Last year I asked my Facebook friends on my “Wall,” where conversations are texted (Is this English?), “Why are people so upbeat on Facebook?” I’d been on Facebook a few months, having been sold on it by NSNC veteran Dave Lieber (who pushed the social networking site in last month’s edition of The Columnist newsletter), and was amazed by the civility and cheerfulness. When people reported devastating news, if they didn’t spin it up, then the Wall responses were nothing but empathy and affirmations.

My query received a wide range of answers. Two resonated. One was that people intuitively want Facebook for uplift and you have to give it to get it. The other explanation was fear — fear of being disliked or rebutted … or worst, ostracized in Facebook by being either “hidden” or “removed.”

So I was hit by a bucket of ice water when a friend of over 10 years blasted me on Facebook in mid-August, over a column I “shared” by providing its Web page address. Worse, his comments got “liked.” The piece was by Robert Niles in the Online Journalism Review, “This Year’s Advice for Journalism Students.”

In his piece Niles — who early in his career had a reporting stint at the Herald-Times in Bloomington, Ind., site of the NSNC 2010 conference — updated the usual spiel of networking and specializing by noting that the depth of students’ online presence now will be judged by potential employers.

Of course he meant watch the silly talk and embarrassing photos, but mainly, Niles seemed to be saying that being published is being published, even if you’re doing it yourself. In other words, clips are clips. So post well. “When you read, watch or listen think always, ‘Would others find this interesting?’ That’s how you find the material you’ll need to fill your blog, Twitter feed or whatever else you publish online.”

Some professionals, perhaps the more traditional newspaper people, i.e. older, are threatened by that, in the same way authors debate that while talent can be developed, writing cannot be taught to just anyone.

Let me quote the online dialog that was posted after my link to Niles’ column.

My friend X—-: “Horse sh*t. I didn’t start by sucking a sportswriter’s golfballs as an intern and puking accolades to pay for the privilege. I got my foot in the door as a ‘copyboy’ and worked the streets. Chased cop calls, filed a few unpublished features about interesting people — got two or three pieces accepted each year — and studied ‘on the street’ with people who had spent their lives working ‘on the streets.’ Learned how to ‘get my facts on straight’ from people who had done so for 30-plus years before I ever showed up. Whatever ‘ojr.org’ is, this is the first and last time I will visit the site. Bunch of dilettantes who have no clue whatsoever, apparently. Feel-good cr*p for wannabe celebs.”

A friend of his left the comment, “You go, X—–!”

I tried to lower the heat with what I hoped was humor: “OK. Next caller! You do make strong points, X—–. Niles though is an experienced newspaperman, Midwest to Denver to, there you go, California — LA Times then USC. I think he’s about the most feet-on-the-ground of the gung-ho Internet journalism guys. He’s been solid on where we’re heading.”

Again, my friend, a longtime reporter: “Ben, I first met Geraldo Rivera when he was starting his career in ‘straight journalism.’ The idea that ‘every blog is valid reporting’ is absolute Geraldo Rivera horse sh*t.”

Two people clicked “like” on this.

I ended the thread with: “Your quote ‘every blog is valid reporting’ is nowhere in this piece. Nor does Niles mention or advise the exploitative sensationalism of Geraldo. The closest quote to this invented sentence is, ‘Everyone who posts online has the potential to create journalism.’ If he means any blogger can choose a topic, nail the facts and write clearly — wouldn’t that be an improvement over the ‘professional’ coverage of U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert? ‘What a maroon,’ as Bugs Bunny would say.”

In reading this now, maybe I didn’t handle this well — look up “Gohmert terrorist babies” online — but our new era scares folks. It should concern people who are comfortable with new media.

In a short time, 15 years perhaps, original work appears first online routinely. If a columnist doesn’t have a berth at a daily or weekly, a newspaper or magazine, or was dropped, the writer can set up a blog with a permanent web address. It can be done at no cost. It’s another option besides freelancing or moving to other formats such as books.

For we columnists, it means more places for where we can explain, report, comment and mock.

My friend isn’t the only one breathing hard.

Dan Gillmor asked in the Internet-only publication Salon (if it has new material every day, is it an online newspaper?) “Who’s a Journalist? Does That Matter?” He begins, “If you’re a creator of media, and most of us are these days in one way or another, what should I call you?”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is getting all ACLU on this, as can be seen at its page Bloggers’ Rights.

Want more confusion? Blogs are starting to be taxed.

The Philadelphia Inquirer just reported in “Is Philly Taxing Bloggers?” how city officials believe that blogs that make money are businesses so their creators must pay $50 a year or $300 for a lifetime privilege license.

Angry? Yes, I flared, then in debating myself I recalled sales tax on newspapers. Many but not all states exempt newspapers from adding sales tax to their price. Few states, on the other hand, exempt magazines. While tacking 7 cents to the price of a newspaper could cut rack sales, especially these days, I’ve never understood how we’re a necessity like groceries, also exempt from taxes in some states. I can’t see a First Amendment angle, either. As long as tax is owed across the board, those nickels help pay teachers and police officers.

But I studied further. It turns out that Philly’s Business Privilege Tax is not new. For many years, freelancers of all sorts have had to pay it, too. (How does City Hall know who to send that form to? The IRS tells it who reports such income.)

Thus, you can find lots on the Internet about the levy. After all, it’s something for writers to write about.

Government revenue is another sign that blogging is becoming mainstream. You may not make more than coffee money off it, but the puppy just heard the can opener.

* * *

Want to take a shot? — Comment at columnists.com or facebook.com/columnists.

– Ben S. Pollock, NSNC president

Thank you for electing me president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Didn’t you hear? I have not published a running column since Sept. 16, 2001.

Instead I’ve written at www.benpollock.com/brick for nearly seven years. After the first year, the water warms up. Blogging is how I’ve coped with the recession and the panicking publishing industry. We’re all attacking this differently. The iceberg appeared so suddenly. As president, I’ll help the NSNC help you.

We cannot reverse the value of your home, though.

I joined the NSNC in 1991, toward the end of its First Wave: staff columnists but also writers like me, editors or reporters with columns on the side. Through conferences and newsletters we gave one another advocacy, support and education, leavened with irreverence.

In the mid-1990s the Second Wave began to roll in, free-lance columnists from veterans to novices. The First Wave hung on, with more staff columnists joining. High jinks ensued.

The Third Wave has started. We added online-only columns to the annual contest. Then we welcomed blog-columns, where entries must be bound by commonly accepted journalism values and honor the three-century history of newspaper columns in tradition, format, spirit and variety.

Important: The NSNC needs all three waves. The NSNC serves columnists everywhere at all levels of experience, in all media and formats, through education, support and advocacy. A column is a running series of essays, from personal to persuasive, employing research and reporting or extending to fantasy and satire. Written columns are the most common, but audio and video essays are no less valid. Journalism standards and ethics are observed in columns.

A column is a column in essentially any media. It’s a technical term, medium, meaning canvas, stone, paper, pixels etc. Newspaper as a medium is abstract. It always has had different forms.

Decades ago, neighborhood sheets would be run off on mimeographs (Google it) and be called X. In San Francisco and Liberia, a few journalists now write news and comment on chalkboards calling them X. Our papers call their websites online X. Salon.com and Slate.com update several times a day like multiple-edition X — they’re all newspapers.

So we columnists board the good ship NSNC — lifeboat or yacht — and watch for icebergs. Maybe I’m thinking arctic because it’s past 90 and not even noon yet in Arkansas.

– This column was first published in the August 2010 edition of The Columnist,
the monthly newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Card-Carrying Columnist Card

A nice thing just happened. On Jan. 31, I was elected vice president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I’ve been a card-carrying columnist since 1991, joining during the run of my column Mirthology, in the old Arkansas Democrat. The post is interim, to cover after a resignation, until the annual membership meeting in July in Bloomington, Ind.

VP should be just another officer and not particularly noteworthy. First I was archivist from 2005-07, then elected secretary and last summer re-elected minutes-taker. It’s cool that it’s a national group, but also comfortable in not being too big, around 300 members in a given year.

But veep is not just another officer. According to the motion, I am “to be willing to be on the slate as a nominee for president at that meeting.”

That’s what I’m in for. And barring nominations from the floor — a qualified candidate could get my vote — I’ll be out front for 2010-12.

Here’s the thing. I am a former newspaper columnist. My last print-published column, Loose Leaves, was dropped when I was downsized from that newsroom, in fall 2001. I’ve repeatedly made the fact known to board and lay members alike. For several years, different people have suggested I make myself available to the nominating committee, but I’ve insisted the NSNC president has to be a columnist. It’d be like the Bar Association run by a subpoena server, the Teamsters headed by a CPA, the American Veterinary Medical Association led by a Shih Tzu.

Times are changing. No need to detail here changes in the newspaper business/craft/industry/profession/racket.

The motion by longtime member, and currently newsletter editor, Robert L. Haught lists, too generously, my alleged qualifications:

The president needs to be someone who has been a member of NSNC long enough to know the organization well, who has demonstrated genuine interest in the future of NSNC, who is attuned to the conditions in the news business that affect columnists, who is articulate, promotion-minded, persuasive and able to lead. Ben possesses all these qualities and more. He has gone beyond the responsibility of the offices he has held to provide valuable assistance on the web site, the contest, the bylaws and other areas. He is the right person at the right time to move into a leadership position he has earned.”

But, I am a former newspaper columnist. For nearly six years, my 40-hour, insurance-carrying job has been news page designer and copy editor. When I was a columnist, it was always a weekly gig, a few hours taken from my business-card title of some kind of editor or another.

On reflection, though, I’m a former lots of things. Ex: reporter, metro editor, editorial page editor, low-brass musician, watercolorist, freezer assembly lineman, wire editor, photojournalist, book and show critic, public radio news producer, journalism scholar, college instructor. …

Former isn’t forever. Most of these things I can pick up again, should something happen to the current gig. Buy a picture of a trombone?

No worries: I am a columnist in a 21st-century sense: I blog. I opened my Web site back in 2002, a long time for this medium.

Most of our members who still produce columns for newspapers have an online presence as well, both staff and freelance writers. Yet we’re gaining members whose essays run solely online, either at their own or on broader sites.

Sure, among my former selves, newspaper columnist is tops. I’m a realist, though, so I press on under my own masthead. Brick gets a lot of hits.

These are interesting times. Thank heavens I’m still a columnist.

Last Tuesday, May 26, the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective hosted the noted, and local, poet Miller Williams at the independent Nightbird Books in Fayetteville. What a turnout for such a space. The reading area — Nightbird just moved to a larger space, the fondly recalled Ozark Mountain Smokehouse, and soon food will be served among the stacks — held more than 50 seated, about another 20 standing along the back, and in the shop itself I was told another 40, who only could hear him read. Miller read a few of his crowd-pleasing earlier poems then read from his latest collection, Time and the Tilting Earth. On stage, Miller pays particular attention to timing and inflection, and it was over way too quickly. A few days before I was surprised to be asked to introduce him, but accepted the humbling challenge.

Perhaps some people would like to know what I said.

My name is Ben, and I’m a … Am I high-stepping or side-stepping or 12-stepping? My name is Ben, and I’m a writer. It shouldn’t have been up to her, but Jordan Williams, Miller’s wife, taught me it’s OK to say that. We were at some presentation five or seven years ago, sitting together somehow, and the fellow asked, “Are there writers here?” I got gun-shy, self-conscious, and Miller’s wife gave a look: “Well, aren’t you?” It’s not to the qualifying level of good or bad, or merely the quantifying of whether or how much you’re writing. When you write you write. (Raise hand.) Many of us here are writers. Still there are writers and … Writers.

When you’ve published more than 30 books of poetry, criticism, essays, textbooks (or at least books that are used in many schools as textbooks) and fiction — now that’s a writer. When you’ve been honored by your country, by the President at his Inauguration, that’s a writer, big time.

Still with my friend Miller, that’s just a part. It gets to be like the story of the blind men describing an elephant by considering the parts separately. In Miller’s case, elephant might leave the wrong political impression. Make it a donkey.

When I first came to know Miller in the beginning of the decade, he seemed a squire, somewhere between a Patriarch of the University and the Lord of his Manor, yes I mean his home, full of literary and musical history being made, near the campus.

Yet Miller Williams in this town is best known as a professor. A well-known and beloved teacher, of long tenure and extending into his retirement, he is known by reputation and innuendo that’s not always … friendly. You hear a lot when you hang out in Kimpel Hall.

I had to see for myself. In graduate school about six years ago, I connived, though in Journalism, to take Creative Writing classes, arranging my thesis to justify that. I thought, why attend the UA if I can’t connive to take courses by Molly Giles, Ellen Gilchrist and Miller Williams.

I found for myself that Miller as a professor mixed old-fashioned method with contemporary thought. I discovered that as a well-prepared lecturer and a very tough grader where he would disappoint students expecting a pushover. He knows poetry, literary writing in general, and is generous when you get it, and not too lenient when you don’t.

Mainly, though, I am grateful for the chance to stand here tonight, because Miller is my neighbor. After my wife and I signed the contract on the house in early 1999, its owner, himself an already retired professor, in agriculture, and I stood on our front walk. He pointed.

“You know who lives across the street?” No, Jake, who? “Miller Williams, and his wife, Jordan. Know who Miller Williams is?” Well, yeah. And I think: I am a writer, though an editor for the day job, but as a writer and a reader and an Arkansan, by God yes I know who Miller Williams is. And I hoped then that his creative, prolific karma floated in the neighborhood. I think it does.

But that is space-talk. On our first or second day, I was bringing a couple of empty boxes back out to the carport, and there walked up the man I’d seen in photos and television. He introduced himself and produced a plate of Jordan’s cookies and a couple of cans of cold soda.

A couple of weeks later, Miller and Jordan arranged for a small luncheon with a couple of other neighbors and a couple of other people, to welcome us. Things like that. Then two months ago, Jordan and Miller spontaneously took care of our new dog for a few hours when Christy and I had to meet at the emergency room.

As one of Fayetteville’s metaphorical blind men — me — the side of the critter that I behold, that I’ve come to know, of Miller, is his good heart.

Miller Williams.

We would be following the path of a larger, older and more prominent group, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, that earlier this month voted itself the American Society of News Editors. Never mind that most print journalism outlets dub the chief copy editor the “news editor,” the name is otherwise restrictive, because news outlets both offline and on offer more than news content.

Our group — columnists, former columnists and would-be columnists — aren’t anything but what we are, and that will hold for a few more years. So let’s stick with the moniker under which it was founded some 32 years ago. The name we pick once the news media upheaval begins to settle will be better than our best guess now.

By a rather elementary fashion, I will show word by word why the National Society of Newspaper Columnists will be apt for a few more years. This is being posted today because it’s National Columnists Day, held on the anniversary of the killed-in-action death of one of our heroes, Ernie Pyle.

• Society. It could become Organization or Association, as long we’re cleaning house, but if we change the form of group, it should remain lean and clean. Society is easy on the tongue. Besides, it indicates class. If journalists have any class, and we do, as much as any profession can claim (more fun than lawyers and slightly better hours than doctors), then columnists in general would have the highest status. Or almost, second to copy editors.
• Of. To the extent we remain an exclusive organization, “of” must stay. “For” works for the National Organization for Women so men can belong. The NSNC exists to support our sort of writer, not associates, fans or other third parties. On principle, every group should be inclusive, right? Yes, this is a defensive move. If we post the Keep Out sign then we won’t get our feelings hurt when no one shakes the ladder of our tree house.
• National. For years we have welcomed our few Canadian members. Two have served on our board. This year a Swede has joined. Like “national” groups of America and those of other countries, we have some international components but acknowledge a trace of xenophobia. We are primarily Americans, and our focus remains U.S. media. When we start acting like PEN, then we can revisit this.
• Columnists. The form of essay by which we have defined ourselves is concrete. It’s a column of type, straight down the page. Many of us who still write columns don’t have a vertical format but two or three columns wide and 3-5 column-inches down, “modular,” as page designers call it. Either way, we are measured by the column. All sorts of writing comprise the text portions of the Internet. Bona fide columnists when online are not restricted to text but orate from podcasts and video streams, or series of tweets. The kind of online writing now honored and explored by the NSNC are column-like pieces, written or otherwise recorded by columnist sorts of newsies.
• Newspaper. No other type of journalism defines what columnists did, do and will do. Radio and TV don’t have columns, but commentaries, and with a few exceptions their journalism ethics and credentials are looser. At least for a few more years, I suspect newspaper Web sites will be called newspaper Web sites. “Aggregator” or “portal” or another word yet to gain favor likely will not encapsulate what washingtonpost.com or arkansasonline.com do and stand for. Newspapers, print and virtual, are fallable, but no other journalism medium has its ethics, breadth and ambition.

As humans we think and speak (and write and text-message) in metaphors. A newspaper doesn’t have to be ink on paper to communicate reporting and analysis of news. A literal column, depending on point size, can be 400 to 900 words or so. Anything shorter is a brief, blog or tweet, and those much longer turn into those section-front think pieces, the kind only its editors read. If we drop “newspaper,” then we must drop “columnist,” and we cease to exist in an implosion of logic rather than wait for market forces and society to tell us which way the winds really will blow.

We are the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

At least until after the Revolution. Has it started yet?

-30-

A newsmagazine commentary from a couple of weeks ago stopped me cold. I still think about it, in a similar way a comic panel from last year comes up, which has put me off Outback’s Bloomin’ Onions. These are like cloying old songs that once heard reverberate for days within the skull.

Speaking of skulls, let’s discuss blockheads, as considered by the venerable Samuel Johnson:

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

For a long time I fully agreed, only that it didn’t yet apply to me, making me a blockhead, a fool. Brick obviously has no money behind it. Or in front, either. I’ve been paid for writing only a few times per century. Oh, there’s been indirect compensation, writing a column a week while editing the other 35-39 hours. For putting up with such an arrangement, Dr. Johnson would kick people like me out of the coffee house. I wonder if that’s how pubs came to flourish, when the English coffee houses emptied for want of compensated scribes.

Noting someone named Francis Wilkinson agrees with Dr. Johnson does not raise the former to the latter. Earlier in March he wrote in The Week magazine more than 800 words what the good doctor accomplished in 10. I see Wilkinson’s point, and even though it is wrong, it still makes me angry.

Rather than quote and quote the essay, why don’t you click to it and see for yourself. In a hurry? Allow me: Wilkinson goes into a fair amount of detail about how writers in recent decades invariably were paid, though rarely much. Now, however, there’s even less pay, relative to inflation but more so relative to Internet opportunities. He believes that only writers whose money comes from elsewhere will be able to afford to produce and the society will lose needed voices. Wilkinson has one personal example: His experience editing at the online Huffington Post. It pays writers nothing yet has been overrun with submissions since its beginning.

Wilkinson professes not to understand. Yet his credit line indicates he is his news magazine’s executive editor. His column is a sideline, proving his point, that the world of prose will narrow to those who can afford to. Only he avoids the argument. “HuffPo” attracts writers who find satisfaction outside of remuneration. Most writers do.

Even in Johnson’s time, 1709-1784, few writers wrote for money and the rest were not blockheads. Those Brits who were literate did not have phones, podcasts or television. If they weren’t face-to-face, they wrote — letters. If you couldn’t write, you’d hire someone to take your dictation.

Paging Cyrano de Bergerac, white courtesy telephone. Paging Cyrano …”

For centuries, people have written to communicate. They wrote in order to be written back to. They wrote in order to be heard or, rather, to be read. Money would be nice, but it’s not the only economy. Here are two terrific examples, John and Abigail Adams; you may know them from their TV show, now on DVD.

There’s a prime reason why people make words, crafts or art besides getting greenbacks. I’m only now learning about this so can’t explain it well. Its common name is the Gift Economy. It’s not some form of communism/socialism/terrorism/anarchism out to defeat capitalism while boosting Rush Limbaugh’s ratings to oppose. Giving is reciprocal, but precision in the exchange often devalues it. For young geeks, file sharing is a Gift Economy exchange, not a Market Economy one. Wilkinson only acknowledges the Market (or Barter) Economy. Gift Economy is what sociologists and philosophers, and law school heroes and surely economists (though I haven’t read them yet) have termed this, awkward for the ambiguity of “gift,” and created models and histories for it.

Most of law professor Lawrence Lessig‘s books start from the premise of the Gift Economy. Lessig helped found Creative Commons, to protect those intellectual rights worth bothering about. Lewis Hyde explores the world of artists and art lovers in his book The Gift, and a PDF afterword, where trade can be explained only partially by exchanging money for a picture to hang or a book to read.

The Gift Economy can help explain why capping the accessibility of free news on the Internet will prove to be impossible. The Gift Economy is not a competitor to capitalism as communism is commonly thought to be. Gift and Market are complementary. Each fills different needs of society, and a healthy society allows a flowing equilibrium between both of them.

The Market Economy and Wilkinson find an oversupply of writers. The Gift Economy does not tabulate them. Most writing these days more closely resembles letters than anything else.

The Gift Economy even applies to market-successful artists. It does not apply only to art no one buys or capital-L literature few read. Writing to formula as a hack is no gift. Stephen King is wildly successful and enviably prolific, yet in reading any of his works the kick this artist gets from spinning tales is as obvious as the nose on Cyrano’s face.

Update to Johnson:

No one but a hack ever wrote, except for money.”

People like us enjoy creating — words, woodcarving, fishing lures — and it’s a reverse-lagniappe if someone actually takes a look. As I mature, it grows more attractive.

This Good Depression (the Great Depression was suffered by the Greatest Generation, and at best we’re just a Good Generation) accelerates such contemplation. All that I previously understood was based on Johnson, that a lack of pay proves futility. It does not. No that I won’t accept lucre, but my world has gotten a lot simpler since I quit scheming to write for money.

I’m not blocked anymore.

I can be a snob sometimes: I enjoyed most movies based on Stephen King novels but read nothing of his until seeing a short story or two early this decade in The New Yorker. The plan’s not to catch up on everything he wrote, but so far I’ve enjoyed the early now-classics and recent books, including On Writing.

Cell is normal King, a creature thriller set as a road story, great fun, hiding a societal satire. The much-praised Lisey’s Story was nearly a standard novel: a woman resumes living after the premature death of a beloved spouse. An insight then became more manifest when I grabbed this year’s Duma Key, another formal novel with a twist: The man can’t help adding a monster or ghost or giving a character a bit of the old telepathy. [King cannot be trying to hold his core audience -- fans of the Dark Tower series aren't getting near a 40-something woman dealing with her husband's estate and her sisters.]

Both Lisey and Duma would have been fine works as detailed character studies, bringing King critical praise from literary types. I don’t think King added the paranormal to thumb his nose at them. The old boy can’t help himself.

Edgar Freemantle is an established Minnesota builder, an American success story, until a debilitating accident. He moves to Florida’s fictitious Duma Key to recuperate not just from his injuries but what they brought: chiefly a divorce from his wife and a divorce from the life they built, forced to retire, one-armed, gimp leg, brain damage. Get a hobby, he’s advised, and he recalls he’d taken an art class or two in school. Edgar in his rent-house turns out to be a painting prodigy, but is his gift his own?

Stephen King, by emphasizing that plot-question instead of keeping this pulpy gimmick a subplot, is being honest with using what he likes in storytelling. Every creativity-targeted how-to writing book, including his own, says write for yourself. (The other kind is market-oriented.) He dares infect a post-9/11 saga with what may be zombies, refining the question to, Does he jeopardize the book’s integrity? The plot would collapse in the drafting of thousands of other writers.

What I like about King is what the supernatural aspect represents. He is not a fiction writer who merely rearranges the deck chairs of his own life time after time, memoir pulled like taffy. That’s not to say the true fiction writer doesn’t use his own life; of course he does. King knows about convalescing from multiple injuries. As a subtext, the man has a lot to say in Duma about pulling work from the creative process. After skads of Oprah author interviews (except the Cormac McCarthy), you’d think “let’s pretend” was a perversion past the point where sick sells so well. God bless Stephen King for believing in imagination.

His On Writing belongs with just a few other decent books of that sort, Anne Lamott’s and Natalie Goldberg’s, and the mighty godmother of them all, On Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande.

There’s one other book, and, today, gratitude must be expressed.

Ten years ago today, My Beloved and I began the 12-week exercise program in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It’s so important we mark the date on calendars, for it changed our lives.

A few days earlier, an east Arkansas artist stayed the night at the B&B we managed that year. She made bas relief renderings of homely houses and barns in painted clay, less than a foot in size. Her work sold pretty well in our gift shop. It was midweek, and she was the only guest (I’ve forgotten her name). The crafter evangelized about the book but in a no-nonsense way, or I would have politely disappeared into the laundry or kitchen. MB and I found a copy in a Eureka Springs bookshop and ordered a second on Amazon.com so we each could make notes in the margins.

In what Cameron would call synchronicity, we were shopping for supplies in Fayetteville and saw a poster for an Artist’s Way class starting right away. We already were falling for Fayetteville, having to make frequent Sam’s Club trips, and we’d stay for a movie or a band at a club. The teacher, our fellow students and most important the friends of all these folks quickly made us family. And family’s for keeps.

What’s this have to do with King? Art teacher Betty Edwards says a lucky few figure out on their own how to paint (or write), but the rest of us, if we want, can start with learning blind contour drawing. Cameron teaches contour writing. King’s a natural.

You can find good lessons everywhere, but when you find a hot spot loaded with them, why not lock it in.

I didn’t mind. This is one of the “little magazines.” Big magazines have generally brief, vaguely sourced articles written with patronizing triteness. Little magazines have larger pieces using longer sentences and paragraphs, with bigger vocabularies. Some cross over, like most of Vanity Fair and parts of Esquire. I wanted this little New Yorker in both hands, not some low-resolution Internet image of the jacket, and time to think.

The cover, by Barry Blitt, is titled “The Politics of Fear.” Blitt has drawn a number of covers, as seen in this online selection, and all are topical and pointed. This time, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. and his party’s presumptive presidential candidate, is shown wearing Arab garb in the Oval Office, bumping fists (fearmongers call it a street gang or al Qaida greeting, because aren’t they all in it together, to get us?) There’s his wife, Michelle, topped by a foxy Afro with an automatic weapon slung on her back. A portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs above the fireplace in which the U.S. flag is burning.

Yeah, it’s satire. Look it up. Satire — usually some form of communicating the opposite of what is meant — isn’t always ha-ha funny. It’s not necessarily a New Yorker “mild-chuckle” funny. It can be a short gasp of recognition, of getting the point, yet finding irritation not humor. Let’s be clear:

I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”

– E.B. White’s caption for a Carl Rose panel cartoon in The New Yorker, 1928.

Another tack: When I was 11 years old my family took a trip that had a stop in New Orleans; Dad decades earlier attended Tulane. One evening, Mom insisted on seeing Bourbon Street, not for the music clubs but the strip joints, just to walk by them. Mom had me by one elbow, leading me as if blind, for I was: Her other hand shielded my eyes from the open, inviting doorways.

For quite some time, satire has been like that. You can identify it, even ascertain its strength, by both the number and variety of “brother’s keepers” who say, “I get it but others won’t.” People who are shocked on your behalf, would like to see it not published because it might encourage you or because you may not comprehend “opposites,” though young children’s humor shows they can create and understand opposites.

Here are some examples. First, Both Obama and his presumptive opponent, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. have expressed anger. Umbrage for politicians, though, is a matter of first of choice then of calculation.

• “That’s who we are in this country: ignorant, irony-impaired and petrified.” — Leonard Pitts Jr., The Miami Herald.
• “Dumb cover.” — Garrison Keillor, in Slate, and to think he’s both a lefty and a New Yorker contributor.
• “I think we all have to watch very carefully what we say — our attempts at humor, our attempts at informing people — because some of what we say can be misinterpreted and do real damage.” — New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in The New York Times
• It’s a recruitment poster for the right-wing. — Jake Tapper, ABC News
• “The New Yorker cover advances the virulent version of Obama as a closet radical with dangerous associations.” — Eleanor Clift, Newsweek

Thus, Blitt’s “The Cover of Fear” not only is satire but a modern-classic example because so many oh-so-important people have condemned it, mainly because it could persuade the unschooled that its various elements are true, just like they heard.

The only way for satire to win in this context is to be powerful. Thus the cable channel Comedy Central (caution, audio) gets only praise for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. The New Yorker, eh, not so big.

Most of the men I know who read books, admittedly a small number, read fiction, going by conversation at get-togethers. The minority who prefer non-fiction go for history. Now, the women I know, including writers, are all over non-fiction but especially these three, how-to, self-help and spirituality or new-age, all tellingly neglected in the three articles above. I’ve heard mentions of history, science and current events as well but, in strong fourth place, memoir. In my crowd, both sexes enjoy poetry.

Thus the claim that women prefer fiction and men non, is wish-fulfillment by these refined major media intellectual essayists. Here’s another theory: A lot of women fear possibly having been short-changed by college and life experiences in general and want to level the field with more and better knowledge through self-education. They don’t feel they have time to relax into made-up / let’s pretend / derring-do / boo-hoo escapism. Men do, which would prove this feminist point.

I used to be a bachelor who checked out women’s bookshelves and cast judgments. I never did that to My Beloved when we dated; I was too smitten to think that mattered. It didn’t, but as it happens she had a shelf or two, mostly of the self-help order. For her part, she mocked my hundreds and hundreds of volumes. At rare times she does still.

MB’s collection has grown tremendously but they’re generally in that top three, very few fours (memoir). While she loves movies and the better TV dramas, she sees no point in getting involved in the prose lives of other people if they don’t exist. After 15 years of marriage, as of last month, I realized something: We can converse in detail about books, because we read different ones. If both read Cormac McCarthy or Suze Orman, that can last only a sentence or two, right?

Mostly I listen, though. Ask me about dollar-cost averaging! MB really sees no point in my telling her that Suzie Salmon’s dad just had a heart attack in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Like The Constant Gardener or The Golden Compass, which I read or heard (as audio books), she always loves the film when it comes out. -30-

My main club — only because inclusion means adherence to its rules before and beyond any others — is the Journalist Club. The name for the rules collectively is Conflict of Interest. Being an ethical person from early childhood, even teaching a semester of journalism ethics to UA undergrads, demonstrates I easily accept the avoidance of Conflicts of Interest.

We journalists, funnily enough, don’t quite agree on the extent of Conflicts of Interest. At one extreme, senior people at The Washington Post don’t even vote though that’s by design a secret act. At the other extreme, no publication or broadcast entity dares interfere with a correspondent’s choice or intensity of worship (though like in any profession one is surprised by the ignorance of educated people). They also don’t object to The Society of Professional Journalists, which not only takes stands but issues press releases.

My current employer forbids gifts of value, and that’s a good idea, though vague. A coffee is nothing, but a full dinner is out of bounds (so pay your share or pay for his and expense it out). You make an ethics course lively by debating where an elaborate espresso drink fits in.

A long time ago, at the Irving Daily News (now fully absorbed into The Dallas Morning News) I wasted a third of an interview appointment at a cafe explaining to the city official why he could not buy me a coffee, yet he refused to let me treat. This paper had strict rules. Either he was truly dense or deliberately killing minutes. I did not realize I should have let him treat after the first objecton so we could move on to the topic — because my editor would not know to ask me if I’d been a good boy. Most people figure this out by age 12; it took a couple of years after the coffee shop incident for me. No wonder the saying was, “Don’t trust anyone over 30″; it was about age 29 when I realized no one else reads minds, either.

The issue becomes more prominent because this is an election year. News media sites have noted several newspapers have forbidden journalists from participating in party caucuses in those states that have them. The reporter will be seen, for example, at a Democratic caucus site and therefore must be biased against Republicans. Worse, in its open format, the public can see if he voted for Clinton or Obama and would be biased against the other.

Makes sense, yes. Open endorsement is just that. Most news media outlets forbid employees from bumper stickers, yard signs and the like that support or oppose a candidate or issue. Including mine. Some, including mine, don’t want family members of newsroom personnel sporting the same. Your spouse drives you somewhere, and, whoops, that bumper sticker is in plain site. My Beloved is not happy about it. This is America with the First Amendment she says. My ethical boundaries end where hers begin, or don’t.

While perceived conflict of interest has a theoretical legitimacy, in fact, the people who see bias in the news very often announce discoveries of far subtler signs of it, many of which do not exist. Thoughts along this line do need elaboration, which puts non-journalists quickly to sleep, except for those non-journalists who are “Brothers Keepers” who’d just say we’re lying anyway.

I am comfortable with avoiding public shows of bias. It rebuts sincere accusations of partiality. But mainly, when you’re a journalist who’s settled in a place and come to know a lot of people, these rules not only keep you out of trouble but also from much awkwardness. MB and I were just asked to post a yard sign for a mayoral candidate, and it was convenient to be able to say, good luck on your race, but we’re not allowed.

The only true way to show oneself and one’s journalistic outlet as overall fair is in consistently thorough news coverage. Week in and week out, most readers trust my newspaper. Those citizens (they’re not necessarily readers) who don’t, also seem to believe with enough effort they can turn back time among other delusions. People around town with whom I’ve opined about leaders and issues at gatherings also know I am scrupulously if not annoyingly fair. I don’t wear my politics on my sleeve because that’s fake anyway.

Newsroom management’s obsession on political conflicts of interest conveniently avoid one fact of American life: Everything is political if someone wants to make an issue of it: Clothes, diet, favorite TV shows, Wal-Mart versus The Mall.

Outsiders may judge where you worship, but some fellow congregants act as if they have clout to advise you on what and how something is covered. My yard has no signs, but the lack of chemical pesticides and fertilizers is obvious. That might mean I have a stewardship bent and call weeds native grasses. Or I might be lazy. My 1995 Geo Prizm (the kind of car you drive also carries a political statement) has two bumper stickers, signifying I am an alumnus of the University of Arkansas and Stanford University. MB and I have the Arkansas woodpecker license plates. Brothers’ Keeper sorts may think I am a romantic believing in rural urban legends. Or that I believe my car is more than plastic and steel for there’s irony, too.

In my wallet are cards for AAA and AARP. Their services are cheap but their politics only occasionally my own. My newspaper would freak out if I carried an ACLU card — I don’t — but AAA and AARP to which I have sent dues have viewpoints that are political.

You’ll also see a half-dozen coffee punch cards. Please don’t judge me by Fayetteville’s Jammin Java, the national Panera, and Fort Smith’s Sweet Bay (caution, audio). Oh, you’re wondering where the card is for Atlanta Bread Co. or Arsaga’s? Hey, I don’t like ABC, and Arsaga’s charges for refills. Go ahead, snitch; I’ll deny favoritism. -30-