Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 468: Local Journalism and the Folly of Fame with Maggie Messitt
354 Plays18 hours ago
"I genuinely feel that those of us writing books need to remember that we are writing them simply because we feel the desperate need to write that particular thing. And unless I feel that way, I shouldn't be writing it because it's not for the financial benefit. It is not because it gives me more time to do things with other people. It doesn't matter how many books or lengthy features you write, it's all kind of a painful process. So you have to do it because you're really invested in the things that you are focused on," says Maggie Messitt, author of Newspaper and The Rainy Season.
Maggie is a professor and a journalist and an author. She's was the founding national director for Report for America and currently is the Norman Eberly professor of practice in journalism.
Find more about her at maggiemessitt.com and follow her on Instagram @maggiemessitt.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Upcoming Events
00:00:01
Speaker
AC and Efras, we are less than ah week away from the publication of The Front Runner. Oh boy. Fuck. So be sure to secure yourself a pre-order while supplies last.
00:00:16
Speaker
Call now. Operators are standing by, but seriously, go to your bookseller of choice and maybe pre-order it. Otherwise, if you wait any longer, you're just going to be ordering it.
00:00:28
Speaker
Go to the independents and skip the big A if you can help it.
00:00:34
Speaker
And some events, Wednesday, May 21st, 6 p.m., Pub Day 5K with RunHub and Eugene. Community run for those who are able and want to.
00:00:46
Speaker
And then at 7 p.m., we go over to Cold Fire Brewing for a book event. I'm hoping to goad the owners that I've been working with with RunHub to just have a little conversation and then turn it over to the audience for a little Q&A.
00:00:59
Speaker
And then I'll sign and stamp some books. I have a cool stamp. I'm going stamp. Thursday, May 29th, I'll be at Powell's Books, Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton, Oregon.
00:01:13
Speaker
The Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton, Oregon. 7 p.m. with Ruby McConnell, my pal. She gonna interview me.
00:01:24
Speaker
My, how the tides have turned. Or something. Okay, May 28th to June 1st, Archer City Writing Workshops at the Larry McMurtry Literary Center.
00:01:37
Speaker
Still a couple spots available for the feature writing Reconstructed Narrative Course led by Kim H. Cross, Hampton Sides, and Glenn Stout. Go to lmcmurtrylitcenter.org slash events to learn more.
00:01:50
Speaker
You're going to enter this retreat, one writer, you're going to leave a new one, a better one. And that's a guarantee. People are driven to share information.
00:02:03
Speaker
And it doesn't matter how much pressure is being put on them to not share that information.
Creative Learn Fiction Podcast Introduction
00:02:10
Speaker
People have always found a way.
00:02:19
Speaker
Hello, AC and Edwards. It's a Creative Learn Fiction Podcast, the show where I speak to primarily writers about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm the goose you fed. That won't go away now, friend the era.
00:02:33
Speaker
Today, and welcome back to the show Maggie Messon. You remember her, right? You're going to have to page back a few... a couple dozen pages she's from episode eight that aired back in 2015 right that's right episode eight maggie and i have known each other for close to 20 years now which when i say that out loud kind of makes my head hurt we met at goucher college in the creative non-fiction mfa program in 2006 that was my first year and her second i believe
00:03:05
Speaker
And for 20 years, we've been these neighboring moons on a faraway planet. She knows full well the breadth of my frustrations and bitterness in this line of work, as many of you have gotten very familiar with.
00:03:20
Speaker
ah But she was one of the first. She always tried helping me with querying. Yeah, back when I was trying all kinds of keys to unlock doors that weren't opening ah before I just said, fuck it, I'm building my own house. Show notes of this episode and more at BrendanAmero.com. Hey, okay, but listen though.
00:03:38
Speaker
The pod stack on sub stack. Good idea in theory. I'm killing it. Not worth my time to do a thing there and then a thing over here and then another thing over there.
00:03:50
Speaker
So what was the pod stack? It's just going to be on the website now as part of the show notes. So that's going to be a link to a mostly accurate transcript. Maybe my favorite quotes or a little bloggy type thing, the parting shot and the look into the archive, like the 400 episodes ago, 300 episodes ago, 200, 100.
00:04:12
Speaker
ah All right there in the show notes section. So you don't have to subscribe to anything else. There were only 19 people who bit in the two months that i put it up there.
00:04:23
Speaker
And that's not enough worth my time. It's a bit it's but redundant. Then the show notes were suffering because it was like, all right, well, what do I share here versus share over there? And it was an okay experiment, ah but it's not worth it in the end. So now the show notes are just going to be extra beefy.
00:04:41
Speaker
So much beyond meat. Okay, cool with that. Great. And be sure to sign up for the monthly Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. Been doing it a long time. Lots of new newsletters out there, more popular ones by the metrics, have come out of late.
00:04:56
Speaker
They're all going to have the same ethos about sticking it to social media. Rage Against the Algorithm, the original, still raging. First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it.
00:05:09
Speaker
Okay. Wasting enough time on housekeeping like podcast reviews and Patreon, that's all things you could check out. But let's get back to Maggie. Her latest book is titled Newspaper from the Object Lessons series from Bloomsbury.
00:05:26
Speaker
ah yeah Maggie chronicles in curated detail the 400-year history in 30,000 words of newspapers in the United States and South Africa.
00:05:37
Speaker
It's a trippy little book. Maggie also is the author of The Rainy Season, a work of immersion, she loves that word, journalism, living, and starting a newspaper in South Africa. That came out in 2015. That was the cause for us talking 10 years ago on Mike, though we've always been in touch.
00:05:54
Speaker
She was the founding national director of Report for America, a national service program that places emerging journalists in newsrooms across the country, addressing critical coverage gaps and the changing landscape of local news.
00:06:10
Speaker
So we talk about her latest book, but also the arc of her career and mine over the last 10 years.
Career Reflections with Maggie Messon
00:06:16
Speaker
you know Back when we were like these these babies in our early to mid-30s, and now we're in our we're pushing, we're in getting into the second half of our 40s.
00:06:27
Speaker
Oh, wow. Oh, man, that makes my heart hurt a little. yeah Not that that's old. and Not that anyone's older than that. You follow me. How our relationship to ambition has changed. How historically journalists didn't really make that much money and it was more of a need to share information.
00:06:43
Speaker
Not necessarily this career we've come to know. and the compulsion of writing books. I don't know, CNFers. I have a special bond with Maggie. I don't know what it is, but I feel a kinship with her.
00:06:54
Speaker
I always have. I'm not sure if she feels that way, but it's always something I've held on to since we first met when we were just kids, man. We were just kids. Parting shot, I'm returning to this idea of enough, but for now, here's Maggie Messett's return.
00:07:10
Speaker
Riff.
00:07:18
Speaker
The writing part is where the magic is for me. My students, the kids these days. you know, there's a difference between losing and being a loser. I either work on it or I allow it to torture me for a really long time. This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:07:42
Speaker
You know, you and I last spoke really, you know, 10 years ago, and we were just at such significantly different parts of, like, the arcs of our career and just our far place in it. I remember just in in our correspondence back in the day there, you know, my daily correspondence with a lot of people like yourself and colleagues was just like, I was just, I just stank of desperation and just that frustration. LAUGHTER of us did.
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah. You know, I just of trying to get traction and failing and ah quite literally still feeling like it's it's even not happening, even though things have happened.
00:08:21
Speaker
If you cast your gaze back 10 years ago, like wait like what what's the what's the woman you see, you know, 10 years in the rear view? Gosh, my life has changed so much in 10 years. Yeah. 10 years ago, I was still able to wake up every single morning and write. And my life has dramatically changed in that just in terms of having stepkids and trying to navigate how you have others in the house and also do this thing called writing, which really for most of us means that we are writing and doing whatever brings in an income. Yeah. So it feels like I went from being able to fit it into my life to figuring out how that fits into your life.
00:09:06
Speaker
You know, i I worked on a book for what is now 10 years that I have not published. And there's a lot of reasons behind that, some of which is just painfully deep flu personal.
00:09:20
Speaker
And I had never written anything really personal. And so sort of that struggle of figuring out whether or not I wanted to let go of it and whether or not it made any sense for it to be in the world But I think that, you know, the last decade just sort of represented what for a lot of writers or a lot of creatives is that sort of time period where you're really tested as to whether or not this thing can be part of your life and be a priority.
00:09:50
Speaker
And many people walk away from it altogether and and others just kind of hold on by a thread and figure it out. um I also stepped away really for a lot of that.
00:10:03
Speaker
in order to really launch Report for America and and focus on what felt like a really important, pressing moment in time, which was looking at our country's journalism.
00:10:19
Speaker
And interestingly enough, with my life in South Africa prior to you know coming back into the country in 2009, i didn't think I would be having very similar conversations that I was having in rural South Africa in the U.S. When I came back, i I really just did not envision the trajectory of journalism ah which was part just blind because I was so focused on on issues in Southern Africa. My life was there.
00:10:53
Speaker
But also i think a lot of us in journalism were blind to just how just how difficult difficult it was going to be ahead. And so I really stepped away from everything that was important to me in order to invest in building out what is probably, you know, just a partial and not probably, but is just one small solution in what needs to be probably ah thousand solutions working alongside one another to address the crisis and local news.
00:11:28
Speaker
So, so much of my life and really focused on, on that. Oh, for sure. I think what struck me about the a big pulse throughout the and your entire
Press Freedom Challenges in U.S. & South Africa
00:11:38
Speaker
book on newspapers, you beat South Africa and the United States, was how constantly under threat the free press from its very founding. It's just kind constantly bombarded. And I'm sure that that was that was something you certainly, I imagine you noticed throughout. It's like, oh my gosh, you really have to fight for it, ah for it to have any life.
00:12:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think from day one, um so much of what frustrated me when I came back into the country and sort of refocused my energies in the same space that I was focused on in South Africa, which was the sort of development of independent, free press in rural communities,
00:12:25
Speaker
I found it deeply frustrating how people talked about journalism and talked about the history of journalism. It was very short sighted. And part of what I found...
00:12:39
Speaker
so important in some of the conversations I was having when building Report for America, um but also sort of what catapulted me into looking at everything inside this book, is the long history shows something that is constantly push and pull, constantly under threat.
00:13:01
Speaker
Its origins were in opinion and editorial and not this thing that we uphold as objective truth lacking bias that we also needed to recognize all of the people that were left out of the voices we saw in journalism early on and intentionally left out And this mirrored so much of what I saw in South African history.
00:13:34
Speaker
But Americans have a much harder time looking at themselves critically. i found that, you know, South Africans, you know, where I lived nearly a decade and never envisioned unreturning,
00:13:48
Speaker
South Africans had the ability to reflect on what went wrong societally and within sort of industries like journalism.
00:13:59
Speaker
What went wrong? And it doesn't mean that they fix it right away or perfectly, but there is an ability to talk about it realistically and and openly about politics.
00:14:13
Speaker
bad things that happened. Americans do not do that. We do not like to openly speak about the ways in which an industry or a government or a community really did things poorly in the past and how much it impacted people.
00:14:30
Speaker
And that is really a huge part of what we have to do in journalism and a huge part of why I was so fascinated and and just wanted to hit pause and go back to the beginning.
00:14:42
Speaker
And say, how did we actually start? Not how did
Historical Injustices: U.S. vs South Africa
00:14:47
Speaker
we start, you know, talking about objective truth and the role of journalism, but how did we actually start?
00:14:54
Speaker
It's far more complicated than that, but it also has the ability to make us think about what's happening right now as just part of this like conversation. long 400-year journey of up and down and constantly using papers to empower people and to keep people down.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I, what I found is interesting as people expanded West, one of the first things that any settler set up was like, well, we need to, we need to ground ourselves here with a, with a newspaper of some kind and start, ah you know, for whatever, ah opining or editorializing, or at least or writing the narrative of that place to invite more people out. And then it just kind of spread, had its own kind of virality from there.
00:15:42
Speaker
Yeah, i loved it. I mean, that part was so fun for me because when we think about people moving West, we don't think of this war of the papers, right? We already had people who were trying to sort of gain the power of the press in these new states or in these new territories.
00:15:59
Speaker
But at the same time, the pert the the publisher or the printer who gained that power were usually... the printers who got the government contracts to be the official printing press for the state.
00:16:15
Speaker
So right away, we had really government subsidized newspapers because they were going to be not just the printer of legislation and any of the announcements that the state was going to make, but they were by default also going to be The newspaper of record, it was it was just inextricably linked, which just sounds dirty and nobody would want to acknowledge that today that we sort of had government subsidized or really, if we're being honest, government selected, right, newspaper of record for that state.
00:16:53
Speaker
Yeah, and there's, ah you know, you talked a moment ago ah yeah just about some, you know, being able to you know stare at the ugly truths of things. And, you know, I think of the and how uncomfortable this country is because of ah you maybe the inherent shame they feel. They just want to turn a blind eye. and ah But, like, Germany will look right at it. we Like, this is why we don't have the death penalty in our state. Like, we put people through the Holocaust. Like, the death penalty is, like, no go here.
00:17:21
Speaker
And, ah you know, there's something to be learned ah to learn there. But yeah. But but yeah, you you try to be critical of this country's origins and a significant part of the population just says, like nope, let's ah let's not do that anymore.
00:17:35
Speaker
Right. Especially directly. um i think that my approach to immersion journalism is also not to process the information on the page for the reader.
00:17:49
Speaker
And my approach with this was much the same, that this is too complicated to directly address for readers.
00:18:00
Speaker
think a lot of readers wouldn't read it if that's how I handled it. And this was a lot more, it was much more focused on giving you these plot points throughout history alongside one another for you to grapple with what you were seeing across time.
00:18:19
Speaker
And some of my approach is ah the byproduct of this wonderful series, Object Lessons, and it's sort of um writing exercise in constraint because you only have between 28,000 and 30,000 words, which I pushed and pushed and pushed.
00:18:39
Speaker
And so the exercise of you know constraint or the insanity of saying, I'm gonna write the history of two countries, journalism across 400 years in 30,000 words.
00:18:51
Speaker
But also I think it forced me to be comfortable with saying, I am just going to tell you these stories And curate them in a way that authentically ah a thoughtful reader is going to have to grapple with what they're seeing alongside one another.
00:19:09
Speaker
And... for these two places that i call home and that I am deeply invested in and that both have deeply complicated histories of racism in in their bones and and a journalists ah sort of a journalistic history that has government interference and heroes and villains.
00:19:35
Speaker
that seeing them alongside one another makes it so that a South African looks at this differently and that an American reader looks at this differently, which was a ah complicated goal for myself um and and task. But I also think makes it that much more obvious that these trends exist across time and across two different nations that were...
00:20:05
Speaker
colonized really around the same time. Yeah. and And the fact that a free press is like kind of always under attack from despots and demagogues and and there have always been different kinds of newspapers, like you know, trashy ones, very opinionated ones, your more brick and mortar news ones.
Resilience in Journalism
00:20:28
Speaker
you know given Given that we um you know you've seen it under duress for centuries, you know the what feeling of optimism might you have you know now now that we're under you know similar very tribal and tribalism and in news? like oh you know what What degree of optimism might you have for yourself for for news going forward ah in this particular climate?
00:20:54
Speaker
The one aspect that really makes me have hope is that it doesn't matter what the circumstances are, people are driven to share information.
00:21:06
Speaker
And it doesn't matter how much pressure is being put on them to not share that information. People have always found a way. And most papers have come and gone away.
00:21:20
Speaker
We talk about legacy papers all the time. Legacy papers come with their own complications. But most papers or most things that were acting as papers have come and gone, sometimes just one issue.
00:21:36
Speaker
Sometimes they were like pop-up papers in war time periods. People are so driven to make sure that they get information out that it doesn't have to look like a traditional newspaper.
00:21:49
Speaker
Whatever is available to make that paper work or to communicate that information is a newspaper, whether they're in You know, the Civil War, where we had people actually printing on wallpaper to, you know, war in South Africa during the Boer War, where they were printing on pretty much anything they could get their hands on And they found it so important to disseminate information that they...
00:22:18
Speaker
put a printing press inside of a um a rail car. And it was like there is a constant understanding that there is power of the press, whether it is underground and someone is printing it secretly with, you know, work Xerox machines or the mimeographs or, you know, it's more official.
00:22:40
Speaker
People find a way. If you can look in history and see how people were creating their own newspapers inside and concentration camps, concentration camps that Americans and South Africans don't even think existed during South African history.
00:22:57
Speaker
If you can see people in all of these really moments of duress or just moments of wanting to connect with people, right, people have always figured out a way.
00:23:08
Speaker
And so today, when we look at papers in rural communities, especially that are just flat out disappearing, people find a way. No one wants to say that that Facebook page that people are using or this newsletter, this digital newsletter that people are using, nobody really wants to say that those are newspapers, but they're a kernel of something that eventually is likely to evolve. Some of those are eventually likely to evolve into something that we will consider part of that like long history of newspapers.
00:23:43
Speaker
Yeah, i think when you talk about ah some of the underground stuff and what people disseminate the information they need to, you know, I think of yeah Stephanie Gorton's latest book, um The Icon, The Idealist, and how a lot of women would basically make zines essentially for like abortion access, birth control, women's health kind of stuff that had to be underground and was banned from the Comstock Act of being put into the mail. So a lot of the stuff was hand to hand you know in ah in a network of people that are that that had a kind ah need and an interest but had to go under the radar.
00:24:19
Speaker
Absolutely. There's a long history of that, really a long history of that in the women's movement, long history of that, ah really kind of the equivalent during um the Civil War. A lot of the black papers, early black papers started it that way Early black papers started in basement churches in many ways.
00:24:38
Speaker
But we see that particularly in spaces where the communication was identity driven. Yeah. And, you know, we call them zines because that is how we've sort of tagged these at the time almost like Xerox papers, right? Early newsletters. But these are all part of papers.
00:25:01
Speaker
the The two versions of that that I find really interesting to look at are the constant papers that were popping up and disappearing during Vietnam that were created by mostly by active military in order to speak out.
00:25:23
Speaker
Right. So it's sort of the. you will eventually find a way to communicate something with people. We did not have the internet. And so what are what are we leaving in our wake in the places that we're coming and going from? The coffee shop movement with these, quote, sort of newspapers, they were really just zines, the same ones that you're referring to.
00:25:42
Speaker
um Same thing happened in, you know, indigenous movements across America in issue based sort of during the 70s when we had campuses that were just full of protests.
00:25:55
Speaker
And the beauty is that we have some amazing archives that were thoughtful enough to actually archive these archives. even if there was only one issue.
00:26:07
Speaker
um The space where I realized that some of our greatest assets in understanding this long history are local historical societies who, when I was covering the Wisconsin worker protests, when I was sort of still in South Africa, but coming back and forth, I saw the folks from the Wisconsin Historical Society Preserving in real time all of the communication that people were having with one another during these protests, which now I look at and they are zines just like we are talking about.
00:26:46
Speaker
But it takes people to recognize that these are a part of this important lineage of finding a way to communicate with others. I don't know how I would have done or understood all of this if we didn't have a long history of amazing historians connected to either like micro hyper local historical societies or statewide historical societies holding on to things, saying that this is important. This is communication of the time.
00:27:17
Speaker
um Many people wouldn't call those newspapers, but they absolutely are newspapers. And many of them eventually evolved into newspapers. At its heart, journalism and journalism done well. I think it's like a very it's a it's it's it's a handshaking face to face business.
Trust in Journalism: Face-to-Face vs Digital
00:27:34
Speaker
But over the years, we've gotten very digitally interfaced, which I think it really mucks up the whole trust aspect.
00:27:40
Speaker
of very good journalism, certainly local. And a couple journalists who have been on the show recently ah for Atavist Stories, um Andrew Dubbins and um and Drew Philp. You know a lot of that, like with those guys...
00:27:54
Speaker
to engender trust in the people that they wanted to write about. Like, they invested a lot of personal capital personal risk, and in the case of Drew, to go to those countries and meet face-to-face with people. And only then did those people trust them.
00:28:09
Speaker
And i think that speaks to something on on a level of, you know, ah trying to get back to that face-to-face ethos. So, like, you know, just for you, what do you how can reporters and journalism just start to engender more of that trust or get get back to that ethos?
00:28:23
Speaker
handshaking face-to-face reporting that um that that I think is really built on and really does engender more goodwill. I think that something happened 20 years ago. I mean, when I was in school, I guess 25 years ago.
00:28:40
Speaker
There was a real shift towards success meant covering national. And for a lot of journalists, that meant skipping some of the most important developmental phases of what it means today, not even 60 years ago in my opinion, but what it means today to be a journalist. and And that means that they didn't spend time in local communities trying to just sit at meetings and listen to what people are worried about, what people really want for their families, what people...
00:29:16
Speaker
don't see working in their community. And that sort of race to cover national has impacted, and and I day to day am working with you know undergrads, it has impacted what people envision for themselves as journalists. They don't envision themselves hanging out with people and listening to them.
00:29:40
Speaker
and trying to understand what basic and baseline needs people have, that's a real disservice not just to them but to journalism at large.
00:29:53
Speaker
On top of that, you have the financial crisis in journalism that doesn't allow the kind of work that really means to travel and spend a lot of time with people.
00:30:07
Speaker
There's just no... there isn't the finances to be able to send people to places, especially if they're national. But even local, I look, you know, I'm in central Pennsylvania right now and i look at the local NPR affiliate. They're supposed to cover 14 counties.
00:30:26
Speaker
They don't have the manpower to cover 14 counties. Our local paper, Center Daily Times, apparently long ago used to have a robust newsroom, now has, I think, maybe three people in it.
00:30:39
Speaker
They can't cover the county. People who live in a county that have, you know, 26 different townships and some boroughs thrown in there. That means that, you know, you need to have 150 meetings covered a month.
00:30:55
Speaker
Those three people can't cover 150 meetings a month. So when I think about sort of on the ground journalism, the kind of journalism that I supported in South Africa, which was sort of Daily, but really long form, helping people understand the issues in their community that were a little bit more investigative. That's a luxury.
00:31:17
Speaker
But that's actually probably what we need to be investing in, because we don't have the ability to have people cover the tiny breaking news pieces.
00:31:28
Speaker
I really am invested in seeing people like all of these heroes, in my in my opinion, that sort of dot throughout the book. People who are just going to say, i have to figure out how to find a way to serve my community, and it's not going to look...
00:31:45
Speaker
like what it looked before and the iterations over time have really shifted. But ultimately, i think we have to continue to reckon with the fact that it didn't start with objective news. It started with editorial.
00:32:01
Speaker
It stayed with editorial for ultimately hundreds of years. Yeah. This idea of the objective truth is new, but sitting and listening to people isn't new. And actually articulating what makes people worried or what's just happening down the street isn't new.
00:32:18
Speaker
But this objective truth is new. And this idea that mainstream news is serving everyone is is this new fan dangled thing we call mainstream media. Yeah. Yeah.
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah, it like the wicked bummer of it all, too, is how the longer you're in this game, it's almost the more of a financial liability you are. And that's when you're most valuable as a reporter is when you've been in a community for 10 or 15 years and you you you know, let's say, various ballot measures or the history of like these counselors or whatever, just to keep it hyper-local.
00:32:56
Speaker
But then ah of late, you know the the longer you're in it, the more expendable you appear. And then you you get and then you you cleave off all this institutional knowledge and for you know someone who costs half has like a tenth of the experience for a tenth of the price. And then it's just like, we'll just churn through those reporters, burn them out in two years, and then they're usually a flack for somebody else.
00:33:20
Speaker
and no And no one and stays ah stays in the business long because it's just, you can only make $25,000 year for like so long before that just gets old.
00:33:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. I think we're losing a lot of really amazing people just because of the economics behind it. However, with the long history, I'd like to I'd really love to look at the payroll over time. That is something that isn't sitting in archives for me to look at.
00:33:50
Speaker
But to really understand. what the payroll looked over time. I'm pretty convinced that we only had a very tiny time period where local journalists actually could make something that was sustainable.
00:34:03
Speaker
And the rest of the time, people were never really making a lot of money. And i I think about the journalists, especially during the civil rights era or sort of post-Reconstruction,
00:34:16
Speaker
Being in journalism meant putting yourself in front of really ah metaphoric and sometimes a real firing squad, right?
00:34:28
Speaker
You are putting yourself out there. You are talking about things people don't want to talk about. And for the most part, Most of those people, as far as I can tell, weren't making a lot of money. a lot of those papers went bankrupt. A lot of the publishers were activists in spirit. And they would, like most of us, sort of scrimp and figure out their way.
00:34:49
Speaker
And then their paper couldn't print one day because they weren't managing the money. and But out of nowhere, nine months later, they'd pop up with a new paper. And so I just don't see journalism as ever really having been, with the exception of a small time period or the exception of the people at the tippy top throughout history, just weren't making money.
00:35:13
Speaker
These ventures did not last very long because they they weren't lucrative unless you were, you know, the very few, the very few people at the top.
00:35:25
Speaker
Getting back to like the very start of our conversation, when you it was like, you talk about, you know the rainy season came out 10 years ago. you know, this book about 10 years later.
00:35:36
Speaker
My first book came out in 2009. My second one's coming out this year. So it's like, no, it came out. I reported it in 2009. It came out in 2011. So I'm like 14 years between books. I look back on that. I'm like, what the hell was I doing for the year?
00:35:51
Speaker
For the last 15 years, like what the fuck happened? Like for you, I know you said you had a, you know, ah your life was in a different kind of upheaval for you. But do you look back in the last 10 years and be like, oh my God, like where did the time go? And like, what what was I actually doing? I don't i don't know. I have...
00:36:10
Speaker
Yeah. Where did the time go? I definitely do. yeah um What was I doing? i don't know. Sometimes I ask that myself every single day. I have no idea what I was doing. So the rainy season represented my 20s and and figuring this out and figuring out what I consider and and constantly try to preach, which is shut up and listen journalism, where you're really just, you know,
00:36:34
Speaker
sitting and observing and hanging out with people and trying to understand a time and place. For me, that was 10-ish years post-apartheid.
00:36:46
Speaker
And that was really complicated. i spent the next 10 years working on a missing persons case, which I am finally sort of finishing and willing to let go of. But so much of that, i yeah to be completely transparent, as all of us should,
00:37:02
Speaker
I was not working on that for 10 years. Right. I was working on that for fits and spurts and that took 10 years and all of these other things, life, work, et cetera, fits in between. This book was really interesting.
00:37:20
Speaker
I envisioned being a palate cleanser to working on something that was deeply personal and traumatic, which is this missing persons case. And the palate cleanser was something that I sort of thought about during the pandemic when we were shut down.
00:37:37
Speaker
um Because what is a journalist who just hangs out with people do when you can't leave your house? But i can immerse myself inside digital archives um and think about sort of the state of the world. Also, because that was i was still at Report for America.
00:37:54
Speaker
um or just finishing up my time at Report for America and um had a lot to process from that experience and process about the state of journalism. But I think the last decade for everyone has been, everyone in the U.S. particularly, um but also in South Africa, has has been particularly complicated. i think our national and even international politics has made those of us who are storytellers ah really question the purpose of the work that we're doing and the ways in which the work we're doing can have impact.
00:38:33
Speaker
And many people just totally fled and were like, i can I can only read or write fiction. Right. the The rise of of fiction when some of us can't seem to digest any more nonfiction is is a struggle when you only identify as a nonfiction writer. Yeah.
00:38:54
Speaker
Yeah. You said something that caught me here, you know, of the of the last 10 years or certainly 10 years ago, just trying to figure things out. And in that there is so much I know if I know for me personally and you just from our our correspondence over the years, especially around that time was just the the tires spinning in the mud. And yeah i remember you sending me like ah how to write query letters from ah ah a talk like Rebecca Skloot did. I think I've still got it.
00:39:24
Speaker
It's just all these things. You're just like trying banging your head up against this wall, and you're trying to follow this blueprint from the mentors that you had, be it undergrad or even MFA programs. and like That playbook just was already obsolete, but you're running those same plays over and over again.
Creativity in Constraints
00:39:40
Speaker
and youre and it just led to i know for me, it just led to a lot of bitterness and resentment and just...
00:39:45
Speaker
Just a lot of lot of anger in that and yeah talk about figuring this out. I don't know if i have in the 15 intervening years, but I feel like I have a better grasp of it. And that that could just be being 10, 15 years older. But ah to what extent have you figured anything out?
00:40:03
Speaker
I don't think I've figured anything out. It's like surrendering to not being able to is actually pretty... Yeah, yeah I mean, I totally... I have not figured anything out.
00:40:15
Speaker
um I have figured out that i have way too many ideas for things I want to work on and not enough time.
00:40:26
Speaker
And I've also figured out that 99.999% of us working on books are working on books because we can't seem to get whatever that book is about out of us, right? Like it's, I either work on it or I allow it to torture me for a really long time.
00:40:46
Speaker
This book in particular sort of falls under a slightly different category. But for most of the things that I feel really compelled to write, um i i would say this lovely 30,000 bite sized format allowed me to get something that I was processing inside of me out in a much shorter, much shorter length, which is really nice.
00:41:08
Speaker
Yeah. Constraints are nice in that regard. I feel like constraint in this case increased its value, increased its readability. it increased how creative I could get with content and give me permission to get really creative with something that is, you know, ultimately about, you know, very painful, very complicated things.
00:41:31
Speaker
If I had turned this into the length that each of these sort of mini stories collectively, Or, you know, what each of these mini stories could tell if I gave each of them a chapter, you'd look at a four volume history that nobody's going to read.
00:41:45
Speaker
But I do think that for me, I genuinely feel that those of us writing books need to remember that we are writing them simply because we feel the desperate need to write that particular thing.
00:42:00
Speaker
And unless I feel that way, I shouldn't be writing it because it's not for the financial financial you know benefit. It is not because it gives me more time and to do things with other people.
00:42:13
Speaker
Writing, it doesn't matter how many books or you know really lengthy features you write, it's all kind of a painful process. So you have to do it because you're really invested in the things that you are focused on. Yeah, with long form ah magazine writing or reported essays, ah even in book stuff also, I almost feel like, especially with um long form articles that ah ah you and i I came up on and probably like on on some level, like still deeply wish like that could be like the thing that we like write four pieces a year and make you like make a living doing it, like though that's long gone.
00:42:53
Speaker
for the vast, vast, vast majority of anyone doing this, I kind of liken it to just being a short story writer at this point. It's like no one in their right mind is like, I'm writing short stories to make a buck. It's like, I have to write these stories. I'll submit them places. If I get a check, awesome. If not, I did something creatively fulfilling and then I got to pay the bills elsewhere somehow.
00:43:13
Speaker
But it's like it writing. Yeah. I've kind of taken that mindset of like, it's more, more akin to being in a short story writer. It's a craft. I mean, I think that's what I'm hearing you say is that it's a craft. And um i have more.
00:43:31
Speaker
i should say having been. and Inside newsrooms. Since my early 20s, when I came back into the country, one of the things I did was give myself permission to slow down, to take a deep dive into literature, to think about the ways in which people tell very complicated true stories um in in non-traditional ways.
00:43:59
Speaker
And so I'm much more interested and probably have for the majority of my life identified more as a nonfiction storyteller than as a journalist. ah To others, I'm a journalist, but inside of me and even the way in which I'm training Students is that we are ultimately fact based storytellers and however that fact based storytelling can come across best and reach people, whether that is a small number of people or a large number of people.
00:44:32
Speaker
to just follow that. So I don't feel so bound to book length or books or magazine articles or newspapers. I feel like my brain now is constantly thinking across form. And some of that just has to do with the fact that I've I've been with newspapers. I've been inside magazines. I've been inside public television. I've supported newsrooms through Report for America across the country, across form, that it's really ultimately about what's the best form that this story can take.
00:45:06
Speaker
And that is really, i think, amazing. it relieves me of any feeling of pressure around either publishing books or sort of having these milestone markers that say this is a successful pathway.
00:45:22
Speaker
and I think also it has impacted the way in which I think about books. I think about books very differently now after my first book came out, which felt wonderful, felt like I had the opportunity to share with people in really a large number of places across the country, sort of to open up a window into a community in South Africa that most people don't have access to and to allow people to understand a time and place.
00:45:52
Speaker
But most... author experiences and most books are not very community engagement driven, right? It is not about actually engaging with people. The classic, I'm going to go to a reading and everybody is sitting there listening to someone read and ask a few questions and then off we go, is no longer interesting to me. And it wasn't really all that interesting to me a decade ago.
00:46:19
Speaker
yeah I'm much more interested in us figuring out ways to transition whatever we write into a book into like eight other forms so that more and more people can engage with it.
00:46:34
Speaker
I worked not this book, but the book that I sort of have sitting sitting digitally but in my in my vault, in my computer, hopefully to finally be released soon.
00:46:46
Speaker
I constantly think about the ways in which it has the power to occupy different spaces and how we can be better collaborators with other people, whether that's with visual artists or artists.
00:47:02
Speaker
audio storytellers in order to make sure that it meets people in a different way. So this next book, I have a sort of interactive gallery exhibit with someone that is a fine art photographer that I just think we have to do a better job of getting these important stories out and to be sort of precious about the form of being a book.
00:47:28
Speaker
is a disservice to the people that give us their time to put these together, but also ah disservice to the stories we're trying to actually share. And in looking at the the the scope of the last decade or so, let's see, how has your relation changed to ambition, versus like what it was a what while ago and where you are now?
00:47:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's a hard one.
00:47:57
Speaker
I don't think i
00:48:01
Speaker
think my ambition when it comes to books was so different. I remember coming back into the country before my first book was published.
00:48:15
Speaker
And I remember being at one of the very first, I think it was the third, don't quote me on that. think it was the third nonfiction now. And I sat in a panel of folks who were, i honestly think the panel was titled something like regional writers, which for a lot of people would be like, oh, that's a sad panel to go to.
00:48:37
Speaker
It's like, I guess I'm going to go listen to the regional writers because someone has deemed them regional writers. i don't like I I felt like there was judgment in the title of the panel. But I went because I was like, what are we actually thinking of regional writing?
00:48:53
Speaker
And I listened to people. The people with the greatest joy were the people on that panel because they were honest. They said, i want to write every day or I want to write on a regular basis.
00:49:05
Speaker
The things that I'm writing about are important to me or they're important to the people that I feel like I'm serving. And they all feel they all felt so joy-filled about what they were doing.
00:49:18
Speaker
And i walked out of that panel and I was like, I have to figure out how to be them in whatever form that takes for me. And that altered everything for me after that. And that was around 20, want say maybe that was around like 2011. I was still going back and forth to South Africa, between South Africa and Wisconsin, um like fifty fifty And I had no idea what ambition looked like for me anymore at that point.
00:49:46
Speaker
But that was what and like that was what i transitioned my goal to being, was i need to figure out how to do this and be joy-filled about it and feel like I'm able to do
Joy & Fulfillment in Writing
00:49:59
Speaker
it. Like the joy is I'm able to wake up every day and do this and I'm not an accountant and I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a doctor in the way my father would like me to be and I can figure out somehow to still do this thing.
00:50:12
Speaker
um And at the time was going through my own struggle because when you report in South Africa for nearly a decade and you come back, people are like, you're our Africa reporter. Welcome back to America. what are you going to do now?
00:50:24
Speaker
And, you know, you have to figure that out. So my relationship with ambition shifted towards how do I feel about the thing that I am doing? And all of my choices after that have been grounded in that.
00:50:38
Speaker
Stepping away from what others would say was my natural trajectory to, you know, work in a really important role for me in Report for America felt really valuable. It felt worth putting things on pause and being joy filled, but also stepping away from that again and saying there's parts of me missing here. So I do think that my ambition is about that balance.
00:51:03
Speaker
which younger people than us are much better at articulating and much better at talking about balance and like what makes them happy and walking away from things. But i do think that a lot of my choices have been about what's going to make me happy and less about probably what I would have defined as successful when I was 20. Yeah.
00:51:26
Speaker
Have you reached that point, you think? success that I defined as 20 years old. Or just that joyful prism that when you take on something like, oh yeah, this is something I can lean my talents into.
00:51:37
Speaker
Yeah, i think that's a I think that's a journey for me. I also think that it's my own personal tug of war between am I doing things that are actively making, in I mean in this case, addressing the crisis in local journalism.
00:51:55
Speaker
um am I actually... supporting this industry in the way that I think it should be supported as much as possible because sometimes I feel like my own work is a luxury.
00:52:09
Speaker
And so i I do, I toggle. I toggle on a daily basis and I toggle in in my sort of, you know, the job that pays the bills.
00:52:20
Speaker
i'm I am sitting someplace now where I'm not totally certain that i have occupied a place as long as I have occupied this place, which is weird. And I've only been here for three and a half years. So um i think the itch of any immersion journalist, someone who just actually, if you could give me a salary to just go out and do that work, I would do it.
00:52:42
Speaker
um But I'm realistic that most of us can't do that. Most people who do this work take a financial hit for it. It's our own investment in self is the way that I look at it now.
00:52:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That kind of gets back to kind of my earlier point about being a short story writer. It's just like if you're going to take the time to do that, you're doing it for your love of that craft and that that that medium. And you've got to find other ways to subsidize that enterprise.
00:53:09
Speaker
And it's i think I think a lot of us who come up in nonfiction and revering the people who paved the way for us, like they they were doing the thing and it was paying their bills and hs just you start to rot from the inside when you realize you you can't do that because the the world just doesn't play by those rules anymore. And you're like, what am I doing? So some people just pull their ripcord and and get out. And then some of us like me just hammer my head up against the wall and, you know, and i yeah i have a spouse with a steady job and the health insurance. So it allows me to weather these long spells of nothing.
00:53:45
Speaker
And, you know, i didn take my menial day jobs here and there. i haven't had to do that in a little while, but it's you because I've had you know I have some institutional support at home. It allows me to weather the impossibly long droughts and i that I hope will be more fertile going forward.
00:54:03
Speaker
I don't know. But it's just one of those things where you know you talk about being transparent earlier about you know various just certain situations. like I hammer it every...
00:54:13
Speaker
Every time I get, ah you know, some people ask me, well, how do you make money? How do you do this? I'm like, well, sometimes I make money, but other times, like, we can live on my wife's salary. And so what a privilege. And so I, because I know how, if i if I wasn't transparent about that, and I was someone else looking from the outside how does Brent do this? you got This podcast doesn't make any money.
00:54:36
Speaker
And everyone thinks it does, but it doesn't. and And so I just have to always tell people, like, no, I don't I don't make a dime from any of this stuff. And how do you do it then? Well, they the wife makes the money.
00:54:47
Speaker
So it's that's me being clear in a in force. Yeah, I mean, I think we don't talk about this enough in the arts or in sort of the end of journalism that you and I have occupied. Right.
00:55:01
Speaker
Writers have a long history of sponsorship. Right. And I don't know. I was talking to someone the other day thinking about so many great writers who were like deemed sickly. who We now benefit from their you know amazing writing centuries and decades later because they were deemed not worthy to go to school or go out in the fields and people were just gonna take care of them at home. So they had the time to read and write, right? Like get them out of the way, give them a book.
00:55:33
Speaker
And I think that not recognizing that that has been a long history and that not having a lot of money. Writers have not historically had a lot of money. It's like anybody in the arts.
00:55:47
Speaker
But I do think that there is something to be said about just the consistency in saying this is what I want to do. My brother's a cinematographer and...
00:55:59
Speaker
I am one of six kids and I'm the youngest. And I remember watching him and watching everybody say, like, what are you doing? You're not going to be able to do this.
00:56:11
Speaker
And he looked at me and I was much younger. And he looked at me and said, this is not just a game of talent. This is a game of, yes, you have to have talent.
00:56:22
Speaker
But it's really about are you going to put your head down? And do this thing because ultimately other people are going to quit. And so you have to put your head down, forge forward.
00:56:35
Speaker
It's going to be messy. It's not always going to work, but you have The longer you are willing to stick with it, the more likely it is going to happen.
Perseverance in Creative Careers
00:56:45
Speaker
And some of that is because some of the most talented people we know will quit.
00:56:51
Speaker
And the people that we see are the people who were consistent and just kept getting up and kept saying, this is something I'm going to do. And I firmly believe that.
00:57:02
Speaker
My stepson Zev is a dancer and i feel the same way about him dancing. but I also am probably like other, not like other parents where I'm like, it doesn't really matter how much money you make right now.
00:57:14
Speaker
Go dance. Just do it yeah because your body won't allow you to dance for the rest of your life. Go dance. And you know what his sponsorship is? He's a waiter. So when you tip your waiters, you are sponsoring an artist. They could be writing a book. They could be dancing. They could be doing anything. And so I really do believe in in just if this is what you want to do, you just have to do it. But Too many people, you know, having gone through an MFA, having taught in an MFA, too many people like to pretend that they are living off of their craft. yes And very few of them are living off of their craft. I look at students all the time and say, you are so excited about the work I do.
00:57:58
Speaker
I am not living off of my craft. I am living off of teaching. So whatever that job is that you are going to live off of, just remember, you have to figure out what job allows you to fit your craft in the cracks of the day, in the cracks of the week, in the cracks of the year.
00:58:15
Speaker
And the more honest we are with people about that, I feel like the less traumatized a lot of creative people would be. And shame.
00:58:26
Speaker
A lot of people wrestle with shame because their craft isn't the thing supporting them. And they feel like ah everyone we revere, thanks to social media, has leveraged that image.
00:58:37
Speaker
That people are they post. Oh, look at this thing I wrote for so and so and like, oh, that person. Well, they're not. and There's all this writing or all this other shit that they don't tweet about. But then they show you should they show you this forward facing thing. And as a result, us on the other end, knowing that we might have to teach or do copywriting or whatever.
00:58:57
Speaker
Like we're like, how do they do that? And I'm here doing all this you know mercenary work. And and so if yeah, I think it's very like to be transparent about that helps dispel the shame around day jobs subsidizing the art we want to do. And if we can make a happy buck doing in the art, great.
00:59:12
Speaker
But odds are no one is no one is really making like a true go of it unless you're Patrick Radden Key for David Grand. Right. And fiction writers for years were known to go into journalism because they were like, I really want to write a novel, but I guess I'll be a journalist and write a novel secretly at night. Right. yes And so many poets in this book.
00:59:35
Speaker
You I don't know if you picked up on that. But down like from colonial era, early papers were driven by poets because most newspapers had poetry and poets were like, what else am I going to do with my life? All I want to do is write a poem.
00:59:50
Speaker
And so I need to have a printing press and publish a paper so that I can distribute my poems to people. And that, you know, so this is an old tale, right? That is really like woven inside newspaper history. But it is just it is the trauma that most creative people experience is how do we actually do this thing yeah and still have food on our table and still have a family and and people figure it out or they quit.
01:00:23
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and to your point of encouraging your your stepson to just to to just get out there and be dancing and you know wait those tables, ah basically any good fortune I've had over the last 15 years was a result of doing exactly
Networking & Creative Opportunities
01:00:42
Speaker
that. Like six weeks in Saratoga, I got fired from my newspaper job and I reported the book on spec wrote the book on spec and it sat in my drawer for a little bit and I was working at a fleet feet, fitting people for running shoes.
01:00:57
Speaker
Long story short, I happened to be fitting a woman who was a massage therapist who it was a medical night. And so all we had a lot of medical people and we were fitting them for shoes. She asked me what else I did. And I said, I was this, you know, you know, I'm a writer and, you know, have this book and,
01:01:13
Speaker
She was friends with someone at SUNY Press who would eventually publish the book. And she like, oh, I think they're writing, they want they want a Saratoga book. And I just happened to have written one. A few months later, you know, they accept it.
01:01:25
Speaker
Awesome. Cool. That book only happened because I was publicly interfaced in a way that I was not proud of. This Prefontaine book.
01:01:36
Speaker
So I start this podcast in 2013.
01:01:39
Speaker
Over the years, and who interviewed hundreds of people. And ah Kim H. Cross, a good friend of mine now, she she was like, do you have a do you have an agent by now? I'm like, no, you know I've tried over the years, like 100. She's oh, no, no, no, no. no she's like She found that unacceptable, introduced me to Susan Canavan, who happens to be my agent.
01:01:57
Speaker
And we had a conversation. This was actually around my like baseball memoir. We were just talking about that. She's like, oh, you know this is all well and good, but you're not famous enough for a memoir. She's like, are you working on anything that could be more commercial?
01:02:10
Speaker
Caught me totally flat-footed. And I look over at my bookcase, and I i was saving string on Prefontaine because I knew the 50th anniversary of his death was coming. it is about three years ago at this point. And I caught the slim little spine of Tom Jordan's, you know if you want to call it the seminal text, the only other biography on Steve called Pre.
01:02:28
Speaker
And I was like, well, I'm saving string on Prefontaine. And she's like, I could sell that on prop Proposal. So after I've done this podcast for close to a dozen years at that point, it puts me in touch with other people.
01:02:40
Speaker
I have like this kind of community around us nonfiction weirdos ah who put me in touch with Susan. I happen to be saving string on that. And as a result, sure, the podcast doesn't make any money. And sure, it took 10, 11 years.
01:02:53
Speaker
But as a result of that, I got $150,000 book advance to write this Prefontaine biography. So did the podcast make any money? No, but kind of because, you know, I got a significant book advance that allowed me to just write that book for two years.
01:03:07
Speaker
So underscoring all of this is putting it out there, just being out there, being in front of people, taking that day job because you never know who you're going to be put in front of and just doing work you're proud of. And it allows luck to play in your favor.
01:03:23
Speaker
It's just not on the timeline that you might wish it was. No, so much of this is about existing in the world. yeah And as much as, you know, I had i had an amazing MFA experience.
01:03:36
Speaker
I loved teaching in an MFA. I didn't have an amazing first MFA experience. I was an MFA dropout. and Where was that? yeah We will not say that because there are listeners out there. But it was really, was formative experience in thinking. was in an era where nonfiction really wasn't in MFA programs yet.
01:04:01
Speaker
And um the few MFA programs that were adding it sort of said, well, we have a fiction writer who has written an essay or has written a memoir. Right. And so we've got, you know, faculty that can do that when in actuality they weren't really prepared for nonfiction.
01:04:18
Speaker
But it did really push me to realize, oh, actually, what I really need to be is in the world. And. It's not just in the world to you know get by to be able to write, but in the world so that I can be absorbing and listening to people and experience things that can drive the stories that I think should be written in the length and form that I'm most interested in.
01:04:45
Speaker
And we really don't push that enough. There is this sort of track. perhaps And, you know, i know plenty of people right now are down on higher ed, and i think there's real value in higher ed.
01:05:03
Speaker
I think as a writer or as an artist, you need to go out and be doing in order to get this. And sure, that being out and doing could be in an MFA, but it doesn't have to be.
01:05:17
Speaker
i really genuinely felt that my going out and just doing the thing was being every parent's worst nightmare and taking a one-way ticket and a job in South Africa and just saying, I'm going to go do this thing because no newsroom in America right now is going to give me the assignments that I want.
01:05:37
Speaker
And so I'm going to find a way to do this thing independently and take the risk. Risks that, you know, now 20 years later, would I take them now?
01:05:48
Speaker
mean, I have way too many responsibilities to take them now. yeah So I could take them at 23 and just be like, one way ticket sounds great. You know, now that I have, you know,
01:06:00
Speaker
One kid who's graduated from college and one in college, if they say they're taking one way ticket across the globe, i just remember how horrified my parents were. And I was like, see ya. And, you know, I've got my visa. I'll be I don't know when I'll be back. I mean, I came back eight years later, but not really. Right. I mean, I i never feel like I'm fully back.
01:06:22
Speaker
I think it's that it's about just saying, like, if you want to do this kind of work, just take risk and don't be afraid. And um nobody nobody around you is likely to fully understand what you're doing.
01:06:35
Speaker
But i look at my trajectory and it all makes sense. There is a very clear through line. Other people look at my trajectory and say, you have changed your jobs a lot. It's like, no, I have not. I have always been in the same through line.
01:06:53
Speaker
So it really is about vantage point. And I'm. And understanding that people who do this for fame are foolish.
01:07:04
Speaker
Oh, for sure. It's um it's funny. like I sure as hell hope that we don't go 10 years without talking again ah without like the sporadic email every two or three years.
01:07:15
Speaker
It feels. ah But in the unlikely event that it is 10 years in 10 years, like what What do you want to see your intervening years do? What are some things that you're hoping to accomplish given where given where you've been and given where you want to go?
01:07:31
Speaker
Yeah. So I actually um I'm going to give you the answer that I probably would have given you 10 years ago, which is, you know, the book that probably my whole self is inside of is this book that, you know, I i have now more recently completely finished, um,
01:07:53
Speaker
is a book about my aunt who went missing in 2009, the only reason I really came back from South Africa.
Upcoming Projects: Missing Persons Focus
01:08:01
Speaker
And it really occupied every part of my being for a long time.
01:08:10
Speaker
And it threw me inside the world of missing persons in America, which is really a very underground amateur space.
01:08:22
Speaker
And it's a place that I know or I knew, which was part of my hesitation to let go of the book, among other things, is that once it is out there, a huge part of me will just be focused on that.
01:08:37
Speaker
And I envision that for the next decade of my life, I will b split my creative and professional life between Training and supporting local and rural journalism across the country, but also addressing this through storytelling, through narrative, um through open source investigation, which I've really spent a lot of time deep inside and that I'm training young journalists around.
01:09:08
Speaker
to really invest in the missing persons crisis and not just missing persons in the way that people envision first, you know, what is a missing person, but to think about it both historically, to think about individually.
01:09:23
Speaker
in a far more sort of nuanced way, thinking about sort of everything from folks that are missing because of systemic issues and folks that are missing because of dementia and, you know, really pushing and pulling our definition of missing, but also authentically thinking about the lack of a missing person's system in our country to address it. And i you know, that book took over my life um and part of reason of putting it down. And I think there's a lot of creative people that take on a project that really swallows them whole.
01:10:02
Speaker
Putting it down was in part to kind of save myself from it for a while, but to also prepare myself that once it is out in the world, That is the only thing that I will, when I say we need to occupy spaces in the world, that is the only thing that I will be focused on because um creatively because I think it's so deeply important and it is one of those issues that people are compelled to listen and want to talk about.
01:10:31
Speaker
And this book, newspaper, was for me, from a writing standpoint, a palate cleanser away from that. yeah And it gave me the vantage point to go back and do a final edit and and to accept that it was um important enough that I will be throwing myself into, as a nonfiction storyteller, not just with the book, but in many other forms to focus on narrative around missing persons in the U.S. Nice.
01:11:00
Speaker
Well, nice, Maggie. like ah Well, can I bring this conversation down for for a landing for podcast purposes? And I don't know if you know at this point anymore, but I love to ask guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners out there. And it's just anything you're excited about that you want to share.
01:11:15
Speaker
And I would just extend that to you. So i am um going to probably get this name incorrect. And so just give me one second. There is a book that is sitting in my house that I purchased after I was in New Hampshire recently for the Radically Rural Conference. For anybody who knows that, it is amazing.
01:11:40
Speaker
um and I picked up a book by Claude Johnson. And sadly, the title of the book is escaping me right now. um But it is called The Black Fives, the epic story of basketball's forgotten era. And it's amazing.
01:11:59
Speaker
I am not completely through with it. In fact, um my partner is reading it at the moment and I'm just dipping in and out. But it's It's not only amazing just as narrative nonfiction, but it is an amazing example of how important our preservation of newspapers are.
01:12:20
Speaker
And a shout out to the Black Press Archive at Howard University that I am sort of... If I'm geeking out about anything, it's the work that they're doing, because so much of the book that I just referenced, Claude Johnson's book, is only capable of having been written because of these newspapers.
01:12:42
Speaker
And it's, you know, it's about black basketball players in an era playing in colleges and playing in local teams that I just have never seen recorded anywhere else. And it is only because of these papers that he was able to pull the history and and really sort of amazing narrative together.
01:13:02
Speaker
Oh, fantastic. Well, well, Maggie, it's ah let's let's not do this. Let's do this more frequently than every 10 years. Deal. deal. Absolutely. Fantastic. Well, thank you for carving out time to talk about newspaper and just the last 10 years and, uh, and the projects you have forthcoming. So and as as always, just, uh, thanks for your time and your insights and, uh, for being a friend.
01:13:25
Speaker
Yeah. Thank you. This is fun. We need to make sure we do this very, very soon.
Audience Engagement & Podcast Growth
01:13:35
Speaker
Thanks to Maggie for coming back on the show. When I asked her for her new headshot, which she still hasn't given me, but I found one that is newish, so she's off the hook. um She baited me to try to kill the episode because she couldn't remember saying anything interesting. And I was like, fool, you stop it with that tone.
01:13:54
Speaker
Thanks to you, kind CNF and listener. And if you dig the show, consider leaving reviews wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple being the the prime one. Haven't had one in a million years. It would be cool to get some more.
01:14:08
Speaker
I've riffed on this a number of times, but Seth Godin wrote about in his blog recently, and I'll link up to that in the new beefy show notes. And it gives me an opportunity to run with the ball that he has handed off to me, so to speak.
01:14:24
Speaker
Now, if you have a podcast or a YouTube channel or a blog, the obsession online is with growth, growth, growth. It's how we're conditioned in a capitalistic culture. You need more listens.
01:14:38
Speaker
You need more downloads, more followers, more views. It's more, more. more And there's never enough. And someone always has more. And yes, you need to consider some growth. Otherwise, you're just talking to yourself or writing to yourself, which is fine if that's what you want to do. No judgment.
01:14:56
Speaker
But most of us do this because we want to communicate, reach people, inspire people, ah build a little platform on which to plant a flag of some authority, make people feel less shitty by telling them how shitty you feel. You know, you get it.
01:15:13
Speaker
I get spammed all the time from companies promising me more listens and greater reach. And my take is, like, I'm good. I'm good, guys. I just kind of... And and if they sometimes when I'm really frustrated, I reply to them and say, no, I'm good.
01:15:32
Speaker
I don't need any more. And they're like, the fuck? I'm yeah, yeah, I'm good, man. i They're, like, confused. They have no idea. It's like I'm totally speaking a foreign language. I'm not really concerned with growth.
01:15:46
Speaker
I'm concerned with doubling down on the people who are already here and giving them, giving you, ah better experience. I won't quote the entire blog post from Seth, but here are a couple gems.
01:15:57
Speaker
A farmer might yearn for twice as much land, but it's far more efficient to double the yield on the land he already has. uh marketers often hustle to get the word out to reach more people and yet activating the fans you already have the ones who trust you who get the joke who want to go where you're going is far more reliable this is seth saying this like i write books for my readers instead of trying to find readers for my books marketers face a choice every day hustle for new people or serve the ones who care activation is much more productive than persuasion
01:16:31
Speaker
you know, he also said ah long time ago, too, in a different blog post, that he stopped caring about growing his blog subscribers, which number is probably in the low millions or several hundreds of thousands, and instead aimed to serve his current audience.
01:16:45
Speaker
Surprise, that earned him more trust and thus growth. And that's kind of my ethos at this point. Yeah, I'd love to say that each episode gets 100,000 downloads and that I had enough clout and celebrity in this ecosystem so that famous authors I have on the show will actually share it instead of ignoring the fact that they came on the show with me.
01:17:04
Speaker
This part drives me insane. In-fucking-sane. I can say with certainty that when I have famous-ish, famous writers or famous adjacent people on the show, they will categorically not engage in helping to amplify their episode.
01:17:18
Speaker
But, but, I wouldn't care if they just were like that for everything. But if they appear on a show with more clout... They share that.
01:17:29
Speaker
It's insulting and maddening, and I know it's intentional. You might have ah modest email list or subscriber base, and in an age where the metrics are right in your face all the time, there's this pressure to grow. Otherwise, you must be worthless.
01:17:44
Speaker
And also, you measure your worth against those metrics, and it just makes you feel crappy. And then you might put out crappier shit. Put that on your corkboard. If I have 100 subscriptions and that person has 10,000, the wayward listener is likely to assume the one with the larger audience is better.
01:18:00
Speaker
Maybe so, but they might have the backing of a media company or already have a built-in audience from some other thing that they brought over. From the annals of, what a guy.
01:18:12
Speaker
You know, this random podcaster reached out to me ah to see if I'd join him on a show to talk about the front runner. I don't know when we're going to talk. I said, absolutely. And he's like, do you think your publisher will send me a book?
01:18:24
Speaker
So this tipped my hand or tipped his hand to how inexperienced he is in this milieu. He said he'd buy a copy and whatever. And I was like, I said, for the purposes of the podcast, insist on the publisher providing a copy. And I gave him the link to link email my publicist for the book.
01:18:41
Speaker
ah And then I said, but by all means, go buy copies for gifts, please and thank you. um When that episode airs, I'll share it and amplify it and curate it on my website. Like i said, what a guy.
01:18:53
Speaker
It really does sicken me when certain people think they're too big to help a smaller producer. And you're also, you're not just like helping me if you're a famous person and you're promoting the show. There's hundreds of other writers on the show who could benefit from an extra degree of amplification that they might not ordinarily get.
01:19:12
Speaker
I always use the the concert festival poster. You know, the the big bands in the big fonts at the top of the poster, they bring in, they bring attention to all those smaller bands who have a lot of talent but just don't have the clout yet.
01:19:31
Speaker
At one point, that maybe famous podcaster or author, they were... They were obscure. And someone lifted them up.
01:19:44
Speaker
It all comes down to status roles. Another Seth Godin observation. And once you see the status ballet, you cannot unsee it. and Just go look it up.
01:19:55
Speaker
Google Seth. Go to his website, Seth.blog. Look around for status roles. It's illuminating. So stay wild, CNN efforts. And if can do, interview.
01:20:07
Speaker
See ya.