Francovich: A goodbye to the glory and grime of daily journalism

I fell in love with journalism, fully and undeniably, while being threatened with bodily harm in a bar in Troy, Montana. It was the kind of dive that, growing up in North Idaho, I thought I knew well.

Elk racks stapled to the walls. A saddle, perhaps never used, in a corner. Newspaper clippings of hard-nosed men standing next to dead animals. Bud Light and Miller High Life posters slowly peeling downward, the humidity of a thousand drunks over a thousand nights loosening it all.

Pull tabs and a jukebox. Cigarette smoke pooled above it all, haze upon haze.

I was there for The Spokesman-Review with photographer Tyler Tjomsland. We were trying to track down information about Rachel Dolezal, the Black lady who wasn’t.

She’d grown up near Troy and we’d been sent to find out whatever we could about her childhood (“I want to see her yearbook. I want to see her bedroom,” were part of our marching orders. We found neither.)

I was a 25-year-old intern and a month removed from graduating from Gonzaga University. I had a stylish, at least I thought so, haircut – one verging upon a pompadour.

We’d been there two days and had struck out hard, and I was stressed. Tyler, more used to the up-and-down nature of journalistic fate, was less worried.

He also had a staff job. I did not.

So we went to that bar and drank and tried to figure out the next move.

This is an aspect of reporting, at least the kind I’ve been lucky enough to do, that isn’t always understood.

Once sent on assignment, it’s on you. Editors have ideas and leads and the best-given wise advice over the phone, but once in the field, it’s your show. If you hit a home run, that’s your victory. If you crash and burn, that’s your failure.

I was feeling the pressure of an imminent crash and burn that night in that bar.

So it felt like a godsend when we started chatting with a guy who said he’d gone to high school with Dolezal.

We told him who and what we were and why we were in town. He was a big guy, with a tight utilitarian haircut. While I don’t remember what he did for a living, an educated assumption would be logging.

He wasn’t exactly friendly, but he wasn’t unfriendly and so we chatted. Normal bar talk, really nothing useful for the story, but at least it felt like we were doing something and not just drinking.

I was feeling that pressure, though, and began pushing and prying for something that I could use, trying to hide my angle behind bar banter.

I needed ore for the ol’ journalism smelter. An anecdote or a lead that would secure me a job, turn me from intern to staffer. A tidbit from his life that would improve mine.

He saw through that about as fast as a bird sees through a bay window and his tone downshifted.

He looked at me, looked at my haircut and then asked, “What would you do if Justin Bieber walked through that door?”

I stuttered, and failing to promptly respond, he continued, “I’d punch him in the face.”

Then, looking me dead in the eye, he said, “You look a lot like Justin Bieber.”

He did not punch me in the face, and I don’t look much like Justin Bieber, although perhaps my haircut was a bit foppish.

Tyler smoothed things over with a combination of good cheer and diesel engine knowledge. We left the bar unscathed and returned home to Spokane with no story, although I did later get a job.

Still, the encounter stuck with me.

In one way, it’s just a crazy story, familiar to anyone who has stayed out too late drinking, particularly in Montana.

But as that encounter settled, a deeper meaning revealed itself over the course of hundreds of interviews and reporting trips, many in stranger, more fraught contexts than backwoods Montana.

His threat showed just how important storytelling is and what an awesome – in the true sense of the term – responsibility it is to tell someone’s story.

And that has been my job for eight years. My trade. The way I’ve made a living.

But, unlike metal fabrication, say, or dentistry, the nature and boundaries of this job get confused. To do my job, I spend time with you.

I ask questions – and as anyone who has been on a successful first date knows – the best way to get someone to relax and trust is to show interest.

But as a journalist, my questions aren’t solely based on curiosity (although that is a huge part of it).

I’m also trying to produce something. I’m trying to tell a story about someone or something.

In exchange for that telling, I get paid. That story is theirs, but as I prod and pry and translate what they’ve told me to paper they lose control of their story.

That’s a scary thing for a source. In my naivete in that Montanan bar, I was abusing that role, treating it too casually.

I was too desperate for the goods and forgetting the man in front of me – focused only on me and whatever the hell I thought I’d accomplish by hoovering up sad tidbits from Rachel Dolezal’s childhood.

Because whatever else that drunken Montanan was, he knew one thing: A story is serious business and not one to be casually extracted.

A story can save a life. It can end a career. It can change a city, or simply bolster the status quo.

That’s why I say I fell in love with journalism that night.

It was a slow sort of love, one marked by doubt and angst and plenty of flirtations with other careers (maybe I could be a prep cook at an Antarctic research station), but love nonetheless.

And in the eight years since, I’ve traveled the region and world for The Spokesman-Review. I interviewed refugees, septuagenarian cyclists and teen junkies.

But that lesson, imparted by a man who’d had a few too many, remained my guide stone, even if it wasn’t always articulated: Treat these stories, and their owner’s, with respect.

That’s what a newspaper, particularly a regional one close to its readers, does. It reflects the community back upon itself, in its glory and grime.

Which makes it hard to say I’m leaving the paper and daily journalism.

I’m leaving for no lack of love. In some ways, I believe I love it more than I ever have.

Driving or walking through Spokane, I’ll see a person whose face is so expressive that I can only imagine the stories they have – lifetimes of joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment.

A deeply personal story that if told in the right way could hold meaning for us all.

The reasons I’m leaving are varied. Money is certainly part of it. Money and time, the two great constraints on any story.

But I also feel a general restlessness, a readiness to try something new. A desire to work with my hands and be part of stories, not only a witness.

I remain a firm believer in the importance of journalism, particularly local journalism.

Because in a time of endless online knowledge and manufactured cultural and social division, journalism isn’t just about the facts. It’s about putting readers into conversations with people and subjects they may never otherwise encounter.

It’s about giving others the respect that a drunken logger demanded of me all those years ago.