Pulitzer winner Mary Schmich’s journey from newspapers to podcasts with ‘Division Street Revisited’

There's two categories of advice, right? One, there's the journalistic, artistic advice, and two, there's the ‘get real’ advice. It's not easy to make a podcast — a narrative storytelling podcast. It's not easy to find the money to do it. It's not cheap if people are going to get paid and if you’re going to have people who are really good at all the elements that you need to make the thing good. So a certain realism about it is helpful. On a journalistic, artistic level, the advice would be not all that different from the advice you'd give  to someone about telling any good story. What are the elements that make a good story? It's the same essential elements, right?

You've got character. You've got setting. You've got action. You've got meaning. How do you weave those? It's always a puzzle. Which is part of the fun.

I like it a lot. It's just fun to learn something new. To tell a story in a somewhat different way. To be more alert to sound. There are things you can convey with sound that when you're just writing them down, you have to try to do with words. If the birds are chirping in the background, or the guy out front is banging in the dumpster, you have to describe that if you're writing it in a column. In the podcast, it's just there and people can get the vibe without your having to make up the words. There's a lot to be said for intonation, right? People's voices carry so much that when you're just writing them down as quotes, it’s different.

 I admired the energy that he brought to the conversation, that simultaneously left space for the person  to talk. And there is an art in that, to be an active listener, to talk but not too much. All of these interviews are fun to listen to because Studs is clearly having fun. You just hear him cackling away. He had some questions like … "If you were God, how would you change the world?" "What are you afraid of?" I think a lot about that question. … Somebody should do a podcast just called "What Are You Afraid Of?" And go talk to people. 

[In Schmich's own work,] I don't remember ever quite that bluntly saying, "What are you afraid of?" I mean, I'm always looking for “What are you afraid of?” I'm often aiming for specifics and I like to give people plenty of space to just say what they're thinking and feeling. But the value of the blunt, broad question was brought home to me by what Studs does.

I came into column writing at a point in my life where I didn't really think I wanted to write a column. When I was younger, I did. I was very full of opinions. And then I had to be — got to be — a real reporter for a long time. I covered the South for the Tribune. And I came to just understand how little I knew and not trust myself to have huge opinions on whatever the news of the day was. Because I came to see that if you have not reported the news, you don't understand the news. Even when you do report it, you're having trouble understanding it. But wow, you're just reading about it and reacting? What are you talking about?  

So, I mean, I always had an approach to column writing, which was a melding of opinion and storytelling. Because I do think the stories you choose to tell express ideas, express viewpoints. Sometimes better than the hammer-on-the-head opinion. 

One thing I got from column writing — a really important thing — was how to write tight and short. Because for most of my time at the Tribune, the column was literally in a box. And you couldn't break out of the box. Every now and then you could. But you had to figure out, what can I say in the space and time I have today? Over the years, I cultivated three essential mantras, which [were]: Panic is my muse. Deadlines crowd out doubt. It always gets done. 

I started writing a comic strip having no clue what I was doing. I learned along the way. But once again, I think all of these forms of storytelling are different and they require different skills. And yet, a story's a story. So with writing the comic strip, first of all, there's no reporting. You’re just making stuff up, right? But I think on some level it did help me to visualize stories. Obviously I wasn't doing the drawing, but I had to write in a way that would allow the artist to draw. I don't know how to get too lofty about that, but I do think it probably accentuated my sense of how characters and dialogue help to carry a story. 

 This is a column I wrote in an afternoon, in a panic, because I had nothing else to write. So, we're going back to my "deadlines crowd out doubt, panic is my muse, it always gets done" philosophy, right? I just thought, well, it's graduation time, I'll write this fake graduation speech. M&M's and a cappuccino and a deadline, and I wrote it.

And I remember thinking, Oh, I kind of like that. I wouldn't always think that, but I kind of like that. And then it just took on this unbelievable life of its own. It was early days of the internet and it went viral before I think “viral” was even a term. Attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, which helped to elevate it, because now it's attached to a famous, cult famous, writer. And then the fact that it wasn't really him elevated it a little more. 

So now you've got the whole element of, Oh my God, look at this evil internet, what it can do, the lies it can tell. And then Baz Luhrmann swoops in and puts it over some music that he'd used in his movie "Romeo and Juliet." Turns it into a spoken-word piece.

Originally around seven minutes. Did well in Australia. And then some radio station cut it down to five minutes. … And then The New York Times did a little blurb. I mean, the steps in this are fascinating, the steps to something rising in the cultural consciousness. 

Then it was off. And all of a sudden, it was just everywhere. Part of what I take from it is, just do your work, because you never know what's going to come of it. 

I always say there was a ghost in that piece. There was some unspoken stuff in that piece that people felt.