Writing About Lives

During my Christmas vacation to San Diego, my former colleagues at The San Diego Union-Tribune, my last newspaper, were completely taken up with this topic. Even though I left five years ago it is saddening to see an industry I loved (and hated) go through a metamorphosis.

Dramatic Losses Force Union-Tribune to Lay Off Employees
By ROB DAVIS Voice Staff Writer (voiceofsandiego.com)

Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008 | The San Diego Union-Tribune laid off 27 employees Tuesday afternoon, including at least five newsroom staffers, the latest cut in a company that has reduced its workforce by 10 percent in the past month.

On top of the layoffs, the Union-Tribune has bought out 76 employees since late December, laid off an additional 14 press room workers and told 18 advertising artists their positions would be outsourced later this year.

The layoffs mark a seminal moment for the local newspaper: visceral evidence of the extent of the company’s financial struggles. While the newspaper has previously acknowledged the challenges posed by an industry-wide financial downturn, it has addressed them through less painful methods, either by enticing employees to leave with voluntary buyouts or by not filling vacant positions.

In a memo to employees, Gene Bell, president and CEO of Copley Press, the La Jolla-based company that owns the Union-Tribune, said the company needed to transform into “a new media company that will regain its footing as an independent and powerful force in the future of our region.”

“Not since the merger of the Union and Tribune over 15 years ago have we faced such wrenching changes,” he wrote. “At the same time, never in our history have we faced revenue losses as dramatic as those of the last 12 months.”

Bell did not say how large the losses were. Those figures are not public because Copley Press is privately held. If the company fails to bring its costs in line with revenues, “we face a slippery slope of ever more difficult measures,” Bell wrote. “Our goal is to avoid sliding down that slope and, instead, to convert our many competitive strengths into new strategies. … [W]e cannot succeed without conserving and redirecting our resources.”
Related Links

Gene Bell’s Memo to Employees

Shrinking Union-Tribune: ‘Doing Less With Less’

Three current or former newsroom staffers confirmed the layoffs include film critic David Elliott, reporter David Washburn, director of photography Andy Hayt, photographer Sean DuFrene and assistant sports editor Michael Rosenthal.

Their layoffs come after the newspaper failed to meet its goals for employee buyouts in December. It aimed to cut 83 positions, but 76 employees took the offer, which included as much as a year’s salary for the most veteran workers.

Copley Press has made cuts throughout its newspaper holdings in the last two years. Citing the burden of estate taxes from company matriarch Helen Copley’s 2004 death, her son, David Copley, sold off smaller newspapers in Ohio, Illinois and the Los Angeles area in 2006. The company began trimming staff at the Union-Tribune in late 2006, when it bought out 45 of its most senior employees.

In total, the Union-Tribune’s newsroom, once estimated at about 360 employees, has lost at least 51 staffers from the layoffs and two rounds of buyouts. Copley Press’s 10-member Washington, D.C. office has been cut in half, losing reporter Marcus Stern, who broke news of the scandal that led to the resignation and jailing of disgraced former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. That coverage won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in 2006.

The cuts have come as the Union-Tribune has continued to struggle to stabilize its plummeting print circulation. The newspaper has lost 19 percent of its Sunday subscribers since 2004.

“Many of us are fortunate to have grown up in a marvelously stable and consistently profitable business,” Bell told employees in the memo. “Unfortunately, all communications media now face destructive competitive forces seldom seen before. Newspapers are not immune.”

Drew Schlosberg, a Union-Tribune spokesman, wrote in a statement that the layoffs marked “difficult times” at the newspaper.

“Any decision to reduce staff is painful,” he wrote, “especially at a family owned business where it means saying goodbye to longtime friends and exceptionally talented colleagues.”

How newspapers got into such a fix, and where they go from here

By Paul E. Steiger
3085 words
29 December 2007
The Wall Street Journal
A1
English
(Copyright (c) 2007, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

It was the fall of 1999, and the newspaper I edited, The Wall Street Journal, was awash in money. Thanks to the dot-com boom and the lush advertising it generated, we were running the presses at full tilt nearly every day, yet had to turn away ads for lack of space.

Even as the good times rolled, two non-newspaper names kept coming up. I recall being stunned to learn that the main place where our own readers checked stock prices was the finance section of Yahoo. A couple of kids from Stanford had launched a search engine called Google. Already, many of my colleagues were using it.

Less than six months later, the tech bubble began to deflate. Hundreds of dot-coms died, taking with them their ad budgets. But the Web industry pushed forward, and within a few years it shredded newspaper business models that had held sway for decades.

That high-tech jolt to my industry wasn’t something I could have imagined on the July day in 1966 when I walked into a factory-like building in San Francisco to start work as a 23-year-old reporter for the Journal. Vintage Linotype machines spat out hot-metal versions of stories a line at a time. An industry of family-owned newspapers was setting off on a momentous period of growing power and profit.

On Thursday I’ll pack my last box and take leave of a place where I’ve spent 26 of my 41 years in journalism, including 16 as managing editor of the Journal. (The other 15 years, 1968 to 1983, I was a reporter and then business editor at the Los Angeles Times.) Today, all around me is an industry in upheaval, with slumping revenues and stocks, layoffs, and takeovers of publishers that a decade ago seemed impregnable. Just this month, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. completed its acquisition of Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s publisher, and real-estate magnate Sam Zell gained effective control of Tribune Co.

The Journal’s editors have asked me to retrace my experiences of the past four decades in search of insights into how all this has happened, what may happen next and the implications of all this change for readers, the nation and society at large.

For readers, the implications are clear: a stark contrast of feast and famine.

The cornucopia of national, international and business news, sports, and especially opinion available free on the Web is rich beyond historical parallel. Anyone with a fact, a comment, a snapshot or a video clip can self-publish and instantly compete with the professionals.

At the same time, the vast array of investigative reporting and foreign correspondence assembled at American newspapers over the past several decades is being cut back at all but a few publications, as papers succumb to the pressure to cut costs.

Many journalists and academics see in these cutbacks a threat to the democratic ideal of a well-informed public. Some urge turning to philanthropy or an expansion of public television as a way to fill the gap. Others have begun to argue for a government subsidy for newspapers — an unlikely prospect for now.

Less clear is how the industry will ultimately be transformed.

Many papers are seeking to leap ahead in adapting to the movement of readers and advertisers to the Internet. This means tightly holding down costs of print publications while leveraging metro papers’ principal unique assets: local reporting staffs and local ad-sales teams.

Cash from newspapers’ own Web offerings has grown fast but needs to grow faster, because at current rates it will be years before it makes up for the slumping inflow from the still-much-larger print side. As Google, Yahoo and similar Internet enterprises suck away ad dollars, many newspaper companies hope to gain new revenue by forming once-unthinkable partnerships with each other and some of these same rivals, particularly Yahoo.

In some ways, what’s happening to the newspaper industry is a return to its past. Less than 50 years ago, American newspapers were in the main relatively small, narrowly profitable, family-owned, locally focused and hotly competitive.

As a kid reporter in California in the ’60s, I heard tales from newsmen and photographers about how, just a few years earlier, they had sat in cars, engines running and radios tuned to police bands, trying to get an edge in covering the next murder. The national and international news would be handled by the wire services. Lurid local photographs on page one were what sold newspapers in that era.

A certain fast-and-loose, devil-may-care attitude often prevailed. I remember walking past a photographer’s open car trunk and noticing that he carried a well-preserved but very dead bird among his cameras and lenses. The bird, he explained, was for feature shots on holidays like Memorial Day. He’d perch it on a gravestone or tree limb in a veterans’ cemetery to get the right mood. Nowadays such a trick would get him fired, but in the 1950s, this guy said, there was no time to wait for a live bird to flutter into the frame.

Then, beginning in the 1960s, the industry morphed into a series of mini-monopolies. First, mounting costs forced a shakeout — mergers and newspaper closings that typically left one city paper preeminent in the morning market and another in the evening.

For a while, the evening franchise had a slight edge: People had more time to read then. In a twinkling, that advantage disappeared, crushed by a phenomenon that can be summed up in two words: Walter Cronkite. More and more families gathered in front of the tube at the dinner hour.

The morning papers then got a boost, a surge in women readers. As baby boomers reached school age, their mothers could sit back for a moment with a second cup of coffee and read sections aimed squarely at them.

Soon, in city after city, the leading morning newspaper came to dominate and often eliminate its rivals, reaping comfortable margins in the process. Before long, these were linking up in multibillion-dollar, multi-city chains, building publicly traded companies with rising profits and stocks. Some acquired TV stations as well.

Many of these information behemoths invested heavily in quality, expanding their reporting locally, nationally and internationally. This was good business as well as a boon to readers, because it raised barriers to entry for would-be competitors.

The result was a golden age of American journalism. In New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles, of course, yet also in Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Milwaukee, Atlanta, St. Louis, Des Moines, Louisville, St. Petersburg and more, daily papers were willing to send reporters far afield in pursuit of stories exposing corruption or explaining the world. Newspapers opened or expanded Washington bureaus and added reporters abroad. Some stationed them not just in London, Moscow and Tokyo but in places like Sydney and Sao Paulo.

As their financial strength and staff size increased, they became fearless in pursuing corruption. A 1964 Supreme Court decision, New York Times v. Sullivan, protected publishers from libel judgments by public officials even if what was published was inaccurate, so long as the paper didn’t know the article was inaccurate and wasn’t reckless about what it published.

The news operations of the three main television networks in those days followed a similar pattern. As profits grew, they added to staff and launched foreign bureaus and investigative projects. The Sunday-night magazine program CBS launched in 1968, “60 Minutes,” set a new standard for expensively produced and deeply reported video journalism.

The public seemed to approve. Intrepid journalists proliferated in films like “All the President’s Men,” depicting Washington Post reporters’ exposure of Watergate. Enrollments in journalism schools surged, as well as applications for reporting jobs.

They were heady times indeed. When the L.A. Times investigated suspected gasoline hoarding during fuel shortages in 1979, one reporter got the idea of flying over refineries and tank fields to look for evidence. As the editor running the coverage, I asked my bosses for approval to hire helicopters or small planes for a story. The answer: Go right ahead.

In the end, we didn’t. Our reporting showed that most of the hoarding was by people like our own readers, who’d taken to driving with their gas tanks always full. But the lesson was clear: When it came to getting an important story, don’t worry about the cost.

I don’t remember exactly when cracks began to appear in this halcyon life. At most big papers, circulation, revenue and profits grew through the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, with recessionary pauses that weren’t excessively fretted over.

Around the time of the 1980 slump, L.A. Times editors were told they needed to impose modest spending restraints. I figured out I could meet my target just by eliminating first-class travel on my group’s reporting trips, then allowed on flights of more than three hours or so. I was quite proud of myself until the next day, when the top editor of the entire paper, who only occasionally visited our floor, strode straight to my desk. “I like flying first class,” he said with a grin. “You’re setting a bad example.” I found another way to reach my goal.

In the mid-1980s, when I was a deputy managing editor at the Journal, the Dow Jones CEO almost apologetically imposed limits on our then-ample spending, in the face of cyclical advertising cutbacks by financial firms. As the CEO quipped, referring to then-managing-editor Norman Pearlstine, “We gave Norm an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it.”

In those days, we worried quite a bit about television. Survey after survey showed that, with each year, more Americans were getting their news there. While that made circulation growth tougher to achieve, ad revenue continued to rise, as newspaper readers generally had better incomes.

Cable TV added a new worry, because here was a medium that could target smaller, exclusive audiences and thus pose a greater challenge to print. Even so, newspaper revenue continued its growth.

Then in the 1990s came the digital networks and the Internet, unleashing forces that would ultimately undermine newspaper business models that had been so supportive of journalism. First came dial-up, then a few years later the Internet, and by 1995, dozens of newspapers, including the Journal, had online editions.

Early leaders of the Journal’s online edition privately referred to it as “the paper killer,” to the great annoyance of print colleagues when they found out. But the phrase was apt: The Web could deliver words and numbers at nearly the speed of light without the cost of printing, paper or delivery trucks, all searchable and archivable.

In response, newspapers sought to do three things: cut costs, diversify and, above all, embrace the new technology and dominate it. After all, in the 1940s and 1950s, the leading radio networks had become the leading television networks. Why couldn’t newspapers copy that model?

They certainly tried.

Cost-cutting first followed a path set in the 1970s, of using computers to eliminate jobs downstream from the newsroom. Today, nothing but electrons stands between the minds and hands of the journalists and the photographic image used to produce a printing plate. But those cuts often weren’t enough, and publisher after publisher turned to hiring freezes, buyouts and ultimately layoffs. The reductions have fallen particularly heavily on foreign and investigative or “project” reporting, which are among the most expensive categories to produce.

Diversification typically took the route of investments in television stations, cable systems, satellite, book publishing and other domains at least notionally related to newspapers. Some were successful, some not.

Publishers’ Internet ventures almost always had limited success, at least at the outset. Part of the problem was that those in charge of print advertising and circulation were suspicious of their counterparts on the online side, and vice versa. At the Journal, I saw it often.

At one point, the print folks suggested that online subscriptions be awarded free to print subscribers. It was an idea, the online folk retorted, that relegated their site to “toaster status,” as in savings banks giving away cheap gifts for opening an account.

In turn, the online people wanted renewal mailings to print customers to include a line soliciting a paid subscription to the Journal’s Web edition. The print side resisted mightily, fearing that adding any new option to the form would cause some customers to delay responding long enough to trigger a costly follow-up mailing.

A bigger problem was that newspapers often sought to copy fairly closely on the Web what they did in print, rather than offer new products taking full advantage of digitization. The most creative new products came mainly from enterprises with little connection to newspapers. And soon, if you named almost any bit of data you used to rely on papers for — sports scores, weather, stocks, movie times — there were Web sites offering more information faster, and free.

The decisive blow may have been Google’s, with its powerful search engine that would either give you a quick answer to a question you had or steer you to sites that could. The irony, of course, was that some of the most useful of those sites were newspapers’.

Papers remained quite profitable, for the most part. But as the future began to look increasingly troubled, one publisher’s stock after another got hammered, starting around the turn of the century.

Especially hard hit were publishers of prestigious newspapers. Dow Jones stock was at less than half its high before News Corp. made its successful bid for the Wall Street Journal publisher last spring. Times-Mirror fell more than 50% before being acquired by Tribune Co., which in turn has fallen around 45% from its high. Knight Ridder fell 20% from its high before its acquisition by McClatchy, which now trades at around 80% below its peak. New York Times Co. is near an 11-year low. Washington Post Co. is about 20% below its top.

Some publishers with less-prestigious papers have done better. Scripps and Cox have diversified successfully into cable networks and cable systems, respectively. Thomson sold all its newspapers and became a financial-market, legal and medical data company before reaching a merger agreement with Reuters this year. News Corp. leveraged its Australian newspaper business to acquire not only newspapers but also a movie studio, television, cable, satellite TV and Web interests around the world. It picked up the prestigious Times of London along the way, and the Journal after its transition to a global media company.

Why this divide? It could be that operators of high-prestige newspapers were more reluctant to risk the franchise, even under a level of financial duress that would provoke many managements to bet the farm in pursuit of a radical opportunity.

What happens next? Change, rapid and largely unpredictable. Nearly every company in the industry needs major new revenue, big cost reductions or a healthy dollop of each. The people and entities to watch most closely are:

– The entrepreneurs, Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Zell. Mr. Murdoch has vast experience in media generally and newspapers in particular, controls major financial resources and has big plans to expand the Journal — in print and online, domestically and overseas. Mr. Zell used financial engineering to control Tribune Co. with minimal investment of his own, has little media experience and isn’t likely to spend much on his new properties. Both are decisive investors and operators. They aren’t always successful, but it’s unwise to bet against them.

– New York Times Co. Mr. Murdoch has said he’ll use the Journal to steal a portion of the general-news and cultural-news franchises of Times Co.’s eponymous flagship newspaper. But entities fight hardest defending their home turf, and the Times has both a strong, growing Web site and a Sunday edition that remains an advertising monster. It will be under pressure to follow some of the cost cutting its sister Boston Globe has done. Pure conjecture: Assuming that New York Mayor and Bloomberg LP owner Mike Bloomberg isn’t U.S. president-elect a year from now, would he and Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. consider putting their two enterprises together?

– Hearst Corp. After the inheritors of William Randolph Hearst’s empire lost their bet on evening papers in the 1960s, they bulked up their revenue from magazines like Cosmopolitan, diversified smartly in TV (including a 20% stake in ESPN, now worth roughly $6 billion), and stayed in newspapers but with a close eye on profit. With four metro papers, like the Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle, and eight smaller ones, Hearst is in the vanguard of figuring out ways to exploit newspapers’ local-reporting strengths, both in print and online.

Hearst has helped forge a partnership involving a consortium of newspaper companies and sometime-nemesis Yahoo. The idea is that together they can offer advertisers total coverage of various metropolitan areas, and feed readers back and forth. Question: Are these going to be best friends forever or a cobra and a mongoose?

Final word: Next week I move over to a nonprofit called Pro Publica as president and editor-in-chief. When fully staffed, we will be a team of 24 journalists dedicated to reporting on abuses of power by anyone with power: government, business, unions, universities, school systems, doctors, hospitals, lawyers, courts, nonprofits, media. We’ll publish through our Web site and also possibly through newspapers, magazines or TV programs, offering our material free if they provide wide distribution.

Pro Publica is the brainchild of San Francisco entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists Herbert and Marion Sandler, who along with some other donors are providing $10 million a year in funding.

The idea is that we, along with others of similar bent, can in some modest way make up for some of the loss in investigative-reporting resources that results from the collapse of metro newspapers’ business model.

A few nights ago, I was walking in central Harlem at 139th and Frederick Douglass when I saw dozens of police cars swirling around something.

As I got closer I could see blood spilled onto the streets and a young Latino male laying beneath a police car. He had to be in his late 20s, early 30s. From the way the cops were acting, he was already dead. Then, when I saw rescue workers cover him up under a white sheet and carry him away, I knew he was dead. It’s one thing to see that kind of a thing on Law & Order. It’s quite another to see it for yourself. It was hard to know if the blood was from gun shot wounds or a knife.

Then I read the following chilling account in The New York Times:

One Dead After Attack on Transit Worker
By AL BAKER

A New York City Transit worker walking home after a late shift, three muggers armed with a curved knife and a bystander who somehow got caught in the middle: they all converged on a dark and rainy street in Upper Manhattan late Thursday in a blood-soaked frenzy that left the bystander stabbed to death and two others — including the transit worker — hospitalized.

Hours after the midnight attack on West 139th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, detectives were still trying to sift through the details of the deadly encounter.

As the day wore on, it appeared that the bystander, Flonarza M. Byas, got involved either as a good Samaritan trying to help the struggling transit worker, Maurice Parks, or inadvertently collided with the mugging. Earlier theories — that he might have been one of the assailants or that he might have jumped in to prey on the conductor once the muggers knocked him down — were being discounted.

One thing was clear: As of late Friday, investigators said it appeared that the subway motorman was a victim who decided to fight back — just as officials said he did when he was mugged in the city in 1994.

This time, Mr. Parks was attacked from behind, hit on the side of the head and knocked to the ground after he emerged from the subterranean subway tunnels at West 135th Street and walked about three blocks, the police said. Once down, the assailants started beating Mr. Parks and took a denim bag he had packed with clothes and papers. The muggers — detectives believe there were three men in all — pulled a knife and Mr. Parks pulled one too, the police said.

The conductor apparently carried the blade for just this reason, so he could defend himself, one law enforcement official said. But who stabbed whom first in this case is an open question.

When the blades were wielded, the tally of wounds was long: Mr. Parks, 39, of Manhattan, was stabbed in the abdomen and slashed in the hands; Mr. Byas, 28, was stabbed in the chest, back and leg; and Hector Cruz, 21, was stabbed twice in the abdomen, the police said.

The official said that investigators believe Mr. Parks was stabbed by Mr. Cruz and that he — in turn — stabbed Mr. Cruz and Mr. Byas. The police said they believed Mr. Byas was homeless and said he had received a summons an hour before the attack for trespassing in a nearby park. But Mr. Byas’s fiancé and his brother each insisted he had been employed as an accountant and was not homeless.

“He was a really good person, a person I really loved a lot,” said Stephanie C. Diaz, 22, who said she and Mr. Byas were engaged to be married last year. “We had a lot of plans for us; it’s just hard to see that go away.”

One official said Mr. Byas “wandered into the middle of it, unbeknownst to the victim, Parks.” The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said that Mr. Parks appeared to believe Mr. Byas was an assailant so he stabbed him. “That is what it looks like,” the official said.

Another official said another possibility is that Mr. Byas might have mistook Mr. Parks for a criminal.

“It’s possible he thought Parks was the aggressor,” the second official said of Mr. Byas. “He probably stepped in to help, but it might have been difficult to tell who was the aggressor and who was the victim, Parks or the others.” The official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, added of Mr. Byas: “He could have been stabbed by both of them, for all we know.”

In the chaos, 911 calls were made. When uniformed police officers from the 26th Precinct arrived on the street in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood they were flagged down by Mr. Cruz, who was bleeding, and Leandro Ventura, 15, who initially characterized themselves as victims. Mr. Parks and Mr. Byas were lying on the ground next to one another less than a block away to the west. Mr. Parks identified Mr. Ventura as one of his assailants, the police said, and the three wounded men were taken by ambulance to Harlem Hospital Center, where Mr. Byas pronounced dead at 12:46 a.m.

Mr. Ventura, meanwhile, was taken into custody and interviewed at the precinct station house, the police said. He was later charged with first-degree robbery, even though his relatives said he was being wrongly accused.

“He implicates himself in robbing, but tries to put himself away from the stabbing,” the first official said of Mr. Ventura, adding that investigators believe Mr. Cruz was wielding the knife.

Two knives were recovered as evidence — the folding knife with a curved blade and a straight knife that Mr. Parks is believed to have pulled from his pocket. Detectives were seeking a third assailant whom the responding officers initially saw, but who is believed to have fled. They were checking video cameras of nearby stores.

As for Mr. Parks, a conductor who became a transit worker in 1997, he was recovering after surgery on Friday, his mother and a spokesman for his union said.

Officials said it was not likely he would be charged criminally.

In New York, it is legal for someone to carry a knife provided the state penal law does not define it as illegal, such as a switchblade or a gravity knife, for example, according to prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys. Many objects — such as a legal knife or a baseball bat — can be classified as a “dangerous instrument” if they are used in a crime, the analysts said.

“It’s a common question in criminal cases, whether what someone had in their possession fits the definition of these few illegal knives, or whether they knew that the knife was illegal,” said Thomas M. O’Brien, an attorney with the special litigation unit of the city’s Legal Aid Society, who said he could not comment on the case in Manhattan. “Just having an ordinary knife is not a crime.”

At Mr. Parks’s bedside was Roger Toussaint, the president of the Transport Workers Union, Local 100, said the union spokesman, Jesse Derris. Transit workers were seen on Friday coming and going from the hospital at Lenox Avenue and 135th Street.

And Mr. Parks’ mother, Mona Parks, 57, who lives in the Bronx, spoke outside the hospital, saying she was upset that her son had been so seriously hurt, but relieved he had survived. She said she had spoken to him and that he whispered that he wanted some water as he slowly regained consciousness after surgery.

“I’m glad he did what he did, otherwise he’d be dead,” said Ms. Parks. Mr. Derris said Mr. Parks, “works vacation relief, meaning he covers different lines on the numbered trains when people are on vacation.” He works nights, Mr. Derris said, and got off work at about 11:23 p.m. on Thursday.

Ms. Parks and a martial arts instructor, Little John Davis, said Mr. Parks was a dedicated student of martial arts and was physically fit. “I’m sad that it happened,” Mr. Davis said. “But it’s good that somebody had some training to be able to take care of themselves.”

Ms. Parks said her son is not reckless and that his heroics were borne of necessity.

“If he had an opportunity to run he would’ve run, but there were four of them,” she said, apparently mistakenly including Mr. Byas in the group of assailants. At Mr. Ventura’s home at West 141st Street, the teenager’s older brother defended him. George A. Ventura, 21, said his brother was walking home from playing basketball in St. Nicholas Park when he saw the altercation and stopped to help one of the stabbed men who was screaming for help. Mr. Ventura said his brother flagged down a police car.

“I know he had nothing to do with it,” said Mr. Ventura, who said his brother is a student at Washington Irving High School. “I know his friends, I’ve never seen my brother hanging with older dudes in my life.” He added: “He’s a good kid, he’s not a troubled dude, he always listens.”

George Ventura said that the police called the family home after the incident and that when he and his mother, Yolanda Escoto, went to the precinct, officers said the teenager was a witness. It was not until Friday morning that the family learned he was a suspect, said George Ventura.

The teenager’s lawyer, Ismael Gonzalez, said, “He’s going to plead not guilty to the charges.”

Relatives of Mr. Cruz also came to visit him at the hospital. “He’s a good kid,” said his sister, who declined to provide her name. “He was hanging out with the wrong people.”

This story is compliments of thevoiceofsandiego.com

Union-Tribune Cutting More Newsroom Employees
By ROB DAVIS Voice Staff Writer

Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2007 | A year after buying out 19 of its most senior newsroom employees, The San Diego Union-Tribune is again reducing its news staff. This time, the cuts are deeper.

The newspaper aims to cut 43 employees in a newsroom of approximately 360 people, a 12 percent reduction in reporters, editors and photographers. Forty employees from other departments are also being targeted in a company of 1,422.

In a Monday memo to employees, the newspaper outlined a menu of staff cuts its management wants to make: nine metro reporters (from a pool that one newsroom source estimated at 75), three columnists, three critics, two photographers and 12 editors or supervisors. If voluntary buyouts are not successful, the memo said the paper would take an “involuntary” approach — layoffs.

The cuts come as the local newspaper’s print circulation has dropped precipitously, echoing a nationwide trend. As people grow more comfortable reading newspapers online, they’re canceling their print subscriptions. Since 2004, the paper has lost 19 percent of its Sunday subscribers, despite aggressively marketing the product, offering two Sunday papers for the price of one.

“This is obviously an organization that is fighting for survival,” said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University. “We’ve all watched papers become fractions of themselves and send themselves into irrelevance. That’s the risk. Will there be a paper? Yeah. Will there be a good paper? That’s the question.”

Cuts have touched nearly every facet of the company. Citing the burden of estate taxes from company matriarch Helen Copley’s 2004 death, her son, David Copley, sold off smaller newspapers in Ohio, Illinois and the Los Angeles area last year.

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45 Take Buyouts at U-T (Dec. 19, 2006)

U-T Buyout Offer
Since then, Copley Press’s 10-member Washington, D.C. staff has shrunk, losing at least six of its 10 staffers. Two key reporters who contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of disgraced former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham have left the Washington bureau.

The company could cut more reporters and editors. In the memo to employees, the newspaper said it had only outlined the “minimum” number of reductions it will make.

“As you know, we have taken a number of cost-cutting steps in response to the economic challenges facing our industry,” the memo to employees states. “… Still, it is clear that we must cut costs further. The [buyout program] is one of the several steps we will take to reach that goal.”

Employees can begin submitting applications for the first-come, first-serve buyouts on Wednesday morning. They’ll receive 2.5 weeks of pay for every year they’ve worked — with a maximum of a year’s salary and six months of health benefits. The 19 veteran employees who left last year got a richer severance package, which included 18 months of pay and a full year of health benefits.

“We must make significant changes in our business and aggressively move to bring our organization in line with the needs of the future,” Drew Schlosberg, a company spokesman, said in a written statement. “The voluntary separation program is part of this effort.”

Some employees are not eligible for the buyouts, an indication of the newspaper’s core strategy for future news coverage. Its environment and politics reporters, breaking news team, computer-assisted reporting specialists, sports columnists, copy editors and editorial cartoonist cannot take the buyout. Nor can employees of its Internet site, SignOnSanDiego.com.

“You can see what they’re saying they still value,” Nelson said. “And they’re obviously saying we can no longer be covering all things about this town. The fact that SignOn is protected I think says a lot. Because that’s where the future is.”

The reductions underscore a paradox that is common among newspapers today: They are cutting quality but hoping to improve their bottom line. Tim Wulfemeyer, a journalism and media studies professor at San Diego State University, said the Union-Tribune was taking a risk with that approach.

“If it continues to damage the quality of the product, it may end up in worse shape,” Wulfemeyer said. “When it all comes down to it, quality, credibility, believability and image is about 90 percent of what journalism has to sell to the public. When that starts to erode, people start to turn to other sources for their information.”

When I first arrived at The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1998, I immediately got acquainted with Caitlin Rother, a serious-minded investigative reporter who made certain public figures quake when they heard the words, “This is Caitlin Rother,” on their telephone. In the course of getting to know her, I learned that every Sunday for eight years she wrote her novel, while holding a full-time reporting job. There was no publisher on the horizon. We bonded over writing, took a class on writing the nonfiction book proposal, and the rest is history.

Almost ten years later, Caitlin’s first book, a true crime story Poisoned Love, received a tremendous boost when the E! Entertainment Network featured Caitlin and her book on a documentary “Women Who Kill.” Her first novel, Naked Addiction, comes out this month. Her first hardback work, Twisted Triangle, a nonfiction crime story comes out next spring. She has already started writing the fourth book, Killer With a Conscience, and, in her spare time, is working on another novel. There’s no stopping this woman.

1. Congratulations on publishing your first novel, Naked Addiction. I know how difficult fiction can be. What motivated you to work on this for so many years without any promise it would ever be published?

Thank you. I almost had an out-of-body experience when I first heard it was going to be published. Writing fiction has always been one of my passions, which I fed by writing short stories long before I became a journalist. I’ve always felt a certain indescribable freedom and joy from delving into my imagination and playing out the what-ifs. I also gain a deep feeling of satisfaction when I am able to articulate a truly esoteric vision, especially when I manage to do it — often after many rewrites, I might add — in an artful way. In the 17 years leading up to the publication of this book, I managed to find enough hope in the small victories — I am also a very goal-directed person — that I was able to continue to improve it. For a long time, I wanted to publish a book more than anything else in the world and every time I thought it wasn’t going to happen, I’d see another sign that maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t give up just yet. I believe that persistence and the ability to pick myself up after each rejection were the two keys to getting published.

2. People always want to know where novelists draw their inspiration and motivation. Where do you find yours?

I find inspiration in many places. With Naked Addiction, the original inspiration came from a crime story I wrote for the Springfield Union-News. I barely remember the details now. But I do remember this: a young woman, who happened to be an old friend of my then-boyfriend, was murdered in New York City and my boyfriend took me to her wake. That true-crime story worked as a creative catalyst that led me to create the character of Tania, the first murder victim, and the plot built from there. As I continued to rethink the characters and rewrite various scenes over the years, I drew from my own feelings, experiences and spiritual discoveries that happened along the way. Also, because I’m writing in a crime genre, I also drew from my growing investigative reportorial knowledge as well as news events and trends going on in the world around me. I have a few favorite themes that seem to make their way into my fictional stories and also play a part in the non-fiction stories I choose to write about. Those include drugs, sex, suicide, mental illness, addiction and ethical conflicts. Yes, I know, all very uplifting topics.

3. How did you get interested in writing fiction?

Growing up as an only child, I told myself stories, talked to myself in the mirror as different characters, and read lots of fiction and comic books to keep myself amused. Later, I added movies into the mix. I just love stories and storytelling. I started writing fiction before I was a journalist, as a hobby, really. It became more important about two or three years into my newspaper career because it provided a creative outlet, a therapeutic one if you will, because it provided some relief from the analytical thinking and fact-finding that was draining my life energy at the newspaper. I thought that after writing as many as four stories in a day that I did not have the time to spend any more time writing at night or on weekends. But I was wrong. Writing fiction energized me, keeping me up late at night, as the plot for what ultimately became this novel unfolded on my notepad. It was like a drug. I enjoy writing nonfiction, too, but for some reason, perhaps because I worked for 20 years as a newspaper reporter, the intoxicating high it produces is not quite as strong.

4. And how does the writing process differ from when you’re writing nonfiction?

With both kinds of writing, although more for fiction, I find myself in “the zone” if I am having a good day. By the same token, it is much harder to write fiction in spurts because I lose my train of thought and I can forget where I’m going with the plot or a character’s motivation. Both forms of writing require a lot of thinking before I can even sit down at the computer. Deciding how to tell a story, what parts in what order, is always difficult. Nonfiction is more challenging in some ways because it requires so much research before I can determine the best way to present that information in a narrative form. With nonfiction, I usually know where the story ends, but with fiction, I often seem to end up somewhere different than I’d planned — regardless of any outline I might make — because the characters often take over and go in their own directions. Some of them can be pretty headstrong. That’s how I get my twists and turns. Most of them aren’t planned; they’re as much a surprise to me as they are, hopefully, to the reader.

5. It has been said that most writers have an inclination toward one genre. What are your leanings and why?

To be honest, I can’t even choose between fiction and nonfiction let alone between genres within those larger categories. For the moment, I’m focusing on true crime stories and mysteries/thrillers, but in the future I hope to branch out in other directions. I’ve always lived in a world of gray, a world where, thankfully, I have many choices. I guess I’m lucky in that way. I enjoy doing both fiction and nonfiction, and so, for as long as I am able — and I mean that from a practical, financial standpoint and what the market tells me — I’m going to try to publish both. I know I would miss one if I just focused on the other. After covering a lot of politics and government, corruption and the spin cycle of campaigns as a watchdog journalist, writing thrillers seems a bit less relevant to society at large. Commercial fiction may be geared more toward entertainment purposes, but I do try to incorporate some deeper messages. I’ve heard the opinion that journalists who write about true crime are “predators,” preying on the tragedy of families or glorifying violence, but I believe I have a higher calling. I chose the nonfiction stories that illustrate the psychological aspects of the human condition and the extremely important issues of life and death, trust, betrayal and the utter devastation a crime can cause, not just to the victim’s family but to the criminal defendant’s as well. To me, all of this is just as meaningful and relevant to society, if not more so, than some city council race. I think I can touch on these issues in my fiction as well.

6. Your background as a journalist provides a wealth of stories and the wherewithal to verify information. What are the hurdles in making the journey from newspaper writing to fiction?

It seems much easier for me to write about things that are based on truth, things I know, events I’ve experienced or witnessed, rather than stories or characters that are based on fantasy, pulled from my imagination. I guess that’s where the adage comes from, “write what you know.” The good thing about being a journalist and a fiction writer is that if I don’t know what a character would do in a certain situation, I’m well-versed in finding the right person to ask. I guess the biggest challenge for me is to let go of the “truth” and to be purely creative. Sometimes I feel like I’m scared to go deep enough because we journalists are taught to keep our own feelings out of what we write. That is one of my personal and professional goals: to encourage myself to go deeper toward a larger truth, the one that is inside me, the one that I was not allowed to express overtly as a reporter. Being a journalist is safer, frankly, because you’re quoting what other people think and feel. But with fiction, everyone knows that you must’ve come up with that idea or experience somehow or other. It can leave me feeling, well, naked.

7. In a very short amount of time you’ve written three books with a fourth one on the way. What is your time management secret?

Have no life. I’m joking, but I’m also not joking. I’ve only just realized lately that I’m a workaholic. Apparently I’m the last one to know because it was obvious to everyone else around me. I’ve had to work very hard to get where I am. Holding down a full-time job as an investigative newspaper reporter was at times very stressful and draining, both physically and emotionally. Writing fiction on the weekends and then later working on book proposals and promoting my first book was essentially a second job. Eventually, when the workload forced me to make a choice, I had already choreographed the first and possibly second years of my new career by planning ahead and setting in motion a number of contingencies. I don’t want to say I sacrificed a personal life, but I haven’t had as much of one as many other people I know. I’ve always enjoyed working. It’s fun for me. But I’m also learning that having a more balanced life will be necessary for me to continue from here on out. I’m actually working very hard to relax and slow down (yes, pun intended) because this is a marathon, not a sprint. The more concrete answer to your question is that I make lots of lists and I spin many plates at once, coordinating many tasks according to the time needed, so that I can meet all of my deadlines. I would make the analogy that coordinating the researching, writing, copyediting and then the promoting of books is like cooking a complicated meal. You have to be careful not to let anything burn or get soggy and to make sure that the food is served on time so that your guests want to come back.

8. What’s the biggest misperception about someone who writes books full-time?

Some people have told me I’m living their dream because of all the freedom I have and because I can do what I love while working for myself. Much of that is true, but there is a flip side. Yes, I can come and go as I please. I have “offices” at the bagel place and at the pool at my gym. I can take a walk on the beach or around my neighborhood and consider it part of my work day because I get some heavy thinking done during those strolls. But the truth is, this new career I’ve chosen is an extremely isolated existence. I’ve had to completely rebuild my support system and I’ve lost connections with friends I’ve had for years. I also have been under constant deadlines, many overlapping for different projects, and frankly, I am a much tougher boss and taskmaster than most bosses I’ve had. And when I tell myself not to work so hard, I run the danger of feeling guilty that I haven’t gotten enough done or fast enough. With a newspaper job, you’re often on deadline, but it’s only for a short time and then it’s over. You get a break. But when you write a book, you have a deadline hanging over your head every minute, for months at a time, until you hit the SEND button. Maybe that’s not a misperception for other people, but it’s certainly been a discovery to me.

9. Knowing what you know now about making a career switch, what would you do differently?

Nothing. My philosophy is to live life, if possible, without regrets, which means I try to think long and hard before I make a decision and once I do I deal with it. The only thing I will do differently in the future is try to pace myself better so that I don’t have to juggle so many projects at once. One of my editors told me I was crazy to do what I was doing, but I had no way of knowing how much work I would be faced with until it was on my plate in front of me. I could never have predicted some of the things that happened to me over the past year since I left the newspaper — good and bad — partly because I’m still learning about the publishing world, partly because I don’t have a crystal ball, and also because every project is different and comes with its own set of personalities and unique challenges.

10. Which job is the hardest, being a reporter or author?

Apart from the constant deadline pressure, I find that my short-term memory these days is clogged pretty damn full of details, many of which will never even get into the book. I’m also keeping track of the tasks I need to complete and problems I’m trying to work out in my head. I didn’t have that problem as much when I was a reporter until and unless the investigative stories started stacking up. I think being an author is harder in many ways, but I was definitely at the point in my life when I was ready to make the switch. I don’t think I could have become an author without spending all those years as a reporter, gathering knowledge and experience and improving my writing, speed and organizational skills. I don’t regret a minute of any of it. Onward.

For more information on Caitlin and her books, go to http://caitlinrother.com/

On Saturday night I was sitting outside the Hearst Building, at a building across the street, taking a load off when I heard a woman a few feet away from me scream. The scream resonated enough to cause me to get up from my seat. In fact, I knew just why she was screaming.

Anybody who knows me knows I HATE rats, but they are all around this lovely city. I’ve seen big rats in Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri. The rural ones seem to keep their distance. There’s nothing like a New York City rat. Their presence paralyze me. Walking along the sidewalks on trash night I often opt to take the streets because it’s not uncommon to see three or four digging through the trash. The sound of rustling plastic means take the street or even cross the street. I seem to be a magnet for their presence.

I’ve seen them in my building, (Not my apartment but in the hallways). Look in the subway tracks for about five minutes and one will scurry along.

But when the woman screamed, she might as well have said “A rat!” The vibe from the scream said it for her though. Within seconds, a gigantic, at least foot long gray rat, was exactly where I had been sitting. He didn’t flinch that humans were around.

As I crossed the street I saw the screamer.

“You know, I was just saying to myself ‘I sure hope there aren’t any rats around here.’ No sooner than I said that I see this big thing.”

“I’m glad you saw it and said something. I see them all the time in New York,” I added. “So much for my little break.”

In July 2006 I spent a month researching and musing in Salt Lake City, reflecting upon what my life had been like living as a black journalist in Utah in the early 1990s. Walking the streets of downtown Salt Lake City, so much had changed. The new light rail system made navigating about the valley easier. Main Street, which had once been the most important commercial vein, was all but dead, a victim to a new mall several blocks west. And I noticed significantly more black people.

During my research, I met a Katrina survivor who was among the 600 evacuees who had been air-lifted from Louisiana after the Hurricane. “We didn’t know where we were going. We just were so glad to get on the plane and to be getting out of New Orleans. Then the pilot said, ‘We hope you enjoy your flight to Salt Lake City.’ Everybody said ‘Salt Lake City? Are there any black people in Salt Lake City?” As this woman told me her story, I knew that the evacuees would have there own narratives about what it was like to live in Utah as a black person. Filmmaker Alex LeMay has captured that experience. He sent a crew out to Salt Lake City and spent two years chronicling the stories in his new film “Desert Bayou.”

New Orleans and Salt Lake City couldn’t be more different. NO is below sea level. SLC isn’t. NO is mostly black. SLC is mostly white. NO has a reputation for being politically liberal. SLC has a reputation for being politically conservation. (Note, reputation, because it has a Democratic mayor and the highest percentage of registered Democrats in the entire state.)

Without ruining it, I will say it is a smart film conceptually. Spike Lee has already made what will be by many the Katrina film “When the Levees Broke,” a powerful, devastating and emotional film. Trying to redo that would have been pointless. LeMay has made a truly brave innovative but slightly flawed film. His movie attempts to answer a question that only a handful of us know the answers to: What is it like to be black living in a place like Utah?

LeMay covers a lot of material, from their arrival into Salt Lake City International Airport, their seclusion at The Camp Williams
National Guard training site 26 miles south of Salt Lake City and in the end focused on two families who struggled with transitioning to life in the Intermountain West. The fact that he got Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., and Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson on camera talking about some unflattering events, shows the power and seduction of film. That Anderson spoke is not a surprise but that Huntsman spoke is miraculous.

By the end, the film felt a little fractured, which may have to do with the editing. All in all, this is a powerful documentary on a race and class, something about which there is very little content in the popular cultural landscape. This film showcased the kindness of ordinary people, the awkwardness of the military and the state and federal government. After the screening in Manhattan last Friday night, LeMay himself conducted a question and answer session. Once I heard his views on government, it is remarkable how even handed this movie is. It is a movie worth seeing. http://www.desertbayoumovie.com

My good friend Cupcake Brown, whose memoir “A Piece of Cake,” chronicled her journey through foster care, street gangs, drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution to the world of corporate law at one of the nation’s biggest firms, has resigned.

In her own words:

“The decision to leave was completely mine. I left for several reasons. First, I’m taking a much needed break (last year’s book tour was brutal). Second, I wanted time to pursue other projects including doing more speaking, writing the script for the film version of APOC, and possibly writing another book. Third, and most important, God said “It’s time for a new season.” Remember ya’ll, change is good. So often, we tend to be afraid of change. However, when I look back over my life, it’s very evident that every change I made put me directly in line for a blessing. And, each blessing was better than the last. Furthermore, I know that the finger of God never points to where the hand of God cannot reach.”

To learn more about her go to www.cupcakebrown.com

All the best to you Cup!

Rowena,

You absolutely blew me away for my birthday with your generosity. In fact, you made the day. I figured I would just sit around, goof off on the Internet, take a few phone calls and eat Hagen Daaz. ( Caramel)

But the fried rice you made and
The birthday cake (carrot).
The Thai lunch you purchased.
The movie you treated me to. (The Borne Ultimatum)
The walk through Barnes & Noble.
The stroll around the Upper West Side.
All made a beautiful crescendo on this, my 41st birthday.

Much love,
–
Samuel

PS: I’m gonna have a little slice tonight – just to make sure it’s okay when you have your slice tomorrow.

I’ve always loved Donna Summer. Buried beneath the grinding disco was a brilliant artist……

A Long Way from Wonderland

In 1980, Donna Summer walked away from disco’s strobe-lit boogie wonderland on The Wanderer. Critics embraced her bold statement; audiences less so. Where exactly was Summer going?

by Christian John Wikane

“Alice went to Wonderland but I stayed home instead”.
—Donna Summer, “The Wanderer”, 1980

When Bonnie Raitt, Pat Benatar, and Carly Simon were among the nominees announced for Best Rock Performance, Female, at the 1979 Grammy Awards, few would have guessed that the queen of disco was also a contender. Though Donna Summer was the frontrunner in the pop, R&B, disco, and Album of the Year categories, she ultimately won the prize in the rock category for “Hot Stuff”, an irony that foretold the artistic journey Summer was about to embark on with producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte.

“Donna was hot as a pistol then”, recalls singer-guitarist Bill Champlin, himself a nominee that year in the Best R&B Song category. (He took home the award for co-writing Earth Wind & Fire’s “After the Love Has Gone”) Only days earlier, Champlin had been ensconced at Rusk Sound Studios in Los Angeles recording background vocals for Summer’s new album. What very few of Champlin’s peers at the Grammy ceremony knew was that Donna Summer, who ruled the better half of 1979 with three number-one singles and two number-one albums on the pop charts, was stepping out of disco’s strobe-lit boogie wonderland.

By 1980, Donna Summer had amassed enough currency in her career to take chances. In October, Summer astounded audiences with The Wanderer, a decidedly rock-oriented album that marked Summer’s liberation from the image-making machinations of her previous record company, Casablanca, and from the grueling celebrity lifestyle that sent her to the brink of suicide. (The album also inaugurated David Geffen’s eponymous record label.) Harry Langdon’s album cover photograph for The Wanderer depicts Summer clothed in layers of scarves and leggings, sitting atop a black bench with suitcase nearby, looking very much “the wanderer”. With one hand casually nested in her perfectly coifed hair, Summer’s gaze is direct and provocative. “I dare you to listen” is the implied message.

In the February 1981 Musician, Roy Trakin assessed The Wanderer as “disco diva Donna’s Inferno, a trip that will take us through her cold hell, up against fiendish temptation and out the other side to spiritual redemption”. Using rock as catharsis, Donna Summer issued a bold artistic statement that surprised listeners expecting another Bad Girls (1979). I had an opportunity to discuss this critical career juncture with Summer herself in January 2003 for a research project about black female singers and rock music. Did she lose her way when trading gowns for guitars? A closer listen to The Wanderer suggests that Donna Summer was anything but lost.

The Songs

“I view my singing as an acting piece, so every song is a different character. I approach each song based on the texture and the color and the ideas that are in the song”.
—Donna Summer

As one of popular music’s most bankable figures in the mid-’70s, Donna Summer had worked virtually nonstop for five years by the time she sat down to compose songs for The Wanderer. After relentless touring and averaging two albums a year since 1975, she desperately needed a respite. “I was home. I was actually pregnant at the time, and I had all the time in the world to really conjure new songs”, Summer recalled. What emerged were highly personal stories about spirituality and superstardom.

Emancipation from the shiny shackles of fame is a prominent theme on The Wanderer, particularly on the opening track. In the lyrics to “The Wanderer”, Summer insinuates that she’d tired of assuming the glamorous image propagated by Casablanca. Bad Girls did little to dispel the modern day Aphrodite image she was never entirely comfortable with, but the Donna Summer on “The Wanderer” is not the same Donna Summer who moaned “Love to Love You, Baby” for nearly 17 minutes in 1975. Instead, she warbles lyrics in an uncharacteristically deep voice not unlike 1950s rocker Gene Vincent (“Be-Bop-a-Lula”). The voice affectation is a vanishing act of sorts as Summer distances herself from the sassy, sexy “bad girl” image: “Slip down the back stair / on my toes and out the door / They didn’t hear now / they won’t see me anymore / ‘Cause I can’t take that nine-to-five /life is a bore”

Similarly, the world-weariness Summer projects on “Who Do You Think You’re Foolin’ “ (written by Sylvester Levay, Harold Faltermeyer, and Jerry Rix) reflects five years spent in the heat of a blinding spotlight. Singing in third person Summer cautions, “Fame is only a dream land away”, knowing full well that stardom is a tenuous phenomenon, based on a shaky semblance of reality. Summer and her background singers repeat the phrase “You’re a star” at the end of each chorus not with elation but with abrasive cynicism.

The elusive nature of fame and its soul-sucking power preoccupies the somewhat indecipherable “Grand Illusion”. Giorgio Moroder’s spacey, heavily synthesized sonic landscape creates a hypnotic mood for Summer’s otherworldly voice. She sings in what can only be described as a sped-up falsetto:

Oh grand illusion, likes to fade away
take my love and go out to play
It’s no intrusion, it’s like a rainy day
comes to wash the clouds away
and this pain of mine

The words are sung in a chantlike cadence, as if Summer wrote the lyrics in a meditative state. During the bridge, Moroder’s swirling synthesizer patterns make it seem Summer is being circled by a benevolent celestial force that will wash away her pain. Imbued with its munificence, her voice takes on an operatic, seraphimlike vibrato: “Find the melody / that puts our hearts in tune / Simple symphony/that makes us feel brand new”.
She addresses spiritual rebirth more directly on three other songs: “Looking Up”, “Running for Cover”, and “I Believe in Jesus”. The latter is Summer’s resounding declaration of redemption. Summer had become a born-again Christian only months before recording The Wanderer and “I Believe in Jesus” was the most explicit expression of her renewed faith.

Less overtly spiritual, but more musically compelling, is “Looking Up”, which sounds like the single that never was. For one, Summer sings in her trademark, full-bodied voice rather than the camouflaged tones on the title track. Summer’s lyrics, co-written with Pete Bellotte, take flight with Moroder’s propulsive dance-rock arrangement. Building on its fervor of guitars, drums, and keyboards, “Looking Up” contains a bracing chorus-to-bridge transition. Just before the second chorus ends, Summer swoops up in her falsetto to sing an angelic “oooh” that fades in an echo to the sole beat of Keith Forsey’s drum. It’s merely seconds long, but the sudden suspension of the rhythm section, save the drumbeat, creates an energizing anticipation. The keyboards and guitars quietly return and Summer self-harmonizes a type of prayer in a soft, sung-spoken voice:

And since that rainy day
the clouds just stay away
You chase them with your love
the greatest love I know
‘Cause in the darkest hour
you’ll come with sunny showers
My life is yours today
don’t ever go away

Of the songs about spirituality, “Running for Cover” captures Summer and her musicians in all-out rock mode. She explained its inspiration to me in 2003: “That was right at the time when I got converted, and I think that I was looking for a way to say what had happened without being obvious. I was trying to explain it in a metaphor that I was running for cover, for protection”. It stands as one the most dramatic songs Summer ever wrote.

From the unnerving, high-pitched keyboard tones that open the song, “Running for Cover” is steeped in an eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere. Summer, who composed the lyrics and music, sings about “running scared” in the city over a sparse bass and drum background. Hers is a nefarious urban space, replete with unsavory temptations, from which she seeks both refuge and salvation. “I was always alone and afraid, such a pity / little girls just don’t know what comes out of the dark / But the devil waits in heat/ and I’m on that dead-end street.” Her narrow escape from the “devil” is documented musically. As the beat quickens, so does the urgency of her singing until she bellows “The devil’s in the park and it’s already after dark”. Guitarist Steve Lukather unleashes a manic solo that perfectly conveys Summer’s fear and escape.

The rock edge of “Running for Cover” is repurposed with a pop feel on “Cold Love”, where Summer nurses the wounds of unrequited love in a the tune that illustrates Summer’s character-driven approach to singing. Like the title track, it’s not readily apparent who is singing the song. Critic Dave Marsh noted in his review Rolling Stone review that Summer “punches across” the tune like the “ultimate Anglo-rock singer”. Summer says, “I just approached it like a rock and roll singer. I didn’t think that I’m black or white. I just thought ‘How does rock and roll get sung?’ “
Summer convincingly inhabits each story on The Wanderer to the point where her voice is virtually unrecognizable from one cut to the next. The falsetto on “Breakdown” reflects the fragility of romantic love, while the nursery rhyme about nocturnal dwellers on “Nightlife” is sung with a throaty sneer. “Stop Me” is altogether different with Summer hollering “But if you’ve heard this all before / don’t let me carry on no more” to a scorned lover over a new wave cum hard rock arrangement. Critic Stephen Holden singled out the cast of characters that so typify Summer’s singing on the album in his review for The Village Voice, “Not since I Remember Yesterday has Summer adopted so many different voices. There’s the caterwauling street kitten, the breathless little girl, the tough rocker, and the stagey diva” (1981).

The “supporting cast” for Summer’s characters on The Wanderer is a trio of male background singers who give a distinct shape to each song. Bill Champlin brought session vocalists Carmen Grillo and Tom Kelley to the project, and their voltaic vocalizations broadened Summer’s sound from the disco diva-isms that mark her earlier work. As Grillo recalls, “We would do these pyramid types of things. We thought, Why don’t we all hit the same note and then it will sound more people-y? We would all sing the low note, then we would all sing middle note, then we would all sing the high note”.

“Last Dance” this certainly was not.

The Reaction

“I think that they were kind of taken aback because they were expecting a big dance record and I didn’t go there. I specifically didn’t go there so that they would not continually pigeonhole me, not because I didn’t like dance music—I love dance music—but I wasn’t in dance mode. I was in ‘writing something else’ mode”.
—Donna Summer (2003)

Here are the statistics: The Wanderer earned Summer a gold album, two Grammy nominations, a top-five single in the title track, and nearly unanimous praise among critics. Writing for Billboard, Ed Harrison remarked, “The singer has chosen to experiment…veering gradually in new directions and in doing so has progressed as a performer and a writer” (1981). Robert Christgau wrote in his Consumer Guide, “Personally, I delight in the synthetic perfection of the thing” (1980). In Rolling Stone, Dave Marsh commented, “It’s Summer who pulls everything together with such intense purposefulness that the album is finally a complete and convincing statement of innocence, faith, joy, terror and the ability to deal with life head-on” (1981).

Audiences and radio programmers, however, were a bit confused. The woman who only a year earlier playfully chanted “toot toot, beep beep” was earnestly proclaiming her devotion to Jesus. Whereas Summer’s first two singles on Bad Girls were chart-topping smashes, the follow-up singles to “The Wanderer”— “Cold Love” and “Who Do You Think You’re Foolin’ “—scraped the bottom of the Top 40. How did someone so ubiquitous one year become so difficult to program the next? Quick to defend the first artist he signed, David Geffen explained the struggles of promoting a rock record by a black female artist to the Los Angeles Times:

The problem with Donna’s album is that it’s a rock record, but rock stations aren’t playing it because of a prejudice against black artists and female artists. When you look at a rock station playlist and can’t find a single black act, I think there’s something radically wrong, and it has nothing to do with Donna Summer. And Donna has the misfortune in terms of rock radio to be both black and a woman.

Tom Hadges, the program director at KLOS FM, hypothesized, “It’s a difficult thing to try to reverse an image. The people who bought her albums before aren’t buying the new one and rock audiences aren’t willing to put their money down on a Donna Summer album right now”. The compartmentalization of radio formats and audience’s resistance toward Summer’s change in style clearly hindered the record. Not wishing to gamble further, Geffen hired Quincy Jones to direct Summer towards a more conventional R&B sound for her subsequent album (Donna Summer, 1982)

About the reception of The Wanderer, Summer remains philosophical: “If you’re an artist, you have to do your artistry. Sometimes there’s a conflict and people don’t want your artistry to be what it is and so you make the adjustment to try to please them. At that point I wasn’t trying to please anyone but myself. That’s not my best selling record but at the same time, I think it certainly was one I felt that I was being true to myself. I was not allowing myself to be pigeonholed where people were trying to put me, but I was taking them with me on this journey. We were going to ‘wander’ around and we were going to go to places that they hadn’t been with me. That’s what The Wanderer meant to me”. Listeners who accompanied her on the journey heard an artist who simply refused to stagnate. Summer may have left “wonderland”, but she found her soul.