Ken's Second Act

A business that gets ugly inspires my 'big, beautiful novel'

For years, I held the ambition of writing a novel.

During my early twenties, I asked a college roommate, a Vietnam veteran, what he thought I’d be doing in 10 years. His answer was quick: autographing books. I think David was impressed with the letters I sent him when I lived in another state and a feature story titled Return to Dormalcy that I wrote for a college magazine class.

Using fake names, I described the randy antics and boasts of characters living in the dormitory of a state college in California’s Central Valley. Fearing a libel suit, the professor chose not to run the feature in the magazine. He knew one of the characters.

However, I had only a few life experiences that could inspire a novel. I had debilitating asthma as a child, overprotective parents and a disastrous start in the newspaper business in Florida. Over the years, I focused on my “career” in journalism. After coming home at night, I was often physically and mentally exhausted, too tired to work on a novel.

Inspiration came 12 years ago when I received a dubious assignment while working for a small daily: a weekly profile on local restaurants that followed a format with standard questions. The advertising director came up with the idea, which was poorly thought out. Readers soon complained if I profiled a restaurant that received poor ratings from the health department based on sanitary conditions. The assignment took me away from doing solid reporting.

I wrote five column-length satires in response using an assumed name, only one of which got published. The short story, Realty Check, became the precursor to my novel, We’re Cutting You Loose. A business that can get ugly inspired my “big, beautiful novel.” The novel is a dark satire about the erosion of ethics at a twice-weekly newspaper where the general manager is beholden to the paper’s largest advertiser, a sleazy car dealer, readers be damned. The reporter resigns after refusing to apologize to the car dealer, who threatened to pull his advertising because the reporter asked a question that angered him. The reporter, who took the job after a long period of unemployment, is out of a job once again but retains his integrity.

Many reporters, including some of the best in the business, started their careers at small papers. They gained experience and moved on to bigger papers in a few years if they were talented and lucky. For example, a former co-worker who started his career at his hometown newspaper in the late 1980s is now democracy news editor at The Associated Press.

However, small newspapers can become career graveyards. Over the past several decades, many talented young reporters have left the business after only a few years or even their first job. It was difficult in my experience to produce the quality of clips that impressed the bigger papers. While between jobs nine years ago – the third time in two years -- the city editor at the largest newspaper in Arkansas told me that my clips didn’t “knock my socks off.” I landed a new job a few months later at a small daily in Texas that paid less than an entry-level teacher's salary – nothing unusual in the business – and retired there after reaching Medicare age.

Reporters at small papers toil with low pay, long hours, stress and scant recognition. Given the low pay and work schedule, it could be hard to lead a normal personal life, and being a reporter could be lonely. The idealism of a young reporter can morph in a short time into cynicism.

However, one of the biggest factors in job satisfaction is the caliber of management. I’ve worked under editors who were hacks, sycophants, bullies and sociopaths, or combinations thereof. They operate under the reality that nobody is indispensable. Instead of nurturing careers, they sabotage them. They could place a help-wanted ad in the Los Angeles Times, JournalismJobs.com and other sites and draw more than 100 applicants. Unemployment is an occupational hazard.

I recall working at one small daily in Northern California in the 1980s where management required staff to recommend samples of their work to the annual contest of the California Newspapers Publishers Association. If we had no plans to submit entries, we had to send management a memo to explain why. I suggested a profile on a trans woman who formerly was a father and had a security clearance. It was a rare case where I was allowed to write longer than 15 inches, typically 500 words, and wrote a sensitive feature double that length. After the contest period, I asked my immediate supervisor whether he had entered the feature. “We couldn’t find it” was his lame response. He could have asked me. The paper didn’t win any CNPA awards during my three years on the job.

A few years later at another paper, I was sitting in an editors morning meeting when the color photo of a colleague was projected on a screen. Frank had won a CNPA award for a series exposing corruption in land deals involving private entities that created nature preserves. It was the most impressive work I recall reading from a small newspaper after spending more than 10 years in the business. Instead of praising Frank for his diligence that brought prestige to the paper, the top editor said, “The son of a bitch almost got us sued.”

A few years later, I had a combative relationship with the city editor at a small daily in the California desert. He once wrote a humorous column mocking Whitney Houston’s song I Will Always Love You. I placed a copy of Newsweek with a cover story on Whitney Houston on his desk. He hurled it at me, and after deadline berated me. On other days, he’d say things like, “What do you mean you didn’t know …?” and “You’re interrupting me. I hate it when you interrupt me.” Even worse, he got angry one day after I responded to his regular Today’s Style Note in a computer file named the Wishing Well. I questioned whether sea mammal cave should be hyphenated and signed my message “Today’s Smile Note.” He immediately went on a rampage in a message, accusing the unnamed sender of being a smartass who didn’t have the guts to tell him to his face. He suspected someone else was the culprit. While a co-worker shared photos of her trip to Mexico, the city editor shouted at the suspect to find something else to do. My colleague said the city editor was being personal. “Get out of my face. I’ll kick your ass,” the city editor screamed. The city editor later went into his boss’s office, emerged shortly afterward and spoke apologetically to my colleague. He should have been suspended for a day.

Amid that backdrop I finished my novel and will try to find an agent. Newspaper editors who are good bosses inspire reporters and photographers to work hard and excel in their craft. Bad bosses—and I’ve had many— have appeared in my nightmares and inspired me to write We’re Cutting You Loose. As a caveat, I can add to the disclaimer about the novel being a work of fiction: “I’ll swear on a stack of Mad Magazines that no characters were assassinated in the writing of my novel.”