Newspaper columnist and magazine editor Ted Genoways joined The University of Tulsa as a President’s Professor in fall 2022. In this question-and-answer article, we dig deep into his background and what he sees ahead for himself and UTulsa students.
How did you get into investigative journalism?
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with magazines. My parents had subscriptions to Time and Newsweek, and my dad subscribed to Sports Illustrated. My mom and dad both came from science backgrounds, so most of the magazines were science magazines – National Geographic, Natural History, Discover, Omni, and Science News. When I got to high school, I didn’t want to work for the student newspaper; I wanted to put out a magazine. A group of likeminded friends and I started Muse at Lincoln East in Nebraska. We were inspired by two very different magazines: The New Yorker and SPY (a long-defunct satire magazine). When I was a senior, Muse was named the best student publication in the country by the Columbia Journalism School, so we went to New York for the awards and met Roger Angell in his office at The New Yorker and a number of editors at SPY. I had the bug.
I started another magazine called The Coyote in college at Nebraska Wesleyan, where I majored in creative writing and minored in journalism, and then started a literary magazine called Meridian while I was in grad school studying poetry at the University of Virginia. When I was working on my doctorate at the University of Iowa, I worked for Iowa Review and wrote my dissertation (later a book) about Walt Whitman and how he blended his poetry and journalism during the Civil War. Eventually, I was asked to return to UVA where I edited the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) for nine years.
Talk about VQR and winning six National Magazine Awards.
By the time I was offered the job at VQR, I was extremely impressed by two new-ish university magazines: DoubleTake, which was published by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, and The Oxford American, which was then published by the University of Central Arkansas. Both of those magazines straddled the line between literary magazines and art and documentary publications. DoubleTake explicitly drew its inspiration from the work that writer James Agee did with photographer Walker Evans that later became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – a touchstone book for me. The Oxford American was drawing on Southern literary giants, especially William Faulkner, but also producing special issues on food and music. I liked how they were working in a vein similar to The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic but with more visual emphasis and topical journalism mixed with essays, memoirs, criticism, and documentary modes of writing.
With VQR, I worked in that direction and also started publishing the work of graphic novelists like Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, and others. I also started a series of projects that would dispatch poets as reporters, accompanied by photographers and videographers. Natasha Trethewey wrote about the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. Erika Meitner wrote about the urban blight of Detroit. Kwami Dawes wrote about the AIDS crisis in Jamaica. The goal was to break down artificial walls between genres. Poets and fiction writers were encouraged to engage with world events. Journalists were encouraged to use the tools of literature to tell better stories. It worked pretty well. Over time, VQR won six National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzers of the magazine world. And it was special to me that those awards are given by Columbia, just like the award we won when I was in high school.
What is Switchyard and how was it founded?
Brad Carson taught at the University of Virginia after I left UVA, but he read some of the issues that I had edited. When he became president at The University of Tulsa, Brad reached out to me to ask if I’d consider starting a new magazine in the mold of VQR. I told him I’d love to return to that work but the publishing world had changed in the decade during which I’d gone over to writing full time. You couldn’t survive now without public events and a robust multimedia presence, including a well-produced podcast. Fortunately, my wife, Mary Anne Andrei, has won multiple Emmys as a video producer and was a finalist for a Marconi Award (the top prize for radio journalists) for a podcast she had produced while working for the emerging media division at Nebraska Public Media. Brad, amazingly, offered to hire us both, and we created Switchyard together as a magazine, podcast, and multimedia production house with big public events to launch our content.
In less than 18 months, we commissioned an original poem cycle about the Tulsa Race Massacre by Natasha Trethewey, which debuted at the Greenwood Cultural Center. We put on Food Fest to launch the special food issue of the magazine with multimedia by Mary Anne and personal appearances by Tom Colicchio and Sean Sherman. (That issue went on to win a James Beard Award for Best Food Coverage.) We hosted joint talks and musical performances by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips and Tulsa musician Casii Stephan and by climate activist Bill McKibben and singer-songwriter Andrea von Kampen. And we produced a short narrative film directed by Benjamin Font and based on a short story by Miciah Bay Gault from our second issue, which just premiered at the Boston Film Festival. Remarkably, we received five National Magazine Award nominations for our work – but didn’t win any, so we still have more work to do!
What topics do you generally cover in your stories?
I’ve come to be known as an investigative journalist focused on food. I’ve published books about the meatpacking industry, about a year in the life of a small family farm, and about the history of the tequila industry as told through the life of José Cuervo. In the past year, I’ve returned to covering meatpacking but focusing this time on the industry’s increasing reliance on a workforce of refugees and asylum-seekers. I’ve written on that topic for The New Republic with photographs by Mary Anne, and she and I are now working on a new story for Mother Jones. I’ve also been lucky enough to get a Watchdog Writers’ Fellowship from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism to support turning that reporting into a new book. During the past decade, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about tequila and a lot of time thinking about meat!
You’ve recently written for the New York Times on the presidential election. What was that process like?
Writing for the Opinion section is always interesting. My amazing editors have asked me to report stories, much in the way the news side would, but then to include my analysis and perspective. It has a lot in common with magazine writing, so it doesn’t feel unusual in the writing. The main difference is that newspaper opinion sections, by tradition, don’t officially commission pieces. So, we talk through angles and what a good op-ed would include, but then I’m much more on my own than I would be in a magazine setting. It feels a little like working without a net. And sometimes a piece doesn’t quite land with my editors at the end. One piece that I wrote for the NYT didn’t end up running there but was published instead by the Washington Post. Another piece, as I started working on it, turned out to be something much larger, and it will be a feature story next year for Mother Jones.
From a writing standpoint, what I like is the freedom to research a subject carefully but then not pretend that I have no opinions on that material. Fact-gathering forms and changes my opinions, but I’m not disengaged – or pretending to be. That’s freeing, especially when I’m writing in the context of an election. Voters are asked to make a choice between two candidates. I don’t want to pretend that their rhetoric and policy proposals are equal in my mind. They’re not.
How does journalism differ during an election cycle?
The biggest thing is that the subject matter is shaped by the daily events of the campaigns. The first op-ed that I wrote for the NYT this cycle turned out to be a piece about Tim Walz joining Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket. When that announcement was made, an army of pundits began unspooling their opinions, and another army of reporters went to work on background pieces about Walz, in both his home state of Nebraska and in Minnesota where he was governor and a former congressman. That was a case where I was asked to report and write, because I’ve written about Nebraska and Nebraska politics for the NYT before. So, I set aside one piece that I’d been working on and went to work on that, with the goal of reporting, writing, and getting it into the paper in a week. That’s not my usual pace of work, but it’s good a reminder that a lot of research, thinking, and writing can be done quickly. And I like the feeling of drawing on past experience and combining that with fresh reporting. That feels like informed analysis to me.
What classes do you teach at UTulsa?
I’ve been teaching two courses: magazine writing and multimedia journalism, which I’ve taught with Mary Anne. Magazine writing is just what it sounds like: an introduction to the history of the form and then working with students to produce a feature-length piece. We have magazine writers who visit the class, in person and via Zoom, and we go out and do reporting of our own. It’s always amazing to see the work that students, many of whom are first-time magazine writers, can produce in the span of a few months. Multimedia journalism is a next-level course that combines the work that students have done in magazine writing with work that they’ve done in Mary Anne’s audio journalism course. I’ve loved teaching that class – both because it has been yet another way of collaborating with Mary Anne and because it’s a place for students to take some real chances.
That said, we’re reformulating our course offerings to allow for advanced level courses in multiple genres. Mary Anne is going to begin offering a podcasting course, and I’m starting this spring semester to offer a course in investigative journalism. Because of the relative confines of a single semester, we’re really going to focus on a single form of investigative journalism, known as “immersion” or “immersive journalism.” It’s just what it sounds like: spending a long period of time with a single subject. Our text will be “Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep” by Ted Conover (one of my heroes and mentors). Ted was just in Tulsa to record an episode of the Switchyard podcast, which will also be featured in the new issue of Switchyard, so that extended interview will also shape our class conversations.
What advice would you give to students who aspire to become journalists?
The first piece of advice that I give all students, regardless of discipline, is read. I mean, really read. You won’t know what’s possible or what you want to add unless you know what’s already been done. Once you read deeply, you’ll start to see gaps and cracks, places that you can make your contributions. Journalism – but really all knowledge-building – is a team sport. Not many people are going to make epoch-defining, paradigm-shifting contributions, but we need lots and lots of people to cover a narrow strip of the world that holds their interest. I joke about spending more than a decade thinking about tequila and meat, but the reality is that those subjects contain whole universes. Tequila is really about colonialism versus Indigenous knowledge, exploitation, and capitalism. It’s about cross-border commerce and the governmental jurisdictions that determine authenticity and tradition. The meatpacking industry, for me, is really a lens through which to study what we consume, how something as fundamentally hands-on as animal agriculture has been mechanized and industrialized, how that changes our relationship with food, how it often dehumanizes the people who raise and process our meat, and how that difficult, dangerous work has always been left to the newest Americans, arriving here without documentation or as refugees fleeing wars from around the world and reshaping our culture. To me, the meat industry is a way of talking about America, just as tequila is a way of talking about the relationship between America and Mexico. So, my advice to young journalists: Find something that you can’t stop thinking about and go deep.