When to rethink that column idea
Spare a moment of sympathy for your regular columnists.
This is an incredible job. But there’s so much opportunity for frustration and humiliation.
The frustration happens when you’re staring down the barrel of a deadline with no topic in mind. The humiliation happens when, grasping desperately, you seize on a topic that you know better than to write about ... and then, because of the deadline, you write it anyway.
I’m happy to report that this happens to me less often these days. As I’ve learned more about this job, I’ve chosen not to follow a strict list of subjects or interests to share with you. But what I have done is develop a set of principles about what to write about.
The worst trouble ensues when columnists fail to do the latter.
Here are some basic principles I try to follow. I feel that it’s difficult for any columnist to write about these subjects in a way that’s useful for the general public.
Do I occasionally fail to take my own advice? I do. Deadlines come for us all. But one of the reasons I’m writing about these principles is so that you, readers, can provide me with accountability. Feel free to email me if you catch me in the act.
Columnists should not write about ... 1. What they ate for lunch today. Or any day.
Two narrow caveats. Readers care about what a food columnist ate for lunch. Alternatively, if I’m writing a column about a chef, a restaurant, or a specific food
trend, then the subject might
(might) be relevant. Otherwise? No one cares. No one should care, either. Yet the practice of listing what the columnist ate or failed to eat at a restaurant remains startlingly common. At best, it makes the columnist look like a prig; at worst, it makes the columnist look as if she’s being paid by the restaurant to flog its fare.
This rule applies, by the way, even if the person I’m eating with is the subject of the column. Unless the subject flings food across the table or consumes six drinks in one sitting, the only appropriate focus is what he or she has to say. 2. Their conversations with taxi, Uber or Lyft drivers.
I understand why columnists do this: The work of journalism is hard! It’s hard to make a deadline when you need to canvass a wide variety of people for their opinions before making a judgment. It’s particularly difficult to do this in a new or unfamiliar place.
Meanwhile, if they’re lucky, they have a driver — a friendlyseeming, captive audience for their questions. What could possibly go wrong?
Actually, so many things can go egregiously wrong in this situation that I think it’s best just to strike it from the ledger completely. The biggest one is how easy it is for the columnist to look like a myopic, privileged jerk.
A less obvious one is accuracy. Despite the intimacy of the situation, you don’t know your driver. You don’t know if they’re being honest with you, or if they’re just shining you on to get you out of their car. They see a wide cross-section of society, for sure. Yet whom can they really represent, besides themselves?
Even if I have a great conversation with a driver, I don’t share it in this column. I figure we’re all better off if I give the person a good tip instead. 3. Their unusual decision to venture into a lower-income city or neighborhood.
The barriers to entry for journalism are such that the field is overwhelmingly populated by nice middle-class people. The idea of normalcy is the car, the chain restaurant and the comfortable, suburban-style home.
Naturally, journalists tend to believe that their readers share this background and these interests. So they occasionally fail to notice the reality around them. In this reality, millions of people walk or take the bus every day to modest homes in uncelebrated neighborhoods.
Getting around these neighborhoods isn’t easy, and there’s often plenty of graffiti. The paint may be scruffy inside people’s homes. But there are friends and family members whom the residents love, shops and menus they recognize, jokes they understand. In other words: Life is normal, not unusual. It should be regarded as such. 4. Their golf, tennis, baseball or basketball score. The number of laps they swim. The yoga poses they can do.
Is the columnist a professional athlete?
If the answer is no, then no one cares. 5. Their concerns about things often identified with young people: social media, electronic music, exaggerated fashion, expensive toast.
TL;DR: Doing this makes them look old and bitter.
The long version: There are few regular columnists under the age of 40. So by the time most columnists have gotten the gig, the older person’s resentment against young people has set in.
That’s only human. Young people are obnoxious. They have the heedlessness of opportunity without the luxury of wisdom. They can’t help being the way they are.
Most columnists have learned to disguise their disdain. So they project their feelings onto the trappings of youth.
There are two problems with this. The first is that these columnists forget that they were obnoxious when they were young, too.
The second is the fact that this kind of resentment closes the mind. Those columnists might try these youthful things and find the reverse. Social media are useful, electronic music and exaggerated fashion are fun, and expensive toast is delicious. Now that’s news the readers can use.