 years ago. The only difference was they were focused on newspapers. A lot of people thought newspapers were evolving in a dangerous way, too much too fast, too sensationalized, the lack of expert authority, falsehoods everywhere.
00:23:59
Speaker
On the one hand, I realized a lot of our concerns aren't new, but I don't want to trivialize our concerns by saying they're exactly the same as we've always said. I think you've got to sort of thread the needle between those points. It actually gave me some interesting perspective on the media environment of today, which I think is not at its best. But there have been other periods when people have been very concerned, and there's been a lot of disruption and chaos when it comes to the media landscape and how we get our news.
00:24:29
Speaker
This was an era, so Goddard and Brisbane and the Sunday world, that world that you just sort of referenced, that was becoming a big thing in the 1890s. And that was a period when newspapers were enormous overstuffed forms of information and entertainment.
00:24:48
Speaker
They were very cheap. They were actually cheaper than the paper they were printed on. The publishers, however, made great amounts of money just because of the advertising that those newspapers were generating and the advertising profits were getting huge. In fact, it was really a new model of making money off of newspapers, which was advertising, which would come to define media for decades thereafter. So learning all this stuff and again, sort of seeing how we got to be in the media environment we're in today,
00:25:18
Speaker
I thought that was great. And there was a lot of yelling. I think one of the complaints of the time was that newspapers had formerly been a bit more moderate and quieter and thoughtful, and they'd taken the longer view on things. And what you had in the 1890s was a new world.
00:25:36
Speaker
in which newspapers got sensational and started getting very emotional and they were kind of yelling the news rather than talking the news. Not everyone loved that. So that story has many sides to it. These newspapers were popular. They engaged people who hadn't been engaged before by the newspapers. They weren't just for elites to the degree that newspapers had been for the elites before. I do see a lot of echoes in terms of now how social media has disrupted traditional media or legacy media.
00:26:05
Speaker
But I don't know. I think social media has done a lot of damage personally. So to me, it feels to me like a more pressing problem now. And with the rise of AI and not being able to, of being very hard to discern what is real, what is fabricated, what has been airbrushed to the extent that something fake looks totally real.
00:26:32
Speaker
I don't know how we develop a greater sense of media literacy. I don't know. Maybe you can speak to that, just given the world you are in, because there was a lot of sensationalizing and fabrication, and people had to learn how to comb through that in the 19th century, early 20th century, too. Yeah. Well, this topic is where I do see some hope. You know, this world of hysterical fake news where the papers are just sort of making stuff up,
00:27:01
Speaker
hit its fever pitch around 1898-1899, and I go over this in the book a bit, where the US was at war in Cuba and the events leading up to the war in Cuba with the Spanish. This was the war that William Randolph Hearst, the publisher of the journal, was said to have created this war. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but it tells you how powerful he was thought to have been.
00:27:26
Speaker
And the idea that a newspaper publisher could have in fact started a war between the US and a foreign power had some credibility back then. After that, there was a kind of turnaround. It had to do for, you know, there were business reasons behind that, but I think there was also a cultural fatigue with this type of sensationalized and untrustworthy news reporting. And it's out of that fatigue that I think the New York Times was able to chart a new path.
00:27:55
Speaker
around this time. And the New York Times is one of the main characters of this book, if you will, and its publisher Adolph Ochs, who was very intent on kind of going against the tide of sensationalism. And having a newspaper that reported just the facts was comprehensive, reliable, and unbiased, right? That was a big part of it, was that the Times should be seen as an impartial and therefore trustworthy paper for a certain type of reader.
00:28:24
Speaker
The other thing that happened, you know, the Times actually had the curve on this because a little bit after this time, I would say approaching 1910, the industry really put in a bunch of new measures and safeguards.
00:28:41
Speaker
This was necessary because prior to this time, there was no real check on falsehoods and fake news. The market had to govern itself. What was keeping a newspaper from publishing utter rot? It was basically the scrutiny of other newspapers. It was a self-policing world.
00:29:00
Speaker
which worked to a degree, but it was really insufficient in a lot of ways. So what you had happening right around the time my story ends was this new set of ethical standards, a new type of professionalization in the news, a much stricter attitude among the respectable papers, at least when it came to advertising. We sort of forget about advertising, but there's a lot of bogus stuff being advertised and crazy claims being made
00:29:27
Speaker
for things like granola and breakfast cereals and patent medicines that would never pass muster today unless they're deep in the nether regions of midnight cable television or something. You know what I mean? The industry did start to reform. I think we're about at a point now, in my opinion, where some reforms and regulations are necessary, whether that's enforced by the government, which it was to degree back then.
00:29:52
Speaker
but also the industry itself. And I say the industry, I mean social media, more than media, personally. Oh, for sure. Yeah, it's been encouraging for organizations like NPR, NPR, who pulled out of Twitter altogether, and they didn't notice really any drop-off in their traffic and everything. And I think that's an example, a lot of us who have been hoodwinked into thinking we need that stuff for platform building, we're like, oh, OK.
00:30:21
Speaker
you know, if they can pull out and still be fine and they are skiing on their reputation, it's like, okay, maybe we can do a better job of just building a better body of work and reputation on our own and then we can issue social media altogether and get out of that morass.
00:30:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I sound like an old fogey, but I'm pretty into the idea of banning TikTok. There's no reason for me to go into that, and I don't know enough honestly, but on a gut level, that feels like the type of strong step. We're in a world where a lot of things are being manipulated by foreign powers. I wouldn't be sad to see that happen.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yeah, and I was, for about three years here in Eugene, I was the editor of the opinion page of what was left of it. And when I had started, we were still doing editorials and stuff. And then when the paper merged with Gannett, Gannett has a way of wiping out editorial pages. And on the basis that they think that their readers don't want to be preached at, but it's just patently foolish.
00:31:31
Speaker
But there's a moment in the book too where you write or cite that the discontinuing of editorials and newspapers makes journalism more of a business than a profession.
00:31:42
Speaker
And that really resonated and hit home with me as an opinion page editor. People liked having opinions that sparked dialogue instead of taking it back and worrying about offending your readership. Sometimes they needed to be challenged, and they liked to be challenged. And this idea of it was just pandering to the lowest common denominator to
00:32:06
Speaker
to eradicate the editorial page and opinion content and letters to the editor. So that moment in the book really resonated with me, because I had really a finger on the pulse of that fall from grace, really.
00:32:21
Speaker
Yeah. Those are some of the two biggest currents in journalism, in the history of media, and the book covers that a bit. This idea that the newspaper is a community thing that serves its readers, and the idea that a newspaper is a business that serves its advertisers. I mean, I'm simplifying here, but these are kind of the different polls.
00:32:45
Speaker
Early on in American history, I talk about the origins of New York Herald, that paper succeeded hugely in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s because it was serving its readers. The editor of that paper, the publisher, James Gordon Bennett Sr., never shied away from a fight or an argument. He probably went too far. He loved it too much, always stirring up trouble.
00:33:08
Speaker
If advertisers complained about this, he'd tell them to go to hell. I've got more readers than anyone. People read my paper. This is the way I do it. That's a current in independent journalism and how it is done. By the same token, the 1890s into the early 1900s,
00:33:27
Speaker
newspapers were really becoming corporate for the first time and consolidated. You were starting to have some mergers and the advertising model had started to reign supreme. So it's under this advertising model that the publishers get very wary of publishing anything that is going to offend advertisers, really. My understanding is the reason they shied away from conflict was not because they were too worried about offending readers, but because they didn't want to stir up trouble among their advertisers and lose those advertising dollars, which is just
00:33:57
Speaker
A business, a business focus. So newspapers, you know, do need to make money, but what are the priorities here? That's sort of one of the tensions that's constantly at play.
Polar Exploration and Media Influence
00:34:08
Speaker
Yeah, and we've talked a lot about the journalism and the newspaper ecosystem at the time, but there's also the other major spur of your book, which is the Polar Exploration part and the dueling paths of Frederick Cook and Robert Peary. So I just speak to them in Polar Exploration and the rivalry that ensued.
00:34:32
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. In the way that the media story of this book felt very contemporary and relevant to me, it's so much overlap with the day we currently live in. I thought the polar explorer element had a nice throwback feel. We don't really have this anymore, this idea of people, men mostly at the time, almost exclusively.
00:34:58
Speaker
throwing on their furs and getting their dog sleds and trying to perform these huge feats into places that people have never been before. But of course, that was happening at the time. It was one reason these explorers truly were celebrities. And among some of the most famous Americans and Europeans were polar explorers. You know, it's a pre Hollywood time. So the definition of celebrity was very different back then. And these were
00:35:22
Speaker
very inspiring figures that took huge risks and reaped huge rewards. The interesting thing about the North Pole controversy, it's really the period when that heroic image of the polar explorer took a huge beating.
00:35:39
Speaker
because they were considered these sort of stoic men of honor. They were expected to behave a certain way. And with this North Pole controversy of 1909, they behaved not that way at all. You know, there's a lot of name calling and accusations of fraud.
00:35:55
Speaker
and the financial incentive that goes into exploring the profits that can be made out of it became front and center during this whole debate. I really see it as a turning point where we lost our innocence about these explorers and what they do. I found that whole thing
00:36:11
Speaker
irresistible, that story, this fascinating fiery chapter in American history that had never been told with this media perspective before. So how does the media fit into this huge controversy between Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, both of whom claim to have reached the North Pole, and then Peary accused Cook of lying? The media factors into the story because each of these explorers had a powerful New York City newspaper backing it.
00:36:40
Speaker
And the ability of these newspapers to be impartial was, of course, severely tested because they each had a horse in the race. So it's this kind of partisan media moment. That group of factors made me hugely interested in telling this story. And like I say, this idea of partisan media and really Cook and Perry appealed to different parts of the American character.
00:37:01
Speaker
And the way the American populace really came down on either side of this debate echoes very loudly today with these sort of geographical, political, cultural identity divisions that are sort of tearing America right now. Again, I think social media has made it even worse unnecessarily, but a lot of those fault lines were also in existence 120 years ago, and you really see them play out during this sort of headline controversy that was going on.
00:37:31
Speaker
What was it about either Cook or Peery that was so divisive and got different areas of the country rallying around one versus the other? Yeah, it's a key question. You know, honestly, during this three-month period in the fall of 1909, really the dividing figure was just Robert Peery. Frederick Cook came back from the polar regions first. He first claimed to have reached the pole.
00:37:58
Speaker
And he was celebrated around the world, and he was a very popular figure. He seemed like the underdog. He'd done this, purported an achievement on the cheap. He hadn't needed to spend a lot of money. He had a simple background. He didn't have powerful friends in Washington or any of these sort of millionaire businessmen that were funding Robert Peary. So Frederick Cook honestly was a folk hero.
00:38:21
Speaker
for a while the problem was that robert perry and other people suspected he was lying he he was a con man essentially and this news was not received well by the american public to to a person they almost all rejected this as sour grapes on robert perry's part um because cook's reputation had are even just in a few days coming back this great american hero he's discovered the north pole for america america has won this kind of
00:38:48
Speaker
polar race that's been going on for decades. People don't want to dislike or question Frederick Cook. They're kind of in his camp. So Robert Peery's accusations do not go over very well. There's also the manner in which Peery makes them. He's a very blunt, angry guy. He's not a very likable personality, which I think is just obviously a timeless thing that's not going to go over well.
00:39:12
Speaker
But then you have to look at his context, his sort of social context. He was funded by mostly New York City millionaires of the period. He pulled a lot of powerful strings. He was seen as the establishment explorer. He was a Navy man, and he had a lot of resources because he tirelessly sort of cultivated those resources. So the very easy divide you have is the sort of the underdog, the everyman underdog in Frederick Cook.
00:39:41
Speaker
and the sort of strategic cunning establishment guy Robert Peary with his powerful friends. And this was a very potent way of contrast in these two explorers. The point is that
00:39:55
Speaker
this contrast in the explorers and their sort of contrasting characters was much more of the story for a while than the facts of the matter regarding whether either one had been there. And I think I look into this, I think there's a lot of interesting human reasons for this, but people just love an argument and personalities are more compelling for better or worse than facts are. And this was gold if you were a newspaper editor.
00:40:22
Speaker
You know, watching these two guys have this sort of unprecedented type of explorers fight. This was generating headlines on a daily basis. You know, it was sort of complicated for the New York Times and the New York Herald because they were stood to win or lose money or win or lose prestige based on how this thing turned out. But for all the other newspapers commenting on it, it was just sort of, they were sort of having a field day because every day someone would make some new accusation or some new evidence would emerge and you could talk about it.
00:40:48
Speaker
sort of a classic type of news story where the science gets pushed to the side, and we can just have this long barroom conversation about who's the better man and who made it and who didn't. That's what America was doing. And with an explorer making that mission to try to get to the poll, what are the kind of notes that they need to take? Or what are the difficulties in verifying how far they get?
00:41:15
Speaker
Right. So with any explorer of the period, you are expected to provide documentation of where you've been. You're expected to have some corroborating witnesses, but a lot of this is considered sort of an afterthought to be looked over by scientific authorities after you've made the announcement.
00:41:32
Speaker
This is not what happened in the case of Cook and Piri. Cook came back and it was unclear what kind of documentation he had. And then Robert Piri coming back and claiming that Cook has invented the whole thing suddenly put a huge spotlight on this idea of documentation. You know, oh, well, what evidence should a person like this bring back and what does it all mean?
00:41:52
Speaker
And this happened in the context of the North Pole, which is uniquely hard to navigate to and uniquely hard to prove that you've been to. This would not be an issue, for example, two years later when Roald Amundsen discovered the South Pole, which is a fixed point on Earth.
00:42:12
Speaker
You know, you go to the South Pole, you leave something there, it will stay there, which is exactly what Amundsen did. So when Robert Falcon Scott got to the Pole several weeks after Amundsen, he saw the things that Amundsen had left behind.
00:42:25
Speaker
At the North Pole, this is really just a notional point, a top drifting sea ice. So if you were to leave something there, it would float away. So you can't leave something there proving you've been to the pole for the next person who comes. And the very task of getting there is incredibly hard because you have these polar currents moving in kind of a gyration pattern.
00:42:47
Speaker
You've got to use a sextant, a compass, all these other navigational instruments to figure out where you're going and make sure that you truly are on a pure north course, despite these currents. So you need at least a couple competent navigators to pull this off, and really the thing that tells you you've been to the pole is these instruments you've brought with you.
00:43:12
Speaker
which require a lot of knowledge, navigational knowledge, knowledge of the stars, astronomy. Of course, you're very cold. You need a clear day to take some of these astronomical observations and you need the weather to cooperate, which it does not always do in the Arctic. So I don't think the public truly understood just how difficult it is to pull off these navigations.
00:43:36
Speaker
and record them appropriately. And the public, to a degree, started to get an education in this. But it's another reason it was kind of a turning point in exploration because it really started to get into the nitty gritty.
00:43:48
Speaker
of navigating and proving you have done something in a way that had never had to happen before, because there was never a controversy to this degree. You had a very complex matter being summarized in often simple terms, which is tricky. And the scientific authorities are not really weighing in with any
00:44:11
Speaker
useful information or direct information because both Koch and Piri were for different reasons withholding their evidence. So it's kind of their fault that it became this uninformed, this whole debate. You know, I would read the book to sort of try to understand why they were withholding their evidence. It's complicated. But the media is basically asked to do a very difficult job of trying to litigate this dispute, which is best decided by science.
00:44:37
Speaker
Yeah, you took my next question right out of my mouth of why they would withhold evidence if it would, in fact, prove or disprove where they were. Yeah. I think the short answer is the evidence was not rock solid and it would be risky for the explorers to truly put it out there. Robert Pirie had his travel log and his readings validated by a scientific body with whom he was very cozy and friendly.
00:45:07
Speaker
But apart from getting sort of a yes, we believe him, the public wasn't really privy to what that scientific body had looked at or what questions they had asked him or not asked him.
00:45:17
Speaker
So all this stuff about Piri basically succeeding behind closed doors happens once again, and just kind of reinforces this idea of Robert Piri for one being sort of master of the cigar filled room, you know, he's got his fellow powerful men there just sort of making sure he succeeds. That's the way he went about getting his his claim validated. It wasn't
00:45:40
Speaker
by making everything available to the public. It was this very closed door type of thing, which later on, you know, this story kind of ends in 1909, but not really. So it would take years for people to go into archives and try to dig up information about Piri's own records and what he had done or not done. And did this lead to a greater sense of transparency when it came to exploration of this nature? You would think it would.
00:46:11
Speaker
I'm less an expert on the subsequent periods. Honestly, I think there's some incidents that happened later on that suggest it really didn't change things as much as you would think it would. I do think nowadays would be next to impossible to pull off something.
00:46:26
Speaker
like this just because the technology makes it much easier to communicate where you're going and to have where you've gone be validated. Obviously we navigate using satellites and you can live stream things almost no matter where you are. This is from a period when you could go off the map for months and years at a time and have no way of getting in touch with anyone. So I think the technology was different in the standards were a little different back then.
00:46:55
Speaker
Yeah, and you talk about corroborative witnesses. And at times, a lot of these Eurocentric white explorers, they would have the help of indigenous and native cultures. And who could really speak to the landscape and how far they got? But the racism being what it was, they were not considered trustworthy witnesses.
00:47:24
Speaker
dismissed on racial grounds, but I don't think that's the whole story, to be honest. The truth is this idea of going many, many days beyond land and onto the frozen Arctic Ocean, that was a white man's idea. So at a certain point,
00:47:42
Speaker
you're going beyond the geographical knowledge of these native peoples, and it really does become about the instruments, and the Inuit did not have the... They had many, many skills that white men like Robert Peary made use of, but using a sextant was not one of them. So it is truly the sort of complex, almost theoretical place that you're going to, and to go there without use of the instruments is just kind of meaningless in terms of
00:48:09
Speaker
how far north you went because you can just be walking in circles and you wouldn't know it. And what ends up being the fallout of this dispute to the two men at the center of it? As I said, the story kind of ends. There's like a false ending in 1909, 1910. Frederick Cook is disgraced and Robert Peary is not. That's not the whole story. I'll leave it at that because I don't want to give too much away. There was, you know,
00:48:37
Speaker
This dispute did damage the field of exploring. It's hard to put a finger just on how much it did that, especially in America, right? This was an American controversy. It was an American embarrassment.
00:48:50
Speaker
It did damage a prospective American attempt to reach the South Pole first. In fact, Robert Peary wanted to endorse an American South Pole expedition. The skipper of his vessel, the Roosevelt, Bob Bartlett, wanted to lead the expedition, and the National Geographic Society tried to raise money for
00:49:13
Speaker
an American attempt on the South Pole and did not succeed. And one of the reasons for that was because the American public was so disgusted with Robert Peary and the way he had behaved during this controversy that they really were not willing to open their pockets and donate to this. In the end, I don't know if that would have achieved a whole lot because Amundsen and Scott
00:49:32
Speaker
were pretty quick on the draw and got there and you had two men who reached the South Pole pretty quickly after this but for a period at least there was a sense of disgust among the American public and how these explorers had behaved and it did sort of put a damper on that for a while and then of course you had World War I
00:49:50
Speaker
during which most exploration of all kinds stopped anyway. But I do think there was a kind of residue of this controversy that lasted for a while.
Modern Exploration: From Poles to Space
00:49:59
Speaker
It was not a shining moment for America or America's explorers. And if you were a period fan, you saw it as evidence of sort of how gullible the American public was to a likable con man like Frederick Cook. That was the perspective of
00:50:16
Speaker
of people in Piri's camp. But even if you were a Piri fan, you sort of had to admit he'd behave quite badly. And this did not reflect well on the exploring community, this whole thing.
00:50:31
Speaker
that nowadays, let's say, I don't know, interstellar exploration is like the new polar frontier. Is that where we're going with American oligarchs and social media and trying to push the bounds of what's excitable to the public who wants to see our boundaries get stretched?
00:50:55
Speaker
I think so. I think that's the closest analogy. I think the other analogy that's made is the space race of the 60s, which might be more accurate just because you think of how public and popular that space race was. I think today's space stuff still feels niche weirdly. Maybe this is just me. I'm not personally that interested in it.
00:51:21
Speaker
It feels dramatic because it's connected to Elon Musk or something. The pursuit itself and the exploration itself doesn't get people excited or the majority of people excited in quite the same way. I think there's a sense that
00:51:37
Speaker
the i don't know who the heroes of this thing are you know so in a symbolic level i think one of the reasons exploring is so compelling and was so compelling. Is because you have individuals who pull off incredible feats of daring and intelligence.
00:51:53
Speaker
I think that was as true in the 19th century polar world as it was during the high point of NASA, you know, the Apollo missions and all that. These were national heroes. Everyone knew their name. They said a lot about us as a country, who we wanted to be as a country. Hollywood movies were made about them.
00:52:14
Speaker
I look at the way space stuff is going today, it doesn't seem to be quite the same. I guess if I had to name one major difference, it seems like so much of it is done by robots. We've got to a point where we can achieve things without putting human lives in danger to the same extent, which is probably good.
00:52:33
Speaker
Overall, at the same time, I think these things take on a monumental significance when there is a type of risk involved and we're now averting that type of risk. So when it comes to myth-making and huge figures, I don't know if we're going to be able to do that in quite the same way, at least the way it is now. If we start colonizing and some of the first pioneers head out, that could change. But when I look at the space race landscape now, I don't see the same type of larger than life figures and larger than life
00:53:01
Speaker
conflicts. It's really about the owners who are sitting in big boardrooms making decisions, but I don't think that's as inherently dramatic as the actual going out there, crossing the frontier yourself and coming back and reporting on what you found.
Book Recommendations and Reflections on Writing
00:53:16
Speaker
Well, very nice. Well, Darryl, as I like to bring these conversations down for a landing, I always ask the guests for a recommendation for the listeners out there. Just something fun and exciting that you're excited about. So I'd just extend that to you as we bring our conversation to a close.
00:53:31
Speaker
Sure. Well, I was going to say Scrivener, but we already talked about that. So I, two years ago, finally discovered the Patrick O'Brien novels. So this is the guy who wrote Master and Commander and something like 19 other historical seafaring novels. And they're absolutely wonderful. And I am not a sailor, despite the fact that I grew up in Maine pretty close to the ocean. I really don't know the first thing about
00:53:58
Speaker
sailing, let alone the Napoleon era British Navy. But I cannot recommend these books enough. And in fact, I've started pacing them out. There's like I said, there's about 20 of them. And so my life plan is to read on average one a year for the next 20 years just to sort of keep myself to the way you would with a tasty dessert, you know, because there's
00:54:19
Speaker
The language is so incredible, the detail is so incredible, the spirit of adventure and Bonhomie among these sort of sailors. This is so beautifully captured by Patrick O'Brien. So that's the thing I'd recommend.
00:54:32
Speaker
Oh, fantastic. Well, this was awesome, Darrell. The book is such a wonderful conflation of that era at the time. And it was so cool to see you harmoniously braid those seemingly disparate industries together. So it was a really great read in that sense. So just thanks for the work, and thanks for coming on the show. Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Brent.
00:54:56
Speaker
All right. Well, thanks to Darryl for coming on the show. Thanks for your patience. Darryl seeing this, this took six months to hit the airwaves has been the can for a long time. And thanks to anguish for the support never without you on the day. This podcast drops dropped April 5th.
00:55:19
Speaker
That leaves your panicky, sweaty, altogether unattractive, somewhat fleshy podcast host with 10 days before deadline. I've cut, as of this writing, 37,000 words from the book on a little more than halfway through the third pass. This last pass is me taking a fucking flamethrower to this book and just burning it to the ground.
00:55:46
Speaker
You know, some combination of Beetlejuice and the Joker, just pure anarchy. There's got to be a better way, but maybe not. You know, at first, the first pass-through was like, you know, trimming everything editor suggested and some little things. And the second pass-through was like, okay, some obvious things to cut. Now, this time it's just like brutality. Brutality. My great worry.
00:56:13
Speaker
as I try to at minimum cut another 10 to 11,000 words from this thing is that areas are starting to read too thin or superficial or like you're just skating over the surface. Like this feels like a grocery list or something. Is this scene or chapter really boring or am I just bored with it because I've read it 6,000 times? I have to really interrogate these scenes. Like what work are they doing? And there's no scene union. You're not gonna unionize and go on strike. You answer to me, fucker.
00:56:43
Speaker
This past week I've had 4,000 word and 5,600 word cut days, any deviation from my main guy, even cool things with my main guy. It's like, sorry, now you gotta go. I still have to write a prologue, but that'll only take me a couple hours, like 1,000 words or so.
00:57:06
Speaker
I've used this metaphor before, and I hope this is what's happening, is when you reduce the sauce, you're cooking out the water to concentrate the flavor, and if you're a messy home cook, you know that the sauce puts up a fucking fight.
00:57:21
Speaker
There's steaming hot bubbles exploding all over the stovetop. Shit's getting all over your apron and your skin and your screaming and cursing at the crushed tomatoes who are like spitting up on you. Like, fuck you, tomato. And the walls and it's getting all over your dignity. Eventually things simmer and you're left with a thicker, memorable sauce at half the volume.
00:57:50
Speaker
So that's book writing. Stay wild, see you in efforts. If you can't do, interview. See ya.