With the increasing popularity of the blogosphere and other online news sources, print media – from newspapers to magazines to books – is facing a paradigm shift. As this technological movement gains momentum, many editors and journalists, like John Timpane, the Philadelphia Inquirer's commentary page editor, are trying to use these resources to expand both journalism and the public debate. Now, online interactive tools like public forums and ''wikis'' – a form that allows readers to edit or alter any part of an online piece – make public discussions more accessible and more expansive; journalists can receive constant feedback and scrutiny; and more and more people simply have access to news stories.
After earning a B.A. in English at the University of California, Irvine, and a master's and a doctorate in English and the humanities from Stanford, Timpane began teaching college-level English at Rutgers University and La Fayette College, with stints at Ryder and Princeton. A Fulbright Scholar, Timpane has also written several books, including Poetry for Dummies, It Could Be Verse and Writing Worth Reading. In 1995, Timpane initially came to the Philadelphia Inquirer as a writing coach, but when the commentary page editorial position opened up in 1997, his former colleagues encouraged him to apply for the job. Seven years later, Timpane is still the commentary page editor and the editor of Currents, the Inquirer's Sunday magazine.
Timpane recently invited ASK into the Philadelphia Inquirer's ''fish bowl'' in the newspaper's Philadelphia offices to talk about his job as the editor of the commentary page, the writing process and the fate of print media.
: Can you tell me a little more about your job as an editor, and even the differences between being the editor of the op-ed page and the editor of Currents.
John Timpane: My job is to produce a daily commentary page, an op-ed page. It's an opinion page where the opinions are different from the ones that are expressed on the editorial page. The editorial page, which is the left-hand page, is the unsigned editorial written in the name of the Inquirer about news events. If on my op-ed page, which means ''opposite to editorial,'' if I only ran pieces that agreed with the left-hand page, it would be like an echo chamber, and that's no good. I have to find divergent or different opinions – opinions you don't see us taking in the other sections. That means my page is quite a bit to the right of the editorial board. That's another part of my job: I'm one of the editorial writers. I write articles on science, on religion, on the arts, Ireland, South America and a few on Africa.
Even though I write, I still have to make a page everyday, and you have to plan way ahead for what's coming up. My main aims are to have a diverse page that covers the news ''hot off the news.'' That is, if something happens, you can find a good opinion about it on my page. So, the issue of Oregon assisted suicide: you'll find something on my page. Alito: you can find something on my page. On the other hand, I like to throw a lot of curve balls because I think most op-ed pages are too narrow. I run a lot more about philosophy and science and art and things like fashion and music. I just make sure you don't know what I'm going to run. I'm constantly trying to give what you need me to give you, which is opinions off the news, so you, as a reader, feel that you're at the table while the great public debate is happening. By the same token, I'm hoping to give you stuff you haven't thought about and ask you to think about that.
Currents is an idea section, and it's got a philosophy which asks what are the ideas behind what's happening now and what's about to happen. Its orientation is present and near future. It's trying to get ideas to you about what's going to happen over the next 10 to 15 years. It's not the same as the op-ed page because it's focused forward, and it's trying to get you to think about innovation, about where society is going, how we're changing, how do you see that, what are the marks of it. I'm trying to get the best people I can in Sunday's Currents. We have Richard Dawkins writing about why religion is bad. We have theorist Gina Barreca writing about why it always seems that the poor are always our humorists. Why does humor come from the working class? We also have little things. We have something called ''Influences'' where we have a picture and an interview with someone in Philadelphia who's a mover and a shaker. But the questions we ask are ''What are you reading now?'' or ''What's on your nightstand?'' We ask people to give more of themselves in a funny way. We do a quiz on the news, but it's always sort of whimsical. It's different from op-ed. Basically, it forces you to think: ''What are the big issues that are coming up? What should we be thinking about now?'' That's how it's different. It's fun.
: How do you come up with the different story ideas for your pages, and then how do you assign them?
JT: Every day I sit down to 600 pitches. I don't read them all because I don't have any help and because I can't. I look at them according to topic, and I make brutal cuts according to topic. I have to look at what the big things are that are happening out there, and I try to cover them. For example, for tomorrow, Philadelphia has a problem – it's got a murder problem and the numbers are going up. Philadelphia, in a country where violent crime is decreasing – it has been for more than a decade – we can't get the number of murders to go down. They're going up. Kids are getting involved in terrible things, and so I want a piece on this. I've run something on Alito. I've run stuff on Dover. I do run stuff on the War in Iraq because you have to. When I run political stuff, I try to get thoughtful pieces. I look ahead to the future, and I see what's coming up. I try to anticipate rather than react. Also, we only have a certain amount of money, so a lot of time I have to use something from the wire or a syndicate because we can't always pay for something. There are also certain things we have to run because we're in Philadelphia.
My personal vision does drive a lot of my selection as well. I have written and run a lot about car culture. It's just terrible. I drove here for six years from Princeton everyday on I-95. And one day I woke up and thought, ''This is nuts!'' Now, I'm taking the train, and my life is a lot better. I'm sacrificing a little time and convenience, but, I'm feeling better about me, and I'm seeing that the car culture is actually one of the biggest problems we have. But, because it lets us do precisely what we want, we won't say that. It is the elephant in the room. If we didn't have such a dependence on cars, we wouldn't have the debate over oil. Those are stressful things, but it's just the way we choose to live. There was once a New York Times editor who said there are two kinds of op-ed pieces. One is a news piece. A reaction – it has happened or it's going to happen. The other he called a happening, that is, something that everyone has to contend with. Eldercare right now – that's a happening. Now I like those. Trend pieces. What's happening to a lot of people that not enough people are talking about. I'm interested in the news; and, like I said before, the curveball – what are people not talking about.
: You mentioned current events and ''curve ball'' pieces. When writing your own essays, do these things typically dictate what you personally write about? In other words, what's your own creative process?
JT: Yes to all of those things, but it's inevitable that, being in a newspaper, current events will drive what you write. Since I'm here, it must mean I believe in the public forum. I believe that it's better to be informed and engaged than to be less informed and less engaged. I just believe that. We've had a lot of impact, and I don't mean that as an egoist, because, actually, you can't have much of an ego in this job. You really have to leave your ego at the door. I love being edited, and the editing process is really brutal. But it's a good thing, and I believe in responding to what's going on in the world, and if I can make a difference, I'll try.
I don't write political pieces because I'm not supposed to. I'm supposed to stay as publicly neutral as possible, and that's one of the demands of my job. I do have political and religious beliefs, but you shouldn't be able to tell what they are. However, I can comment on a lot of things. Last year, for National Condom Week, I wrote a piece in which I said, ''Well, you know, a lot of the precautions we take in life are related to compassion for others.'' You often think of a precaution as something you take to protect yourself, which is true. But think about life insurance. We do an awful lot of things for others that are also precautions for ourselves. Condom Week was a great time to think about that. I look for opportunities like that – for these ''curve balls'' I mentioned to get people to think more about what's going on. So yes, stuff that goes on, you do want to write about as an editorialist. But sometimes I wake up and I say, ''It's time for this,'' and I'll just write it. One of the things I like about the blog that I have at Dragonfire is there are things I want to write about in a way and at a link that the newspaper has no room for. I like writing, and I've done a lot of spoken word stuff. I was a commentator on an NPR show called ''Been there, done that.'' I've done all sorts of radio, so an audio blog is perfect – a downloadable conversation where I start talking about something. Sometimes, you just walk up and think, ''I want to write about this.'' I'm really very grateful to my bosses at the newspaper; in only one or two cases have they vetoed an idea. They've really given me a long leash. I don't test that leash either. I want to be responsible. I want to be a good journalist. I wasn't a trained journalist. I've never been a reporter, but I think that they think that I have something to share and contribute; and I try to do that. I try to make sure that I report on things. I call people; I make sure people smarter than me take a look at what I'm talking about.
: What about blogs and the internet? How has new technology and the sudden popularity of weblogs and online magazines influenced the media?
JT: I think that, although print media will never completely go away, we should be planning to be mostly virtual within the next five years. We have to increase our interactivity and our freshness. The nice thing about the internet is that it allows us to be fresh. We've always said ''up to the minute news;'' we can be up to the second now. We don't need a single publication schedule. We can inform you and engage you much better than we ever could do in print. Now, print has a fixity and authority that nothing on the web has. Really, most of the web offerings are a form of print. So I think it's a great thing, and I'm trying to help us move more and more to the web. There are a few problems, of course, and some limitations.
One of the problems is how do you make money doing this? Nobody quite knows because almost everything we can provide can be found for free somewhere. I think that's going to change, and I think it's starting to change already. Less and less is being offered for free. I think that's fair. Two generations of people have been raised on the expectation that everything on the web should be free, but there's no right to that. I hate to say that, because I love it too, but there's no right to free anything. If I've worked to find information that isn't anywhere else, and you get it on my website, that is a service and that is something I used expertise to get, just as I used to do when you bought my newspaper. Someone has to come up with a business model that makes people feel good about buying what we do and that provides them with something they can't live without, which I do think newspapers do.
The first limitation is we can't let consumers replace what professionals do. Basically, the L.A. Times tried to do that. They tried to have a webpage that was run by anybody. Of course, people started posting nude pictures of their girlfriends. That's not going to work, and they should've thought about that. What we've been saying is we'll do things like that, but everything gets edited. We're putting together a webpage that's just for us. You and any other reader can come on and join us in what we're doing. It's going to be fun. We're going to have five readers, all whom hate the Inquirer, and they're just going to talk about us everyday and talk about what we did and what we should be doing. Some of it, I'll bring back into the print page. So, we need to make a big distinction between folks who go out and get paid to get news and those who just want to be a part of the conversation. We want the second. We want them to feel that they have more of a home than they ever have before and engage us in conversation. We need that, and I think we'll benefit from it too. We want to make it more democratic, but we can't just have ''anything goes.'' The Washington Post just took down their news blog. The problem is, if I say I won't edit anything that's on my blog page, I'm not liable for anything that's posted there. And yet, it appears underneath the aegis of the Washington Post. I have a terrible choice. I can say I'll edit everything and become liable, or I allow myself to become supermarket trash. We don't want that. We want people to trust us.
The other limitation is that most bloggers don't do a lick of reporting. They're ''pajama-ratti.'' They sit there in their pajamas; they never leave the house; they don't pick up the phone; they don't get experts; they don't gather their own information. What they like to do is to respond to what we do, which is fine. We need that, and I love the blogosphere. I've been reading blogs since before the word existed, and that's part of my job. I've found an awful lot of talent that I've been able to get on my page by looking at the blogosphere. It's great. There are great people out there with interesting points of view. The thing that most of these guys do is they post a paragraph from the New York Times that they think is stupid and then they'll go off on that. That's fine, but that isn't reporting. It's opinion of a certain sort. I like the blogs where the writer is well-informed and open to other points-of-view. The blogosphere is the editorial page, but it's never the news page because bloggers just don't know what they're doing. Everyone is saying, ''Oh! The bloggers have broken so many things!'' Actually, bloggers have only broken about a handful of really good first-line news events. About half of those were broken by advocates of one political party who saw that the other side had made an error.
The first limitation is comportment. The second limitation is there's no reporting. As long as we know what the blog is, that's fine. We need them to tell us what we're doing wrong and we need them to question us. They're a vital transfusion of brilliant new energy into an enterprise that needs it. But the third problem is, to me, the biggest problem, and that is credibility. I get so much crap from people filing facts that they found on the web. I'm responsible for anything that gets on my page, and when someone says, ''I found this on the web,'' I think no you haven't, you found it where? They need to trace it, and if they can't find it, we can't run the piece. You have to know that we do everything we can to give you fresh and accurate figures and facts.
The problem is that the web, so far, hasn't done enough to be either credible or responsible. By responsibility, I mean if you make a mistake you get fired. For example, Drudge has had some great things. A lot of stuff has surfaced up through Drudge. By the same token, he gets an awful lot wrong. For example, he reported that the Pope died three days before he did. If I did that, I would never work in newspapers again. For him, there's no price to pay, and I need the standards to be just as high. I do believe there's a fix to all of these things. In the future, that's what I'm looking for: a virtual world where those things are steady. Then we can have this broader, richer, more inclusive dialogue of engagement and information. Those are the things I really believe in. I think democracy is only as good as its citizens are willing to remain engaged and informed. If citizens decide they'd rather be ignorant, then we're really in a dangerous world, and we're fighting against it. I think you're going to see a world in which visual media and what we think of as the print media and virtual media will be the same thing. There's going to be a cross roads.
The thing most people don't realize is that most other media still rely on the print sources. That's because we have the most people here. We've got 500 news gatherers here. We still turn out almost all of the original reporting you see in the world. I'm not saying CNN doesn't break news; of course it does. But print still is pumping out, especially locally, almost all of the original reporting that you see, about three quarters of it. All the rest, what they're doing is they're giving you the images, and then once the story's established, they can give you that sense of being on top of it moment to moment, which we can't do. In this world that's coming, we will. I actually think that the Philadelphia Inquirer will be a website and a TV station someday. All the time – 24 hours. We'll be a sort of local CNN.com thing. It'll be classy, and it will be exciting, and it will be dependable.
: Lastly, do you have any advice for aspiring writers and journalists?
JT: First one is read. There's no substitute. Read all sorts of stuff. Literature is absolutely indispensable to the education of a professional writer. Make sure you get into poetry and fiction, and that's on top of the other stuff you have to read: all the non-fiction, all the newspapers, all the magazines. Reading is only the way to expand your vocabulary. It's the best way to expand your knowledge base and to see what's out there. Go to your local bookstore and just hang out in the magazine section and find out what people are writing about, and read what they're writing about. See what people are writing about and how they're writing about it and how they approach it – the available styles and attitudes. Watch where people go for their information and how people gather it. That's the center of the reporting enterprise. Where do you go to find out the answers to your questions? Now it's true that there is an intellectual and spiritual side of it, which is formulating the right questions. What are the right questions? When the person asks the right questions, they are speaking for the rest of us. That you just have to learn; you have to watch people doing it.
The other thing you need to do is practice getting smart about something and then write about it. You need an original idea, and you've got to have an opinion. Know about logic and rhetoric, and go out there and get your first assignment. The best way to get started is to get published by a local paper or at an internship in any field. Ask your boss if you can write about what you did during the internship and how it felt and what you got out of it, and ask them to put it in the company newsletter. As you're writing, you'll become more aware of literature and be more savvy and a good writer and a good learner. Get published a lot; ask editors of places you want to work to sit down for an interview with you. Correspond with writers you like, but never use flattery. Always tell them what you want. Basically, go out and play with people who are better than you. They'll teach you humility, and they'll teach you about the business. You have to learn to think the way they think.