I was born with ink in my blood. My grandfather was a printer in Brooklyn, and my father spent most of his career as a newspaper editor straight out of The Front Page, with a gruff demeanor, soft heart, and instinctive sense for the news. Much of my adolescence was spent hanging around his workplace, the old downtown offices of the Capital Times in Madison. Reams of copy paper, dark blue carbons, glue pots, pneumatic tubes, thick mark-up pencils, cigarette butts on the linoleum floor, the rim manned by old guys in suspenders with flasks of liquor stashed in the bottom drawer — that was the newspaper milieu imprinted on my brain, and I loved it.
I never wrote for the high school newspaper, but early on during college, long after I realized that I’d never play shortstop for the Milwaukee Braves or match the academic prowess of my older siblings, I started reporting and writing, and I’ve never stopped.
First I wrote my own fifteen-minute radio newscasts on Radio Free Madison, an invaluable experience that taught me how to put together sentences with a natural rhythm. Then I started covering high school sports and student protests, both subjects prefiguring themes of books I’d write decades later. And finally in 1975, at age 25, I landed a job at the Trenton Times, which had just been bought by The Washington Post and served as its farm club. Two years later I was called up to the Post, and I’ve been there ever since, most of my adult life.
Everything has changed from then to now in my profession. We all know it; no reason to count the ways. When people ask me about the future of newspapers, I say that platforms change, unavoidably. I might not like it, I might wish that printed newspapers would be around forever, but I accept the reality of inevitable change.
Only two things should not change. I feel good about one, less so about the other. The first is the primacy of story. Story is how we humans understand one another and our place in the world. It has been that way from the beginning, and I think will be there always. The format constantly changes, and is not the most important thing. From long form narrative and documentary to tweet and Instagram, there is still a story at the heart of communications.But the search for truth matters more, and is more vulnerable. Technology is neutral. It can be used for better or worse. But as technology transforms the nature of news, it can lead in directions both illuminating and dangerous. Information, disinformation, and misinformation are all equally available. Everything is quicker, attention spans shorter. The modern culture tends to value snark and entertainment as much as or more than reason and substance. Facts are deemed negotiable, if not irrelevant — everything is about attitude. People look only for arguments that fit their preconceived notions. Writers build followings by preaching to the choir. And the search for truth suffers.
That search requires an open mind and a willingness to let common sense and the diligent accumulation of facts shape the story. As a journalist and nonfiction narrative writer, I’ve come to think of my own process as the four legs of a table.
The first leg is my admonition to go there, wherever there is. That meant for a book on Vince Lombardi, the iconic football coach, turning to my wife and uttering the immortal loving words, “How would you like to move to Green Bay for the winter?” Being there was crucial to the story, both in terms of finding people who knew Lombardi that I would not find any other way — his old paper boy, the piano player at his favorite supper club, caddies from the Oneida tribe who carried his golf clubs — and in feeling what it was like to endure a Green Bay winter, since the football climax of the book would be a game, known as the Ice Bowl, played in minus-17 degree weather.
The second leg is to find the documents. Those could range from the letters that Bill Clinton’s great aunt showed me in a box she kept in her attic (letters from young Bill to his grandmother when he was a student at Georgetown University), to documents at Duke University that showed me how the J. Walter Thompson ad agency conducted its marketing of the Ford Mustang; military reports at Fort McNair that revealed the true and long covered-up reality of a tragic search-and-destroy mission during the Vietnam war; the papers at the University of Illinois of Avery Brundage, former president of the International Olympic Committee, that brought to life his actions during the 1960 Rome Olympics; or two boxes of Federal Aviation Administration transcripts and reports that a former government lawyer kept in his closet, documents that traced the tragic plane crash that took the life of baseball great Roberto Clemente.
The third leg is to interview as many people as possible. Some interviews might add only one fact, one detail, but that can be enough. In most cases, human memory is flawed, particularly when it comes to chronology, but I tend to trust specific shards of memory — colors, smells, sounds, emotions. When I talked to a Vietnam veteran about a horrible battle that he had survived, I did not trust his chronology — a minute can seem like an hour, an hour like a minute during times of trauma — but I did trust his specific memory that just before the ambush one of his comrades was opening a can of peaches and another was taking a piss. The more you know, the better the interviews become. The first two legs — going there to understand the geography and culture, amassing contemporary documents — help in that regard, but it is also essential to go back to key figures, gaining new and deeper material with every conversation, breaking through the myths that people tend to create from their memories.
The first three legs lead to the fourth, which is to look for what is not there. In most cases, there is a received story, repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact, but quite often it is wrong. By going there, finding the documents, and interviewing enough people, you can usually break through the encrustation of myth and get closer to what really happened, which is both what my father taught me and what the Pulitzer prizes are all about.