Authors In The Media With Tom Coffey 

After doing a regular Q&A with Tom Coffey last year and returning a year later doing a Behind The Book Q&A with Tom, I am doing an Authors In The Media Q&A with Tom Coffey discussing his journalism career! We briefly spoke about it last year and now this year we are getting more in depth about it! 

Q: Last year when we did our regular Q&A, we briefly spoke about writing books and being a journalist were a calling in your life and how you always had the passion for both in you. I ask every author who is (or used to be) a journalist this question, did you go to college for a journalism career, or did you apply for a job right after you graduated high school?

A: I graduated from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, which likes to call itself the best communications school in the country, which might even be true.

I’m the oldest of four kids, and when I was growing up my parents used to tell us, “We’ll support you until you’re twenty-one – but after you get out of school, you’re on your own!” Turns out I was the only one of my siblings foolish enough to take Mom and Dad seriously. Anyway, since I believed from a young age that I’d have to support myself, while I was in high school, I began to think about what I’d like to do to keep a roof over my head. I’ve always been interested in what’s going on in the world, and I grew up on Staten Island in the 1970s, so it seemed to me that being a journalist in New York City would be an interesting way to make a living.

Which it was most of the time.

Q: Would you say that your journalism writing helped with you writing your novels? 

A: No doubt about it. You learn to write and edit by … writing and editing. And since journalism happens every day, you always must produce – it’s not an academic exercise where you can say, “I’m not feeling inspired right now.”

I was fortunate to study with some excellent teachers, both in school and in the newsroom. Even more importantly, I worked with incredibly talented people, beginning with my stint at The Daily Orange, the student newspaper at Syracuse, and continuing through my professional career at The Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, New York Newsday and The New York Times. You get better when you work with people who are passionate about what they do, and who are really good at it.

Journalistic writing tends to be simple and direct, so if you want to be the next James Joyce, don’t work in a newsroom. I believe that the straightforward declarative English sentence is one of the most beautiful things in the world, so working in journalism helped my writing get where I wanted it to go.

Q: What important lessons have you learned as a journalist that you would like for everyone to know whether they pursue journalism or not?

A: Above all else: Be open-minded. Do not enter any story with preconceptions. A longtime colleague of mine at The Times had these words of wisdom tacked to one of the walls in his cubicle: “Assumption is the mother of all (bleep)-ups.”

Entering a story with an open, almost childlike demeanor means that you must listen to people, and really hear what they have to say. Since you run into saints and sinners and everything in between, you need to have both empathy and skepticism, which is a hard trick to pull off, but it’s invaluable for writers.

One other thing about journalism that can help aspiring writers is this: You will run into many, many, many different types of people, from all walks of life. In my view, many so-called literary novels of recent years suffer from focusing on one narrow tranche of society. I’m not the biggest fan of 19th-Century European social novels, but I admire the way those authors tried to write about the totality of society. Very few serious writers try to do that anymore.

And if I never read another book set in academia, I’ll die happy.

Q: Last year you wrote, As a reporter, I was responsible for generating most of my own story ideas, which is good for your creativity. It’s also useful to go through the editing process – you learn what works and what doesn’t. Would you say that generating your own story ideas & the editing process were your favorite parts about being a journalist? Why or why not? 

A: This is an interesting question, so I’ll answer it sideways. My favorite part of being a journalist was being a member of a team with people I liked and respected and helping to create a product – every day! – that I was proud of. The editing process is an integral part of that. Editing, done properly, introduces a rigor into the creative process that will improve the result, often significantly.

It’s important for both editor and writer to be on the same page. The editing process can be difficult for everyone, even when it’s successful, but it will end in frustration and bitterness if the two most important people involved in it have conflicting ideas about the nature of the project.

Not surprisingly, generating story ideas gets the creative juices flowing. Some story ideas are terrible, and others just never go anywhere, but that’s all part of the process. If you’re responsible for your own story ideas, you learn to pay attention to what’s going on around you all the time, because everything is potential fodder. It goes back to what Henry James said was the most essential quality in a writer: Be the type of person upon whom nothing is lost.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that some of my favorite memories are of sitting around a battered table in a newsroom conference room and kicking around story ideas with my colleagues. Creativity breeds creativity.

Q: I know you are retired from the journalism game at The New York Times. Would you ever return, or have you moved on?

A: I’ve moved on. After spending more than four decades in the news game, I decided it was time to do something different while I still had the energy. And in my last few years at The Times, the company’s leadership made some important changes in the way the place operates that I strongly disagreed with. In 2022-23, I took part in union activities that led to a new contract, so I got a chance to see how upper management operated, and it wasn’t pretty. By the time I left, in addition to feeling that it was time to explore new opportunities for myself, I was also thinking: “I don’t want to work for these people anymore.”

I do miss my former colleagues. They were tremendous.

Q: What are your favorite shows & books (nonfiction or fiction) with journalists in them? A show I did enjoy (at least in the first season), Tokyo Vice, is based off Jake Adelstein’s memoir of the same name. Have you ever seen it? If so, what did you think?

A: I haven’t read or seen Tokyo Vice, so I’ll have to check it out. I was on a panel about journalism and mysteries at the Bouchercon writers conference this summer, and the question came up about fictional newsroom characters you’d like to work for, and I immediately piped up: “Lou Grant!” The WJM newsroom on The Mary Tyler Moore Show always struck me as a great place to work. (I’m showing my age here.)

If you go back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, films like His Girl Friday and Deadline U.S.A. are a treat. Ace in the Hole is a classic noir by Billy Wilder that paints a darker picture of the profession. All the President’s Men is a good movie that recaps journalism’s greatest triumph. More recently, Spotlight provided an incisive look at the way investigative journalism works. I also enjoyed The Post, which showed how The Washington Post tried to play catch-up with The Times on the Pentagon Papers story.

And, of course, don’t forget Citizen Kane.

In terms of books about journalism, two classics are The Kingdom and the Power, about The New York Times, by Gay Talese, and The Powers That Be, by David Halberstam, which hops around among several important media outlets. Personal History: A Memoir is the autobiography of Katharine Graham, the longtime publisher of The Washington Post, and it’s well worth reading for its insights into both journalism and a society that severely restricted women. I also must mention The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, by Richard Kluger, because The Trib was my father’s favorite newspaper.

Q: Another favorite question I enjoy asking authors who used to be journalists is, could you please give a list of the interesting people you had to interview or report on for a story? 

A: When I was a reporter at The Miami Herald in the early 1980s, I interviewed a woman who had just turned 100. I wish I could remember her name. She was Black, and she had seen and been through, well, just about everything, but her grace and wisdom were striking. In that same period, I also did a story about a new cast at a local movie theater that did midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Hanging out with those kids for a few days was a hoot. Couldn’t believe I got paid for doing that.

Many years ago, a Chicago newspaperman wrote a book called Such Interesting People. It wasn’t about the people he interviewed – it was about the people he worked with. Every newsroom has fascinating, offbeat characters; it’s a profession that attracts men and women who tend to look at life differently. I’m thinking of one fella in particular who worked the night shift at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. This was in the 1980s, and he was a middle-aged jazz freak and major league pothead who took a reefer break every night around 10 pm. He was also a great guy. Someday I’m going to get him into a book I write, but I haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

Thanks so much for letting me do this, Bianca. I hope I didn’t go on too long. The questions were great, and they gave me a chance to travel down Memory Lane.