Writer. Editor. Photographer.
After 49 years in journalism, William McDonald’s recent retirement was well-earned. For the past 20 years, McDonald was The New York Times’ obituaries editor. In July, E&P spoke with him about his remarkable career; how the obituaries team operated; and his thoughts on life and death.
Read on at Editor & Publisher:
There are a few things in life that bring me joy, and one of them is my weekly trip to the library. Stepping inside feels like entering a portal of possibility.
I’ve written a lot about libraries as a local community amenity and myriad ways our libraries support our communities beyond providing free access to books and periodicals. There’s also the individual, personal connection many of us have to libraries, including fond memories from childhood. Some of my earliest memories are accompanying my grandmother and great-grandmother to the library, where we’d all load up with a stack of books to devour in a weekend. (Pictured: My great-grandmother volunteers at the library.)
Now, from the vantage point of my work at Editor & Publisher, I see the shared missions of libraries and local news media: to inform and build communities, expand access to knowledge and defend the First Amendment. In honor of National Library Week, I spoke with the American Library Association’s president, Sam Helmick, about the week of celebration—with the theme “Find Your Joy”—and its critical call to action. Click the link to read, and please share your thoughts on your local library in the comments.
I believe divine intervention happens in library stacks. Something beyond a captivating cover leads you to certain books that you didn’t even know you wanted to read. During my last library visit, I left with two surprisingly related titles in my book bag — one nonfiction, one fictional:
Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, by journalist Beth Macy, recounts her reflections on Urbana, Ohio, her hometown.
And Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, which is a retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield, set in Appalachia during the height of the opioid crisis. It earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023.
Both are stories about places where hope dissipates over time and across tragedies. Jobs move out. Drugs move in. Despair abounds. Local newspapers shutter, while social media conspiracies run rampant. Politics becomes pastime and pew fodder.
Education becomes devalued. Truancy goes up. For example, in Paper Girl, Macy recounts how Ohio lifted the rules and benchmarks for home-schooling students. Parents struggling with their own addictions and paying the bills simply took their kids out of school while providing no formal education at home, essentially ensuring a generation of drop-outs and if-they’re-lucky minimum-wage earners.
Even with best-laid plans, people in communities like these run the risk of becoming mired in their circumstances, not by virtue of geography but by fear and poverty. Both stories articulate how often it takes aligned stars to escape — someone to see you, someone to recognize your talent, someone to believe in you, someone to give you a fair shot, plus a little dumb luck.
In both books, I recognized glimpses of my own hometown in the late-1960s and 1970s. It was easy to circle the drain there if you were a teenager. We spent our weekends at the skating rink, or cruising the downtown circuit in some senior’s car, drinking and driving (do not do this, kids), and getting loaded on whatever we could put our hands on — mostly dirt weed and liquor our parents wouldn’t notice missing from their wet bars. I smoked my first cigarette in my friend Pam’s attic bedroom when we were in 7th grade. I developed an affinity for weed and pills before I entered the 8th.
Now, kids contend with synthetic drugs and opioids, including cheap, accessible and deadly heroin and fentanyl.
In my hometown, one of the biggest events of the year was the town fair. There was a midway with rides, junk food and dizzying lights. As tweens and teens, we’d get high or drunk and walk around the fair every night for a week — our parents assuming we were off pigging out on fried foods and having wholesome fair fun. On one of those occasions, my friends dragged us into a fortune teller’s tent. For a few bucks, she’d read your fortune via tarot cards or a crystal ball like the Wicked Witch’s. When it was my turn, she snatched my cash and didn’t bother consulting either. She simply said, “You’re going to die before your 21,” and pointed me toward the exit.
That’s how far gone I was.
Much of my self-destructive behavior, I learned later in life, can be traced to childhood trauma I won’t recount here, but a lot of it was also culture. We had our share of kids who aspired, who got voted “Best This” or “Best That” in the yearbook, who played sports and avoided the allure of drugs, some whose parents socked away college funds as if it was a given.
But for so many of my peers, aspiration was as pragmatic as a daydream.
Like Journalist Beth Macy and the fictional Demon Copperhead, I had the good fortune of people who helped me transcend what could have been a wasted, brief life. There were my parents, who moved us out of the town — partly to be closer to their jobs in the D.C. suburbs, and partly to save me from the wrong crowd.
There was Debbie Riley, a court-appointed social worker assigned to me when I got busted for grand theft auto at 15 (I was a runaway who went joyriding in my friend’s brother’s car. He pressed charges, which were dropped on condition of counseling.)Â
Debbie Riley asked my parents to come to our first session. My father spent the hour red-faced and irate that he had to be there — and because he couldn’t seem to discipline me with tough love, nor keep me from running away from home. My mother sat stone faced and said nothing. She didn’t know what to say or do with me. At the end of the session, Debbie Riley told them they didn’t have to come to any more of our meetings; she’d meet with me alone from then on.
I never had to tell Debbie Riley about my childhood trauma, not specifically, anyway. Back then, I couldn’t have choked out the words. It took me decades to process it and to talk about it, even today, somewhat superficially. I don’t like to go too deep into those rough seas.
But it was like Debbie Riley — who probably spent every day with kids like me — could read me, or smell it on me. She knew I was broken and spiraling, but that I might be salvageable, if I wanted to be.
Way more than a decade before Robin William’s famous scene in “Good Will Hunting,” Debbie Riley took my hands in hers across her cold-metal police-department desk, and looked me in the eyes and said, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”
That scene with Matt Damon brings me to my knees every time. I see us in that moment, me and Debbie Riley — as much a breakthrough for young Will Hunting as it had been for me.
Just feeling seen lifted me a fraction of the way out of the dark pit. I started thinking about a future, about who and what I wanted to be. But I still had a long way to go.
(Spoiler alert: Beth and Demon make it out of their hometowns, too, though not unscathed.)
Sometimes the tides shift for communities like these. In the case of Urbana, new industry came to town, and there were jobs again and a little more disposable income, Macy recalls. That happened in my hometown, too. Washington, D.C.’s sprawl crept in, bringing with it new taxpaying residents who cashed big paychecks signed by defense contractors and lobbying firms. The main street transformed. No more drunken high schoolers cruising the circuit. No more 5-and-10 store once owned by my great-grandmother. Now, there were art galleries and microbreweries and restaurants with Top Chefs in their kitchens.
People who survived the leaner years now sit-pretty on homes worth 10x what they paid for them. But for so many rural communities, there’s no D.C. sprawl to swoop in like a superhero to save the day. And for too many kids, there are too few Debbie Rileys who care.
You may buy the books here, but please consider checking them out from your local library. One of the best ways to support your library is by signing up for a free library card and then using it.
Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, by Beth Macy
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
“Any journalist will tell you. Sometimes you hear something so quotable that you can see the words in print in real time, right before your eyes. The room changes when deep truths are being spoken, when raw honesty is in the air.”—Cameron Crowe, “The Uncool: A Memoir”
If you’re a journalist who likes to see other journalists’ approach to the craft, I recommend Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical “The Uncool: A Memoir.” Crowe is a fascinating person. There is his undeniable storytelling talent, proven by his many decades as an accomplished music journalist, screenwriter and director.
There’s his encyclopedic knowledge of music from the 1960s-1980s — and perhaps beyond. There’s his almost Forrest Gump-like fortunes and happenstances, where he casually meets and vibes with so many important figures of those decades, from the worlds of music, industry, Hollywood. It’s a collage of pop culture.
The reader gets a sense of Crowe’s perspective on journalism, and the lessons he learned from mentors along the way. He wrestles with editorial dilemmas and relationships with sources. You sense the pressures he felt answering to editors, rock stars, publicists and readers — especially remarkable when he was a teenage reporter. That kid (then) had precisely what it takes to make a name, to build a byline and a brand: courage, resilience, introspection, fortitude, a great vocabulary, an inquisitive nature, and a little dash of naĂŻvetĂ©.
The author says this is a story about family. Crowe’s family takes center stage throughout the book. Their connections are complicated, and he doesn’t sanitize them. He peels back the curtain on their shared tragedies and idiosyncrasies. It’s all relatable.
Naturally, in the memoir there’s the running theme of Crowe’s early life, which he so astutely, delicately captured in the semi-autobiographical film, “Almost Famous.” That is, his absolutely passionate love for music and reverence for the people who make it. You feel it. It’s almost tactile, vibrating off the printed page.
Love the printing on the book block’s trimmed edges. Grabbed my eye from the new-book shelves at the library. It’s “The Ghostwriter” by Julie Clark.
Looking back over four decades I’ve spent in publishing, I have found that the most successful newsrooms I’ve worked in or consulted for have had a cooperative organizational culture. It’s typical for editors to lead daily or weekly newsroom staff meetings to discuss reporting projects in the works, accomplishments and obstacles to work around. But what I’ve observed is the benefit of broader team cooperation, too.
In one newsroom where I served as the editor, I regularly brought together not only the newsroom team, but also periodically welcomed the publisher and members of the staff representing production, marketing, IT, audience, data and art/creative to join us. While traditionally these roles are distinguished and separate, it became apparent to me early in my career that they are each a critical gear in the publishing machine. They literally have to work in tandem to make the engine run. Routine interaction allowed for every member of the team to have a voice and an opportunity to express their observations, challenges and ideas. They felt valued and empowered.
That’s not just a feel-good byproduct, it had practical benefits, too. Together, we created great things—compelling brand messaging, newsletter and special supplements, interactive storytelling, fresh design for our covers and pages, powerful impact reports, and live events, including three conferences that brought together thousands of attendees. It strengthened our magazine’s brand and galvanized our team.
If you are operating as silos, you’re missing opportunities for innovation—and, in this climate, growth and the potential for long-term sustainability.Â
Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is the most compelling work of fiction I’ve read in years. It’s a tale about a contemporary Irish family, told through each of its four members’ perspectives—father, mother, daughter and son. Murray’s use of first-person narrative, sentence structure and punctuation (or lack thereof) ensures each voice is distinctive.
Though the story unfolds over more than 600 pages, for the reader, there’s never a sense that even a paragraph is ancillary or unnecessary. It’s a story that conveys raw human emotions: grief, fear, disappointment, yearning, joy, duty and desire.
Murray cleverly, almost stealthily, explores some grand themes, such as one’s desire to be purely authentic, while the forces of life and societal conventions push back. He expertly captures how the past imprints on a person. Hardship, envy, violence, poverty, happiness, fleeting moments of awe, passion—memories that bind to us like DNA strands.
The author keenly explores the friction of a life that doesn’t follow the path you’ve plotted. Does it ever?
If you’re looking for a book that sucks you in and holds you captive until the final sentencee, this is that book.
I preordered Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna. I felt it mandatory reading. I’d listened to the band(s) back in the day. I was fascinated by the lore and that Kathleen married my second favorite Beastie Boy. I wanted the backstory on it all, especially what it was like to be a woman in a band in the midst of a nearly all-male punk moment. I certainly knew what it was like to be a woman in the clubs, basements and warehouse shows where women were relegated to the perimeters by virtue of slamming male bodies and fear of being trampled or groped.Â
What I didn’t know to expect was the constant struggle, the poverty, the family dysfunction, the sexual abuse, the rapes, the violence, the loneliness, despair, the anger and hatred (especially from other women), which Hanna reveals in bite-sized chapter chunks. Sometimes it’s all you can swallow before snapping the cover shut and trying to process it, wondering how the author ever did.
Did she?
Can you?
It’s a question I ask myself all the time. Do we actually heal? Or do we just learn to be temporarily okay in the moment and then string those moments together to make a day, a week, a year, a decade, a lifetime?
Hanna’s storytelling kept me captivated. I read the book in two days. After all, it’s what a memoir should be — raw, candid, honest and deeply introspective.
When I was growing up, libraries seemed this quiet, unassuming certainty in everyday life. They were well-funded, accessible to everyone in the community, no matter why nor when you needed them. I saw librarians as all-knowing beings, who could find even the most obscure title on the stacks, without so much as a glance at a card catalog.
I worked for a while at my university library, in the periodical section. When students came in looking for references, I’d pull out newspapers and magazines from the bowels of the back or help them learn to use the microfiche machines — high-tech back then.
It may have been my paternal grandmother and her mother (Ida Locke, a librarian seen here) who encouraged my early reading.
Great-grandmother Locke lived with my grandparents, and I have fond memories of her seated on their sofa, a stack of books always present on the end table beside her. An insatiable reader, she could sail through a book in a single afternoon. She was a quiet, tiny mouse of a woman, always dressed for going out, even when there was no place to go. I can’t remember her voice, because she rarely offered even a hint of a smile nor a string of spoken words. But when I’d visit, she’d pat the sofa next to her, inviting me to sit and tell her what I was reading that week. Born to a German community in rural West Virginia, books were her way to rise above, to escape, to aspire — to work and have autonomy as a woman of that era.
Books didn’t change her nature — who she was or how she conducted her simple, frugal life — but they did broaden her perspective and informed her understanding of the world outside of her own.
I think about her a lot lately, as libraries are under attack from so many directions. Funding is imperiled. Politics has landed on their doorsteps. Shamefully, surreally, book bans — patently anti-liberty and anti-intellectual — are part of our national discourse. Librarians themselves are harassed and forced out of their jobs by politically motivated and dark money-funded mobs. Can democracy survive under these circumstances, I wonder? It feels symbolic of how we’ve lost our way.
Gretchen A. Peck 