The changes in journalism wrought by evil Frankie Magid probably would have occurred anyway. If not him, some other marketing genius would have realized that dumbing down the news would pump up ratings. Forty years later, the challenge, for those who prefer in-depth, unbiased reporting, is where to find good journalism. Certainly not on your local TV news program, and probably not in your local daily newspaper (unless you get the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times or a handful of other august, and failing broadsheets).

For me real news is a moving target. When I was younger I read magazines like Newsweek and Time. But recently a friend sent me a link to a Newsweek story. Although the topic was of some interest, the writing had been clearly diluted to appeal to “everyman.” Ostensibly it was a story about the quest to write the great American novel, but it was filled with “the best,” “the biggest,” and other non-specifics. And it was about a quarter of the length it should have been to really cover the subject. I knew the mass market journals had changed, but since I haven’t read Newsweek (outside of a doctor’s office) in years, I wasn’t sure how much.

Other, formerly trusted news sources are also caving to the demand for entertainment value. I watched “60 Minutes” last week and was amazed to see they included not one, but two full personality profile segments. That’s thirty out of the sixty minutes devoted to unabashed ass-kissing, plus commercials, plus Andy Rooney (and who knows what he’s talking about anymore).

So now I get my news from more esoteric sources like The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The NewsHour, Nightly Business Report, The New York Review of Books and others. Heavy stuff perhaps, but good for you.

I am curious as to where others turn for information. I’ve created a little poll, so please take a moment and let me know if there’s still hope for intelligence, or if I should give up and start watching cartoons. You can click as many answers as apply, and you can enter specific sources in the “Other” box.

Magid died last Friday, after a long career in marketing. He is credited with transforming television news from journalism into entertainment. In 1970, he was hired by a Philadelphia TV station to boost ratings of their local news program, and he developed the concept of changing the news to a combination of light features and gossipy reports, all delivered by a heavily coiffed and made-up crew of readers instead of trained journalists, who seemed to spend more time joking among themselves than reporting the issues of the day.

Naturally, it was a hit with viewers, and the style was copied not only by television stations across the country, but also, eventually, by many newspapers and magazines. As corporate interests took over journalism outlets, the bottom line became not investigating to determine the truth, but ratings. Magid, I’m sure, was proud of that. He is reported to have said, “I am only giving the people what they want.” Hey Frank, how about giving the people what they need?

Never mind that the ubiquity of such faux news makes finding real, in-depth journalism a challenge for those who seek honest information. The real tragedy is that so many people believe what’s broadcast on these shows is what they need to know to make decisions in their lives, or at the ballot box. And the insult is that this junk is marketed as “news.”

So next time you tune in to your local broadcast and the lead story is the latest celebrity scandal instead of the economy, or the war in Afghanistan, or the proposed health care bill, or the Supreme Court’s latest decision, or … you get the idea … blame old Frankie Magid. If there is a hell, perhaps he’s there now, being forced to watch a never-ending local news program, filled with reports about the dangers of brushing your teeth improperly, or which movie is number one at the box office, or yet another Michael Jackson remembrance …

Throughout the entire eighteen-month writing process, my novel was called The Ballo Brothers, which was the name of my grandfather’s vaudeville act. He and his partner are the central figures in the story, which is set in Paris in the week just before World War I. But there’s a woman who is also a main character, and my agent didn’t think a title with “Brothers” in it was sufficiently accurate.

So about a month ago I began to work on a new title. No problem. I’ve always been fairly good at titles with my short stories. But I drew a blank. I tried short ones, long ones, literal ones and vague ones. I’ve prepared lists of descriptive words and tried dozens of combinations and nothing captures the essence of the story. Opening Acts? Closing Acts? Songs of War? Songs of Discord? Nothing worked. As we’re now ready to solicit publishers, I suggested we submit it as The Novel Formerly Known as The Ballo Brothers. Publishers might not see the humor in that.

Fortunately my agent, Rob Daniel of Andrea Hurst Literary Management is a patient man. Each time he rejected my title efforts he suggested I concentrate on the essence of the book. What is it really about at its core?

I turned to my local writers’ group for help and they gave me some good suggestions, but I still wasn’t there. I even searched web sites having to do with the theater and the war, hoping to find a term or phrase that worked.

And then, finally, without warning or further provocation, an inspiration. As the Music Fades Away, Sure. It captures the tone of the book—Europe slipping from peacetime into war, and has a literary application in that the performers must stop playing when their theater abruptly closes. I think it will work. I’m waiting to hear back from Rob. I hope he likes it. I hope, too, that he doesn’t ask me to start considering pseudonyms. Hmmm. How does the writer formerly known as Joe Ponepinto sound?

This one is quite different from the first—it’s a satire and written in an existential style. I’ve been working on it in various forms for several years, and have finally found the correct voice for the narrator, so I have recently been enthusiastic about moving ahead at last.

I don’t want to say too much more about it, but about a year ago I had an idea that as the main character, who is something of a loser, continues to gain power, he might also gain weight—a metaphor for his growth and the indulgences that come with it. Rather creative, I thought.

Well I guess I wasn’t the only one. Got my Wall Street Journal today, which included a section on books to watch for in 2010. Right at the top of the page is a blurb on Ian McEwan’s latest, titled Solar, a comedy about climate change. Here’s what they wrote: “Solar centers on a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who leads an initiative to pioneer a new source of clean energy. He also gets fatter as the novel unfolds.” So much for my creativity.

I suppose I should be flattered that a writer of the “weight” of Ian McEwan came up with the same idea. And maybe his treatment of the weight gain is not quite the same. But it sure is frustrating. His book is due out March 30. Guess who’ll be first in line to grab a copy and see how the fat man sings.

I realized that with the end of the term, my communications with the faculty and students will lessen significantly. No more need to check the discussion boards each day. No assignments to complete, or prepare. And since NILA is primarily an online educational experience (one ten-day in-person residency per semester), I won’t be seeing the great people I met there too often, since the distance is great, and the cost of the residency is, right now, hard to justify.

Writers everywhere lament that their profession is one of the loneliest, with long hours spent in solitude just thinking and writing, not interacting with other people. The experience has not been so bad for me, because I’ve always had my involvement with the school to ease those moments when the writing mind needs a break.

I will still have the online alumni forum linking me to classmates and mentors, but I will miss the experiences of talking literary theory and sharing the pleasures and frustrations of the writing life in the classroom setting. Of course I have my local writers group, but for a writer, diminishing relationships with other writers is always hard to bear.

Moving forward, writing will become more of the kind of singular pursuit other writers have mentioned.

A couple of posts ago I commented on some published books with odd titles and subjects. Today a friend posted a link to a story about a new book that features dozens of awkward and confusing titles. It’s called Do-It-Yourself Brain Surgery and Other Implausibly Titled Books, and features 96 pages of winners like Fabulous Small Jews, Knitting with Dog Hair, The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories and I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen.

A book about bad books. How come I never get ideas like that?

Here’s a link: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/12/knitting-with-dog-hair-and-other-unfortunate-book-titles.html

Apologies to Neal Armstrong, and excuse the pun, but I’m a little excited, as I’ve just been signed by Andrea Hurst Literary Management. They’ll be representing my novel, tentatively titled Songs of War.

The “giant leap for fiction” part was just for laughs, but the “one small step for a writer” phrase is spot on—no reason to pop champagne corks yet. Acquiring an agent is really just a small step in the overall process of publishing a novel. From here on its gets tougher.

Already the agent I will be working with has warned me that book sales are down, and advances are lower. An article in today’s Wall Street Journal talked about major publishers’ worries that e-book price wars will bring down the price of printed books.

Still, the article mentioned that a large publisher like Simon and Schuster publishes approximately 2,000 books a year. I’m only asking for one. For now.

And more good news this week. I’ve been asked by the staff of the Los Angeles Review to become their Book Review Editor. LAR is an excellent, and growing literary journal under the auspices of Red Hen Press, one of the nation’s fastest growing publishers.

It’s only Wednesday. Someone said good things happen in threes. We shall see.

In the world of literature, no one’s philosophy about writing has had more influence than Anton Chekhov. Although he wrote around the turn of the 20th century, his short stories are as beautifully written and well regarded as anything penned today. And his approach to writing fiction is still as important as it was when he introduced his style to the world.

I was reminded of his influence last week while reading short story submissions to Fifth Wednesday Journal. Most of the stories suffered from an avalanche of backstory—details about a character’s past life that are important to the writer, but not to the events of the story. One 35-page tome began with a full eight pages of unnecessary backstory. I had recently read an article in The Writer’s Chronicle, by Frederick Reiken, in which he illustrated how Chekhov dealt with the issue:

…a Russian priest by the name of S. Shchukin, had come to Chekhov with a manuscript of his work. Picking up the notebook, Chekhov said: “Fledgling authors should frequently do the following: bend the notebook in half and tear off the first half.”

I looked at him in amazement, Shchukin wrote.

“I am speaking seriously,” Chekhov said. “Normally beginners try to ‘lead into the story,’ as they say, and half of what they write is unnecessary. One ought to write so that reader understands what is going on without the author’s explanations, from the progress of the story, from the characters’ conversations, from their actions.”

The simplicity of his argument is quite profound. It seems from the submissions to 5WJ, most of which appear to be from undergrads, that Chekhov isn’t taught much at universities anymore, perhaps in favor of more modern writers and new techniques. But that is a shortcoming. Chekhov’s approach to writing is still one of the foundations of fiction, and there are many writers who could benefit by it.

more on backstory to come

I’m still at that first waiting point, so I often take notice of other books that are just coming out, and wonder about the decisions made in the publishing process, such as: Who will read this? Is the audience big enough to justify a print run? Why did the publisher choose this one?

To be honest, there are some books* I see whose allure for readers escapes me. Really, how many people are going to rush out to pick up a copy of Whose Fair?, the history of the St. Louis Exposition of 1904? Whoever those folks are, they may have to wait in line behind people clamoring for The North American Porcupine—second edition. Second edition? Are you telling me the first edition sold out?

I begin to have serious doubts. If this is what the public wants to read, what chance do I have with a novel about three American entertainers stranded in Paris on the eve of World War I who become involved in romantic and political intrigues?

Better I should go back to the keyboard and write something like Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World. I can see it now—first you take a 500-year-old onion… Or maybe I should try sports. Spartak Moscow, A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State made it to print; how about I take a couple of weeks and bang out a sports tome on…I’ve got it…The History of Hackeysack.

I suppose these titles should give me hope. If these volumes got published, perhaps there’s room on a bookstore shelf somewhere for mine.

*These are all actual books advertised in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.

I’ve noticed that in some of these stories, the characters are made to sound something like hillbillies, or at least what the writer thinks hillbillies should sound like. All that reminded me of the stories of Breece D’J Pancake, who was from West Virginia and was known for his stories about the places in which he grew up. As you might imagine, the people in his stories sound not like hillbillies, but people.

Pancake was an extraordinarily tragic figure. As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, he never fit in with the kids from affluent families in his writing classes, and so began to deliberately style himself as an uncultured hillbilly. His stories were elegiac yet brutal portrayals of life in Appalachia. He had four of them published in The Atlantic. Several critics considered his work to be genius. Joyce Carol Oates said his stories were “as compactly and tightly written as prose poems and should be read (and reread) with extreme care.”

Why don’t we have more of his work? Pancake died in 1979, at the age of 26, probably from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

The Atlantic maintains links to the Pancake stories they published, and they are worth a read. One doesn’t see work of this depth much these days.

“Trilobites” “In the Dry” “The Honored Dead” “Hollow”

And here is a link to Oates’ essay on Pancake:

The New York Times Review of The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake by Joyce Carol Oates