White, Bill

An Interview with Bill White (May, 2012)

Bill White has been employed by The Morning Call newspaper (Allentown, PA) for 37 years. He began as a reporter and worked in a variety of editor positions before becoming a full-time columnist and blogger. He is a graduate of Lehigh University and received a master's degree in journalism at Ohio State University, where he was Kiplinger Fellow in Public Affairs Reporting. In addition to his duties at the paper, where he has won several statewide awards as a writer and editor, he has taught journalism at Lehigh University for more than 25 years. He and his wife Jane, an editor at The Morning Call, have two children, a dog, and five cats.

Interview by BWG member Jeff Baird

BWG: You write a newspaper column, a blog, feature stories and teach journalism courses. All of these activities have very concrete deadlines, how do you stay organized or what is your work flow process?

Bill White: During the last presidential campaign, when they asked me to write political columns as well as my regular column three times a week and my daily blog, I sometimes found myself writing 10 pieces a week. I think the best thing I had going for me was that I have no problem working on several pieces at the same time, so I suppose that demonstrates that I’m mentally organized, even if my desk tends to look pretty chaotic.

As far as work flow, although I’ll occasionally cover live events and write about them for the next day, I like working ahead wherever possible, which means I usually have at least two columns in the works at any given time. I hate arriving at the office with no idea what I’m going to write about, so that almost never happens.

One reason I like my blooper and Grammar Police columns is that there’s no time element, so I can write them in advance and save them for when I’m taking time off, tied up with more time-consuming projects or just in search of a change of pace in the column.

Because I work ahead, I typically will come in and prepare my blog – much more likely to be written on the fly – first. I prefer to get that filed by lunchtime, because that’s when many readers are likely to be surfing.

Once the blog is done, I’ll put the finishing touches on my column, usually filing that before 2. Then I spend the rest of the day working on future columns and blog posts. I also attend night meetings or weekend events whenever I think one of them might generate a story or to promote the column and the newspaper – mostly food judging -- but my usual shift is about 10-7.

My Lehigh classes are 9:10-10 Monday and Wednesday mornings and 1-4 Tuesday afternoons, plus four weeks of night classes early in the semester. My schedule is so flexible that my time at Lehigh doesn’t present a problem. I do my class preparation and grading at night.

BWG: Over the years you must have written hundreds of columns and stories and I’m sure you have hundreds of unwritten stories or ideas just waiting to print. Have you ever thought of writing your own book?

Bill White: I have thought about compiling some of my columns into a book, and readers have suggested the idea many times, but I’ve never really pursued it. I guess my hope was that the paper would approach me with the idea, since it has the rights to all the columns. I’ve never talked to anyone in management about doing a column compilation on my own.

The concern I always come back to is that because my columns almost all have been about local issues, there wouldn’t be much interest in a book beyond the Lehigh Valley. I wonder if Morning Call readers who like my columns constitute a large enough market to make this financially feasible. However, if there are any publishers out there who think this is a good idea, I would be happy to discuss it with them.

Like many journalists, I’m also a frustrated novelist. I wrote one novel and ran it past one editor, but it was rejected, and I don’t think it was very good. I have an idea for a play, but I haven’t gotten around to writing it yet. I also was approached by a local artist one time about collaborating on a children’s book tied to my Christmas Light Tours, but when I sent her my suggestion for a story, she was so appalled that she never got back to me. I finally ran into her at a party years later, and she said she thought it was much darker than what she had in mind – it involved vandalism on the real-life Christmas Lane -- and she was embarrassed to tell me that.

BWG: Like my father before me I wake up every morning to read my daily newspaper, the Morning Call. However, traditional newspapers are fighting a battle with the Internet for delivery and dissemination of information. Many people believe that traditional newspapers will not survive. Your newspaper is now charging for online content, will this be the future trend of newspapers and will it be enough to save them?

Bill White: I have lots of doubts about the future of newspapers in their present form. I ask the kids in my classes every semester how many of them read a daily newspaper, and the answer typically is zero. And these are journalism students; some of them even journalism majors!

Still, there are a lot of people out there who either grew up reading newspapers or evolved into habitual newspaper readers, and I wish we were making it easier for them to stick with us. With the way newspapers everywhere have cut their newsroom staffs and reduced the quality of their customer service, I wonder how much we’ve accelerated the loss of newspaper readership because our product just isn’t as good as it used to be.

The competitive environment certainly has changed. I remember when our big concern was beating the Easton Express-Times. In fact, I took the job as Easton bureau chief because we were beefing up our operation to compete with them in their hometown.

What we’ve learned since then is that it’s not just about competing with the Express, the Times-News, the Intelligencer or whatever smaller paper is in that particular market. It’s weekly newspapers that provide the community news that we can’t give readers anymore. It’s Channel 69 and its website. It’s patch.com. It’s bloggers, some of them very ambitious about covering and reporting the news in their own style. Heck, it’s “The Daily Show,” which is the biggest source of news for a lot of young people.

I took a high school student to a Northampton County Council meeting with me last year after she asked if she could job-shadow, and it was a great education for her, beyond the fact that Ron Angle was acting up. At a not-particularly-significant county meeting, there were reporters from The Morning Call, the Express, a local weekly and patch.com. There were two reporters and a videographer from Channel 69, with one of the reporters working on their online story and the other doing a report for the late TV news. There was a local blogger, whose report would appear first thing the next morning. And me.

That’s nine media people at a meeting that would have attracted only two – reporters from the Call and Express – five years ago.

Anyway, back to the paywall question. After giving their content away for so long online, and with so much other free content available, newspapers are likely to have a difficult time convincing readers to pay to visit their sites. I know my blog readership and participation have shrunk since we started charging, and it’s frustrating, because many of those lost readers are loyal subscribers to our print product. I have no problem with the expectation that nonsubscribers should help support the newsgathering process if they want to go to our online content, but I wish newspaper subscribers could continue to get it free online. I feel as if we already have a relationship that transcends the two platforms, and I hate to see it broken. The best answer at this point is to put enough compelling new content on the website to convince all those readers that it’s worth paying for.

BWG: What does the future look like for someone wanting to pursue a career in journalism?

Bill White: Lehigh journalism graduates continue to do very well when it comes to finding jobs, but they’re rarely in daily newspapers. They’re working for magazines, television, public relations, various forms of electronic media and all kinds of other areas.

I try to give my students a realistic picture of the journalism world as it stands today and how quickly it’s changing. I still believe there always will be a market for people who are skilled at gathering information and communicating it to the public, whatever format we evolve into.

BWG: Would you recommend that a young person go to a recognized Journalism school, such as the University of Missouri or Columbia University if they were looking for a career in journalism or can an individual still break into journalism by the intern, cub route?

Bill White: I think the schooling is helpful, but then, I’m a guy with a master’s in journalism. The days of the young copy boy being elevated to a reporter job are long over, partly because there are no copy boys. The young people we hire as reporters are college graduates, although they’re not always journalism graduates. Our reporting interns are college students, not kids out of high school.

As for recognized journalism schools, I think there’s a certain prestige when you have Missouri or Columbia on your resume, but journalism is taught very well at many other schools, including Lehigh, where small classes and very personal attention have led to many successful journalism careers. In fact, I just had a high school student from San Diego visiting my class the other day, and she said she investigated and concluded that she wanted to take journalism at Lehigh rather than one of the bigger journalism schools, because they seemed more innovative and less rigid. It was good to hear, although it’s possible she just was buttering me up in case she ends up in my class.

BWG: In your classes at Lehigh University how do you handle the traditional style of writing vs. the newer social media aspect of writing? For example, you also blog, do you approach your traditional newspaper writing the same way you handle your blogging?

Bill White: My class has evolved over the years to focus more and more on other forms of media, including social media. The students start their own blogs, for example, and have to keep them going twice a week. I even bring local bloggers in to talk about their experiences and offer tips.

Still, the core of the class remains pretty much the same. Until someone instructs me otherwise, I’m trying to help these kids understand how to write in traditional news style, including strong leads, careful attribution and a tremendous focus on accuracy and fairness. Lehigh journalism classes always have been extremely writing-intensive, and my students get practice writing all kinds of news stories before we transition into feature writing. My feeling is that many of these skills are necessary whatever their ultimate writing platform.

I read them a sentence every semester from “Elements of Style” that sums up my philosophy about good writing in any format:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

That says it better than I ever could.

Regarding that last part of the question, about blog style vs. news style, my blog really is just an extension of my column. I think it’s important for a columnist to find his/her own voice, which eventually becomes very familiar to readers, and my blog is written in that same voice.

BWG: We have been told that as authors we need to get our names out there as much as possible using all of the new social media tools, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, e.g. Would you have any other recommendations or formats that would be a benefit for our purposes?

Bill White: I have nothing profound to add to what most of you already know. I use Facebook and Twitter to promote my blog and as another way of interacting with readers, and I’ve noticed that at least one local author whom I admire tweets regularly now.

When I began blogging, someone told me I should avoid responding to readers’ comments. It took me about a month to figure out he was wrong. Those direct exchanges of ideas are the best thing about blogging and social media. When I write a column, I respond to all my emails and phone calls, but I don’t get involved with the online comments, which I can’t control and which sometimes get really ugly. I can control the conversation on my blog, and I make an effort to be as engaged as possible.

I think that has to be helpful if you’re looking to attract readers. I know I’ve been thrilled on the rare opportunities when I’ve heard – mostly in response to blog or Facebook posts -- from novelists I admire or their families. It’s fun to directly engage people whose words you’ve been reading for so long.

BWG: As a journalist, many of your columns are written more like stories that engage the reader. Do you think journalism and story-telling have overlapping qualities?

Bill White: Absolutely. I write an opinion column, but I’m well aware that my opinions have no more value than anyone else’s, particularly if I’m not backing them up with compelling facts. The bottom line is that people aren’t reading my column because I’m such a brilliant political analyst. If they’re reading, it’s because I’m telling interesting stories or expressing my opinions in interesting ways. My goal is not just to persuade them; it’s to entertain them.

One of the challenges of writing an opinion column in an area that’s as spread out as ours is that when I’m writing about small-town politics, which I like to do on occasion, there’s no reason why people in, say, Slatington should care about Williams Township government. So my job is to find ways to make that story interesting to everyone, by finding the humor in some of these situations, finding themes that everyone can relate to and maybe tying them to pop culture or other references that will resonate beyond municipal lines.

One of the ways I’ve done that is by playing up characters in some of these communities so that they become familiar to readers all over. That’s one reason I created my Hall of Fame of the area’s most colorful characters. It creates a kind of shorthand where I can return to a Ron Angle or Emma Tropiano and readers will more easily share my amusement or outrage.

BWG: Do you approach serious subjects, such as the congressional redistricting in Pennsylvania, differently than those about, say, the food at Musikfest?

Bill White: I’m a big believer in variety when you’re writing a column three times a week. Yes, I want to comment on local politics and maybe make a difference in shaping public opinion and even politician behavior. Other times I like writing what amount to feature stories about interesting people and situations.

But I’ve found I get the most enthusiastic reactions to columns about me and my experiences. My column about my dog’s death was by far the most popular I’ve ever written, and other columns about my life have gotten good reactions, too. Eating My Way through Musikfest unfortunately seems to be the most popular recurring feature I do, which I guess means I’m stuck with it until I keel over someday in Festplatz..

I try to do the personal columns sparingly, because I’m really not all that interesting, but I think they work because I don’t take myself very seriously. Clearly, I’m more than willing to make fun of myself, which is absolutely necessary for a writer who routinely is making fun of other people. I suspect readers have a pretty good sense of who I am after all these years, and that’s a good thing.

The danger, I guess, is that people may not take you seriously when you turn around and start ranting and raving about congressional redistricting or illegal legislative pay raises, but I think the opposite is true. Because readers know me and the kinds of issues that are important to me, they’re more likely to come along with me when I’m explaining why this kind of thing shouldn’t happen.

My preference most of the time is to use humor and subtle jabs to make my points, but there are a few issues, usually involving the lack of ethical standards in our state government, which send me over the top into a much more bombastic place. My hope in those cases is that readers will take up their torches and pitchforks and follow me to the castle walls, but I suspect some of them are just shaking their heads wondering whether I’ve lost my mind.

BWG: Becoming a traditionally-published author with a Big Six publisher has never been harder. Not everyone can write a bestselling novel, but that does not mean that a profession in writing is not obtainable. What advice would you give to someone seeking to become a writer in any area of writing?

Bill White: I would advise them to read that sentence from Strunk and White and take it to heart. I would tell them to write every day, whether it’s a journal, a blog or the beginning of the Great American Novel, and to read as much as they can. I would suggest they try to find a voice that works for them and the right forum for their kind of writing.

I knew I wanted to write a newspaper column from the days of my high school newspaper. I found it suits my writing style and the way my mind works.

The great thing about the blogosphere is that even if publishers don’t like your novel, even if your favorite newspapers or magazines won’t hire you, you have the potential to share your words and your ideas with millions of readers.

My friend and I started a national college wrestling newspaper after I graduated, and although we were moderately successful, it meant we had to hire a printer and spend a lot of time and money on distribution.

That same friend now writes an email college wrestling newsletter that has much wider readership and that he can distribute just by hitting the Send key. No postal permit. No printer. No stapling. No lugging bundles of newspapers to tournaments.

So I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re good and if you have something interesting to say, it’s much easier to find an audience than it used to be.