My semester as the T. Anthony Pollner professor at the University of Montana’s School of Journalism has been one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. (Yes, ever.) Thank you students, faculty, Kaimin staff and especially Carol Van Valkenburg. And, miles away but often in our thoughts, Alice Thorpe, Ben Pollner and friends and family of Anthony Pollner.

I’m off. The shortest way back to D.C. is obviously west to Seattle then down to Oregon, then California, then New Mexico, then Kansas, then Texas. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

We were up before dawn on Thursday to meet one last time for a group critique of the final stories. The professor worked hard not to get verklempt, but that got exponentially more difficult when he was presented with this amazing poster (above), a gift from the class, designed by Carli Krueger.

It’s a graphic of our big round classroom table in room 301. I’m the gray dot at the center. The dots around the table are the 17 students in Jour494, represented by a color that might or might not have meaning or relate to something that student wrote about for this class — I’ve deciphered quite a few: Pretty in Pink, The O.C., Avatar, orange earplugs, black metal, etc. I will treasure this poster, and the semester we had together, forever. Thank you Carli (the pink dot) and everyone else (counter-clockwise): Allison Bye, Caitlyn Walsh, Dustin Askim, Heather Jurva, Patrick Record, Erik Anderson, Candace Rojo, Billie Loewen, Brooks Johnson, Eben Wragge-Keller, H. Neil Sauer, Cody Blum, Ashley Oppel, Tom Holm, Levi Hunt and Donelle Weston. I’ll miss you terribly.

This was a class about writing deeply and interestingly about the ways we live and absorb popular culture. Originally, the final paper was meant to be a deep narrative or profile, about 3,000-words long, of someone creating and/or consuming a kind of popular culture.

But, as time closed in, I had to reduce my expectations, and amend the assignment somewhat, which became an encore of the scene story assignment that would hopefully go a little farther and deeper. But not too far, too deep, and stay within 2,000-2,100 words. I guess if I had the Pollner professorship to do over, I would have pushed the final assignment harder, demanding pitches back in September and progress reports along the way — in addition to the other assignments. The present-day 44-year-old in me would in late August hear “major assignment is due first week of December” and start working on it then and there; but the 21-year-old me would never have planned that far ahead. I should have remembered that.

Nevertheless, I am not disappointed in this crop of stories. Mostly because this was not a longform narrative magazine-writing class. This was a class about thinking fast and smart; reporting the facts and writing with analysis; and, most of all, filing clean and often. Although we admired and discussed many articles by writers who had months and thousands of words to reach for perfection, I know for certain that the surest path to that kind of work comes from a mastery of the deadline grind. These stories all had the distinct flavor of the rush-job. None achieved greatness, but we do have some that were certainly headed there.

Here are excerpts from five of the best — and the reasons why I thought so. (These excerpts are reprinted as they were filed to me, with none of my editing marks.)

Brooks Johnson wanted to do a profile of a popular country-western cover band. Initially he wanted to explore the idea of popular mediocrity through the measured success of the Copper Mountain Band, and he also used the opportunity to write about Missoula’s only (!) country bar, the Sunrise Saloon. And, like a good reporter, he came away with a different set of impressions than the ones he had going in — especially when it came to the true artistry involved in giving the people what they want while managing your own dreams of stardom:

The band takes the stage on yet another Saturday at 9:30 p.m. and thanks the crowd at the Sunrise Saloon for at least the hundredth time. Izzi and Nate pick up their stringed moneymakers and play with their pedals while Jacque gives some hand-fluffed volume to her blonde hair. The cousins wear black cowboy hats and Nate’s plaid-covered arm occasionally covers his bass while he tunes it.

The Copper Mountain Band opens with the energy of a Budweiser cracked after an hour in a paint-shaker. All over the stage, the young family band never gets bored and neither does their spritely audience. They go through the modern hits and a few originals before the surprising “Take it Easy” cover comes on.

Izzi says country fans, while loyal, don’t just want to hear country. They especially don’t want to see some stranger up on stage. They want to see the hats, the boots and feel respected in how they live their own lives. They want to see their cowboy neighbors, but a lot of the time they want to hear rock.

“If you only like country music, you’re probably an idiot,” Izzi says. “Nobody, myself included, wants to go to a club and hear the same singer and the same type of songs for four hours. Nobody has that kind of patience unless they’re your mother or something.”

Nobody on the dance floor bats an eye between all the country songs, old rock hits and originals like “Beers and Beers Ago.” Heel-toe-heel-toe they go, the motion of old and young never slowing no matter the number of beers flowing.

“People in New York and Nashville aren’t really going to relate, but we really don’t care,” Jacque says. “They should like this because this is the real cowboy shit here in Montana. This is really what we do.”

• • •

Heather Jurva wrote about the weekly open-session Irish music night at Sean Kelly’s pub. What I wanted students to notice here was Heather’s sense of control. She knows her story is no great shakes, but she went deep into the very American allure of being and seeming and aping Irishness. The writing is everything here. One of the great lessons all journalists — especially feature writers — need to learn is how to weave gold from straw (boring stories, boring scenes) without contorting the facts. It’s all about tone and writing.

It’s an old-style Irish pub, and the lights are low. A dozen older musicians – mainly men – sit just below the stage in a half moon of metal patio-esque chairs, plucking fiddles and banjos and mandolins. They are wearing sweaters, mostly, and polo tees and floppy-topped golf hats in greys and greens.

One man tootles a tiny black flute, testing the notes, then launches into an undulating line of trills. Another man, across the circle from the first, pulls a hand drum from what looks like a hat box. He thumps it, then listens, thumps, listens, thumps again and turns a key which tightens the head of the drum. The tone changes slightly, bringing the drum into line with the rest of the group.

Two young men in basketball shorts walk in the door opposite the stage.

They instantly walk back out.

It’s Open Session night at Sean Kelly’s in Missoula, Montana, and it draws a very specific kind of crowd: pressed and tweedy professionals who cut loose with a pint and a lilting tune. Nothing here seems to draw the typical Missoula scenesters, trendy collegiates who drink only PBR and drop the bass. Even the bartenders look bored, clearly waiting for the real party to start.

[snip ...]

“Kevin is probably the most Irish among us. He’s even got an Irish name,” Steve says. “He’s got dual citizenship.”

One or two of the others claim Irish heritage. None of the others can trace their line back to the Old Country, and very few have set foot on Irish soil. But they all love the music, and for tonight that’s enough. Missoula loves the Irish. All of western Montana loves the Irish. The nation loves the Irish, despite the masses who have no direct bloodline or history of travel.

But it doesn’t even matter. For those who are in love with an idea, it has nothing to do with the genetic code or stamps in a passport book.

“A lot of us, we think in terms of DNA, ya know… The thing about culture though, it doesn’t come down to DNA. It comes down to soul. It functions, in a sense, like glue that holds people together.”

• • •

Levi Hunt went off to the Found Footage Festival at the Wilma Theater, a touring show that collects old VHS training tapes, educational programs and other VHS-only oddities, and repurposes them into an awkwardly hilarious compilation. Not only did Levi capture the flavor of the show and interview the two guys behind it, he went deep on the brief lifespan of VHS technology, how it affected those who are old enough to remember videotapes, and how it comes across to those who aren’t.

Levi also managed to do something that looks easy, but is rather difficult: explaining something on the screen and making it as funny as seeing it in person. Like this:

One of the first videos of the night shows a group of maybe six adults who sit in a circle of patio chairs, surrounding a woman writing on a large poster-sized sheet of paper for the room to see.

“What’s another name for a penis?” the woman on the grainy video asks.

“Prick”, one of the men on patio chairs responds.

She writes that word right under “penis” on the board. “Good, what else?”

“Peter.”

“Rod.”

“Dick!”

Now it’s not just the group on the video responding to her question but seemingly the entirety of the viewers who are assembled in the main theater at the Wilma.  It doesn’t matter that the Wilma’s theater goers are about thirty years too late to respond to the lady on the video’s questions, they decide to helpfully throw out more suggestions for her anyway.

“Meat!”

“Ding dong!”

“Weiner!”

(This goes on for awhile)

“Okay, that’s good thank you.”

The Wilma-goers raise their drinks and cheer.  Good job by them.

“All together now,” the teacher on the video says as she points back to the first word written down on the paper.

In unison those in the Wilma in 2012 and those people on the video, pre-recorded some thirty years ago, do as commanded.

“Pe-nis.”  “Prick.”  “Pe-ter”

(This too, goes on for awhile) …

• • •

Cody Blum rode along late into the night with one of the drivers who started UCallus, a Missoula cab service that only accepts donations instead of fares, thereby circumventing taxi regulations, but opening a world of possibilities (good, bad and weird) in terms of passengers, who pay whatever they feel like paying. (A few pennies? A $100 bill?) This story showed how important it is to invest time, sit still, and just observe:

The first guy we picked up was huddled under a street lamp on a dark street I’d never been on. He wore torn blue jeans, a black leather jacket, a black beanie, and a backpack that sagged from his pale, skinny frame. He had the kind of headphones that wrap around the back of your head and up over the ears, the popular design in the nineties. The man looked a little sketchy, but when Mike Grafft eased the Buick Roadmaster with a barely functional transmission up to the curb and greeted the man through the passenger window, there were no worries in sight. Grafft is the most established, most experienced cab driver in Missoula, and according to his calculations, he’s driven over 1,000,000 miles transporting drunks, early morning airline commuters, businessmen, and sketchy anomaly characters like this one through Missoula’s confusing streets in his 20 plus years of driving. He hasn’t scratched a car yet.

The guy wanted to go to the Thunderbird Motel.

“You got it, bud,” Grafft said cheerily as he eased the Roadmaster out of first gear with a disconcerting tremor. Then he made light-hearted small talk, and the man in black reciprocated willingly like he hadn’t been treated this well in ages.

Grafft was the longest running driver at Yellow Cab, and now he’s the longest running driver at UCallus, a relatively new non-profit service in Missoula.  They got started on Oct. 1 of last year, and their aim is simple: get drunken bar occupants home, safe. They don’t reference themselves as a cab operation, rather they’re a designated driving service. The whole thing runs on donations, which leaves every cab-ride open to the possibility that the rider will take it for free. At the end of the ride, it’s up to you how much to give the driver. If you don’t have money, the hope is you’ll make it up next time. It’s all based on trust.

“Free is the four letter F-word to me,” Kevin Sandberg said. He’s the founder of UCallus. “Somehow we got slammed into that ‘free way home category.”

• • •

Finally, Patrick Record, a photojournalism major, invested a lot of time looking into and thinking about the black-and-white framed portraits that hang in Charlie B’s, a popular working-class waterin’ hole in downtown Missoula. The portraits are the work of Lee Nye, who took them of the bar’s regulars decades ago. These are a much beloved part of Missoula’s vast drinking lore. The pictures and the bar are something everyone here knows a little about. Patrick went deeper and gave some nuance to what the pictures mean to Missoula. He interviewed Nye’s widow and the bar’s current owner. There’s a real sense of how the past is present, including the art of hanging out with the men and women who currently spend a great deal of time in the time and might have, in another time, merited a photo on the wall…

Belangie-Nye is currently working on putting a book together consisting of the collections. At her home in Lolo, Mont., stashed away in a corner of her office, she pulls out a DVD with two interviews of Nye. Sitting in a chair wearing a cowboy hat, Nye answers questions from Belangie-Nye about his collections.

When it came to taking the photographs there was a criteria that had to be met. They had to be a regular at Eddie’s, and have a good face. Belangie-Nye recalls Nye saying they had to have a “Montana face.” Basically meaning they had to be blue-collar workers: lumber jacks, railroaders and people of the like. Using a Roloflex two and a quarter camera, they were always done in the alley behind Charlie’s during the morning hours – “that’s when the light was the best,” Nye says. A gray corduroy backdrop was put up and it wasn’t uncommon for Nye to give his subjects his own red and black plaid jacket to wear for the picture. He did this for the contrast the red creates in black and white pictures.

Nye took great pride in his portraits, and truly believed his subjects really had to have the face to be photographed. He really felt strongly about this with the Native Americans. Nye believed the strong facial Native American features were being lost as generations grew bigger and bigger.

“I don’t think this face can be created again,” Nye says as he hold up the portrait of Joe Malatare, a Native American who is frozen in time while he lights a cigarette and smoke floats in front of his glassy eyes as they look to the sky.

Nye remembered things about each person he photographed, and recalls the memories as he goes through the photographs.

“This is Roy Davis, he played the accordion”

“Oh, this is ‘Honk.’ We called him that because of his cucumber on his head,” referring to the man’s big nose.

“Sylvester, he was a cowboy out of Wyoming. He was full of shit most of the time.”

He could have gone for hours.

*          *          *

It’s 9:43 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 20, and Charlie is wearing a tan shirt, jeans and black suspenders, standing behind the bar cleaning up and organizing a few things as his bartender serves drinks. Sitting at the bar there’s six older gentleman, each of them with a draught and a small stack of cash in front of them.

Charlie turns around and holds up a cardboard poster tube, still sealed with postage tape. He looks at two of his customers as if they were just ordinary old friends and tells them he’s supposed to hang the poster because it has the state’s laws for bartenders. After a small chuckle, he spins right back around and stands it on its end behind the television.

“Here come the glasses,” the bartender says as a UPS deliveryman wheels in four large boxes. Charlie gets up and leaves to show the deliveryman where they go.

Soon after a man walks in holding a credit card and asks the bartender if he can use the phone and she slides it over. The man dials a number and after several failed attempts asks the bartender if he needs to dial nine first.

The guy sitting at the bar with a draught interjects, “It has to be a local call.”

“It’s a 1-800 number” the man replies.

“No, Charlie has restrictions up the ying-yang with that,” he tells the man as if he’s had to explain this to someone once or twice before.

Just before noon in walks a gentleman with long gray hair. He sits down at the bar and the bartender already knows what he wants, a screwdriver.

Patrick Smith, now 56, was the youngest to be photographed by Nye for the Charlie’s collection.  It was 1974 and Smith was 23 with long blonde hair, and working construction. His picture is located behind the Fat Tire bicycle on top of the poker machines.

“I had just back from running the running the Grand Canyon. I talked him into it,” Smith recalls. “[Nye] sat you in there, made you look up or down and then you were done. It happened fairly quickly.”

• • •

So there we have it. I turned in Jour494′s final grades Friday afternoon. This week I’ll pack up my car and go. There was a great vibe on the ghostly, gray campus Friday, a feeling I had all but forgotten about: When you’re a student in college and finals are over but you haven’t left for home yet. The power naps, the extra cash in your pocket from selling back all those textbooks, the warmth of crowded bars. The feeling of having crashed ashore and survived.

I’ll be back this week with a FURTHER READING LIST and a farewell to Montana. It’s hard to go.

Wednesday was our last official class, which I set aside for just general gabbing and pre-goodbyes. Any questions? Any advice I can give? Anything?

I was prepared to just tell them what a real joy it’s been to be here in Montana and work with them, and, once that was done, let class out early — especially for those still sweating the 5 p.m. deadline for their final stories.

It turns out we had plenty to talk about for the whole 80 minutes.

But before I forget:

Our “final exam” is a group critique of the final stories. Reading copies are now available for pick-up at my office. The final critique is Thursday, Dec. 13, 8 a.m. to 10 a.m.

Unfortunately, the 8 a.m. part is not a typo, so set your alarms; I’ll bring frosted breakfast baked goodies for the class. You guys bring your own caffeine or whatever it takes to get the juices flowing. Come “loaded for bear,” as my father used to say: Mark up those stories and let your classmates hear what you truly thought. Enough of this “I really liked this, and, uhhhh, ermmm …” stuff. Get in there. We’ll all kiss and make up when it’s over.

The stories did come in — all but one made it before deadline. I’m diving in this weekend to begin grading. This assignment, which is sort of a hybrid between a long narrative and a scene story, counts for 30 percent of your writing grade; you do the math. (And rest assured, I’ll do the math too. I’m excited to turn in grades!)

Once again we’ve got a range of subjects, perhaps not as broad or original as I’d once dreamed they would be, but nevertheless: a flower shop, a holiday craft fair, a record store, a tanning salon, a free-ride cab service, a country cover band, bingo night, open-session night, a poetry group, the hot springs, the Old Post, Charlie B’s, a holiday tea party for little girls, an upcycling thrift shop, a “found footage” film fest, and people still nursing a Dance Dance Revolution jones. Either this all sounds exciting or it doesn’t. We shall see. I’ll post highlights and excerpts next week, once it’s all over.

So now what? What are you going to do with the rest of your lives? We talked some about that.

When it comes to the future of journalism (and actual jobs in the field), I’ve got no insight that is any more prescient or helpful than anybody else’s big picture. A lot of times, people my age and older tell today’s college students that there’s never been a more exciting time to be entering the field. We say that because we honestly do see some potential opportunities that we never had. Some of us recall how many times we heard that our journalism dreams were “at least 10 years of hard news experience” out of our reach, which is the last thing you want to hear as an eager 22-year-old.

To us (almost) old farts, the new media platforms are exciting, so long as you can set aside the small matter of a paycheck. So much bullshit has been done away with. It feels like opportunity.

But we’re also lying, too. It was never easy to get a job at a newspaper, but they were also pretty freakin’ great places to work. Back then (whenever — the ’70s, the ’80s, the ’90s; five years ago) was also an exciting time to be entering the field. We had a blast.

And you will too. It’s a different sort of blast. Life is long and so are careers. Stop waiting for the renaissance to work itself out — I’ve already told you that I don’t think that even our grandchildren will figure out the perfect business model for media. Shouldn’t it take at least a century for us to completely dismantle and reinvent six centuries of the printed word? So hang on and fight on.

Some good news:

I’m a lousy prophet, but I do predict that we will all live to see a resurgence in quality journalism that employers pay good money to produce and readers pay good money to read/view, only we’ll be working for smaller audiences who have been rediscovered by a whole new version of what we now call “advertisers.”

We’ll have to let go of some of our most beloved concepts and objects (“the morning newspaper,” e.g., or “the new issue of Vanity Fair,” and things like “layouts,” or “book jackets”). First we’ll see a resurgence in accountability and investigative journalism, and shortly behind it will come a discovery of good feature writing. This will be annoying to those of us old enough to remember “New Journalism” and the era that came after it; the prose aspects of tomorrow’s feature writing, presented to us as innovation, will seem very much like an act of reinventing the wheel. When it cycles back around, I hope you’ll remember all the great stuff we read in this class. You will recognize its characteristics and see how this sort of work — cultural analysis, narrative, longform, shortform, empathetic and funny — has evolved.

Come visit me in the nursing home and we’ll talk about it.

PS: I’ll update the Jour494 portion of this blog a couple times more before I leave Montana — including a “further reading” list of all the stories and books I wanted to discuss with you, that I hope you’ll have time to read someday. Maybe long after graduation, when you’re feeling nostalgic about room 301.

PS 2: One last thing. For the love of pete, stop putting two spaces after a period. You know who you are. Do this for the editors and web producers you’re going to work for in this, the 21st century. Farhad Manjoo is here to tell you why. Two spaces after a period has outlived its typewriter-era purpose. I don’t care what your English teachers said. (Mine said it too. So did my 9th-grade typing teacher. They were right then, but they’re wrong now.)

Continuing my end-of-semester metaphor — this is what it’s like:

Today, however, we turned our attention to the criticism/reviews that students filed this semester. The TV recappers — Heather Jurva, Levi Hunt, Caitlyn Walsh — had to file five, 500-word recaps of consecutive episodes, and did so quite ably. Levi nitpicked “The Walking Dead,” even as he praised it; Caitlyn hilariously broke down this extra-loony season of “Dexter”; and Heather called “American Horror Story” on its own BS and took it to task for being such a mess this season.

We moved on to the reviews: Three “Lincoln” reviews, plus “Red Dawn,” “Looper,” “Trouble with the Curve,” “Rise of the Guardians” and “Life of Pi.”

Albums? Yes — Mumford & Sons, Taylor Swift, Philip Phillips, Lupe Fiasco and the Evens.

The rest? An art exhibit called “Evanescent”; a novel called “Storm Dancer”; the Pearl Jam concert to get votes for Montana Sen. Jon Tester; Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Kennedy” and, last but not least, an energetic review of “Borderlands 2,” a video game, from Tom Holm.

That’s just a sampling of what was turned in on Oct. 3 and Nov. 26. The reviews were okay — and I gave full credit to students for turning them in — but only two or three truly stood out. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Writing reviews is hard, hard work. It’s one of those jobs that looks a whole lot easier than it is. Still, I encourage everyone to keep honing their critical skills. In one way or another, you’re going to need it — maybe not as a paid cultural critic, but certainly in this crazy-mixed-up world we live in, with its Yelp!-style consumer reviews, etc. Having an articulate, meaningful opinion is the currency in this culture, whether you’re in the pages of the New Yorker or trying to explain your reaction to a presentation in a business meeting. Abstractions (“it was good”; “that was awesome”) are more empty than ever. People get ahead now by being sharp and by keeping up.

For Wednesday, Dec. 5: Our last class. Bring Kleenex. But most of all, file your final assignment no later than 5 p.m.

Kaimin photo: Tim Goessman

On Monday we went around our beautiful circular wooden classroom table and began critiquing the scene stories that were filed Nov. 7.

Some of the stories have been published in the Kaimin once the writers filed to me first: Dustin Askim’s story on the campus Belegarth scene grew a little in word-count and became a Friday Kaimin cover story on Nov. 9, just when the editors needed it most.

Brooks Johnson wrote about a new go-kart/laser tag emporium in Missoula, which also ran in the Nov. 9 Kaimin. And Billie Loewen’s piece about the tailgating faithful — who remain resolute even if the Griz football season has been less than they hoped — ran on Nov. 16, in advance of the storied Montana/Montana State game. (Montana State won. The final insult.)

Overall, I think people did a fair job of finding and observing a slice of local pop-cultural life. Colorful details — check. Dialogue — check, mostly.

The hard part, as many in the class discovered, is how to make the details and vignettes cohere into a fully-realized feature story — something with a beginning, middle and an end, but also a section where we step back and suss out some theme or meaning: why do people participate in this scene? What does it tell us about ourselves, our culture, this moment? What does is feel like? What does it mean?

Many struggled with the literal beginning. We had a lot of stories start with the weather, or “the crowd’s not here yet,” in which the story (including the writer and the reader) just waits around. That strictly chronological structure is often a misstep. Instead, start with action; get right in there; use the second or third paragraph to tell us who/what/where/when/how. (And delay firing your big guns for the why, somewhere in the middle or near the end.)

A note on chronological structure: Novice feature writers are tempted to use exact time stamps in their stories as a structure or transition technique. (Example: “It’s 8:49 p.m. and …”) I call this the Jack Bauer effect. Unless the story follows the harvesting and transplanting of donated organs or a race against a bomb detonation — where seconds really do count — approximation is less distracting. “Early afternoon.” “Shortly before sunrise.” “After all the bars closed at 2  …”

Students also had to confront issues of, for lack of a better word, anti-climax. When you’re reporting a story, you have to play the cards you’re dealt; if the people and the scene aren’t so interesting, you have to report harder, interview deeper, find someone else to talk to or observe. Don’t feel obligated to keep hanging out with the owner or the person in charge of the event. Remember that an underwhelming crowd is still made up of people who cared enough to come check it out.

And even when something is eventful or exciting and you have lots of great notes, you still have to be the one who will entertain and inform the reader with the facts at hand. The answer is not to fill the story with bad jokes and snarky asides. The answer is usually found in feeling. Convey what it felt like to be there; what it meant to those who were there. While reporting, ask better questions. I’ve always believed that there is no problem that a full notebook can’t solve.

On Monday, Nov. 26, we’ll pick up the critiques where we left off — we have seven left. There are three stories in this batch that I really liked. I’ll share some more excerpts next week.

The second review is also due Monday, for those who haven’t filed it yet.

And we’ll be talking about the final assignment some more. Have you found your subject yet?

Meanwhile, no class on Wednesday, Nov. 21. Happy Thanksgiving!

We spent a fair amount of time Wednesday discussing Tom Junod’s 8,100-word profile of Mister Rogers. It ran 14 (!!) years ago in Esquire and it’s still one of those pieces that makes me tear up. It’s beautifully constructed. Its paragraphs are dense but many of its sentences are deliberately simple, mirroring Fred Rogers’s way of speaking to children. Yet the story is also very deeply felt and intellectually considered.

The access Junod got to Mister Rogers can only be admired and envied — the paragraph where Mister Rogers strips down at the health club to change for his daily swim is, I think, one of the best ever written, not only because it describes Mister Rogers naked, but it does so without a trace of snark or humor. It’s just so real and true. Which is what Fred Rogers was about.

Now. A word about Mister Rogers. I was born in 1968. One thing I’ve noticed is that people my age and younger have, for the most part, a deep and abiding respect for Fred Rogers. He was a real friend to us. We trusted him. This Esquire piece was the first time I’d seen Mister Rogers regarded with reverence and depth and no awkward humor. I think this article validated Mister Rogers’s elevation to pop-cultural sainthood during the last five years of his life. This story taught me a lot about tone.

But baby boomers? Anyone who was too old for Mister Rogers’s first demographic? For them it’s all pedophile jokes, all the time; morning-zoo crew gags and Eddie Murphy’s “Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood,” etc. (And my students, born around 1990? They’re a little “meh” on him. They knew him, they respect him. I sensed a little ambivalence.)

Back to the story: Does the resonant use of “once upon a time” work? Should Junod have led with Old Rabbit? (Should Old Rabbit have factored in at all? Is it necessary for Junod to weave in his own childhood?) Are there places to cut? Should there be more biographical information of Rogers? Should we learn more about his television show and how it’s made? Are the paragraphs too long?

I think you know my answers. (This story is perfect.)

Meanwhile …

Thanksgiving is upon us and it’s time talk turkey and face reality. We have five classes left. I’ve adjusted the remainder of our syllabus accordingly, and — the big news — I’ve changed the final assignment a bit. I just don’t think it’s possible to pull off a longform narrative in under three weeks. I was starting to get some signs about this from some of the students. All semester I’ve been suggesting that it was never too early to start the final project, but I should have been more emphatic. And even then I’m not sure that would have worked. So, in my ongoing effort to not be perceived as a pushover, I went ahead and pre-pushed myself over.

Not because I’m a wonderful guy. I’m just using an ancient editor Jedi mindtrick of re-budgeting. For the record, I think everyone in Jour494 is capable of doing an intimate, surprising, 3,000-word feature about someone’s relationship to making or consuming popular culture. I don’t doubt the ability; what worries me is time. And I just don’t want to read any half-assed efforts or last-minute Hail Mary drafts.

So, the new final assignment is still going to be a long(ish) story, but the target is now 2,000 words instead of 3,000. It’s to be more like the scene story you just did, with a little more intimacy and a broader use of scenes; it will also require a bigger “step-back” section, which will get at the real meaning of the story. It’s a hybrid feature story, blending aspects of the scene story and the reported essay. I’ve also pushed the due date as far as it can go, to Dec. 5.

We spent a lot of time Wednesday brainstorming and came up with some great ideas that can be turned around in 21 days. Now get to work.

• • •

For Monday, Nov. 19: We’ll be doing roundtable critiques of the Nov. 7 scene stories — please roll up your sleeves for a good scrubbing and mark up those copies with feedback, raves and criticism.

And take a moment just to admire the range of subjects your Jour494 colleagues have covered: a wild house party, a karaoke night, Belegarth players, Dead Hipsters, drag queens, a roadside tourist trap, a sports bar, tailgaters, a go-kart track, a mixed-martial arts competition, a weekly pub trivia night, the Day of the Dead parade, an estate sale, a spook house, a videogame smackdown, a charity ride, a psychic fair.

All that!

My day never really gets going until I read what Nancy Nall has to say, as well as her regular commenters. Reading her blog has been a daily habit for, gosh, maybe a decade now.

Lately, both in class and in the Kaimin critiques on Friday (the student-run paper at the University of Montana), I’ve been trying to stress clarity and finesse in stories. You can know the basics of newswriting (fives W’s, one H, arranged in inverted pyramid, and hello, where is the nutgraf?) and still spend the rest of your career struggling to make it all clearer, more coherent, uncluttered, smoother. Many times I find myself asking what the story I’m reading is about — especially with feature stories, whether by students or in the nation’s best magazines.

In Popular Culture Journalism we are now buckling down on two big writing assignments — the scene story and the long narrative — that are going to test the students’ reporting skills and ingenuity. But I think the real test is going to be organization, theme and order.

Back in the summer of 2007, I was struggling through the first draft of what would become my book about Christmas in America, Tinsel. I had lived and reported in Frisco, Texas, through the fall and winter of 2006-’07; and before I returned there for a second round of Christmas (and, although I didn’t know this at the time, returned for a third Christmas, in 2008), I came home to Washington for spring and summer and tried to hammer through all the material and write everything but the final chapter. I had a massive outline mapped out on my bulletin board, but in many ways the material was still very loose, out of my control. There was too much.

One morning, out of nowhere, Nancy blogged about this very dilemma, based on her recollection of a tip she gleaned from a writing seminar in her former workplace. Take it away, Nance:

“Some writers have a really hard time understanding what a ‘nut graf’ is — the explanation paragraph that answers the readers’ ‘so why should I care’ question — as well as why you need one, and why the best nut grafs encompass the theme of the story in some way. So they went around the table and had each of us think of a narrative project we’d like to write or have written, and asked two questions: What’s it about? What’s it really about?

What’s it about? It’s about a couple who had a kid with a terrible genetic disease, and it was really breaking them down, and then she got pregnant again and they considered aborting but decided not to, figuring God wouldn’t curse them twice, but the second child was born and it had the same disease. What’s it really about? Coping.

The first question is the subject, the second is the theme. The story can be big:

What’s it about? The Rwandan genocide. What’s it really about? The paralysis of moral actors in the face of great evil.

Or small:

What’s it about? These two guys, lifelong best friends, who’ve spent all the lives chasing Bigfoot sightings, until one got discouraged and switched to 9/11 conspiracies, and they stopped speaking. What’s it really about? Craziness and friendship.

See how it works? The first question is easy, but if you can’t answer the second, you’re going to get into trouble, because at some point you’re going to get stuck and say what the hell, and if you don’t know what you’re really writing about, you won’t be able to go on. …”

This is one of the greatest pieces of advice — for all kinds of writers — that I’ve ever heard. When Nancy posted this (July 31, 2007) I was nearing 80,000 words of an out-of-control manuscript filled with false starts, divergent threads and a thousand “TK’s” waiting to be filled in on the next draft. I was averaging about 1,500 words a day, some days many more. That horrible draft grew to an ungodly 125,000 words by September.

So, on that same day, I took Nancy’s advice, opened a new Word document and quizzed myself:

What is this book about? I quickly disgorged a page-long summary of my book project, the characters, the setting (exurbs, shopping malls, etc), the facts, the discoveries, the Christmas culture, the many scenes, the little family dramas, the pressure, the vibes.

What is this book REALLY about? That answer didn’t come so quickly. I thought about it all afternoon and finally typed:  “The cultural and economic need for myth. Joy and heartbreak.”

Somehow this helped enormously with the clogged drain. I started moving pieces of my outline around on my bulletin board, where I also tacked up my answers to What it’s about and What it’s really about. I started shoring up some unruly chapters. I forged ahead. It would be many more drafts before I finished.

So, on that note, I had the class take another look at David Finkel’s “Group Portrait with Television,” (see last week’s recaps) with an eye toward how it’s built. I broke down its classic — and bulletproof — structure for them on a big pad: Opening Scene, followed by a whole section that could be labeled What Is This Really About?, followed by Deeper Scene and a more biographical and a Still Deeper Scene. Then, a Step-back, of sorts, a directional shift — Bonnie Delmar’s girlhood, growing up with one TV in the house, which then clocks forward to the present and a scene of a concerned-moms group that worries about television habits and influence (and seamlessly works in the voice of a contrary view); followed by more intimacy with the Delmars, in which, ultimately Bonnie imagines her life as a TV show in the Closing Scene.

Keep Finkel’s story handy, gang — it’s a perfect map for writing a narrative feature, especially for this class.

We then went around the table to check in on progress for the scene stories, only this time, we put them to the test:

What is this story about? The answer to this can be as long and rambly as you need, in order to tell us.

What is it REALLY about? The answer to this should always be a short phrase, or even just a word.

We also started brainstorming ideas for the long feature, which the students have about a month to do. Every idea will be put to this same test: What’s it about, then What’s it really about?

Already it’s making it easier to separate “topic” ideas (trends, “people who [insert odd new activity here]“) from true narratives — STORIES — that focus on a person or moment. Something more real. Something deep. In the case of this class, these will all need to have some pop-culture angle, but this can be widely defined.

• • •

For Wednesday, Oct. 31: “It’s Halloween, it’s Halloween …”

Two good ones to read and discuss. The first just popped up in my Twitter feed Sunday, a nice read from Stephanie Hayes about a costume shop in Florida. Kind of a scene story, also a profile, and right in our zone: “At House of Make Believe in Clearwater, owner gives life to dreams” (Tampa Bay Times, Oct. 28, 2012)

And also, one of my favorite stories ever: “Meet The Shaggs,” by Susan Orlean. (The New Yorker, Sept. 27, 1999)

Read both and come ready to talk.

Washington Post photo: Evy Mages

We spent most of Wednesday’s class period talking about the five scene stories I assigned for readings. These are each different kinds of scene stories, and I want the students to keep these handy as they work on their own scene stories, due Nov. 7.

The first one is a ride-along (literally), as Dan Zak follows the scene at Washington, D.C.’s first-ever “tweed ride” of people who share the common wish that the 21st century could be more dandy and old-fashioned.

(For links to all of these stories, go to the bottom of Monday’s recap.)

The next one is mostly reconstructed scene from a very good, thoughtful interview, as Robin Chotzinoff talks to a widow who made the uncoventional decision to have her husband’s wake at home, with the guest of honor propped up on the couch, which turned into a party that last for days.

Another one is short — almost a vignette really. It’s pure scene with a very smart layer of cultural rumination, as Michael Kruse hangs out in the Yankee Candle store at an outlet mall on Black Friday morning.

One is a bar story/event story — a dispatch I wrote from Washington’s first-ever Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament. (Was there ever another tournament? I never heard of it again. But for a minute there, RPS really seemed to poised to be the next hipster kickball.) I am stunned that this was already eight years ago. It seems like five minutes ago.

And the last one is one of those great scene stories in which a bunch of people all believe in something hopeless — in this case, Monica Hesse’s weekend at the Green Party’s presidential nomination convention this summer in Baltimore.

We got some advice from the writers of these stories — what they remembered specifically about how the story got to them (was it assigned? Or was it something they pitched?) and how they reported. The key to all of them is pre-reporting. In some cases, the writer only had a few hours to read the clips, get familiar with it, set up interviews and access, and then go. But every bit of preparation counts.

Dan Zak says he did three “phoners” (interviews) before the tweed ride, and then got there way early so he could see it come together. He rode alongside the tweed crowd and spoke his observational notes into his tape recorder. He hung out a lot — before, during, and afterwards, at the bar. He listened a lot — as much as he directly interviewed participants. The ride was on Sunday afternoon, which means Dan had to file no later than 6 p.m. to make that Monday’s Washington Post Style section.

“At a macro level, I just kept all my senses open,” Dan told me in an email, which I read to the class. “It was a very tactile, noisy scene. And hot. Lots to absorb, for all the senses. I remember toggling between each to make sure I had notes for all five senses. What do I hear? What do I smell? What do I see *beyond* the scene itself? … And because this scene had a lot of details, sartorially, a good portion of each interview involved asking a person *exactly* what they were wearing or riding, down to the manufacture year of his/her bike and at what garage sale and when they got their fighter-pilot goggles. And so on. And it was in reporting these details — many of which clashed, in terms of eras — that I found my way to one of the themes of the piece: The mash-up generation, and how it loves a tweed ride of course.”

For general advice on reporting deadline features, Dan says:

“Talk to people. Most importantly, I guess, is WHY are they here? WHY are they part of this scene?

But don’t talk to people constantly. I actually prefer observational reporting. Just fading into the background and watching, and switching into anthropological mode, and observing behavior. If all you do is interview people, you won’t get any sense of the scene. I also like to imagine myself looking at the scene from a height of some kind. What must it look like from above, or from a distance away? … Wander. Lurk. But stay fixed sometimes and let things move around you.”

• • •

On the Yankee candle piece, Michael Kruse says, via email:

“Early in the week before Black Friday I read around the subject, which basically means read as much as I can, which I always do, and in this case that meant some swimming around in the history of Yankee Candle, the specs of the industry as a whole, and also I re-read a few parts of Tinsel. [Note: I had completely forgotten this piece contained a reference to my book. Not trying to self-promote, honestly! Not more than usual, anyhow. -- HS] The “lost aroma of the real” — the actual phrase as well as the interesting idea(s) behind it — had been bouncing around on the inside of my head for a while.

So come Thanksgiving night, Lauren and I finished up a game of Scrabble and then we drove to the outlets, together, because she’s a good wife and because the holidays are about family goddammit. We got stuck in the traffic.”

Michael noticed/found Sue Newman, and decided she would be the one customer he quoted in the piece:

“How I glommed onto Sue Newman was I didn’t. I watched her come into the store. The red wagon made her interesting. I watched her shop. This wasn’t as creepy as it sounds, I swear, because there were LOTS of people crammed into this place, and so it’s not like I was just following her all weird and doo-doo-doo. I noted what she looked at and what she put in that wagon of hers. I made notes in my notebook but I didn’t have my notebook out all the time because frankly I didn’t want some employee coming up and asking me questions and telling me to call some PR person. Fuck that. When she checked out, I got close enough to hear “106.46, please.” Then I followed her outside. Introduced myself. Told her what I was doing. Asked her some questions. We talked for maybe 15, 20 minutes, and then I thanked her and went back inside. I did this with probably five Sue Newmans. Sue Newman was just the Sue Newman I eventually picked. All the other Sue Newmans didn’t make the cut. I needed just one Sue Newman.

Why’d I pick her?

The red wagon.

“106.46, please.”

“I flip on the security system …”

We got home at something like 4 and I slept till like 9 and then went to the office and wrote pretty quick. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving. Quiet in the cubicles. I like it at the length it ran. Said what needed to be said. To me the three most important parts are: 1. Christmas up the nose. 2. His company doesn’t sell wax and wicks. 3. Everything’s like. Nothing is.

The “nut graf” doesn’t always have to be, like, the third paragraph, and there’s no rule that says it all has to be in the same place.”

On her Green Party story, Monica Hesse recalls (again, by email) that she had part of Thursday to read everything she could about Green Party politics, history, etc. Then … :

“I drive to Baltimore Friday morning. Word starts buzzing that Roseanne is not going to show. I call my editor to tell her that. She asks if I want to bag it and come home. I tell her the story is funnier because Roseanne isn’t coming and they’ve been dissed by a joke of a celebrity.

I go to a bunch of sessions. I interview any people who say something interesting at the sessions. They’re all very excited that a reporter has been sent to cover the convention. I go out of my way to be straight up with them: I am a feature writer. I don’t cover politics. I was sent to cover the scene of this convention. I will probably make fun of you a little bit.

I come back [to Baltimore] on Saturday. That’s when they actually nominate their candidate. I barely interview anyone that day. I just sit and observe for hours as the states go up to the podium one by one. Everything I get on Saturday is 10 times better than the research I did on Thursday and 20 times better than the interviews I did on Friday. Mostly because I’m just watching people be themselves. That’s probably the biggest “tip” I could give your students: shut up. Sit in a corner. Watch. If you overhear someone say something wonderful, you can go up to them at that point and say, “I couldn’t help but hear you talking about blah blah. I’m a reporter, and I think that’s a wonderful quote. May I use it, and ask you a few other questions?” That way you get the wonderful quote, whereas if you just walked up to someone cold and introduced yourself, you never would have been able to pry it out of them.”

Monica finished her reporting on Saturday night, late, drove back to DC, slept on it, and filed her piece Sunday evening by deadline. She spent five hours writing it. It ran in the Monday Style section (and went up online Sunday night).

• • •

There’s a lot more here that we discussed (as did the authors), but you lurkers aren’t paying University of Montana tuition, so we’ll leave it at that. The Great Robin Chotzinoff was on the road when I contacted her, and she wanted to send some thoughts on “Life of the Party,” and may yet still — if so, I’ll post them next time.

And as for what I remember about reporting/writing “The Koan of Roshambo,” it mostly comes down to the same tips and techniques that Dan and Monica offered. You just gotta go, pay very close attention, and make something of whatever you’ve got. You have to make it interesting for the reader.

Of course what I do remember is that I had to cut a few hundred words because the paper was so tight that day. I can’t remember what those words could have possibly been, or what they would have added to a story that is already plenty long enough, but a writer never forgets the whacking.

For Monday, Oct. 22: It’s Pollner Day. I’ll be giving the 2012 T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor lecture Monday night at 7 in the U.C. theater. It’s called “Liner Notes for the End of the World: My Adventures in Covering Pop Culture Journalism.” Please come if you can.

For class, we’re going to be discussing the students’ personal essays, aka The Riffs. Mark up your copies and come ready to critique one another.

We’re delving into scene stories now, and what do I mean by that? It’s a feature that’s not too long, heavy on narrative and vivid detail, that takes a reader into a place they might not normally go, or were too busy to get to, or don’t have the access to. Reporting on a trial is, in a way, a scene story: What happened, but also, what did the courtroom feel like as it happened? What did people say during court recess, in the hallways? What did people wear? How did they react to evidence, testimony, verdicts? And, of course, what is the news?

Is there news? A scene story in the features department must often work from a much more nuanced notion of what is news. (“That’s news to me,” is often a reaction you hope to elicit from your readers– especially when it involves cultural events or subculture scenes that the reader might have only been vaguely aware of, or not at all.)

The Jour494 students must find a local(ish) scene story and file it by Nov. 7, and it must be 1,000-1,300 words. We launched into a terrific brainstorming session for most of Monday’s class period, but first I set forth the following parameters:

• It can’t be a scene you already know too much about or participate in. Never write about your own scene. These pieces should not be personal or involve the vertical pronoun. (“I.”)

• It must have narrative in it. Which, above all, means the reporter needs to go to something that is happening and follow it through from beginning to end. In some cases, what happens in a scene story transpires in a couple of hours — or sometimes less. In other cases, you’re up at dawn and see it all the way through for 12 or 24 hours.

• It should be pegged to an event, but in some cases, it can be a scene that occurs every day, and is therefore more along the “day in the life” (or “night in the life”) genre. Be careful, though, about being too broad. The best scene stories are specific.

• Don’t just show up unannounced. You are not on an undercover mission, you’re a journalist. Pre-reporting is the key to success with a scene story, even if you’re assigned a day-hit, where you only have an hour (or less) to prepare. Before you go out to your scene, interview the people in charge. Get a feel for what’s planned to happen, what the scene is like. Gather sources. READ UP — read everything you can find that’s been written about it before. And make sure that people know you’re coming as a journalist, that you’ll be taking notes. Establish rules ahead of time about permission, on/off-the-record, etc.

photo via cultofmac.com

• For this class, it must have a popular culture angle, but this can be so broadly defined that almost everything qualifies. Something people do in their spare time for fun. (Or faith? Or belief/politics/devotion?)

• There must be a “step-back.” This is where the writer/narrator steps back and provides broader cultural context. What does this scene mean? What does it represent? Why are we here? Why do people love it? This isn’t an opportunity to be opinionated; it’s an opportunity to be smart. It’s a payoff for the reader. The step-back can usually be accomplished in a perfect paragraph or two. Sometimes it can be done in one amazing sentence. (The reported essay and personal essay assignments were meant to limber the students up for writing step-backs.) If you ever find yourself at odds with an editor who wants to take your “step-back” out of the story, I say it’s probably worth dying on the hill for. Fight for it.

• Find a scene that occurs no later than Nov. 4 or 5, or else you’ll really be pushing deadline. But, having said that, there is Election Night on Nov. 6 — scenes galore. (Bars, political victory/defeat parties, etc.) Some of my favorite scene stories were written in an hour, on a tight deadline. If you feel up to the task, go ahead, but don’t file late.

Brainstorming ideas took off from here. I encouraged the students to give one another feedback and ideas/tips for more angles. It was like a giant story meeting. And fear not — Missoula is a small town, but it has an endless number of scenes. Halloween itself is a gift from the scene story gods. I’m liking what I’m hearing, but get out there and pre-report; make a plan.

For Wednesday, Oct. 17: We’re going to deconstruct five scene stories and see how they worked. I’ve also solicited advice from the authors (one of them is me), asking them what they remember about this particular assignment and how they did it. Read these, mark them up, and come to class ready to talk about reporting techniques and writing mechanics.

• “The Cycles of Fashion,” by Dan Zak — The Washington Post, Nov. 16, 2009.

• “Life of the Party,” by Robin Chotzinoff — Denver Westword, Feb. 14, 1996.

• “In the dark of holiday retail, a scented candle lights the way,” by Michael Kruse — Tampa Bay Times, Nov. 27, 2010.

• “The Koan of Roshambo: You Are Paper. I Rock,” by Hank Stuever — The Washington Post, Aug. 30, 2004.

• “Patiently waiting for the Green light,” by Monica Hesse — The Washington Post, July 16, 2012.

See you then.

Today’s assignment was to watch Sean Dunne’s remarkable, 23-minute documentary, American Juggalo, and think about how you would have handled that assignment — to spend a couple of days in the midst of the juaggalos at their annual bacchanal in an Illinois campground each August. Factor in everything: the kind of people you’d be talking to, the heat/humidity, the safety issue. How deeply would you throw yourself into it? At least one student said she’d just have to decline the assignment. That’s something to really think about when you’re on the cusp of deciding whether or not to be a reporter/photographer or to look for a desk job. If it could all be done from the comfort of our computer screens, it wouldn’t be journalism. (Too much of it is already done from a chair.)

I picked this film because it raises as many questions as it answers. Some students said they wished it had more information about the juggalo movement — history, logistics, etc. In service to context, some wanted to see concert footage of Insane Clown Posse and perhaps also see an interview with the band. One student said she wanted some hard facts about how the weekend transpires, in terms of police presence and incident reports. We all noticed that the subjects in American Juggalo aren’t fully ID’d by name. Some of us wanted to know much more about the non-juggalo lives of the participants. We also talked about how the film made us feel — about the juggalos, about the scene.

I’ve spent most of my career fascinated by the idea that, basically, everybody’s got their somethin’. That one thing they’re sort of nuts for. Some people pick Jesus. Some pick Harry Potter. Some picked Steve Jobs. As journalists, we should be dying to know WHY and what it MEANS, what it stands for. For us, it means a lot of late nights, early mornings, rental cars and bug spray. It also means you have to interview people more deeply than they might expect. In which case, you need to be wary of how close you’re getting to having your ass kicked. You need to get more from people than easy quotes, slogans and empty sentiments. (Almost everyone in American Juggalo speaks abstractly about the ways the feel they’ve been marginalized by society. It struck me, on this viewing, that their need to feel marginalized is at least as powerful, if not more, than any actual ostracizing they’ve experienced.)

The exercise here is to think, as writers, how we would translate what Dunne and his crew captured on film into a piece of prose nonfiction that is just as spooky, lovely and revealing about one part of our culture (or subculture). American Juggalo offers up great raw material that almost begs for a good narrator/writer to come along and subtly layer some sense on it. That’s what I call a scene story.

One thing I’ve noticed in my short time teaching here, and in advising the Montana Kaimin (the student paper), is that this generation of journalists cedes a lot of the territory once reserved for feature writing to the video format. At the Kaimin, easily the most intimate journalism going on this semester comes through the video stories. The videos are often excellent. I like both, which is why I’d like to see feature writing that is just as compelling as some of the videos. Whoop-whoop.

Next, we talked for a long time about the endlessly entertaining photo galleries on the Nightmares Fear Factory’s web site. Here, at this haunted house on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, we see all of modern life and anxiety laid bare, with a notable degree of diversity. We had great fun talking about everyone’s favorite pictures, and imagining the narratives that could exist behind each. Again I want you to think about what sort of prose story you could do here — what questions you’d ask of the people in the photos. And how you would go about asking them. How to go deeper than just “Was it so, so scary?” How to arrive at deeper ideas, too — what is it about us that we need to be horrified? (I particularly liked Neil Sauer’s idea that needing to go through a haunted house attraction it’s like some people’s craving for spicy food.)

For Monday, Oct. 15: Now that we’ve done this, it’s time for the mother of all brainstorming sessions. Come to class ready to talk about your idea for a good 1,000- to 1,300-word scene story, which you need to file on Wednesday, Nov. 7. The key to it, as with both examples today, is that it needs a strong pop-culture angle. But this can be very broadly defined. My hope is that all of you look way outside your typical interests and comfort zones. Comb through listings in the Missoulian, the Independent, the Kaimin, the Corridor — and beyond. Pay close attention to bulletin boards, kiosks. Open your eyes and ears and start thinking. The goal of these stories is to take the reader into a world they wouldn’t normally visit, or have access to.

ALSO, your personal essays are due on Monday. Remember: double-spaced, two printed copies, one e-copy emailed to me and — cripes — don’t forget those SEOs.