Allan M. Jalon was formerly on staff at the Detroit Free Press and the Los Angeles Times. He is a long-time freelance arts journalist writing mostly about visual arts and books, who was a 2002-3003 fellow with the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and has also been teaching journalism at the New School.
Gal Beckerman: Your beat is a world that very few people have access to or are interested in any more. For instance, in this piece you recently did on John Sonsini, an LA artist who paints life size expressionist depictions of illegal immigrants, how do you write about this one artist in what you’re describing as a post-literate culture? How do you get to people who don’t care?
Allan M. Jalon: At some level I know that if I’m dealing with sensitive artists, they are fully conscious of this problem we share. They are trying to reflect and relate to this world as it is now. And as a journalist, you look for artists who are surrogates for your own interests and passions and quests. And you look for an artist who has interests many people might share. In this case I am interested in the private world of the artist and the act of making art. He was making art about Latino immigrants in Los Angeles. I’ve driven by and wandered by clutches of these men on street corners in Los Angeles for many years, but I didn’t feel like I could enter their world. Now here was somebody who had done that and had done it very much in the terms of modernism and with the skills and tradition I recognize as having the integrity of a very sincere artist.
GB: There is so much questioning about whether newspapers have become an outdated form. Within that critique, why are newspapers the right place for arts journalism? How do justify their continued existence within the newspaper form?
AMJ: I wouldn’t argue at this point that newspapers are the only good place for anything anymore. I don’t know that someone couldn’t look at some of the work being done online, like artsjournal.com, for example. I think that the arts editors and reporters of the 1950s and 60s, if they had had a chance to occasionally talk to their audience through artsjournal.com, that they wouldn’t have loved it. Frankly, some of the art blogging is fascinating. I’m a fan of Jeremy Denk’s blog about being a concert pianist, and the book column that was so effective on Poynter that engaged the New York Times Book Review in a conversation about its future.
But all that being said, oddly enough, I have come to this strange conclusion that yes, holding a piece of paper with print in your hands and writing for print might even have some basic, different chemical relationship to interject between the audience and the writer and the writer and the audience. That tactile experience of paper is a wonderful thing. I hope I can say that without sounding old fashioned.
The newspaper still, for all one can worry about it, grows out of a deeply literate era in the culture. Sitting in your commuter train and reading a newspaper with a book on your lap that you intend to open in a few minutes, that is still a beautiful and classic experience…
GB: You were saying that with the passing of a literate culture, the arts writer dealing with a subject that is becoming more and more esoteric needs to keep reminding themselves who they’re writing for…
AMJ: At one level, it’s a guess. The people who just decided through layoffs and buyouts to let off 85 trained, skilled, experienced newspaper people at the Los Angeles Times, make no mistake about it, they are making a guess. The gamble is that you can somehow improve circulation while compromising quality and depth. Is that possible? There is no indication that they will be right. That’s not really proven.
There’s a contradiction at work there. You can hope that by running stories about the latest DJ or the latest popular music phenomenon you are going to grab the younger reader. You can hope that the younger reader is even inclined to be grabbed. But you’re not sure. You can be sure that if you run a really interesting feature about the new compilation of disks of music by The Band, the audience is there because they are a literate audience. Like the audience for Dylan, for example. And they aren’t only listening to The Band or Dylan, they are also reading the poet C.K. Williams.
GB: But that is also an aging audience. How can you grow a new audience without writing about the new DJ?
AMJ: You can’t reach for a new audience without at the same time maintaining a firm grip on your existing audience. And it’s important for editors to be as smart and literate about culture as it has developed to this point as well as its latest changes.
Don’t forget that journalism, as they used to say about the makers of a certain kosher hot dog, “reports to a higher authority.” It is different. We don’t just feel obliged to give people what they want, We give them what we think is good for them as individuals and ultimately we give them what we hope will be good for the culture as a democracy. Because not only is a democracy a compilation of people organized in a specific way and behaving according to certain ideals and hopefully sharing equally all the responsibilities and benefits of that society. It’s also a kind of personality. It can be encoded into a poet or into a song.
Democracy can be encoded into a daily newspaper. It’s a germ. It’s a nuclear generative spirit that single individuals and institutions can embody. And every newspaper, and every editor, and every reporter has both the opportunity and the responsibility to embody that democratic spirit every day. And that, by the way, is true whether or not the business of journalism is in an upswing or in a decline. There have been many upswings and declines and artists have endured them and survived them. Journalists will have to survive them as well. The poor people who face the very grave uncertainties imposed by the layoffs in Los Angeles sooner or later, they’re journalists to the bone, a lot of the will have to pick up a pen and a piece of paper, or put down their laptops on a dining room table or on a motel counter and they are going to have to find someone interesting to talk to and they are going to have to find something interesting to talk about and they are going to have to tap out a lot of sentences. A lot of them are going to have to find people to publish those sentences, on line or in print. And if they’ve been resourceful enough to get to the Los Angeles Times, they’ll be resourceful enough to get new work. That is a bit Pollyannaish perhaps, but a lot of people will find work somehow.
GB: You’ve been admiring of the Los Angeles Times over the last few years, what is it they’ve done so well.
AMJ: In some cases they were accidents of omission, in some of commission. I think as a freelancer, I do think it’s a marker to watch what happens when they guy or woman with a good story places the phone call to someone sitting inside and see what happens. Certainly in the few years before the Tribune Company became involved in Los Angeles, you could call up with the most obviously interesting story and somebody would either not have the wherewithal to recognize the story or simply not have the support inside to follow through. After Tribune came in, that steadily improved. There was a period of wandering about, not knowing what their priorities would be. So for a lot of people there was that sudden, open, free spirited moment when you could do all kinds of interesting things. But they also knew who to elevate. They took what they were given and they made the most of it. This certainly has to be credited to John Carroll and Dean Baquet. They one after another made some pretty good decisions about whom they could trust with various important parts of the paper. And the results could be seen all over…
The Getty story is a strong example of bringing investigative muscle to look at a cultural institution. That is really an example of the Los Angeles Times reaching new heights. This is an institution performing at its very best. And it’s a beautiful thing to see and it comes within a tragic circumstance. When they have 85 people leaving it is a catastrophe.
Poetry is a wonderful metaphor to a degree no newspaperman twenty years ago could have imagined. Poetry and the world of poets has become a kind of metaphor for novelists and journalists alike. We still do it. We do it passionately. We are still obliged to do what we do passionately. Everyone wants to tell us how less significant it has become and how fewer and fewer people are interested. Still, we wake up and do what we did the day before just as passionately again. Journalists are going to have to learn to do that with a little more determination than in the past. You can’t assume that everybody is listening. You can assume that some people who want to listen, know how to listen, and know how to make use of what they listen to are out there and are going to be very disturbed if we don’t have something to say.
Big corporations can effect enormous changes both in the facts and perceptions in the relationships journalists have to their readers. What big corporations cannot generate, but we as individual journalists can every day, is passion. They don’t have passion. Just as all the on-line producers worry where will the content come from, sooner or later the people who run newspapers will, if they sincerely care about this business, will have to wake up at 3 in the morning, and ask where is the passion, and the answer will have to come from writers and editors, no one else can give it.
In reference to the above interview, Allan M. Jalon writes:
To the editors of CJRdaily.org:
The beginning of the interview with me on CJRdaily.org Friday — which begins with a question that assumes a reading public that does not care about arts journalism and moves on to my discussion by me only of a specific story about an artist — did not reflect the full texture and context of my thoughts and feelings about the relationship between arts journalists, journalists and their audience.
As I said when the interview was conducted, there is a sort of crisis, for newspapers as well as artists, poets and even Hollywood, about the nature of audiences and how to reach audiences. It would be wrong to not also say that there remains a persistant core of smart, educated, literate readers and new potential younger readers for whom culture and stories about culture remain important. This is the basic substance of civilization we’re talking about, when we talk about the arts and the journalism that helps to give the arts their second life as a shared, public experience. Editors give up on the role of that kind of journalism at their peril, for these people who care about culture are among the most loyal and interested newspaper readers. Journalists offer an essential part of the education accessible to readers about the ways in which people express themselves and journalists make tangible the social, political, spiritual and even financial importance that such expression has in the life of a town or city. Without this context, my other remarks about writing about the artist John Sonsini and my comments about arts journalism that others have done, as well as other aspects of the interview, really are not clear.
–Allan M. Jalon
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.