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University of Pittsburgh
Newsletter and Department Title

Nonfiction Track Embraces Journalism

David Bartholomae, department chair 1995–2009


Alumni of a certain vintage may remember when the Writing program’s nonfiction arm had a “newspaper” track for students who wanted to pursue journalism. Setting aside for a moment the discussion over whether the word newspaper has become as quaint as the hogshead, cask, and the demijohn, there was another problem with having a newspaper track: Pitt had no actual journalists on the full-time faculty.


David Bartholomae, the English department chair from 1995 to 2009, recognized this problem.


“I had been concerned for a long time that we couldn’t represent ourselves as having a major in journalism,” said Bartholomae, who often compared Pitt’s newspaper track with the journalism department at Penn State. Bartholomae, who is now the Charles Crow Chair in Composition, said that creative nonfiction at Pitt had become a product of the rise of memoir during the 1970s, as well as of the experimental reportage, or “new journalism,” of writers such as Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Hunter S. Thompson. While acknowledging the importance of these forms, Bartholomae questioned the value of asking inexperienced undergrads to write memoirs. He also noticed that many undergraduates pursuing journalism were not writing for The Pitt News, the university’s student-run daily newspaper. He decided that undergraduates were not being adequately prepared for careers in journalism, and he did something about it.


One of Bartholomae’s first moves was to hire Cynthia Skrzycki, a veteran journalist who covered business for 18 years at The Washington Post and who wrote The Regulators: Anonymous Power Brokers in American Politics.


Skrzycki, in addition to teaching at Pitt, worked with Bartholomae to reshape the nonfiction program. Eventually, the department decided to absorb the newspaper track into the nonfiction program and to make room for nonfiction writers who were more interested in reporting than in memoir and personal essay.


According to Bartholomae, Skrzycki made the case that “the best training for the journalist is to know something and do a lot of writing, including writing for The Pitt News.”


In addition to being the University’s daily student newspaper, The Pitt News is also the name of one of Skrzycki’s classes, a class known by undergraduates for being challenging but essential for aspiring journalists. In addition to writing essays and analyses,

students have to write five enterprise stories, which often require revision and editing before they are publishable. For a student to get an A in the class, all five stories must be published by the paper. Not only are students required to write and publish, but they are also tested on their knowledge of current events and Associated Press (AP) style. Classes focus on critique and analysis, and often feature guest appearances by experts such as Gary Pomerantz, a former Washington Post sports reporter and the author of Their Life's Work, or Fritz Byers, a lawyer and expert in press law and ethics. Field trips are mandatory: For one class, students covered a local town meeting, and for another class, students attended the editors’ meeting at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

 

Before coming to Pitt, Cynthia Skrzycki worked for The Washington Post.

 

Bartholomae and Skrzycki also placed greater emphasis on internships, a change which Bartholomae said has increased the number of graduates who move on to significant jobs in journalism.


“The internship is the root of employment,” said Bartholomae, adding that he and Skrzycki applied for funding through the Heinz Endowments to provide stipends for students who couldn’t afford to take an unpaid internship.


Skrzycki agreed, saying that internships are essential for work in journalism.


“Very few people are going to walk into a significant journalism job without an internship,” said Skrzycki, who added that, when she arrived at Pitt, the attitude of many students was that only Ivy League students got internships. Not only did she have to work to provide access to opportunities, but she also worked to change student perception. She encouraged students to write for The Pitt News, giving them the skills they needed and developing their portfolio, and urged them to apply for internships at major media outlets.


While Skrzycki helped to change how journalism was taught from within the nonfiction program, Bartholomae also relied extensively on Professor Jeanne Marie Laskas—especially for getting everyone up to par when it came to digital media.


Laskas, a Pitt MFA alumna who is presently the director of the Writing program, has written for GQ and Esquire, as well as several books—most recently Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work. She said that her work in digital media began—as with many creative ventures—in frustration.


“Working with grad students,” said Laskas, “we were all sitting around in our workshop . . . and we all sort of thought that the digital revolution was going on beside us, and almost that it had passed us by.” Laskas said that she was bothered by this, and that’s when she, along with Erin Anderson, a tech-savvy grad student, created a class, Digital Narrative Lab, expressly so that they could figure out new media. They bought iPads, got comfortable with software like the Adobe Creative Suite and media hosting platforms like Zeega.com, and at the end of the semester, they had a show highlighting their work. They submitted their content to a longform multimedia contest at Atavist.com, and Anderson won the grand prize, which came with not only national recognition but also a check for $5,000.

 

Jeanne Marie Laskas pioneered digital content at Pitt.

 

As a graduate student at Pitt in the 1980s, Laskas studied under both Bartholomae and nonfiction writer and former Pitt Writing Professor Lee Gutkind, and she sees her pedagogy as a hybrid of what she learned from both of them. She’s no enemy of memoir—she’s written three of them, including Fifty Acres and a Poodle, the Waldenesque experiment in rural life that arguably launched her career as an author—but these days, Laskas is teaching her students how to enrich memoir with research, and conversely, how to enrich longform journalism by drawing from memory and imagination.

 

(In fact, Pitt Writing is now the headquarters for Longform.org, described below, an important Web presence that gathers and recommends the best in quality net-based nonfiction).


“We needed to be pulled out of our own comfort zone,” said Laskas, referring to one of her experiments in teaching: an entire semester of class held at the Braddock Public Library, where she told her students to go out, talk to someone on the street, and find a story.


“These are the basics that every writer needs always and forever,” Laskas said, adding that, while the Web changed journalism, the basic craft remains the same—learning “how to find that place mentally to let go of yourself and your world and immerse yourself in someone else’s and build a narrative.”


She recalled a time when everyone was declaring that the Web and social media had killed longform journalism, noting that the assertion has proven to be false.


“Digital has enabled longform,” she said. “Nonfiction really is an exciting genre now in multiple ways.”

 

Brett Sholtis

 

Brett Sholtis is associate editor of The Fifth Floor. He is a senior Writing (fiction) major who has also written for The Pitt News, Hot Metal Bridge, and other publications. He is a spring 2014 Brackenridge Fellow and a winner of the 2013 Taube Award in Fiction.

 


 

Longform.org: A Virtual Museum

 

As the site quietly boasts: “Longform.org posts new and classic nonfiction articles, curated from across the Web, that are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser.” Put another way, Longform.org is an archival project: a living, breathing museum of a certain style of journalism that many once believed was on its deathbed.

What this partnership really does is bring Pitt writers into the national conversation about digital possibilities ahead of all other writing programs, providing us with global recognition. We are, in logo and in spirit, putting our stamp on a form that is in the midst of a total reawakening—not just in the literary world, but in the academy and in the commercial sphere. Consider that Pitt instructors, including Writing program Director Jeanne Marie Laskas, use Longform as their only textbook. The stuff on the site is that consistently good. Pitt also provides editorial and podcast interns from its grad student population, which is a boon for their resumés and careers. In addition, each year Longform records a live podcast at Pitt—last year's with New York Times editor Joel Lovell was listened to over 27,000 times! This year's podcast (recording in mid-January 2014) will be with writer Wil Hylton, author of Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II (Riverhead Books, 2013).

 

—Robyn Jodlowski

 

Photo by Heather Kresge

 

Robyn Jodlowski, a visiting lecturer in Writing and MFA alumna, is an editor at Longform.org and Pitt's Longform liason.

 

 

 

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5/31/2013 Copyright 2013 UMC Web Team

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