Local labels featured in RFT

From the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion: I've got a feature story in this week's Riverfront Times that takes a look at two St. Louisans who operate small independent record labels - specifically, Jay Zelenka, proprietor of the free improv and avant jazz label Freedonia Music, and Jeff Konkel of Broke & Hungry Records, which specializes in recording little-known Mississippi blues performers. You can read it online here. Go check it out, look at Mark Gilliland's nice pix of Jay and Jeff, and then come back here for a bit of the story behind the story.

Read it? OK, then: Given the usual constraints of the form, the available word count and so on, I'm 98% happy with how the story came it out. But I'd like to address that 2%, because there's one sentence in the published version that's bugging me, a sentence that conveys an inaccurate impression, something that wound up being phrased in a way that was not what the subject said, nor what I originally wrote.

That sentence, in a paragraph about the early musical efforts of Jay Zelenka, said:
"Already a talented percussionist, he later added saxophone and flute to his arsenal."

Here's where perhaps some insight can be gained into the sausage factory that we call "journalism." What happened during our interview was that Jay told me how he had started performing with the Human Arts Ensemble as a poet, and gradually started picking up various hand percussion instruments and playing them. Eventually, he stopped doing poetry and began performing strictly as an instrumentalist, learning saxophone and flute along the way.

This was related in a somewhat discursive conversation that didn't lend itself to a direct quote. So I paraphrased, writing in the original draft that Zelenka "put down his manuscripts to play percussion, later adding saxophone and flute to his arsenal."

Now, one might say that's not all that different from what eventually wound up running in the paper, and, in a sense, that's correct - the edit, likely done in an effort to make the story a bit more concise, is only three words shorter.

Unfortunately, the introduction of the adjective "talented," unused by either the interviewer or interviewee, also distorts the meaning of the passage a little bit more than the original paraphrase did. In our interview, Jay made it clear that learning different instruments was an exploratory process for him; saying that he "was already a talented percussionist" could be interpreted to mean that he was some sort of highly skilled and/or trained percussion player, which was definitely not the case.

None of this is meant to excoriate or reflect poorly upon RFT music editor Annie Z., who approved the idea for the story in the first place and had several helpful suggestions along the way, nor the RFT's copy desk, who realistically can't be expected to divine every little nuance any given writer may be intending on any given day. And, as I said, I'm actually pretty happy with how the piece turned out.

Unlike blogging, which for better or worse is very much a one-person kind of thing, newspaper journalism is a collaborative effort, and these sorts of small edits to compress things happen every day, at every newspaper, everywhere. So I bring this up for two reasons: to apologize publicly to Jay Zelenka for not conveying his back story quite as clearly as I would have liked, and to give you, dear reader, some small insight into how a story progresses from an interview through writing and several stages of editing before it finally shows up in your local fishwrap. As hard as we try to get things right - and we do try hard - there's always room for improvement.