Thanks to our buddy Erik Hahmann (@ehahmann) for this Q and A with the lovely and talented Chris Jones.
You’ve written a number of profiles in your career, perhaps most famously Roger Ebert. Is there a specific challenge that you face with them?
For me, if there’s a problem, that problem is almost always falling in love. There are exceptions, of course. I’ve profiled people I’ve loathed, and I’ve profiled people I ended up feeling pretty ambivalent about, which is probably a bad sign when you’re writing a profile. Ambivalence isn’t a great hook.
But there are subjects for whom I felt love and still do, and I don’t use that word lightly. Roger is a good example of that. I was already a great admirer of Roger’s before we met—I pitched that story in the first place because I thought he was such a good writer and generous, which I think is the most important quality in a critic. After spending time with him, I was only more in the tank. I was totally, entirely without objectivity when I wrote that story, and I wanted readers to feel what I felt.
I’ve talked before about how I don’t believe in objectivity anyway—that it’s some impossible ideal to ask journalists not to feel human emotions about other humans, especially when you’ve spent enough time with them to write a profile. I’ve always said that truth is the more important quality. And there is nothing in my story about Roger that isn’t true. But I can also see how someone who didn’t like Roger for whatever insane reason would have come out with a different story. That’s a lot of responsibility to bear, how millions of people perceive someone.
My next story, the same thing happened. It’s about magic, and I spent a lot of time with Teller, the quieter, smaller half of Penn & Teller. And love isn’t too strong a word there, either. I just love how he thinks, how he views life and pursues his art, how much he cares and feels, his attention to detail. Teller, for me, is the person you get when you combine a big brain with a huger heart, which is an all-too-rare combination. I’m sure readers won’t confuse my feelings about him. I can see how J-school profs and more clinical journalists will not like what I’ve done, will believe I’ve committed sins, and sometimes I feel like I am a sinner. Someone who doesn’t like me very much once dismissed me as “a man of deep feeling,” and he meant it meanly, but I can hardly say that he was wrong about me.
Of course, I believe that deep feeling is important when you’re writing about someone else’s life, and I believe that there’s nothing wrong with there being more love in our stories and the world. Still, when you spend as much time inside your own head as writers do, you have to fight hard to remain doubtless.
Is there a style—long form, profiles, back page—that you feel best suits you? Why?
I think my most “natural” journalism is longer features. I think that’s less because of my writing and more because of my reporting. I think I’m pretty good with people (in person, at least) and I’m good at getting strangers to tell me things. I think people sometimes think of me as a profile writer, but my favorite stories are procedurals, those really intense stories that tell the reader how something went down, like “The Things That Carried Him” or “Animals.” I think those are the stories that I’m best at, or at least those are the stories that I like doing the most.
What’s funny—I started writing the back page at ESPN The Magazine close to a year ago now. And if I’m being honest, I don’t think I was very good at it in the beginning. I think I had a hard time with the length, which is around 770 words, give or take. That’s long enough where you need to have a real foundation for a column, but it’s not long enough to allow you to do the deep dives that I like to do. It’s a weird middle length. But now I’ve come to really enjoy it. I think my last five or six columns have been pretty damn solid because I’ve finally figured out the length. And there’s something really cool about having a single page and trying to make it as perfect as I can. I’ve come to like that sense of confinement. A 10,000-word feature, perfection isn’t really possible, and the way my brain works, that’s sometimes unsatisfying or even painful for me. The hard fact is a story like that is just too big to account for everything. But 770 words, a single page? You have a better chance of making that crystalline. It’s like the difference between building an entire house and painting a single room. You will make mistakes with the house, but it’s possible for every line to be dead straight in a single room. That’s within your reach.
In regards to sports journalism, is there anything you wish you saw more of? Less of? Anything that gets overdone?
I think you used the key word there: sports journalism. Sports sometimes get dismissed as unimportant, but they are hugely important to many people, and they have an enormous impact on our culture and our lives. This will sound preachy, but I’d like sportswriters to commit more acts of real investigative journalism. I think it’s disgusting that Jeffrey Loria has gotten away with the giant fraud that is the Miami Marlins and their new ballpark. That never should have happened, and it never should have happened because sportswriters prevented it from happening. I think because access is so tenuous these days, and deadlines are so crazy, and the competition is so intense, sportswriters sometimes struggle just to get by doing the daily stuff. But I think advocacy journalism is so valuable, it’s worth the time and effort. I’m thinking about stories like the New York Times piece about dead race horses or what finally happened at Penn State, only many years too late. Not every sports story has to be about blood and concussions, but I think it’s important that we cover these things well and thoroughly.
Overdone? I don’t need to see or hear anybody bloviating from his couch about sports ever again. I couldn’t give less of a shit. If a story or a column doesn’t have any original reporting in it, it’s probably not worth my time or anybody else’s. Why should I care what you think any more than I care about what the guy sitting next to me on the plane thinks? With my own column, the best ones are clearly the ones where I didn’t just opine. They’re the ones where I reported, and that’s something else that took me a while to figure out. I started out trying to mimic other columnists, because I thought that’s how it was supposed to be done, rather than trusting the same instincts that I use with my longer stuff. Blow the dust off your notepad and get the fuck out of your house.
I can’t think of a more clear distillation of my feelings than the difference between Dan Wetzel’s Super Bowl column and Jason Whitlock’s Super Bowl column. That’s the fight that’s going on, right there.
The current media landscape is changing seemingly every day: how we consume it, how it’s presented to us, etc. Are you happy with the direction we’re headed? What would you change?
As a reader, I’m happy. As a writer, I’m worried.
Every day, I find ten things worth reading—great journalism, beautiful stories. They are everywhere. Last night, I read a letter by a comedian named Chris Gethard to a suicidal fan. I had not heard of Chris Gethard until last night, and there, suddenly, right in front of my eyes, instantly and for free, was this beautiful important thing written with a voice that was new to me. I think that’s amazing. I’m constantly amazed by technology. That app that lets you hold your iPhone into the air and it tells you what song is playing in the bar or wherever? That is a miracle to me.
But technology has hurt our business in a lot of ways. In terms of jobs, obviously, and I fear that ultimately it will hurt the quality of our available reporting, because newspapers still do the brunt of the heavy lifting, and when they finally get to the end of their evolution, I’m worried that not as much heavy lifting will be done. I’m not sure our delightful collection of aggregators and citizen bloggers will fill that growing gap. Maybe some new form of journalism and journalist that I can’t see yet will knock me on my ass, and I hope with all my heart that’s the case. But more and more, I read and hear lies that go unchecked. Look at modern political campaigns. They’re filthy and untrue and that is a terrible thing for democracy and nobody denies that it is and yet on it goes. It’s almost as though we’ve come to accept lying as part of modern life, and there are fewer and fewer means to keep people honest, and I can’t tell you how fearful and depressed that makes me. Imagine for a moment if suddenly everyone in power had to be truthful with each other and with us; imagine if not every fact were twisted beyond recognition by opinion and sleight of hand. Holy shit, we’d be unstoppable. We’d be back on the moon.
This is a very broad question, but what makes a good writer?
There are many attributes—curiosity, determination, honesty—but the one that matters the most to me is care. I think writers have to be true believers to do their best work. They have to believe that what they’re doing is important and that it’s possible and that it matters and that it will be edited and read with the same care that they’ve put into it. A lot of people think that journalists need to be cynics, wry and narrow-eyed. I don’t believe that at all. You know that line from Friday Night Lights? Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose. That’s what I believe. Give me the biggest fucking heart in the room, every single fucking time.
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