Lincoln's Colleen Kenney writes for Gangrey:
After a martini, two margaritas and half a beer last Friday night in Texas, I said this to some Florida journalists I met at a conference:
"Hank Stuever can save journalism."
I stand by it now, in the fluorescent light of my day. Stuever is like a Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. He makes us laugh while telling us about ourselves and our nation, yet he's ... deep. Even if we don't like a Stuever story, we talk about it. He surprises us. He entertains us.
He gives us an experience.
We need all different types of writers. I'd like to think I'm in the "school of" Dan Barry or Lane DeGregory, not Stuever. We just need more writers to have the guts of Stuever, and we need them to be supported.
Mainly, we need more editors with guts. (I have one.)
I also said that night that I thought most editors are afraid of Stuever-esque writers so they squash them and don't mentor them and then they give up and move on to PR by the time they're 30.
"It's like we eat our young," I think I said the other night.
I can think of writers I've worked with who could have become almost as good, but they're doing bland crap now. These are people I worked with back at the college paper here years ago who made me cry I laughed so hard. How does this happen? Bland editors.
I remember a writer who may be as good as Stuever. I think he got fed up with the mediocrity of the editors at this large metro daily where we worked. Last I heard he was at an alt-weekly in Arizona kicking butt.
I loved it when I heard Tom French tell a Kelley Benham story at a National Writers Workshop, something like: Kelley was in a big editor's office early in her career, and the editor asked what her career plans were, and she said, "I want to write like a motherfucker." She can save journalism.
Tom French told a New York Times reporter at Nieman last year that he thought most of her paper's Page 1 was boring. He can save journalism.
"I'm not afraid," my editor, Peter Salter, told me one day not long after I began working here. I'd never heard anything like that from an editor. He lets us try funky stuff few editors would allow and makes it fun here. He can save journalism.
Who else?
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