Les Payne's 2009 keynote: Opinion writing and the blues

Doug Lyons and Joan Armour have asked me to talk about opinion-writing. They assume that I’ve learned something about this newspaper art during the 28 years I wrote a weekly column for Newsday.

During my career as columnist, manager and editor, I have also been privileged to edit two of the great opinion writers in American journalism: Murray Kempton and Jimmy Breslin.

It was Kempton who coined the phrase about editorial writers that you may have heard during your two days here. (I’ll get back to it a in a minute.) Murray used to say that he wrote always with the sounds of the blues on mind.

He would mention singers such as Bessie Smith & Joe Turner; and repeat lyrics such as:

“He’s yours; he’s mine; he’s someone else’s’ too. (Smith)

OR: “Trouble in Mind, I’m blue, but I won’t be blue always; ‘cause the sun’s gonna shine in my back-door, someday.” (Turner)

I used to wonder how the Blues could possibly inspire this erudite, silver-haired, white Episcopalian from Baltimore. I grew up listening to the Blues in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and paid them no mind; the Blues was my parents’ music.

However, Murray’s inspiration had me recall that, early on, I had been moved to write by listening to the poetry of gospel hymns, and later, as a teenager, the words of rock ’n roll tunes. I was especially inspired by the lyrics of Chuck Berry, such as his tune NADINE: (a young girl he fell in love with)

“I saw her from the corner/ when she turned and doubled back,

And started walkin toward/a coffee-colored Cadillac.”

And there was Arethea Franklin’s version of the Beatles’ song: Elinor Rigby:

“Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name

Nobody came

Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave

No one was saved.”

Lots of young people have those tunes on their ring tones these days. I hope they take time and listen to the words. If you can write a line that can inspire an image like Father McKenzie, “wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave;” you well on your way to becoming a very good writer.

A journalism Professor friend of mine was distressed that many of his students at Hampton University reject his old style of journalism. “They want to make videos,” he said. “They want to build web sites; write Rap lyrics.”

I told him this journalism professor that he should encourage this entrepreneurship; it will be needed as corporate ownership abandons the journalism of the newspaper industry. And he should most certainly encourage his student’s interest in writing lyrics.

There is a thin line between music and good writing.

Technology has changed a lot about the newspaper business, but it has not changed this basic fact: good journalism requires good writing. And good opinion-writing, at bottom, is good writing.

You have heard a lot here in Nashville about the death of newspapers and where our industry is headed. Most of you here, (not all, Doug & Alvin), have never written on a typewriter, and some of you write exclusively for on-line blogs.

There is no denying that technology has changed journalism forever.

However, wherever journalism is headed, with the Blackberry, Twitter, and the down-loading capability of the internet; Opinion-Writing will remain an essential part of journalism.

In many ways—especially with the proliferation of blogs and on-line journalism sites—the role of the editorial writer and the columnist has become even more important.

Journalism, as Thomas Jefferson envisioned a free press, remains an indispensable guardian of Democracy. However, it’s delivered to the citizenry; it will always be required to inform the people so that they can make sovereign decisions.

Here’s how the process works: the reporters make first contact; they kill their own meat. They are charged to track down, identify, and engage the racketeers, the predatory lenders; the corrupt politicians.

One wag described investigative reporting as long newspaper series that disclose to its readers that: “There are a lot of bad guys out there, and here are all their names.”

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting this year, for example, was a series about co-opted, retired generals who helped deceive the public by making the Pentagon’s case for war disguised as radio and TV analysts, so-called.

Finalists in the investigative reporting category included stories about financial abuses by the head of California’s largest union; and a series about dangerous chemicals in everyday, household products.

Most of these long series are distinguished by not being read in their entirety. This is certainly true of young readers who get their news on-line, or from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. So it’s often left up to the editorial writers and the 700-word columnists to come behind the reporters and explain who these bad guys are and the evil they commit against society. The same is true about corrupt politicians.

After the reporters do their work on the battlefield, Murray Kempton used to say: the job of the opinion writers is to “ride down out of the hills after the battle—and shoot the wounded.”

As great as Kempton, Breslin, and that generation of opinion writers were; they era is passing away. Breslin, incidentally, is very much alive, and has often decried the passing of his era of newspapering.

I had Jimmy speak to my journalism class at Columbia University a few years back and he described the change in newspaper writing this way:

“At 5 o’clock at night in the New York Daily News, you couldn’t see from one end of the city room to the other because of the smoke. Tremendous scene. Looked like an old fight club. And the noise of the typewriters was loud, like subway trains running through. And out of all this noise, the smoke, came nervous energy. And they had that

“Afterwards, there were bars people went to, and you discussed how people wrote; used to be discussions about writing styles at the bar.

“There’s no such thing today. Afterwards, nobody goes to a saloon and discuss language—newspaper reporting language.

“They go to a health club, and then, worst of all, they go home.”

Not all of this change to the newspaper business, of course, is bad. The typewriters were noisy and punched holes in the paper—and there was no spell-check.

The cigarette smoking and the heavy drinking mixed in with the nervous energy that Breslin romanticized cut short the life of many a reporter. When I entered the newspaper business, the life expectancy of a newspaper reporter, according to the insurance actuary tables—was about 44 years.

Today, unless they get cut down by the swine flu, reporters are on track to live, perhaps, forever.

Opinion-writing will undoubtedly last forever. It is an art and, unlike say science, which builds on itself; art is linear. Whereas you wouldn’t want to be treated by the doctors of Shakespeare’s era; the writing of that era is at least as good as it is today.

I make this point to emphasize—despite spell-check, Google and the virtual library that internet places at your fingertips—there are a few things that are constant about good writing, good opinion-writing.

You have probably heard many rules and tips, so I would like to summarize a few you might take back and continue to practice in your own editing, writing and blogging.

To summarize my rules, I would say: clarity, efficiency, strong verbs—AND, as Turner Catledge once said, NEVER USED THE WORD, “UNPRECEDENTED.”

The first rule of good opinion-writing is: BE CLEAR.

The 2nd through 5th rules of good newspaper writing are BE CLEAR.

If you are not clear, it doesn’t matter how much reporting or research you’ve done. The reader is just not going to get it. It’s like sitting in on those freshmen philosophy classes and wondering: “What is the sweating Professor trying to say?”

Clarity demands that, right or wrong, you know PRECISELY what you think about an issue. One NYC columnist, who shall remain nameless, has the irritating habit of stating near the top of her column sometimes that she doesn’t know what she thinks about the matter under discussion. (I want to yell: WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE!)

I subscribe to the dictum that A COLUMN IS A MADE-UP MIND. And don’t be afraid of your informed opinions. I trust here that I can stipulate that the opinion-writer must labor hard at the lamp to get informed about the subject about which she is writing.

Mark Twain, who was at bottom, a journalist, cited 18 rules governing fiction. The last 6 of them could apply directly to non-fiction opinion-writing. They are:

1. Use the right word not its second cousin. (Labor over the precision of your vocabulary.)

2. Eschew Surplusage. (The 140 characters of Twitter may be pushing it but brevity counts.)

3. Do not omit necessary details. (Flip side of # 2)

4. Avoid slovenliness of form (tidiness counts)

5. Use good Grammar (strong verbs)

6. Employ a simple and straightforward style. (Use active voice)

Much of opinion-writing seeks to explain complicated issues to readers with precious little time and others with short attention spans.

So, IN ADDITION TO BEING INFORMATIVE, THE PROSE HAS TO BE LIVELY, ENTERTAINING, And PROVOCATIVE EVEN.

No one was more provocative as a newspaper columnist than H. L. Mencken. How many of you watched David Letterman’s segment about President George W. Bush, called, “Great Moments in Presidential Speeches?”

Back when presidents wrote their own speeches, President Warren Harding thought he was quite the wordsmith. Mencken thought otherwise, and wrote the following in his Baltimore Sun column about the president’s writing style.

“President Harding writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.

“It is so bad that a kind of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of posh, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh.

“It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. But I grow lyrical. More scientifically, what is the matter with it?

Mencken goes on to explain in more precise terms of syntax, grammar and surplusage.

The present era of opinion-writing belong to you. It is now your day. You must make of journalism and opinion writing what it is to be for the here and the now.

Wherever journalism is going, you will have to take it.

I will close by reading two short excerpts from commentary that I have written:

A. The first is from a piece the NABJ president asked me to write in answering pundit Patrick J. Buchanan’s attack on non-white journalists. It is posted on-line at the NABJ web-site.

B. The second is from a Newsday column I wrote about Rev. Jesse Jackson, when, over an open microphone, he said that candidate Barack Obama’s position on black self-help had moved the Chicago preacher to contemplate ripping out his testicles.

“Criticism of Jackson’s off-color remarks cites jealousy, envy, self-righteousness, or worse. I rather suspect that the Rev. Jackson is a committed, though reluctant, admirer of the younger Obama, who has outdistanced his own campaign efforts.

“Like most aging lions, Jackson hears the powerful roar of the future and dreads the hunt going forward without him at the lead. It is not enough that Obama stands on Jackson’s shoulders, as he most assuredly does. The proud and dashing Jackson longs once more to square his shoulders and head to the convention podium before the national TV cameras.

“The march of time, however, demands a turning of the page and of the leaves as the darkness turns into day, world without end.”