What do journalists and elevator operators have in
common? (Hint: This is not an "ups and downs" joke.)
But
first a few words from the star of this blog, author Adair Lara: "All journalists aspire to write books, which many consider the blue
ribbon of our profession."
Yes,
in today’s expanding world of blogs, tweets and instant messages, the publication
of a book still gives writers a legitimacy unrivaled by any other achievement. Newspapers are out of date within a day;
tweets within minutes. (If they’re really memorable.) Blogs are archived but surfers rarely go back
to find waves that have already crested.
It
wasn’t long ago that even books had fairly short lives: The vast majority were out of print within
two years and one had to turn to garage sales or to the pipe-smoking
book-seller (there was one in every town) who specialized in finding rare
manuscripts.
But thanks to the same
technology that brought us Twitter, books are now truly as forever as diamonds. We have Amazon’s third party sellers, print-on-demand,
and the immortal Kindle edition. Even if
you can’t remember the name of the book you want, it’s likely that Google or
another search engine can help you: It’s as if the kindly librarian of your
childhood has moved into the ether to watch over you 24/7.
The kindly librarian has
had her victims, too, and the journalists to whom Adair was referring are among
them. Newspapers have shrunk both in
number and size as more people get their news, sports, weather and
entertainment from the Internet. What’s
a poor reporter to do?
Adair Lara had her eye on publishing
books in the years before the storm, and as of now she has eight to her credit,
including the memoir Hold Me Close, Let Me Go (with the self-explanatory
subtitle, A Mother, a Daughter and an
Adolescence Survived), The Granny Diaries, an irreverent mix of humor and advice on "the G
years" to her latest, Naked, Drunk and Writing, an amusing but deadly
useful manual on writing memoir and personal essay.
Adair
started out as a magazine editor here in San Francisco, and it was back then
that she started publishing essays in the Chronicle. In 1989 she earned one of the Chron’s coveted
spots on the features page, and for the next 12 years wrote the
Tuesday/Thursday column that made her a Northern California celebrity.
Her
columns were about her life, first as a single mom, then with her new husband
Bill at her side and her ex-husband Jim living in the unit above them.
Timing
is everything in life. In the nineties
two phenomena occurred simultaneously: Adair’s daughter skidded into some scary
teen years while Adair’s genre of preference, the memoir, underwent a
renaissance, launched by Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club.
So
as newspapers were shrinking, Adair was poised to move into the next phase of
her career. Hold Me Close, Let Me Go, an account of those troubled teen years
that Adair’s daughter somehow weathered, was published in 2002, just about the
same time that the Hearst Corporation bought the Chronicle and downsized the whole
operation, taking a lot of journalists with it, including Adair’s popular
column.
My
father, an amateur economist of no small ability, was wont to tell the story of
how, in his childhood, elevators were operated manually. "When automatic elevators came along, people
lost their jobs through no fault of their own.
Should we have outlawed the automatic elevator?"
In
other words, throughout history people in the work force have had to reinvent
themselves. And while the Internet
provides limitless opportunities for journalists to ply their trade, many of
those opportunities amount to volunteering their time. Even the HuffPo, one of the nation’s most influential e-publications,
rarely pays its numerous freelance staff.
When
dwindling readership closes down a newspaper, people lose their jobs, and
that’s never a joke. Still, I predict
that an increasing number of columnists and reporters who have been postponing
the book they’ve wanted to write will find the time – at last – to write it.