In Part II of our interview, Salon.com Sportswriter King Kaufman graciously answered my questions about his own entry into journalism, and gave advice for others who would follow his lead.

How did you get into journalism?

Followed my brother, who was the real journalism star of the family. He had his own little newspaper that he typed up when he was about 8. He was a star on the high school paper, was working in professional radio pretty early on in college, and went on to a career in the radio and then TV news business before switching over to entertainment. I was always good at writing so I got onto my high school paper, but probably didn’t have quite the same kind of passion for it, though I had some, and I was good.

One of the best things that ever happened to me was deciding that I wanted to go to UC-Berkeley, which didn’t have a journalism major. If it had, I’m sure I’d have majored in journalism. Instead, I majored in history, got a liberal arts education, and only returned to journalism in my last year, when I started working for the campus radio station, KALX, and covering baseball for the Daily Californian. I only did that because I was going to graduate and started thinking, “Maybe I should figure out what I’m going to do for a living.” I eventually decided to go to Berkeley’s journalism school, ended up working for several years at the radio station, including a year as news director but also some sports play-by-play, and finally kind of settled on newspapers, because I got a job first at a chain of throwaway papers in the East Bay, and then at the San Francisco Examiner, where I hired on — believe it or not given this sentence — as a copy editor.

What advice do you have for people, like me, who yearn to write for publications such as Salon? What is the best way for a would-be journalist to get started? In your experience, how important (or unimportant) is a graduate journalism degree to success in the business?

The best way to get started is to get started. Find a place that’s looking for the kind of writing you want to or are willing to do. That might be a local paper, a Web site somewhere. Start a blog and treat it as a professional publication.

The best way to get anything published anywhere is to pitch a story that a publication would be likely to want to run. So get to know the publications your pitching. Figure out their needs and see if you can fill them.

A graduate journalism degree isn’t necessary for success, but going to journalism school is a way to get the basics while meeting people in the profession and probably getting some decent guidance both on your reporting and writing and on your employment search. It certainly can be helpful, though whether it’s worth the time and money is a question for the individual. I always put it this way: I learned more in my first two weeks at the San Francisco Examiner than I learned in two years at the UC-Berkeley J-School. But I got the job at the Examiner through the J-School.

What separates a good article proposal from a bad one? Do you have any suggestions about things to do or not to do when contacting editors?

A good one grabs the attention of the editor quickly — very quickly — gets him or her interested in the story, and is itself well-written. It makes the editor say, “I understand exactly what this person is trying to say, I think it’s a great idea, and I think this person would be able to write it.”

In a 2003 interview, you mentioned that it was sometimes hard for you, as an online journalist, to gain access to locker-rooms. Has the situation improved over the past two years?

No.

Maybe this is a reach, but the illustration of you on Salon reminds me of the frontispiece that Walt Whitman placed at the beginning of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman was famous for using images of himself to construct a public self-identity. Can you tell us more about the image on your column, and the ways in which it helps create your public persona?

I might have a better answer if I’d had anything to do with the creation of that caricature, or even the decision in the first place to use a likeness of me on the column, which I didn’t. Salon had caricatures of its columnists from the first, all of them done by Zach Trenholm. He has a rule that when he does your caricature, you can make — I forget if it’s one or two — suggestions or requests for a revision. So I asked him to add my crown tattoo. Other than that, I had no input.

It’s a remarkable likeness, captures something about me. Everyone who knows me and sees it says that. And a bonus: It makes me better looking than I am. But I’m not sure what it does for my public persona. I write a daily column, and if you read me more than once in a while, I think you kind of get to know my public persona through the words.

Which writers do you most admire?

Mark Twain. As a kid, there was only one time I ever did that cliched thing of being so wrapped up in some adventure story I was reading that I’d stay up late, reading it in bed with a flashlight under the covers after I was supposed to be asleep. Of course it was “Tom Sawyer.” I have a book of his short stories next to the bed and every once in a while I just open it up and read one. I read “Huck Finn” about once a decade. It’s different every time, damndest thing.

James Joyce and Elmore Leonard. Each in his own way, I love what they do what with the language.

Red Smith. He was once on the cover of Time or Newsweek and it said “The DiMaggio of the Press Box.” I’ve read that there’s a play about him called “The Shakespeare of the Press Box.” Really he was the Mark Twain of the press box. I didn’t read him when he was alive, though I
think I was already in college when he died. I discovered him later. He was a New York guy and this was pre-Internet. You didn’t go around reading columnists who weren’t in your hometown paper. Lucky for me I grew up reading the Los Angeles Times, which had Jim Murray, a giant in his own right. In fact, when Smith died, Murray wrote, “He wasn’t a sportswriter. He was a writer.” That’s something I’d say about Murray too, and I hope someday people will say it about me. I’m just starting to look into his contemporary, Jimmy Cannon.

Dave Barry. That sounds a little ridiculous now, I suppose — the guy they based that bad TV series on? When I was just starting out, Barry won the Pulitzer Prize, and that was the first I’d heard of him. I came across the columns he used in his portfolio and they made me laugh so hard I nearly fainted. I was in a library. The librarian was ready to call the cops. And then right in the middle there was one about his mom dying, and it wasn’t mawkish but it made me well up.

I decided to try to figure out what it was that was so good, so funny about his stuff, because I didn’t think it was the subject matter, which was mostly boogers. I really studied how he set up his jokes, how he constructed his sentences. It was really an education. Barry probably gets underestimated because he’s dorky and he writes funny stuff, and I think in recent years he’s been mailing it in a lot, churning out all those dumb books and everything. But at his best, he’s a virtuosic stylist. Not only did I learn valuable lessons about rhythm and timing and syntax from him, but I learned how to study other writers by studying him.

There are dozens of others, of course, and of course they’re not all white men like these guys! But they’re the ones that kind of spring to mind first.

What’s the toughest part of your job?

The dailiness of it. It’s a grind. My wife works at a university, and as a benefit she gets to take a class each semester for free, which she usually does. One time she was kind of grumbling, saying, “I have to write a five-page paper for my class next week.” I said, “I write a five-page paper every day.”

How do your experiences writing for Salon differ from those you had at other publications?

The closeness of the audience. I get more e-mails from readers in a typical day than I got letters from readers in seven years at a newspaper. It really feels more like a conversation than writing for a newspaper does. I also have tremendous, ridiculous amounts of editorial freedom. The meddling levels of middle management that are so crushing to creativity and original thought, and that are so prevalent in the newspaper world, don’t exist at Salon. I appreciate that. There’s also the immediacy. I can finish writing something and have it in the hands of readers within minutes.

What skills does a successful editor, as opposed to a successful writer, need to have?

Good question. I’m not sure. I guess you have to be a generalist to a certain extent. It helps to be a good writer, but I guess the key thing is to be able to read a story and think like a writer and a reader at the same time. To be able to understand, as a reader, what’s missing from a story, what’s working, what needs some fleshing out, etc., and also understanding, like a writer, the structure of the story, how it’s built, how it can be tinkered with. It’s also important to be able to work on a story without making it your own, which is harder than it sounds. Just because you’d approach a story a certain way, or you’d rewrite a certain passage this way, doesn’t mean that’s the proper approach to this story for this writer.

King Kaufman is Senior Writer and Sports Columnist at Salon.com. Be sure to check out his latest column and his archives. You can also join his mailing list by sending an email to kingnewsletter@salon.com. If you missed Part I of our interview, you can find it here.

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