For the 21st annual Dick Johnston Lecture, part of the Richard W. Johnston Memorial Project, the School of Journalism and Communications invited Adrian Nicole LeBlanc to speak about her adventures as a journalist and author on Thursday.
The lecture, titled “Journalism for the Long Haul”, was meant to reexamine the fast-paced style of journalism and to explore the more perceptive, nuanced and insightful style of immersion journalism. LeBlanc was already an immersion journalist when she began to work at Seventeen magazine.
“I am usually quite reluctant and tentative during the course of field work, so I found the extra time helpful,” she said of the assignments she received.
The longer she spent walking around in malls and observing teenagers, the more interested she became in their psychology and the more information she received.
Seventeen, however, wasn’t her first immersion gig; she had to work her way up the ladder like everyone else. She began writing at the Village Voice and the alternative press in New York City, where a lot of young journalists begin their careers. With the help of grants, a rent-controlled NYC apartment and “a boyfriend who had a legitimate job and got paid occasionally,” LeBlanc was able to sustain herself.
At college, LeBlanc took a non-fiction writing course for two semesters so that she could invest more time in a story she was determined to write. “It took me a full year to write a 7,000-word magazine story. It got published, it got anthologized, and it got me my job at Seventeen.”
Her devotion to a single story proves that “if you’re writing a meaningful story, you should take all the time you need, because it will live on.”
While at Seventeen, LeBlanc discovered a Newsday article about a successful heroin dealer and found her inspiration for a book she was to write. She began to investigate the lives of drug dealers and soon became fascinated with the lives of their girlfriends and their families.
Her work on the book is the very definition of immersion journalism: sometimes she would “sleep over at the houses of the people I was writing about.”
When she grew too tired to keep up with the busy night lives of the Bronx teenagers, she would hand them her tape recorder, tell them to use it as they pleased, and leave.
LeBlanc knows when she has truly immersed herself in a story.
“It’s when you actually feel a desire to cease to be in a different place,” she said.
She recalled a time when she was simultaneously doing field work in the dodgy Bronx by night while working at the cushy Seventeen office by day.
She remembered the non-functional and dingy elevator she always used in the Bronx neighborhood and the spotless, posh elevator at Seventeen and at one point remembered thinking “I can’t have both elevators in my life. One I have to be tough for, and the other I can relax in. They’re too different.”
LeBlanc quit her job at Seventeen to focus on her book, titled “Random Family” and published in 2002. Her work paid off: The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of the year and won several awards. In 2006, LeBlanc was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Her advice to aspiring immersion journalists was to “sit down with a notebook and really think about the things you love…and think of a way to make these things aminate your journalism.”
For example, LeBlanc knew she worked best in the afternoon, and her job at Seventeen complemented that fact perfectly because teenagers were the most observable in the afternoon after school.
“A teacher once told me to think of the story as hot water and yourself as the teabag,” she said. “You have to drop into the water and immerse yourself into it until you feel as if it is a part of you.”
Another crucial part of journalism in general is to “try not to judge or put yourself at a distance from what you’re observing. Judgment can get in the way of the most mundane interactions, so you have to cease to be surprised about any of the behaviors you’re witnessing.”
Because LeBlanc was so able to immerse herself, she garnered story ideas from simple daily activities such as riding on the subway.
Journalism instructor Mark Furman can relate. “I had my tires rotated the other day and came out with three story ideas,” he said.
Aspiring journalists found LeBlanc’s lecture inspiring.
Journalism GTF Michael Werner was “impressed by her passion for her work” and couldn’t imagine possessing such an intense passion himself.