The bloody — and wonderful — mess of being a newspaper columnist
Writing a newspaper column is easy. Just open a vein and bleed.
The origin of that description varies. Famed sports columnist Red Smith is most often credited with the characterization of repeatedly sitting down and pouring out your opinions, accompanied by your picture, onto the page while trying not to embarrass yourself.
It’s been a great honor that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has entrusted me with the opportunity to open a vein in this space. I always wanted to be a columnist since reading Chicago’s Mike Royko as a kid. I pestered management for years for the job, but they kept declining. Columnists get big heads and cause irritation for editors. They elicit angry phone calls with their cockamamie ideas.
I finally got the gig in 2014. Once I snared it, I worried if I was up to the task.
But I lucked out because an irritable fellow named Kasim Reed was Atlanta’s mayor. He was a wisenheimer’s dream.
And there was plenty of fodder: Corruption in Atlanta and DeKalb County, gun nuts, sputtering right-wingers, annoying wokesters, bumbling pols, a gentrifying city, obnoxious drivers and Spandex-clad cyclists.
I’ve written personal takes about marriage, family and even the death of our youngest son. The readers gave my family a communal hug that time.
Lots of folks fancy themselves as a columnist. Even Deion Sanders, he of the masterful touchdown dance, once toyed with the idea. I mean, you sit down, type some truths into your computer, toss in some one-liners and stop at 800 words. I mean, what’s so hard about that?
The late AJC columnist Lewis Grizzard opined about column writing: It’s like being married to a nymphomaniac. It’s fun at first, but you gotta keep doing it.
Retired editor Jim Minter, who hired Grizzard to the job in 1977, told me he spoke with the columnist in the hospital shortly before Grizzard died in 1994. Grizzard told Minter, “You said I’d probably be able to do it for 10 years and then I’d burn out.”
Instead, his heart burned out first.
Since 2014, I’ve written about 1,100 columns. That’s going on 1 million words. With 4.2 jokes per column, that’s perhaps 4,620 quips, witticisms and wisecracks. (Not all good, mind you.)
But I do take it seriously, having been handed an awesome responsibility from a proud institution. And why not? Look at those who’ve gone before me.
In August, I channeled Pulitzer-prize winning Atlanta Constitution editor and columnist Ralph McGill when a mentally ill man shot up the CDC, killing a DeKalb police officer. The gunman had been fed endless lies and disinformation about vaccines.
“This is a harvest. It is the crop of things sown,“ McGill wrote in 1958 when the Atlanta Temple was bombed.
McGill wrote a seven-day-a-week front-page column and was a leading newspaper voice during the tumultuous Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Seven days a week!
“He became the spokesman for the new South, the changing South,” Minter said.
Jim Galloway, the AJC’s political columnist for 20 years, compared the job of always coming up with fresh ideas to walking in front of a thresher machine that never slows down.
Galloway, an Ohio native who grew up in metro Atlanta, had an outsider’s inside view of Georgia and offered readers analysis with a sense of history.
He noted McGill wasn’t always so out front with his courageous views of civil rights. The paper’s management in the early to mid-1950s leaned toward the segregationists.
There is growth in institutions, as there is in people.
The job of a columnist, Galloway said, is “simply to make you read what they write next. They’re a guarantee of quality, if you will.”
All have their own lane.
His predecessor, the acerbic political columnist Bill Shipp, who once called legislators “dirty rats,“ was ”out there to jar people,” Galloway said. “McGill was there to explain.”
Former AJC managing editor Hank Klibanoff, himself a Pulitzer winner, said columnists “bring personality. Sometimes it’s that of a bartender or the guy at the bar, like Cliffy at ‘Cheers.’ They’re the wise guy, the smart-aleck, but someone who is plugged in and not winging it when it’s something important.”
The Journal and the Constitution, once two different papers, have a long tradition of columnists going back to Charles Henry Smith, who wrote by the name Bill Arp and started writing in the Civil War, to Joel Chandler Harris of Uncle Remus fame.
There has been Celestine Sibley, who broke barriers as a female journalist; Furman Bisher, who brought the sporting life to generations of readers; and Cynthia Tucker, a Black woman who was the editorial page editor and whose eye for critique was sharp and wide, earning her a Pulitzer.
Once, she angered a Black Atlanta pol so much that he told her that Black people like her in South Africa got “necklaced.” That is, where mobs placed gasoline-soaked tires around the victim and lit them ablaze.
That is the guttural reaction an insightful columnist can bring.
Now, we as an institution are turning a page and leaving ink behind. We have a solid staff of columnists like Patricia Murphy, who does Galloway’s and Shipp’s old job, as well as Ken Sugiura and Michael Cunningham, who must endure Atlanta’s sports teams, and Nedra Rhone, who has one foot in the features world and the other in news. (Coincidentally, the two of us graduated from the same Catholic high school in Chicago.)
I had been set to leave at year’s end but they pulled me back in to pontificate further on a reduced basis.
See you in the New Year, and the AJC’s New World.
About the Author
Bill Torpy, who writes about metro Atlanta for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joined the newspaper in 1990.
