On a Saturday morning in 1992, best-selling author James Michener looked out on a crowd of 350 journalists gathered in Wilmington, Del. As recounted in "The Journalist's Craft: A Guide to Writing Better Stories," by Dennis Jackson and John Sweeney, "the frail, 85-year-old Michener" leaned into a microphone. "Hello, fellow writers."
So began the first
Wilmington Writers' Workshop, the brainchild of two editors who worked for
The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal. It was a unique attempt to provide low-cost training in reporting, writing and editing for journalists willing to give up a spring weekend for the chance to hear from some of the best in the business, who had volunteered to share their lessons about the craft for free.
Within two years, Wilmington's franchise went national as The Poynter Institute, newspapers, universities and
other organizations agreed to co-sponsor
Writers Workshops around the country.
Next year, National Writers Workshops spawned by their idea will set up shop in seven cities that span the country:
Santa Ana, Calif.;
Hartford, Conn.; San Antonio, Texas; Wichita, Kan.;
Portland, Ore.;
Fort Lauderdale, Fla. and
Cambridge, Mass. With tuitions under $100 at most sites, NWW remains one of the best training bargains available today.
Sadly, however, there will be no Writers' Workshop in Wilmington in 2007. After 15 years,
The News Journal has decided not to host a Writers Workshop.
In this e-mail exchange,
John Sweeney, co-founder and director of the Wilmington Writers Workshop, and now the
News Journal's editorial page editor, explained the decision:
CHIP SCANLAN: Why, after 15 years, will spring 2007 come and go without the Wilmington Writers' Workshop?
JOHN SWEENEY: It was a matter of people. Fewer people were coming each year. And that translates into money. Our publisher,
Curtis Riddle, has been great about supporting the program. But the subsidy kept growing and, without changing the purpose of the workshop -- to train journalists -- I didn't see that trend changing. We designed the workshop to be as inexpensive as possible so that editors and writers in the region could take advantage of the opportunity for training. In fact, in 15 years, the fee has only gone up $15. The idea was that if editors and writers from throughout the region came to the workshop, all of us could get to hear and work with some great speakers for a low price. It worked for a while, but I think support for training is down in a lot of newsrooms.
As one of the workshop's co-founders, how do you feel about the decision?
Mixed. Intellectually, the decision makes a lot of sense. Personally, it gives me a lot more free time. This will be the first spring in a long time that I won't have nightmares of walking up to a microphone to tell several hundred journalists that none of the speakers showed up. Emotionally, I will miss the charge. Way back in 1993, Roy Peter Clark described it as a cross between
Woodstock and
Lourdes. And that electric charge held even through the last workshop.
Can you estimate how many journalists you've reached over the years?
I'd say about six thousand over 15 years.
What did you provide them?
A lot of great speakers. But most of all, a connection to our craft. I came up in a newsroom where if you wanted to talk about writing, you had to go outside, maybe to a bar down the street for a beer, out of earshot of editors who knew their business but didn't know how to talk about it. Everything was a formula. I would have loved to go a place where really top writers said, "Break the formula. Here's how." The workshops did that. It was an annual renewal, a remembering of why we wanted to be in this business, and a look at some of the things we really could do. And I always asked the speaker to give their listeners a tip they could use when they got back to the office on Monday morning.
Is this just a hiatus or do you believe the Wilmington Writers' Workshop has folded up its tent for good?
My hope is to come back in 2008. It will be different. Some re-inventing is called for because the challenges are different. Will there be an audience for it? The hiatus will give us a little more time to think about that.
What does the News Journal's decision reflect about the state of training today, including market forces and other changes affecting the news industry?
It says a lot, and not all of it is bad. I'm a print guy and I'm fond of the Wilmington Writers' Workshop. I don't want to knock newspapers or workshops. But we need to adapt. Every editor out there knows this. Soon every reporter will. This isn't a case of some bad guys on Wall Street making life tough for us. Audiences are making life tough for us. And well they should. They have a great array of choices. They want to be in on the media act. We have to know what it is we offer them or can offer them. That's the direction workshops like Wilmington's have to take us in.
How should people view the loss of the Wilmington Writers' Workshop -- as a single casualty or a harbinger of similar decisions at other news organizations that put on these events?
Perhaps all of the above. Ideas only run so long. When we hatched the idea of the workshop, we were answering a need: newsrooms had neglected our craft for too long. Editors had forgotten -- or had never learned -- how to help a reporter tell a yarn, the kind readers loved. This workshop and all of the others helped newsrooms reconnect to that craft.
But times are changing. Journalists are recognizing new challenges; editors are feeling new pressures. I think we, as trainers, have to take that in and provide training that meets those new needs. The challenge to us is to make sure we stay connected to the craft of writing. People want clear, accurate information. And they want it quickly. But they still want yarns. They wanted them around the campfire when we lived in caves. And they'll want them in outer space. The question always is: What's the best way to tell this story?
What are some of the highlights from your time as director?
Two lines stand out. One is from August Wilson, the great playwright. He response to a question about failure: "Have a belief in yourself that is greater than anyone else's disbelief." And, another year, Jim Lehrer was asked how he could be a journalist and write novels at the same time. He said, "The secret of writing is to keep your butt in the chair." Every writer needs to hear those two points over and over.
But a payoff for me came a couple years ago when I invited Robin Gaby Fisher, the terrific writer from The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., to speak at the workshop about crafting narratives. She graciously said yes, but then added that she was happy to do it because she had attended the workshop years before and heard Donald Drake of The Philadelphia Inquirer talk about narrative writing. It was that talk that got her interested in narratives. I got a kick out of that.
You and Dennis Jackson, a professor at the University of Delaware, co-edited "The Journalist's Craft: A Guide to Writing Better Stories," drawn from presentations over the years. What's the most important lesson about the writing craft that you take away after all these years?
That it is a craft. I keep talking about that, but this was a discovery for me. It's not something we will master. We are forever students. My goal is a simple one: I want to be a better writer today than I was yesterday, and a better writer tomorrow than I was today.
Is there anything I haven't asked that you'd like to address?
I would like everyone who has ever attended one of the National Writers Workshops to remember one thing: Those speakers up there, on the big stage or in the side conference room, have a lot to offer. Some of them are going to be funny and pointed; some may be on the quiet side. They may have traveled across the country or just across the street to talk to you. They aren't paid for it. In fact, they're doing it on their own time. So when you have them there before you, appreciate them and take advantage of what they have to offer.
Thanks for all your good work, John; your creativity, diligence, commitment, for being the heart and soul of an idea that continues to bear fruit every year.
