Author: Chris Davis

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

News Makers 3: Media Talk with Wendi Thomas of MLK50 and Storyboard’s Mark Fleischer

This post is supplemental to the Memphis Flyer cover package Going to Pieces about the state of print journalism in Memphis. This, and other posts featuring additional commentary by Wendi Thomas of MLK50, Jacinthia Jones of Chalkbeat.org, Eric Barnes of The Daily Memphian, and Mark Fleischer of StoryBoard Memphis were created to include voices and ideas that didn’t make it into the main story.

Wendi Thomas

Every day I wake up and discover I’m not on the wrong side of Wendi Thomas’  Twitter feed, is a good day.  I kid, but  when I typed that I’m pretty sure I heard a faint chorus of voices from Memphis’ political and business communities saying “Amen.” And that’s a good thing. Whether she’s dragging area media because newsroom diversity (and its lack), determines content and perspective, or calling out bosses who won’t pay a living wage, Thomas is one of Memphis’ most critical journalists — castigatory, elucidative, and vital.

In spite of her long history as a columnist and editor for The Commercial Appeal, I didn’t sit down with Thomas to talk about struggling dailies or the print journalism business. We didn’t get too deep into discussing the reporters she’s cultivated and work she’s published online as founder of the digital “Justice Through Journalism” forum, MLK50, either. I asked Thomas to help me develop a working definition of “information justice,” a topic I’ll come back to in future posts. But some of our conversation did overlap with the Memphis Flyer cover story, Going to Pieces, so I’m sharing some lightly edited excerpts that complement both Jacinthia Jones’s vision for mass partnership and Madeline Faber’s thoughts about transparency and engagement.

Like Jones and Faber, Thomas thinks outside the traditional newspaper bundle. She shared some common sense ideas for distributing less commodified, hyper-local news directly with those the news most likely affects.

Memphis Flyer: I want to talk about information justice but I’m not completely sure I know what I mean by that.

Wendi Thomas: I think information justice starts with “just us” — and who the “us” is. The media doesn’t provide everybody with the information they need to live better lives, or make better decisions about things that are critical — housing, shelter, you know… I read a story about FedEx expansion plans. There’s new tech for getting boxes on planes but not a word about how this might affect employment. When you’re writing with an eye toward justice, these are the kinds of questions you’d ask. So that story wasn’t written for people who work in the hub, or even worried that they might have to ever work in the hub.


I try to imagine a media environment where the information people —low income people in particular — need to make better choices is accessible without too much expense or hassle. And I wonder who profits from the current media environment, where you have to make an effort to get information.

WT: I’ve never found out much about it, but you’ve probably seen a quote I tweet: “If you want to solve any problem in America, don’t study who suffers from it, study who profits.” That’s a huge gap missing in journalism as a whole. There are exceptions, like reporting about expensive calls from the jail. That story was out one week. The next week we weren’t going to make juveniles pay to call their parents anymore. Period, full stop. Public policy can be changed quickly in ways that affect vulnerable people. But somebody has to systematically examine industries, and government organizations, to find where those places are.

I don’t know anything about that quote’s provenance, but I’ve seen you share that and thought it was absolutely right.

WT: I was at a people-powered publishing conference where they were talking about, instead of trying to put our middle class selves in the shoes of a person in poverty, they should be involved in every step of the process. In my 25 years in journalism, this is something I’ve only done sporadically. We tend to think, you know, you report the story
– you go out and talk to the people, you write the story, you do the follow-up. But what if we completely dismantled that process? What if people are involved at every step, and you report on your reporting, in maybe less formal ways. Maybe it’s not 8 paragraphs or 400 words. Maybe it’s using Facebook Live or posting in a group. We talk about growing audience. Part of growing our audience is involving people in the process, and not always deciding what’s best.

You see that kind of transparency sometimes. I’m thinking of the Washington Post’s investigation of the Trump Foundation, which involved posting notebooks, and keeping the process front and center. That changed things a little. But the level of engagement you’re describing is still rare, I think.

WT: It’s not built into our process. Your editor’s going to ask you, “Do you have art?” “Do you have diverse sources?” They’re not going to ask you, “How many times you engaged the people most affected by this?”

Let’s talk for a minute about how people get information, which obviously isn’t always the same as “news.” People weren’t always coming to the newspaper bundle for news. There are entertainment listings, housing and help wanted ads. Now people with public service information partner to multiply resources. Like if you’re doing a voter registration drive, you might piggyback with a health services opportunity, and engage people in barber shops and other third spaces. Can newsrooms learn from that?

WT: The library may be a more economically diverse third space. If we’re rethinking how we distribute information, there’s this system where you can send direct mail. Political candidates do it all the time, but I’ve never seen a journalist use it. So, say you’re writing something about 38126, which I think is the poorest zip code. So what if you used direct mail to distribute stories or solicit information in 38126? Or, you know, use the inserts you get in your MLGW bill? What if there was something in that? Or billboards? I have seen the Commercial Appeal do a little bit of that. Smaller outlets probably think they can’t afford billboards. But what if a non-profit found a way to underwrite [it] and every week maybe they worked with a different [news] outlet?

For justice-forward reports you can follow MLK50 — now part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network here.
————————————————————————————————-

Mark Fleischer says he’s heartened by the changes he’s seen at The Commercial Appeal since they hired new staff. But when Fleischer’s monthly newspaper Storyboard Memphis was in the works, Memphis’ daily was, “getting worse by the day.”

Fleischer, a California transplant now living in Midtown, describes himself as an urban studies enthusiast and “news junkie.”

“I started talking to people and realizing how many other stories need to be told,” he says. “And people have no means to tell them.” That’s when Fleischer, who’d already been blogging about Memphis, got an idea to start a digital magazine. That idea evolved into Storyboard Memphis, a monthly  broadsheet-style newspaper with original historical and urban-themed reporting, supplemented with news articles from many of Memphis’s digital-only news organizations like Chalkbeat and High Ground News.

Memphis Flyer: An online magazine sounds great, but how does it work? It’s tough putting even quality content behind a paywall if it’s not unique or if similar content is available somewhere else free.

Mark Fleischer: I didn’t see a digital magazine taking off. A couple of guys we all know in publishing said, “You should think about print.”… It took a year for me to convince myself that was doable… For-profit seemed the most straightforward way to go. I don’t want to be chasing non-profit money all the time.

You’ve solved at least part of the newsroom riddle by aggregating content from several of Memphis’s digital-only content providers, which is great for a lot of reasons. You get content, they get a sampler platter where they’re included in one nicely curated space with all these other information providers you’d have to track down individually online. Also, the digital divide — there are a lot more people who aren’t online than most people think.

Mark Fleischer: I remember thinking, if I can just convince High Ground to partner with me, and I can be their print medium. Then I’ve really got something.

The kind of deep dives into neighborhoods High Ground does seems like it really lends itself to the urbanist-focused work you’re doing.

Mark Fleischer: Yes. And I talked to Tom Jones at Smart City — same thing.

Another good fit.

Mark Fleischer: I realized, the more I talked about this, the more I realized there was an appetite for print. Maybe more like a hunger.

And there’s already all this content out there…

Mark Fleischer: It’s out there. But it’s out there in digital format. When I came up with Storyboard, I originally thought about telling a stories through all media: audio, podcast, video, photography, art. All that. Well, there’s no reason I can’t do that in print. Not audio and video, obviously, but we can certainly use the medium and get as close to that as possible… High Ground isn’t going to print any time soon. It’s just not in their model. Tom Jones can’t go to print, he doesn’t have enough content. But together we do have enough content. It’s like showing all the work being done by High Ground and Smart City and all these other niche publications.

Storyboard also features original reporting by Fleischer, fiction, poetry, puzzles, and children’s pages. Distribution is free but not forced. It’s available in coffee shops and other public places around Memphis.

This is the last supplemental post to the Memphis

Eric Barnes

 Flyer cover story Going to Pieces. For readers interested in a more in depth conversation with Daily Memphian executive editor, Eric Barnes, he and I spoke at length shortly after the digital daily’s 2018 launch.  Our more recent conversation, was brief and to the point, so there wasn’t really enough leftover content to make a stand-alone post.

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Memphis Comedy Show “You Look Like” Begins Airing on LOL Network

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burkes

Keven Hart’s LOL Network launches a new made-in-Memphis show Tuesday, March 20th. After almost two years spent searching for the right home, Midtown’s favorite insult comedy event, You Look Like, show will be available to comedy fans nationwide.

Memphis Comedy Show ‘You Look Like’ Begins Airing on LOL Network

For the back-story on how filmmaker/TV producer Craig Brewer hooked up with a bunch of Memphis comics to make this series, check out “You Look Like a Cover Story,” originally published in May, 2017.

Justin Fox Burkes

Katrina Coleman

 You Look Like a Cover Story
by CHRIS DAVIS

Photographs by Justin Fox Burks


So a gaggle of comedians from Memphis walk into a bar in Western Arkansas …
No, this isn’t the beginning of a joke. It’s an origin story for Memphis’ most popular monthly, game-based comedy event. You Look Like — so named because the competition’s mean-spirited jokes all begin with the words, “You look like” — recently tickled film and television director Craig Brewer’s funny bone, so now it’s being developed as a streaming digital series.

You Look Like is beginning to look like a comedy institution in the making, but back in the summer of 2015, the embryonic thing that rapidly evolved into You Look Like (YLL), just looked like local funsters Katrina Coleman and Benny Elbows swapping off-the-cuff insults to pass time over a long, boring haul to Fayetteville. Once the other comedians on the evening’s bill were introduced to the concept, they jumped right in and started playing along, too, saying terrible things to each other, such as: “You look like you really believe you’re going to get custody this time,” or “You look like the youth minister who needed a talking to.”

Amanda Walker and Craig Brewer in the bar that inspired Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry

“One time somebody told me I look like Malcolm X-Man,” says Black Nerd Power host Richard Douglas Jones, an early YLL player and convert.

The seminal Arkansas, gig at Nomads Music Lounge (regrettably titled “Memphis in Fay”) started late, in part because the Bluff City comics couldn’t stop playing their fun, new game. When the comedic bloodsport finally broke up, comic and YLL co-founder Tommy Oler grabbed Coleman by the elbow and told her the silly, mean, hilarious thing she’d started needed to grow into something bigger.

“I wasn’t sure. I just thought it was a thing I like to do,” says Coleman. For her, You Look Like was a warm-up exercise — the funny person’s equivalent of a gymnast stretching before a tumbling routine.

Oler took the idea to the P&H Cafe, where he was already hosting a popular Thursday night open mic. The idea was instantly green lit, and it wasn’t long before the eclectic Midtown bar famously associated with poor and hungry artists had to reconfigure its seating to accommodate bigger and bigger crowds turning out for comedy.

“I remember when I’d have 10 or 15 people at one of my shows, and I’d think it was the greatest thing,” Coleman says. “I’d get all excited and call my mom. Now, if there are only 50 or 75 at a show, I wonder if there’s some big concert at Minglewood Hall or something.”

Now, when episodes of the accompanying YLL podcast post late, out-of-town subscribers send grumpy messages. “It’s this really weird show that audiences seem to like and that the comics love to do,” Coleman says, floating a theory: “If you really love somebody, you’ll cut their heart out for a giggle.”

For all the terrible things being said on stage, the love inside the P& H is thick and sticky when, over the course of a week, Brewer and his local production team shoots the entire pilot season for a digital You Look Like series.

“You got robbed,” the winner of one round calls out, chasing down his opponent. “I know. I totally beat you,” the loser shouts back. Nobody’s angry. They’re all in this together.

“I’m not drunk enough to cry,” Coleman announces from the stage as the camera crew prepares to shoot the last five episodes of the 10-episode trial season. “But set your watches.”

Coleman, who certainly looks like the person most responsible for assembling the current big tent of modern Memphis comedy, then gestures to a ridiculous, clearly homemade crown spinning on a turntable just offstage: the winner’s prize.

“It’s still the You Look Like show,” she assures the “studio audience,” acknowledging that, in spite of the many physical upgrades to her show’s homemade aesthetic, “I made that motherfucker in my living room.”

A machine pumps fog into the room, standing in for the P&H’s famously thick cloud of cigarette smoke. Local writer/director Morgan Fox orders the cameras to roll, and the games begin in earnest.

The rules for You Look Like couldn’t be simpler. Two comics stand face to face, trading appearance-based insults: “You look like heroin might improve your life.” Or “You look like the Sorting Hat put you in House of 1,000 Corpses.” Like that. The meaner it gets, the more respect you can feel radiating from the combatants. When a round ends, the audience chooses a winner, and the loser has to gaze into a mirror of shame and play the game over again, solo, hurling insults at him/herself.

Brewer encountered the You Look Like Show while attending the 2016 Memphis Comedy Festival. The Hustle & Flow filmmaker had no idea that such a mature comedy scene had grown up in the artsy little beer joint at the center of his own filmmaker origin story.

For that festival, the show was moved to the Hi-Tone, and Brewer had initially assumed it was put on by a visiting troupe of comics from Chicago.

“I was like, ‘Wow, it’s so great that this touring group came in and did this,'” Brewer says in a phone interview from Los Angeles (where he recently added a new credit to his resume: co-executive producer of the hit show, Empire). Brewer was immediately corrected by fans who told him it was, in fact, a Memphis-based show that had been running for about a year at the P&H.

“Do you know where the P&H is?” someone asked. “Yeah,” Brewer answered. “I think I might know where that is.”

Seeing Brewer at work again inside the P&H causes epic déjà vu. The Madison Avenue bar, with its rotating cast of oddball regulars inspired his first movie, The Poor & Hungry. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he was still an aspiring filmmaker and part-time bookstore employee, Brewer would go to the bar to write his screenplays, shoot scenes, or screen daily “rushes” on the P&H’s ancient TV.

Although The Poor & Hungry never received wide theatrical distribution, the award-winning digital feature, shot on an impossibly low budget of $20,000 with a two-man crew, became Brewer’s Hollywood calling card. When other wannabes were slinging pitches, he was mailing out VHS tapes of a little movie about life at the P&H Cafe that arguably helped step up Hollywood’s digital shift.

“I felt like grandpa,” Brewer says, shocked but not all that surprised by the revelation that he and YLL shared a creative womb.

The following June, two-months after the comedy festival, Coleman received an unexpected voicemail: “Hi, this is Craig Brewer. I make movies. I saw your show and was wondering if you’d maybe like to get together and talk about it.”

Like any any mother faced with sudden, unknown change, Coleman’s initial response was caution. “Please, please, Hollywood, don’t take my ugly baby away,” she pleads emphatically, recounting her initial worry. “But Craig was great. He walked me through the whole contract and explained everything.” All Coleman really needed was assurance that the live show would be always be hers to do with as she sees fit, which had been the plan all along.

“See, the whole live show fits in this little, pink duffle bag,” Coleman says, giggling. As long as she could continue running it out of the P&H and taking it on the road, Coleman says she was up for just about anything else that might happen.

Brewer has always scouted opportunities for exporting Memphis talent and weirdness. In the 1990s, he shot footage of the city’s burlesque scene, resulting in his early short, Clean Up in Booth B. His team-up with MTV on $5 Cover resulted in Midtown’s rock scene playing a semi-fictionalized version of itself.

Unlike earlier projects, where Brewer was starting from scratch, You Look Like was complete and alive. Adapting it as a digital series was additionally enhanced by an all-local crew he’s been collaborating with for a decade and an uncommonly united comedy scene that’s spent the last five years learning to work together.

It’s like what comic Josh McLane says, making his way from the stage to the writers room: “I get paid the same if I win or lose. All that matters is if it’s funny.” That was the dominant attitude backstage during the YLL shoot, giving the whole event an old-school Memphis wrasslin’ vibe. Unlike wrasslin’, outcomes to the matches weren’t predetermined, but the beefs aren’t real, and everybody’s working together to bring serious pain from the top-rope.

“I’m addicted to this feeling now,” Brewer says, remembering the electricity in the room when the comedians hired to write jokes between rounds gathered around the P&H’s pool tables and built their insult database.

Richard Douglas Jones described the writing process as “completely organic.” When one vein of material ran dry, somebody would open another. “I will reinvent the wheel and run you over with it again and again,” he said. Brewer had one big concern. “There needed to be something positive coming out of You Look Like,” he says. “If you were looking at comedians tearing each other apart, you need to feel that they are friends. So, in a weird way, it could be inspiring.”

The backstage cooperation insured that that would be the case. “I left the experience asking, ‘How can I create that again,'” Brewer asks. “Can I go narrative with it? If we did a TV show, what would it be? And what are the jokes?”

That wasn’t the only feeling Brewer left with. He’d drifted away from the P&H after the passing of its colorful proprietress Wanda Wilson, the big-wigged protector of artists, misfits, and backgammon gamblers. “For a while that place lost its energy,” Brewer laments. Working on YLL assured him that the bar’s original spirit is alive and well under the current management.

So what’s next for YLL? The live show continues as usual but now with a new guest host every month. What happens with the pilot series is anybody’s guess, but there are some interesting possibilities: Maybe it gets snapped up right away by a streaming content provider. Or maybe the original series, like The Poor & Hungry, simply becomes a calling card — something Brewer can screen on his phone when he’s pitching ideas. Maybe a producer likes the web series but wants to know if the show can be adapted as a reality show or narrative comedy. “So many times you walk in with a pitch document, and you just don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” Brewer explains. “The network might say, ‘Oh, that’s great, but we want it with Snapchat stars.'”

YLL was a perfect catch for Brewer, who’d been actively looking for right-sized projects for his Memphis-based company BR2 and longtime collaborators like David Harris at Gunpowder & Sky, a production company co-founded by Van Toffler, a former MTV executive instrumental in purchasing Brewer’s Hustle & Flow at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. He sums up YLL’s appeal — particularly for companies looking for unscripted material — in one exclamatory sentence: “Oh my God, you can highlight 20 comedians per season, and it’s already a living thing!”

Brewer thinks a few scenarios seem more likely than others. “These days, there are celebrities who want their Facebook page — or whatever — to be a channel. So there are comedians and celebrities who might buy it just to put on their channel,” he explained.

“And there are networks who might say, ‘Okay, this works on the digital level; what does this look like on the network level?’ But what I really wish is that we can take what we’ve made and just keep making more of that. We just made 10 episodes this first time, but if we do it again, we can make 50. Just plan for three or four solid weeks of work, where we just go in and bang it out.”

Oler, who no longer hosts the live show but remains affiliated with the digital project, says it’s exciting to imagine what YLL might be like as a movie or a sitcom. But he can’t shake the joy of knowing, wherever it goes, it started with a bunch of knuckleheads insulting each other on the patio at Nomads Music Lounge in Fayetteville.

“I’m just really thankful to have had a chance to work on this,” he says. Oler and Coleman are funny co-founders; they don’t agree about much. But they do agree that, given an opportunity to show its stuff, the Memphis comedy scene stood up.

The You Look Like Show is the third Saturday of every month at the P&H Cafe. Doors at 8 p.m. show at 9 p.m.

You Look Like a List
What comprises a perfect you look like insult? It has to walk a fine line between credibility and the absurd. Some require context, some are just funny no matter who they’re aimed at. Here’s a completely subjective list of great You Look Like lines.

You look like:

You support displaying the Confederate flag, but only because you don’t have any other good towels.

You masturbate with ranch dressing.

People who look like their dogs.

The most well adjusted person here, surgically.

One more sandwich and that shirt’s over.

You ask to speak to managers.

You regularly delete your search history.

Your head mole makes all your decisions.

You think the Dakota Access Pipeline is a porn trilogy.

The target audience for Buzzfeed articles.

You pronounce the L in Salmon.

You grew up outside a trailer.

Your spirit animal is a chain wallet.

You fucked up the proposal because you left the ring in your other cargo shorts.

You don’t mind talking to people while they’re using the bathroom.

You broke someone else’s ankle auditioning for Grease.

You were designed by scientists for the purpose of disappointing women.

Birdwatching makes you horny.

Group photos are always your idea.

Your husband hides your yoga pants.

The side bitch of Frankenstein.

God swiped left.

The guy other guys are totally okay letting their girlfriends hang out with.

You’re still waiting to hear back about that job.

Your dad is more proud of his other family.

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

News Makers 2: Chalkbeat’s Jacinthia Jones Proposes More Media Partnerships

Jacinthia Jones

This post is supplemental to the Memphis Flyer cover package Going to Pieces about the state of print journalism in Memphis. This, and other posts featuring additional commentary by Wendi Thomas of MLK50, Jacinthia Jones of Chalkbeat.org, Eric Barnes of The Daily Memphian, and Mark Fleischer of StoryBoard: Memphis were created to include voices and ideas that didn’t make it into the main story. They will be published throughout the rest of the week.

“I heard from another reporter today asking if we were having issues with the School Board,” Jacinthia Jones says. As it happens, Chalkbeat.org, the digital education policy newsroom where Jones works as Memphis bureau chief, had been experiencing problems gathering needed information. So she answered, “Yes.”

Sometimes Jones sounds more like a old school union organizer than a veteran reporter and editor: “There’s strength in numbers,” she says. “We’re all out there fighting this battle by ourselves instead of collectively fighting it.” She thinks the best bet for survival is some kind of strategic, symbiotic partnership between competing organizations.

“As government agencies and entities become tougher to get information from, there’s strength in us being able to go as a united front,” she says. “For us to be able say, “This is a public record, you shouldn’t be able to charge this ridiculous amount!” We’re all losing. Now we need each other. At the end of the day our goal is to tell the stories that need to be told here in Memphis.”
[pullquote-1] Jones’s proposal is a variation on the old riddle, “How do you eat an elephant?” On one hand, there is a lot of redundancy in reporting — many microphones in the same official’s face collecting the same boilerplate comments for various organizations. Meanwhile, there are complicated stories in Memphis that aren’t being told as well as they might be, if they are even being told at all — Stories large enough that every media organization could cover some unique aspect, playing into that newsroom’s specific strengths.

Mass partnership on a deep-dive topic might be a consumer-immersive way to take big, hard-to-reach stories apart, “one bite at a time.”

Memphis Flyer: This is maybe more of a prompt than a question. With search engines and social media gobbling up so much of advertising budgets the narrative is always about how competitive organizations have to be to compete over the scraps. There’s less talk sometimes, about the different ways they may lean on one another as newsrooms shrink and partnerships become more important, particularly in the not for profit world.

Jacinthia Jones:There is a competitive nature to what we do. But if you look at it just that way, we’ve got such a small share. And when I say “we” I mean traditional and online media, because of Google and social media, even though those aren’t news organizations. That’s where a lot of people go to get their news. So, from my position — particularly since I moved into the nonprofit world — is that things are better when you partner. We don’t have the money we used to. We don’t have the resources to staff these large newsrooms. So you’re seeing more and more topic-specific organizations and smaller newsrooms in general. In Memphis we’re all doing the same thing— local journalism. We may want the story first, but we also want to leverage the audience of our partners. That’s why at Chalkbeat we make our content free. We want everybody to re-publish. Another benefit of partnering — We’re all smaller now.

MF: Education is a community cornerstone. It’s always such an important issue at elections. It’s something that was always part of the daily news bundle — and still is. But the work you do is filling some big gaps.

JJ: One of the beats you see cut in traditional papers are education reporters. That’s why Chalkbeat was able to expand. Look at the cities we’re located in — places where the newspaper cut that part of coverage. Also, and obviously with notable exceptions, you typically see entry level reporters moved into that position. But once a reporter gets experience on the education beat you move on.

MF: It’s such a clear example of public interest reporting losing out to the newspaper economy. Education is allegedly something we prioritize. But the most important stories aren’t always the best read.

JJ: When started at The Commercial Appeal we had three education reporters and a higher-ed reporter. Now they have one education reporter and that’s not her title. She covers K-12 and also covers higher ed.
With other editorial responsibilities.

MF: So you are very clearly filling a gap in coverage resulting from layoffs and a shrinking paper.

JJ: And we don’t just cover education at Chalkbeat. We’re covering equity issues and inequity. You see newspapers you see them moving away from covering the large school districts chasing readers in the suburbs. This isn’t just chasing advertisers, but subscribers. It’s essentially chasing the money.

MF: Where do your readers come from? Or, how do they find you?

JJ: We have readers who come directly to us. We get a lot of support among educators, teachers, administrators, and policy makers because we cover education more deeply than mainstream media. Our mission is, we want to partner with as many people as possible. We want to partner with you! That enables us to reach audiences that may not know us and come to us. So yes, I want The Daily Memphian, the new kid on the block. I also want to partner with smaller, activist organizations like MLK50.

Editor’s note: Going to Pieces looks at Memphis’ information providers and news environment at a time when the city’s daily newspaper has been greatly diminished. We hope these excerpts provide some depth/context, and give readers a better sense about what’s unique about various organizations in terms of product and process. [content-1]

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

News Makers #1: Meet Madeline Faber of High Ground News and The Tri-State Defender’s Karanja Ajanaku

This post is supplemental to the Memphis Flyer cover package Going to Pieces about the state of print journalism in Memphis. This, and other posts featuring additional commentary by Wendi Thomas of MLK50, Jacinthia Jones of Chalkbeat.org, Eric Barnes of The Daily Memphian, and Mark Fleischer of StoryBoard: Memphis were created to include voices and ideas that didn’t make it into the main story. They will be published throughout the rest of the week.

Madeline Faber

High Ground News is an online publication that’s been in Memphis four-and-a-half years. It’s part of network of 15 small, digital newsrooms, each unique, but all parented by the Issue Media Group in Detroit. Issue was created to get beyond tyrannizing negative narratives that contributed to the Motor City’s decline, and tell more complete stories about the place and people who live there.

“We stand out among the other publications because we have this explicit focus on neighborhoods,” High Ground executive editor Madeline Faber says. A different approach to community engagement, combined with not being held to the rigors of daily publishing, creates a petri dish environment where new strategies can be tested.

• On identity and adaptability
“Our on-the-ground program within High Ground News started out as a kind of ‘special section’ where we would cover Memphis neighborhoods. Now that’s really all we do, because we saw people responded to this kind of coverage. It fills a gap in the landscape — covering neighborhoods in context.”

• On High Ground’s “pop-up” newsrooms:
“We open pop-up newsrooms for four months. The first month is for research, relationship building, and working with partners in neighborhood, followed by three months of weekly coverage — written articles, profiles of business owners, nonprofit leaders, elders, and video and photo essays. We’ve piloted community engagement techniques that other publications don’t really have the capacity to do. So we do a lot of face-to-face with our readers. We do that with community newsrooms. We have office hours where residents can meet with journalists, talk about how their neighborhoods have been depicted in the media. We convene residents and ask them, ‘What is the information you need about your neighborhood? What are the problems going on now? What are the themes here we need to really flesh out?’ And and events. We do lots of events. Storytelling panel discussions.”
[pullquote-1] • On a “positive” news identity
We’re not in the positive news business or the advocacy business, but I do feel like it’s our responsibility to put some heft in the other side of the scales that have been so unbalanced over the years. It surprises me there are still people who don’t know about Orange Mound’s legacy as the first subdivision where African-Americans could own their own homes on their own property, and that it was built on top of a former plantation. That’s such cool information.

But what we do is take that knowledge and consider it when we consider the fact that there hasn’t been quality affordable housing built in Orange Mound in forever. The affordable housing they have may not be quality affordable housing. The elders of the neighborhood don’t know how to encourage the young people to stay and grow because there isn’t any housing being built or rehab that speaks to a young professional demographic. We show that people choose to live there, thrive there, and open businesses. They shouldn’t be pushed to the margins because there aren’t multimillion-dollar deals happening in these neighborhoods. And a lot of Memphians don’t live in our economic centers, they live in neighborhoods.

• On capacity
We are limited by our capacity in what we can do. It was just me … But what we’ve been trying to do in our own small universe is rebuild trust in these neighborhoods with media. To explain to them, we’re not helicoptering in. We’re here to show a side of the neighborhood that hasn’t been shown. That’s important to us ethically as journalists and personally as Memphians.

• On Transparency
One of the antidotes [to issues in contemporary journalism] is going to be transparency. We should connect people to other resources … . It’s not up to us to hoard access; we should be sharing access as much as we can. Even putting footers at the bottoms of stories explaining how we came to stories. The more we decentralize that process the closer we get to information justice.

———————————————-

Executive editor and sssociate publisher Karanja Ajanaku has been with the Tri-State Defender since 2007. He had previously worked for the Commercial

Karanja Ajanaku

Appeal for, “26-years, 6 months, three weeks and two days.”

The Tri-State Defender is 68 years old, having launched in 1951. “Our intent was to be an expression of the desires and needs of the African American community,” Ajanaku says, quoting copy from an early editorial page. “That intent and that need is as fresh today as it was in 1951. That’s what we stay focused on,” he says.

Like many of Memphis’ print news businesses, The Tri-State Defender is trying to develop new revenue streams. Online content is being reorganized behind a paywall.

•On The Tri-State Defender’s unique position
“When we look at ourselves, we understand, generally speaking, what’s going on with the newspaper industry and the challenges. But when we look at it specifically relative to Memphis and specifically relative to Memphis, we’re in growth mode. We have reason to think we have been underperforming relative to our possibilities.
[pullquote-2] •On the Tri-State Defender’s role relative to The Commercial Appeal
“Even if the Commercial Appeal was at full capacity, the need that we meet isn’t affected. It doesn’t matter if the Commercial Appeal is at full capacity or goes out of business.”

•On being uniquely positioned to tell the story of African-Americans and Memphis
“We’re the longest ongoing entity that can tell the story from the inside out. The Commercial Appeal does a good job. I did a good job when I was there writing about the African-American community. But you still can’t quite tell it from the inside out. There is a value to that position.”

•On what matters.
“We have to do better as journalists, better in Memphis. What does better mean? We have to be what we’re supposed to be: Watchdogs. We have to ask questions. We have to get in there and dig. If we do a better job with that we may just find a larger market.”


Editor’s note: Going to Pieces looks at Memphis’ information providers and news environment at a time when the city’s daily newspaper has been greatly diminished. We hope these excerpts provide some depth/context, and give readers a better sense about what’s unique about various organizations in terms of product and process. [content-1]

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Meet Quark Theatre’s “Radiant Vermin”

Michelle Gregory, Lena Wallace Black, Chase Ring in ‘Radiant Vermin’

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done for something you really wanted?

Chase Ring likes attention. Ring — currently lending his talents to Quark Theatre — made his marriage proposal onstage at Memphis’ annual Theatre Awards, The Ostranders. He’s one of the players in Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin, opening at Theatre South this weekend, and he’s quick to tell stories about the lengths he’s been willing to go to for a little limelight — minor self-mutilation, skinny dipping in the Tony Garner memorial fountain in front of the McCoy Theatre at Rhodes College. None of it’s really bad, but Ring’s co-stars Michelle Gregory and Lena Wallace Black shrink a bit because, to hear them tell it, they’ve never broken the rules for any reason ever. Then, at length, another member of team Vermin makes a sheepish admission.

“I had a fake ID,” she says. I won’t say who engaged in this heinous criminal deceit, nor will I call out the other for fibbing to reporters about never veering from the straight-and-narrow because, as St. Augustine made plain in his Confessions, being a little bad can be its own reward. And once you get rolling it can be hard to hit the breaks.

We humans are infinitely adaptable creatures, all too willing to take risks, and subvert shame and conscious when the payoffs are suitably rewarding, and that’s the most I want to say about this condition as it relates to Radiant Vermin.  Sometimes we cross the line for funsies — like a little skinny dip here and there or fudging our ages for access.

Sometimes there’s a body count. Sometimes we’re all implicated in the carnage.

Meet Quark Theatre’s ‘Radiant Vermin’

I took the sound out of this video to enhance mystery and let users add their own soundtrack. Trust me, you’ll want to.

Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin is a comedy about a newlywed couple discovering the dream-home they’ve always wanted can be theirs, if they’re willing to do what it takes. And what it takes is …  a lot.

What are you willing to do for security? What are you willing to do for comfort? Luxury? To let folks know who you are? And here’s maybe the more important question? Did you even know you were doing it?

Caption contest?

“I almost hate to say the word, but it’s a very ‘meta’ kind of play,” Director Tony Isbell says. “Some have compared it to a sketch show. It’s not a naturalistic, at all, there’s a performative element to everything they do, and it’s funny.”

Ridley’s plays can be dark. The English visual artist and storyteller turned playwright pioneered what’s been described as the “In-yer-face” style. Radiant Vermin marks a shift in tone for Ridley but the fast-paced morality-farce still gets in the audience’s’s face at least a little bit. 

“His early stuff is funny but it can be dark-dark,” Isbell says. “This is more dark-light.”

Radiant Vermin opens this week at the best little basement theater in Cooper Young, Theatre South. Click here for details.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Going to Pieces

“We don’t have the backup we used to have, and the agencies know it,” Jacinthia Jones says, assessing the tough reality of independent journalism in the 21st century. During her 20 years working for The Commercial Appeal, Jones watched the paper’s education beat shrink from a team of a four full-time journalists to a single writer with additional editorial responsibilities — a change that’s definitely contrary to public interest in a community where education concerns run high.

Today, Jones is the Memphis bureau chief for Chalkbeat.org, a digital nonprofit newsroom focusing on education policy, with an eye toward correcting the coverage gap wrought by modern newspaper economies. Chalkbeat’s commitment to sharing free education-related content in partnership with relevant media organizations places Jones at the bleeding edge of conversations about Memphis’ print journalism future.

Jacinthia Jones

“When I worked for The Commercial Appeal, if you requested information and somebody told you ‘no,’ we’d call in the lawyers,” Jones says, reflecting on the daily paper’s financial resources and its historic role in forcing transparency and institutional oversight. “If you look at a lot of the court cases, The Commercial Appeal was filing the suit. Now these agencies are calling our bluff,” she says. “What are you going to do?”

Gather round the campfire, friends, and I’ll spin a tale of suspense, brimming with drama, comedy, and carnage. Information economies are anything but dull, and the ongoing demise of local and regional newspapers affects you personally and everybody you know, whether you’re a serial subscriber or only care about coupons and crossword puzzles. It’s a story about digital triumphalism and unintended consequences disrupting everything from how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks the spread of infectious diseases to consumer education and government oversight.

Local and community newspapers are a vanishing species. Among the survivors, many, like The Commercial Appeal, have become so diminished by layoffs, consolidation, and circulation loss (not to mention the steady shedding of tangible assets and influence), a spooky-sounding term has been coined to describe them: “ghost papers.”

Many articles have valorized print journalism and warned about the important things communities will lose if local papers go dark. This isn’t that kind of story. This is more like Game of Thrones, with Gannett, the CA‘s corporate parent, squaring off against MNG Enterprises (aka Alden Global Capital), a hedge-fund-backed media group formerly known as Digital First.

“If Alden gets Gannett, I think it will be a disaster for The Commercial Appeal,” says Eric Barnes. As the publisher of Memphis’ digital startup The Daily Memphian, Barnes wants to be clear: “That would not be a good thing for Memphis.

“Their track record is clear,” Barnes says of Alden’s infamous path to double-digit profitability. “People are so used to cuts, they may not be fully processing the level of cuts this could mean.”

Eric Barnes

Although its initial purchase offer was rejected and characterized by Gannett as “not credible,” Alden Global Capital/MNG/Digital First, is a minority shareholder and can stack Gannett’s board with Alden-friendly directors. That means the company might change its business philosophy, even if it never changes hands. So, if the takeover stalls or fails, it’s not impossible that the surviving CA could still be reduced to a West Tennessee edition of The Tennessean. It could also just as easily vanish like an apparition and never be heard from again.

And if it disappears, what then? Is the not-for-profit Daily Memphian positioned to replace the city’s historic paper of record? What’s the role played by community newsletters? Or social media? What about all the other news/lifestyle publications like the Memphis Flyer, StoryBoard, the Memphis Business Journal, Memphis Parent, La Prensa, or The Best Times? What about smaller, digital-only newsrooms like the neighborhood-focused High Ground News and the justice-oriented MLK50? Are Memphians equipped to sift through the clutter, internet noise, and propaganda to access the range of information and basic utility daily newspapers still bundle in print and online? Can other local news sources fill the void? That’s the big question.

About the Carnage …

The media-consuming public craves blood, so here it is: During the period between 2008 and 2017, newspapers shed nearly half their editorial workforce, according to data from Pew Research. During roughly the same period, one in five newspapers shut down nationwide.

The Expanding News Desert comprehensive report put out by the University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Journalism in 2018, pegged the number of U.S. newspapers closed since 2004 at just under 1,800. The negative trend continues uninterrupted due to media consolidation, and the one-two-punch of changing technology and reader habits. But hedge funds also fundamentally changed the nature of newspaper ownership when they bought in during the Great Recession, circa 2008. During that period, advertising revenues and the price of newspaper companies bottomed out, transforming the market from a predictable “buy/hold” environment into a five-year flipper’s game.

The UNC report shows more than half the country’s newspapers changed hands in the last 15 years: “Many have been sold two or more times.” The Commercial Appeal, for example, a Scripps-Howard product since 1936, was merged with Journal Communications in 2015, then, just a few months later in early 2016, Journal Communications was obtained by Gannett. In January, 2019, Gannett received an unsolicited acquisition proposal from MNG/Digital First Media, the newspaper company owned by Alden Global Capital.

Self-inflicted Wounds

You’ve probably read stories about the newspaper industry’s decades-long struggle to staunch its slow readership bleed-out. Most of these stories focus on technological change or popular ideological narratives, and every one of them is misleading. Without a doubt, the most drastic newspaper consumer loss of the past 20 years was self-inflicted.

In 2008, for the purpose of reducing costs related to wages, ink, gasoline, and newsprint, The Commercial Appeal curtailed its delivery in Arkansas, Mississippi, and outlying parts of West Tennessee. This change fit a national pattern, as major city dailies ended rural home delivery. This deliberate shedding of the newspaper’s most expensive customers heralded a new emphasis on digital distribution while killing readership that was never resurrected online. The change hedged calculated consumer loss against variable cost savings and the promise of virtually free digital distribution. The change aimed to save money but also made it harder to cover costs associated with newsrooms and the creation of original news content.

Ending rural and regional home delivery also contributed to the nationwide rise of what are now being called “news deserts,” a dynamic that worsened with corporate acquisition and subsequent shuttering of hometown and family newspapers in places where 40 to 60 percent of the population may not have broadband or wi-fi access. News deserts are most common in Southern states, according to the UNC report, and less likely to affect younger, whiter, and more affluent communities.  

Profit-minded investment companies with no historic ties to publishing or local media markets have been more inclined to sell or shutter underperforming acquisitions than previous ownership groups. Which brings our story back to Alden/MNG/Digital First’s bid to acquire Gannett’s papers. Ironically, The Commercial Appeal — in spite of being turned out of its landmark Union Avenue offices, and frequently embarrassed by insensitive, out-of-town editing — is producing some of its most relevant, energized work in years.

Nostalgia for a mythic golden age of journalism makes it fun to believe that relevant work pays the bills. It doesn’t. And it’s not hard to understand why critical evaluations of the newspaper business and its confusing impact on content, quality, and meaning can be experienced as an attack on weary editors and reporters doing the best they can with fewer resources and less material support.

Simply put: News reporting that changes policy at Juvenile Court or shows us how TVA may have endangered Memphis’ water supply or that equips readers to make better choices as citizens and consumers doesn’t create subscription or advertising revenue. Investigative reports and in-depth explanatory journalism may be the result of hours of interviewing, weeks of research, and months or years of institutional knowledge and beat coverage. The first draft of history is always expensive to make. But none of this is especially interesting to advertisers or general-interest readers.

“We’re used to writing an article and thinking all these people are reading because we had all this circulation,” Jones says, recalling her time at the CA. “Now, with digital metrics, we know that’s not always true,” she says, illustrating an important point: The most important newspaper reporting isn’t always the best-read or most desirable for web traffic or circulation. It’s always been subsidized by softer content in a diverse bundle of professionally edited and curated information. This unpleasant fact makes the prospect of starting a fully digital, general-interest daily especially daunting — in an environment where only one in four digital news startups make it.

A New Hope

The Daily Memphian doesn’t yet share its number of paid subscribers, but the publication says monthly page-views clock around 1,400,000, and every morning the paper sends a news digest to 23,000 email accounts. Stories about University of Memphis basketball coach Penny Hardaway do very well. Stories about government and public affairs sometimes do, and sometimes don’t.

“Paid subscribers broke through the first year’s projections in a couple of months,” Barnes says. But he worries The Daily Memphian‘s big rollout may have set expectations too high. “We didn’t cover something on the first weekend, and got a ton of criticism,” he says. “People really thought we were going to cover everything right away, top-to-bottom, 24/7.”

Looking for an experience like the traditional print newspaper bundle, readers have asked for obituaries, comics, puzzles, and national and regional news that may be available elsewhere, but hasn’t been a regular part of the DM‘s mix.

Barnes responded to his first round of criticism by adding five reporters to pick up night and weekend work. He plans to eventually include AP news and additional soft content.

The riddle of the digital news Sphinx goes something like this: “How can an online startup produce enough original content across a broad enough range of consumer interests to build a big enough subscriber base to support a newsroom able to produce original content across a broad range of consumer interests?” Repeat that enough, and you’ll start to see the economic dilemma in an information environment where it’s tough to put content behind a paywall if comparable goods are available free, elsewhere.

Newspaper stories and digital posts are what economists call “experience goods.” You can’t know if a story will be interesting or useful unless you read it, so news organizations rely on columnists and star-reporters to give consumers and potential consumers some idea of what to expect before they buy. As a startup, The Daily Memphian had no brand recognition, so it hired marquee names from The Commercial Appeal: sportswriters Geoff Calkins and Chris Herrington, and food guru Jennifer Biggs. Barnes thinks bringing these known commodities onto a team rounded out with younger but experienced reporters is one of his fledgling newsroom’s big success stories.

“They already knew Memphis,” he says of his team. “There was no learning curve.” Additionally, The Daily Memphian distributes content acquired via partnerships with education policy newsroom Chalkbeat.org and the University of Memphis’ Institute for Public Service Reporting.

By now, at least some of you are probably asking, “Who cares about newspapers?” It’s taken as an article of faith the traditional models are dying, right? But remember Jacinthia Jones’ opening comments about how the agencies know when you’ve got “no backup.” Now figure in a related piece of collateral damage: Between 2005 and 2010, while so many newspapers were biting the dust, the number of Freedom of Information Act requests being filed by government watchdogs dropped by half. This data was reported by James T. Hamilton, the Hearst Professor of Communication at Stanford, in his latest book, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism.
Hamilton answered questions for this story, and the data reviewed in Democracy’s Detectives and his earlier economic critique, All the News That’s Fit to Sell, inform much of this article. Hamilton’s work shows how trends like the ones outlined in this story, “point to a lower chance” of accountability stories being told by professional news organizations about local institutions.

“If the costs of discovering and telling stories drops radically, then it may be the case that subscriptions at the local level would support a smaller newsroom that would survive online,” Hamilton wrote in an email exchange, offering a ray of hope about the viability of local newsrooms. “If a nonprofit or local online service generates other goods, such as events that are ticketed or sponsored, that could also generate income,” he said, allowing that use of artificial intelligence may eventually make story discovery and assembly cheap enough that, “local subscription or nonprofit [models] might support a local bundle.”

Savages at the Gate

In late February, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a sternly worded letter to Alden Global Capital, expressing concern about what could happen if the hedge fund acquired Gannett newspapers. He’d already weighed in on the Senate floor, noting that Gannett was a troubled example of newspaper consolidation, plagued by layoffs and delocalization.

Schumer’s worries were at least a little ironic, considering what Memphis stands to lose if there’s a takeover. Hedge fund-backed owners like MNG/Digital First depend on deep layoffs and cost-cutting, including the outsourcing of back office, sales, and certain editorial duties to central hubs, far removed from the places where news is gathered and where the paper is circulated and primarily read. They sell a newspaper’s real estate holdings and other tangible assets, squeezing all the assets for cash. As the UNC report shows, there’s always been a willingness to sell poorly performing properties or to close them entirely, “not so much to inform the public or hold officialdom to account, but to supply cash to use elsewhere.”

In other words, so much of the worst that might happen has happened already. And yet, to borrow from Bloomberg.com columnist Joe Nocera, when MNG/Digital First moves in, the layoffs aren’t just painful, “They’re savage.”

Epilogue

All newspaper news appears to be bad news. The trends are terrible. The outlook is grim. And yet, most of the people engaged in the act of gathering, organizing, delivering, and paying for the news seem determined, if not optimistic about finding a way forward. Barnes is hopeful he’s found the right business model to go paperless. Jones is excited about using text-based news delivery to close the digital divide. MLK50, a justice-oriented not-for-profit led by former Commercial Appeal columnist Wendi Thomas, expanded its capacity by joining the local reporting network for ProPublica, a national, not-for-profit digital newsroom.

Karanja Ajanaku says he has “some awareness” of what’s happening in the newspaper industry, but the executive editor of the Tri-State Defender takes a unique perspective. “We’re in growth mode,” he says, describing a plan to move the historically black newspaper’s online content behind a paywall. Diverse representation in Memphis newsrooms has sometimes been called out as problematic, and in a majority-black community he thinks the Defender has been underperforming its potential to serve everybody. “But we have to be able to do a deeper dive into the community, and to do that we’ve got to have reporters,” he says, returning to a more familiar theme. “We’ve got to have journalists. We’ve got to have editors — local people telling local stories. So we’re asking the community to help us help them, and we think they will respond to that.”

Excerpts from conversations with Jacinthia Jones of Chalkbeat, Eric Barnes of The Daily Memphian, Karanja Ajanaku of the Tri-State Defender, Wendi Thomas of MLK 50, and Mark Fleischer of StoryBoard: Memphis will be made available online at Memphisflyer.com. Commercial Appeal Executive Editor Mark Russell did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1568

Neverending Elvis

According to news at Justcollecting.com, the last of Elvis Presley’s tiny blue balls goes on sale this week. A racquetball swatted around by the King shortly before his death in August 1977 goes up for sale by GWS Auctions on March 20th. “The blue rubber ball is expected to fetch up to $8,000,” the article states.

Caped crusades

Sometimes life imitates the funny books. When County Commissioner Tami Sawyer announced her candidacy for mayor last week, an image began circulating across social media depicting the activist turned politician as a superhero. At first, this just seemed like clever campaign materials designed to establish a cartoon rivalry between Sawyer and arch nemeses like W.W. Herenton, aka “The Boxer,” or Jim “The Pothole” Strickland. Then the FBI asked Memphians for help catching this man, with a history of robbing banks in a devil mask, and everything got real really fast. Cue theme music: Avengers, assemble!

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1567

Elsewhere, TN

It’s old news by now, but Fly on the Wall wouldn’t be Fly on the Wall if we didn’t point out that the biggest news out of Tennessee last week wasn’t related to Governor/Confederate cosplayer Bill Lee’s general support for the continued public veneration of Southern general/klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest.

It was the story of a disgruntled East Tennessee delivery driver who sacked some salsa and put it on the internet. Bonus points to the WMC story, “man accused of dipping testicles in customers salsa,” which carries the surgically precise, yet innuendo-laden subhead, “he was mad about a small tip.”

Migratory Workers

Following news of his retirement from The Commercial Appeal it’s since been announced that award-winning reporter/columnist David Waters, is joining the Institute for Public Service Reporting, the University of Memphis’s professional newsroom.

Waters will serve as the assistant director alongside director and fellow CA alum, Marc Perrusquia. The Institute for Public Service Reporting was created to give students practical newsroom opportunities. It collaborates with daily not-for-profit newsroom/primary refuge for former CA journalists, The Daily Memphian.

Verbatim

“I’m usually hearing about people getting shot, but a 2-by-4? That’s treachery.” — Memphian Shaun Sian, quoted by WMC on news that several people attacked another man with lumber in the parking lot of a Church’s Chicken.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Mad Men

CREDIT: David Tankersley

There’s a mismatched quality to David Tankersley and Don Meyers. As artists working in two dimensions, their work couldn’t be more different or more complementary. Their group exhibit, “2 for the Show at ‘KNO,” collects more than 70 examples.

Tankersley came late to drawing and takes an almost journalistic approach. The dark, pointillistically rendered places and faces he depicts feel sturdy and lived in. By contrast, even when they’re inspired by gray days, clouds, and rain, Meyers’ abstract paintings are unfailingly colorful, airy, and suggestive of a larger, more mysterious universe.

David Tankersley

Huey’s

“Don’s photography is so colorful and artfully done, when you look at it initially, you might believe it’s painted,” Tankersley says.

Meyers is a retired creative director whose bio reads like the lost season of Mad Men. He started professional life working at Playboy as a photographer’s assistant and would work alongside Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer and Missing Piece author/illustrator Shel Silverstein.

“He was always drawing,” Meyers says of Silverstein, who he describes as a mentor. “He’d say, ‘Don’t worry about structure, just draw. Just get back into your childhood where kids don’t worry.””

Like Meyers, Tankersley is an independent filmmaker and a veteran of the publishing and advertising worlds. He describes his art education a little differently though. “I just hung around public restrooms,” Tankersley says.

Meyers describes his half of “2 for the Show” as a garage sale. “My wife said everything must go, so I’m taking my prices way down!”

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Revolutionaries

Close to the ending of 1776, the enduring Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone musical on America’s struggle for independence, the contrarian patriot John Adams sits all alone in Philadelphia, talking to himself like an American Hamlet. Once upon a time, this man, who will one day become president, dreamed of a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition of equality. Why was that dream met with such ugly resistance by his fellow countrymen? And can you prevail against all that without becoming ugly and shrill yourself? It’s a sentiment anybody who follows contemporary politics or has ever drifted too close to online debates about virtually anything knows in our bones, and the question he asks is one any company mounting this 50-year-old meditation on America’s stormy birth must also ask: “Does anybody care?”

Cecelia Wingate, the award-collecting actor/director best known for her work staging extravaganzas like Young Frankenstein and The Producers, knows people are raw and worn out on politics, but she thinks the answer is yes, and she’s returned to Theatre Memphis with top-shelf acting talent like John Maness, Bill Andrews, and Kevar Maffitt in tow, to see if she can make something at least a little bit revolutionary on Perkins Ext.

“Our watchwords for this have been ‘passion and urgency,’ and we hope it works,” Wingate says. “There’s so much noise out there emanating from a political system that seems broken — the ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ mentality. Now is the perfect time to be doing this.”

1776 loosely follows events leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Its songs address everything from the literal and figurative temperature inside Independence Hall to the slave economy’s tangled web. “It’s my favorite time period to read about,” Wingate says, in a characteristically salty turn. “I research the shit out of this stuff.”